Deep Learning Assisted Differential Cryptanalysis for the Lightweight Cipher SIMON

SIMON and SPECK are two families of lightweight block ciphers that have excellent performance on hardware and software platforms. At CRYPTO 2019, Gohr first introduces the differential cryptanalysis based deep learning on round-reduced SPECK32/64, and finally reduces the remaining security of 11-round SPECK32/64 to roughly 38 bits. In this paper, we are committed to evaluating the safety of SIMON cipher under the neural differential cryptanalysis. We firstly prove theoretically that SIMON is a non-Markov cipher, which means that the results based on conventional differential cryptanalysis may be inaccurate. Then we train a residual neural network to get the 7-, 8-, 9-round neural distinguishers for SIMON32/64. To prove the effectiveness for our distinguishers, we perform the distinguishing attack and key-recovery attack against 15-round SIMON32/64. The results show that the real ciphertexts can be distinguished from random ciphertexts with a probability close to 1 only by 28.7 chosen-plaintext pairs. For the key-recovery attack, the correct key was recovered with a success rate of 23%, and the data complexity and computation complexity are as low as 28 and 220.1 respectively. All the results are better than the existing literature. Furthermore, we briefly discussed the effect of different residual network structures on the training results of neural distinguishers. It is hoped that our findings will provide some reference for future research.