International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Integral, impossible-differential (ID), and zero-correlation (ZC) attacks are three of the most important attacks on block ciphers. However, manually finding these attacks can be a daunting task, which is why automated methods are becoming increasingly important. Most automatic tools regarding integral, ZC, and ID attacks have focused only on finding distinguishers rather than complete attacks. At EUROCRYPT 2023, Hadipour et al. proposed a generic and efficient constraint programming (CP) model based on satisfiability for finding ID, ZC, and integral distinguishers. This new model can be extended to a unified CP model for finding full key recovery attacks. However, it has limitations, including determining the contradiction location beforehand and a cell-wise model unsuitable for weakly aligned ciphers like Ascon and PRESENT. They also deferred developing a CP model for the partial-sum technique in key recovery as future work.In this paper, we enhance Hadipour et al.’s method in several ways. First, we remove the limitation of determining the contradiction location in advance. Second, we show how to extend the distinguisher model to a bit-wise model, considering the internal structure of S-boxes and keeping the model based on satisfiability. Third, we introduce a CP model for the partial-sum technique for the first time. To show the usefulness and versatility of our approach, we apply it to various designs, from strongly aligned ones like ForkSKINNY and QARMAv2 to weakly aligned ones such as Ascon and PRESENT, yielding significantly improved results. To mention a few of our results, we improve the integral distinguisher of QARMAv2-128 (resp. QARMAv2-64) by 7 (resp. 5) rounds, and the integral distinguisher of ForkSKINNY by 1 round, only thanks to our cell-wise distinguisher modelings. By using our new bit-wise modeling, our tool can find a group of 2155 5-round ID and ZC distinguishers for Ascon in only one run, taking a few minutes on a regular laptop. The new CP model for the partial-sum technique enhances integral attacks on all SKINNY variants, notably improving the best attack on SKINNY-n-n in the single-key setting by 1 round. We also enhance ID attacks on ForkSKINNY and provide the first analysis of this cipher in a limited reduced-round setting. Our methods are generic and applicable to other block ciphers.

In 1994, Langford and Hellman introduced differential-linear (DL) cryptanalysis, with the idea of decomposing the block cipher E into two parts, EU and EL, such that EU exhibits a high-probability differential trail, while EL has a high-correlation linear trail.Combining these trails forms a distinguisher for E, assuming independence between EU and EL. The dependency between the two parts of DL distinguishers remained unaddressed until EUROCRYPT 2019, where Bar-On et al. introduced the DLCT framework, resolving the issue up to one S-box layer. However, extending the DLCT framework to formalize the dependency between the two parts for multiple rounds remained an open problem. In this paper, we first tackle this problem from the perspective of boomerang analysis. By examining the relationships between DLCT, DDT, and LAT, we introduce a set of new tables facilitating the formulation of dependencies between the two parts of the DL distinguisher across multiple rounds. Then, we introduce a highly versatile and easy-to-use automatic tool for exploring DL distinguishers, inspired by automatic tools for boomerang distinguishers. This tool considers the dependency between differential and linear trails across multiple rounds. We apply our tool to various symmetric primitives, and in all applications, we either present the first DL distinguishers or enhance the best-known ones. We achieve successful results against Ascon, AES, SERPENT, PRESENT, SKINNY, TWINE, CLEFIA, WARP, LBlock, Simeck, and KNOT. Furthermore, we demonstrate that, in some cases, DL distinguishers outperform boomerang distinguishers significantly.

