New Distinguisher on Reduced-Round Keccak Sponge Function

Senyang HUANG  Xiaoyun WANG  Guangwu XU  Meiqin WANG  Jingyuan ZHAO  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Fundamentals of Electronics, Communications and Computer Sciences   Vol.E102-A    No.1    pp.242-250
Publication Date: 2019/01/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1337
DOI: 10.1587/transfun.E102.A.242
Type of Manuscript: PAPER
Category: Cryptography and Information Security
Keyword: 
Keccak sponge function,  conditional cube tester,  conditional cube variable,  ordinary cube variable,  

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Summary: 
The security analysis of Keccak, the winner of SHA-3, has attracted considerable interest. Recently, some attention has been paid to distinguishing Keccak sponge function from random permutation. In EUROCRYPT'17, Huang et al. proposed conditional cube tester to recover the key of Keccak-MAC and Keyak and to construct practical distinguishing attacks on Keccak sponge function up to 7 rounds. In this paper, we improve the conditional cube tester model by refining the formulation of cube variables. By classifying cube variables into three different types and working the candidates of these types of cube variable carefully, we are able to establish a new theoretical distinguisher on 8-round Keccak sponge function. Our result is more efficient and greatly improves the existing results. Finally we remark that our distinguishing attack on the the reduced-round Keccak will not threat the security margin of the Keccak sponge function.