Meet-in-the-Filter and Dynamic Counting with Applications to Speck

We propose a new cryptanalytic tool for differential cryptanalysis, called meet-in-the-filter (MiF). It is suitable for ciphers with a slow or incomplete diffusion layer such as the ones based on Addition-Rotation-XOR (ARX). The main idea of the MiF technique is to stop the difference propagation earlier in the cipher, allowing to use differentials with higher probability. This comes at the expense of a deeper analysis phase in the bottom rounds possible due to the slow diffusion of the target cipher. The MiF technique uses a meet-in-the-middle matching to construct differential trails connecting the differential’s output and the ciphertext difference. The proposed trails are used in the key recovery procedure, reducing time complexity and allowing flexible time-data trade-offs. In addition, we show how to combine MiF with a dynamic counting technique for key recovery. We illustrate MiF in practice by reporting improved attacks on the ARXbased family of block ciphers Speck. We improve the time complexities of the best known attacks up to 15 rounds of Speck32 and 20 rounds of Speck64/128. Notably, our new attack on 11 rounds of Speck32 has practical analysis and data complexities of 224.66 and 226.70 respectively, and was experimentally verified, recovering the master key in a matter of seconds. It significantly improves the previous deep learning-based attack by Gohr from CRYPTO 2019, which has time complexity 238. As an important milestone, our conventional cryptanalysis method sets a new high benchmark to beat for cryptanalysis relying on machine learning.