The impossible differential (ID) attack is one of the most important cryptanalytic techniques for block ciphers. There are two phases to finding an ID attack: searching for the distinguisher and building a key recovery upon it. Previous works only focused on automated distinguisher discovery, leaving key recovery as a manual post-processing task, which may lead to a suboptimal final complexity. At EUROCRYPT 2023, Hadipour et al. introduced a unified constraint programming (CP) approach based on satisfiability for finding optimal complete ID attacks in strongly aligned ciphers. While this approach was extended to weakly-aligned designs like PRESENT at ToSC 2024, its application to ARX and AndRX ciphers remained as future work. Moreover, this method only exploited ID distinguishers with direct contradictions at the junction of two deterministic transitions. In contrast, some ID distinguishers, particularly for ARX and AndRX designs, may not be detectable by checking only the existence of direct contradictions.This paper fills these gaps by extending Hadipour et al.’s method to handle indirect contradictions and adapting it for ARX and AndRX designs. We also present a similar method for identifying zero-correlation (ZC) distinguishers. Moreover, we extend our new model for finding ID distinguishers to a unified optimization problem that includes both the distinguisher and the key recovery for AndRX designs. Our method improves ID attacks and introduces new distinguishers for several ciphers, such as SIMON, SPECK, Simeck, ChaCha, Chaskey, LEA, and SipHash. For example, we achieve a one-round improvement in ID attacks against SIMON-64-96, SIMON-64-128, SIMON-128-128, SIMON-128-256 and a two-round improvement against SIMON-128- 192. These results significantly contribute to our understanding of the effectiveness of automated tools in the cryptanalysis of different design paradigms.

Impossible differential (ID), zero-correlation (ZC), and integral attacks are a family of important attacks on block ciphers. For example, the impossible differential attack was the first cryptanalytic attack on 7 rounds of AES. Evaluating the security of block ciphers against these attacks is very important but also challenging: Finding these attacks usually implies a combinatorial optimization problem involving many parameters and constraints that is very hard to solve using manual approaches. Automated solvers, such as Constraint Programming (CP) solvers, can help the cryptanalyst to find suitable attacks. However, previous CP-based methods focus on finding only the ID, ZC, and integral distinguishers, often only in a limited search space. Notably, none can be extended to a unified optimization problem for finding full attacks, including efficient key-recovery steps. In this paper, we present a new CP-based method to search for ID, ZC, and integral distinguishers and extend it to a unified constraint optimization problem for finding full ID, ZC, and integral attacks. To show the effectiveness and usefulness of our method, we applied it to several block ciphers, including SKINNY, CRAFT, SKINNYe-v2, and SKINNYee. For the ISO standard block cipher SKINNY, we significantly improve all existing ID, ZC, and integral attacks. In particular, we improve the integral attacks on SKINNY-n-3n and SKINNY-n-2n by 3 and 2 rounds, respectively, obtaining the best cryptanalytic results on these variants in the single-key setting. We improve the ZC attack on SKINNY-n-n (SKINNY-n-2n) by 2 (resp. 1) rounds. We also improve the ID attacks on all variants of SKINNY. Particularly, we improve the time complexity of the best previous single-tweakey (related-tweakey) ID attack on SKINNY-128-256 (resp. SKINNY-128-384) by a factor of $2^{22.57}$ (resp. $2^{15.39}$). On CRAFT, we propose a 21-round (20-round) ID (resp. ZC) attack, which improves the best previous single-tweakey attack by 2 (resp. 1) rounds. Using our new model, we also provide several practical integral distinguishers for reduced-round SKINNY, CRAFT, and Deoxys-BC. Our method is generic and applicable to other strongly aligned block ciphers.

The hash function Romulus-H is a finalist in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition. It is based on the Hirose double block-length (DBL) construction which is provably secure when used with an ideal block cipher. However, in practice, ideal block ciphers can only be approximated. Therefore, the security of concrete instantiations must be cryptanalyzed carefully; the security margin may be higher or lower than in the secret-key setting. So far, the Hirose DBL construction has been studied with only a few other block ciphers, like IDEA and AES. However, Romulus-H uses Hirose DBL with the SKINNY block cipher where only very little analysis has been published so far. In this work, we present the first practical analysis of Romulus-H. We propose a new framework for finding collisions in hash functions based on the Hirose DBL construction. This is in contrast to previous work that only focused on free-start collisions. Our framework is based on the idea of joint differential characteristics which capture the relationship between the two block cipher calls in the Hirose DBL construction. To identify good joint differential characteristics, we propose a combination of MILP and CP models. Then, we use these characteristics in another CP model to find collisions. Finally, we apply this framework to Romulus-H and find practical collisions of the hash function for 10 out of 40 rounds and practical semi-free-start collisions for up to 14 rounds.

