New Results of Related-key Attacks on All Py-Family of Stream Ciphers

Lin Ding (Information Science and Technology Institute, China)

Jie Guan (Information Science and Technology Institute, China)

Wen-long Sun (Information Science and Technology Institute, China)

Abstract: The stream cipher TPypy has been designed by Biham and Seberry in January 2007 as the strongest member of the Py-family of stream ciphers. At Indocrypt 2007, Sekar, Paul and Preneel showed related-key weaknesses in the Py-family of stream ciphers including the strongest member TPypy. Furthermore, they modified the stream ciphers TPypy and TPy to generate two fast ciphers, namely RCR-32 and RCR-64, in an attempt to rule out all the attacks against the Py-family of stream ciphers. So far there exists no attack on RCR-32 and RCR-64. In this paper, we show that the related-key weaknesses can be still used to construct related-key distinguishing attacks on all Py-family of stream ciphers including the modified versions RCR-32 and RCR-64. Under related keys, we show distinguishing attacks on RCR-32 and RCR-64 with data complexity 2139.3 and advantage greater than 0.5. We also show that the data complexity of the distinguishing attacks on Py-family of stream ciphers proposed by Sekar et al. can be reduced fromto. These results constitute the best attacks on the strongest members of the Py-family of stream ciphers Tpypy, RCR-32 and RCR-64. By modifying the key setup algorithm, we propose two new stream ciphers TRCR-32 and TRCR-64 which are derived from RCR-32 and RCR-64 respectively. Based on our security analysis, we conjecture that no attacks lower than brute force are possible on TRCR-32 and TRCR-64 stream ciphers.

Keywords: Py-family of stream ciphers, TRCR-32, TRCR-64, cryptanalysis, distinguishing attack, related-key attack

Categories: D.4.6, E.3, K.6.5