We introduce the QARMAv2 family of tweakable block ciphers. It is a redesign of QARMA (from FSE 2017) to improve its security bounds and allow for longer tweaks, while keeping similar latency and area. The wider tweak input caters to both specific use cases and the design of modes of operation with higher security bounds. This is achieved through new key and tweak schedules, revised S-Box and linear layer choices, and a more comprehensive security analysis. QARMAv2 offers competitive latency and area in fully unrolled hardware implementations.Some of our results may be of independent interest. These include: new MILP models of certain classes of diffusion matrices; the comparative analysis of a full reflection cipher against an iterative half-cipher; our boomerang attack framework; and an improved approach to doubling the width of a block cipher.

Differential fault analysis (DFA) is a very powerful attack vector on implementations of symmetric cryptography. Most countermeasures are applied at the implementation level. At ASIACRYPT 2021, Baksi et al. proposed a design strategy that aims to provide inherent cipher level resistance against DFA by using S-boxes with linear structures. They argue that in their instantiation, the block cipher DEFAULT, a DFA adversary can learn at most 64 of the 128 key bits, so the remaining brute-force complexity of 2^64 is impractical. In this paper, we show that a DFA adversary can combine information across rounds to recover the full key, invalidating their security claim. In particular, we observe that such ciphers exhibit large classes of equivalent keys that can be represented efficiently in normalized form using linear equations. We exploit this in combination with the specifics of DEFAULT's strong key schedule to recover the key using less than 100 faulty computation and negligible time complexity. Moreover, we show that even an idealized version of DEFAULT with independent round keys is vulnerable to our information-combining attacks based on normalized keys.

The NIST Lightweight Cryptography project aims to standardize symmetric cryptographic designs, including authenticated encryption and hashing, suitable for constrained devices. One essential criterion for the evaluation of the 10 finalists is the evidence for their security against attacks like linear and differential cryptanalysis. For Ascon, one of the finalists and previous winner of the CAESAR competition in the ‘lightweight’ category, there is a large gap between the proven bounds and the best known characteristics found with heuristic tools: The bounds only cover up to 3 rounds with 15 differentially and 13 linearly active S-boxes, insufficient for proving a level of security for the full constructions.In this paper, we propose a new modeling strategy for SAT solvers and derive strong bounds for the round-reduced Ascon permutation. We prove that 4 rounds already ensure that any single characteristic has a differential probability or squared correlation of at most 2−72, and 6 rounds at most 2−108. This is significantly below the bound that could be exploited within the query limit for keyed Ascon modes. These bounds are probably not tight. To achieve this result, we propose a new search strategy of dividing the search space into a large number of subproblems based on ‘girdle patterns’, and show how to exploit the rotational symmetry of Ascon using necklace theory. Additionally, we evaluate and optimize several aspects of the pure SAT model, including the counter implementation and parallelizability, which we expect to be useful for future applications to other models.

WARP is a 128-bit block cipher published by Banik et al. at SAC 2020 as a lightweight alternative to AES. It is based on a generalized Feistel network and achieves the smallest area footprint among 128-bit block ciphers in many settings. Previous analysis results include integral key-recovery attacks on 21 out of 41 rounds. In this paper, we propose integral key-recovery attacks on up to 32 rounds by improving both the integral distinguisher and the key-recovery approach substantially. For the distinguisher, we show how to model the monomial prediction technique proposed by Hu et al. at ASIACRYPT 2020 as a SAT problem and thus create a bit-oriented model of WARP taking the key schedule into account. Together with two additional observations on the properties of WARP’s construction, we extend the best previous distinguisher by 2 rounds (as a classical integral distinguisher) or 4 rounds (for a generalized integral distinguisher). For the key recovery, we create a graph-based model of the round function and demonstrate how to manipulate the graph to obtain a cipher representation amenable to FFT-based key recovery.

Automatic tools to search for boomerang distinguishers have seen significant advances over the past few years. However, most previous work has focused on ciphers based on a Substitution Permutation Network (SPN), while analyzing the Feistel structure is of great significance. Boukerrou et al. recently provided a theoretical framework to formulate the boomerang switch over multiple Feistel rounds, but they did not provide an automatic tool to find distinguishers. In this paper, by enhancing the recently proposed method by Hadipour et al., we provide an automatic tool to search for boomerang distinguishers and apply it to block ciphers following the Generalized Feistel Structure (GFS). Applying our tool to a wide range of GFS ciphers, we show that it significantly improves the best previous results on boomerang analysis. In particular, we improve the best previous boomerang distinguishers for 20 and 21 rounds of WARP by a factor of 238.28 and 236.56, respectively. Thanks to he effectiveness of our method, we can extend the boomerang distinguishers of WARP by two rounds and distinguish 23 rounds of this cipher from a random permutation. Applying our method to the internationally-standardized cipher CLEFIA, we achieve a 9-round boomerang distinguisher which improves the best previous boomerang distinguisher by one round. Based on this distinguisher, we build a key-recovery attack on 11 rounds of CLEFIA, which improves the best previous sandwich attack on this cipher by one round. We also apply our method to LBlock, LBlock-s, and TWINE and improve the best previous boomerang distinguisher of these ciphers.

Authenticated encryption satisfies the basic need for authenticity and confidentiality in our information infrastructure. In this paper, we provide the specification of Ascon -128 and Ascon -128a. Both authenticated encryption algorithms provide efficient authenticated encryption on resource-constrained devices and on high-end CPUs. Furthermore, they have been selected as the “primary choice” for lightweight authenticated encryption in the final portfolio of the CAESAR competition. In addition, we specify the hash function Ascon-Hash , and the extendable output function Ascon-Xof . Moreover, we complement the specification by providing a detailed overview of existing cryptanalysis and implementation results.

AEGIS is one of the authenticated encryption designs selected for the final portfolio of the CAESAR competition. It combines the AES round function and simple Boolean operations to update its large state and extract a keystream to achieve an excellent software performance. In 2014, Minaud discovered slight biases in the keystream based on linear characteristics. For family member AEGIS-256, these could be exploited to undermine the confidentiality faster than generic attacks, but this still requires very large amounts of data. For final portfolio member AEGIS-128, these attacks are currently less efficient than generic attacks. We propose improved keystream approximations for the AEGIS family, but also prove upper bounds below 2−128 for the squared correlation contribution of any single suitable linear characteristic.

Statistical Ineffective Fault Attacks (SIFA) pose a threat for many practical implementations of symmetric primitives. Countermeasures against both power analysis and fault attacks typically do not prevent straightforward SIFA attacks, which require only very limited knowledge about the concrete implementation. Therefore, the exploration of countermeasures against SIFA that do not rely on protocols or physical protection mechanisms is of great interest. In this paper, we describe different countermeasure strategies against SIFA. First, we introduce an abstraction layer between the algorithmic specification of a cipher and its implementation in hardware or software to study and describe resistance against SIFA. We then show that by basing the masked implementation on permutations as building blocks, we can build circuits that withstand single-fault SIFA and DPA attacks. We show how this approach can be applied to 3-bit, 4-bit, and 5-bit S-boxes and the AES S-box. Additionally, we present a strategy based on fine-grained fault detection suitable for protecting any circuit against SIFA attacks. Although this approach may lead to a higher implementation cost due to the fine-grained detection needed, it can be used to protect arbitrary circuits and can be generalized to cover multi-fault SIFA. For single-fault SIFA protection, our countermeasures only have a small computational overhead compared to a simple combination of masking and duplication.

The security and performance of many integrity proof systems like SNARKs, STARKs and Bulletproofs highly depend on the underlying hash function. For this reason several new proposals have recently been developed. These primitives obviously require an in-depth security evaluation, especially since their implementation constraints have led to less standard design approaches. This work compares the security levels offered by two recent families of such primitives, namely GMiMC and HadesMiMC. We exhibit low-complexity distinguishers against the GMiMC and HadesMiMC permutations for most parameters proposed in recently launched public challenges for STARK-friendly hash functions. In the more concrete setting of the sponge construction corresponding to the practical use in the ZK-STARK protocol, we present a practical collision attack on a round-reduced version of GMiMC and a preimage attack on some instances of HadesMiMC. To achieve those results, we adapt and generalize several cryptographic techniques to fields of odd characteristic.

We specify Isap v2.0, a lightweight permutation-based authenticated encryption algorithm that is designed to ease protection against side-channel and fault attacks. This design is an improved version of the previously published Isap v1.0, and offers increased protection against implementation attacks as well as more efficient implementations. Isap v2.0 is a candidate in NIST’s LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) project, which aims to identify and standardize authenticated ciphers that are well-suited for applications in constrained environments. We provide a self-contained specification of the new Isap v2.0 mode and discuss its design rationale. We formally prove the security of the Isap v2.0 mode in the leakage-resilient setting. Finally, in an extensive implementation overview, we show that Isap v2.0 can be implemented securely with very low area requirements. https://isap.iaik.tugraz.at

Algebraically simple PRFs, ciphers, or cryptographic hash functions are becoming increasingly popular, for example due to their attractive properties for MPC and new proof systems (SNARKs, STARKs, among many others). In this paper, we focus on the algebraically simple construction MiMC, which became an attractive cryptanalytic target due to its simplicity, but also due to its use as a baseline in a competition for more recent algorithms exploring this design space. For the first time, we are able to describe key-recovery attacks on all full-round versions of MiMC over GF(2^n), requiring half the code book. In the chosen-ciphertext scenario, recovering the key from this data for the n-bit full version of MiMC takes the equivalent of less than 2^(n - log_2(n) + 1) calls to MiMC and negligible amounts of memory. The attack procedure is a generalization of higher-order differential cryptanalysis, and it is based on two main ingredients. First, we present a higher-order distinguisher which exploits the fact that the algebraic degree of MiMC grows significantly slower than originally believed. Secondly, we describe an approach to turn this distinguisher into a key-recovery attack without guessing the full subkey. Finally, we show that approximately ceil(log_3(2 * R)) more rounds (where R = ceil(n * log_3(2)) is the current number of rounds of MiMC-n/n) can be necessary and sufficient to restore the security against the key-recovery attack presented here. The attack has been practically verified on toy versions of MiMC. Note that our attack does not affect the security of MiMC over prime fields.

Recent developments in multi party computation (MPC) and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) promoted the design and analysis of symmetric cryptographic schemes that minimize multiplications in one way or another. In this paper, we propose with Rastaa design strategy for symmetric encryption that has ANDdepth d and at the same time only needs d ANDs per encrypted bit. Even for very low values of d between 2 and 6 we can give strong evidence that attacks may not exist. This contributes to a better understanding of the limits of what concrete symmetric-key constructions can theoretically achieve with respect to AND-related metrics, and is to the best of our knowledge the first attempt that minimizes both metrics simultaneously. Furthermore, we can give evidence that for choices of d between 4 and 6 the resulting implementation properties may well be competitive by testing our construction in the use-case of removing the large ciphertext-expansion when using the BGV scheme.

Since the seminal work of Boneh et al., the threat of fault attacks has been widely known and techniques for fault attacks and countermeasures have been studied extensively. The vast majority of the literature on fault attacks focuses on the ability of fault attacks to change an intermediate value to a faulty one, such as differential fault analysis (DFA), collision fault analysis, statistical fault attack (SFA), fault sensitivity analysis, or differential fault intensity analysis (DFIA). The other aspect of faults—that faults can be induced and do not change a value—has been researched far less. In case of symmetric ciphers, ineffective fault attacks (IFA) exploit this aspect. However, IFA relies on the ability of an attacker to reliably induce reproducible deterministic faults like stuck-at faults on parts of small values (e.g., one bit or byte), which is often considered to be impracticable.As a consequence, most countermeasures against fault attacks do not focus on such attacks, but on attacks exploiting changes of intermediate values and usually try to detect such a change (detection-based), or to destroy the exploitable information if a fault happens (infective countermeasures). Such countermeasures implicitly assume that the release of “fault-free” ciphertexts in the presence of a fault-inducing attacker does not reveal any exploitable information. In this work, we show that this assumption is not valid and we present novel fault attacks that work in the presence of detection-based and infective countermeasures. The attacks exploit the fact that intermediate values leading to “fault-free” ciphertexts show a non-uniform distribution, while they should be distributed uniformly. The presented attacks are entirely practical and are demonstrated to work for software implementations of AES and for a hardware co-processor. These practical attacks rely on fault induction by means of clock glitches and hence, are achieved using only low-cost equipment. This is feasible because our attack is very robust under noisy fault induction attempts and does not require the attacker to model or profile the exact fault effect. We target two types of countermeasures as examples: simple time redundancy with comparison and several infective countermeasures. However, our attacks can be applied to a wider range of countermeasures and are not restricted to these two countermeasures.

MORUS is a high-performance authenticated encryption algorithm submitted to the CAESAR competition, and recently selected as a finalist. There are three versions of MORUS: MORUS-640 with a 128-bit key, and MORUS-1280 with 128-bit or 256-bit keys. For all versions the security claim for confidentiality matches the key size. In this paper, we analyze the components of this algorithm (initialization, state update and tag generation), and report several results.As our main result, we present a linear correlation in the keystream of full MORUS, which can be used to distinguish its output from random and to recover some plaintext bits in the broadcast setting. For MORUS-1280, the correlation is $$2^{-76}$$, which can be exploited after around $$2^{152}$$ encryptions, less than what would be expected for a 256-bit secure cipher. For MORUS-640, the same attack results in a correlation of $$2^{-73}$$, which does not violate the security claims of the cipher.To identify this correlation, we make use of rotational invariants in MORUS using linear masks that are invariant by word-rotations of the state. This motivates us to introduce single-word versions of MORUS called MiniMORUS, which simplifies the analysis. The attack has been implemented and verified on MiniMORUS, where it yields a correlation of $$2^{-16}$$.We also study reduced versions of the initialization and finalization of MORUS, aiming to evaluate the security margin of these components. We show a forgery attack when finalization is reduced from 10 steps to 3, and a key-recovery attack in the nonce-misuse setting when initialization is reduced from 16 steps to 10. These additional results do not threaten the full MORUS, but studying all aspects of the design is useful to understand its strengths and weaknesses.

Implementation attacks like side-channel and fault attacks are a threat to deployed devices especially if an attacker has physical access. As a consequence, devices like smart cards and IoT devices usually provide countermeasures against implementation attacks, such as masking against side-channel attacks and detection-based countermeasures like temporal or spacial redundancy against fault attacks. In this paper, we show how to attack implementations protected with both masking and detection-based fault countermeasures by using statistical ineffective fault attacks using a single fault induction per execution. Our attacks are largely unaffected by the deployed protection order of masking and the level of redundancy of the detection-based countermeasure. These observations show that the combination of masking plus error detection alone may not provide sufficient protection against implementation attacks.

The TWEAKEY/STK construction is an increasingly popular approach for designing tweakable block ciphers that notably uses a linear tweakey schedule. Several recent attacks have analyzed the implications of this approach for differential cryptanalysis and other attacks that can take advantage of related tweakeys. We generalize the clustering approach of a recent differential attack on the tweakable block cipher MANTIS5 and describe a tool for efficiently finding and evaluating such clusters. More specifically, we consider the set of all differential characteristics compatible with a given truncated characteristic, tweak difference, and optional constraints for the differential. We refer to this set as a semi-truncated characteristic and estimate its probability by analyzing the distribution of compatible differences at each step. We apply this approach to find a semi-truncated differential characteristic for MANTIS6 with probability about 2−67.73 and derive a key-recovery attack with a complexity of about 255.09 chosen-plaintext queries and 255.52 computations. The data-time product is 2110.61 << 2126.

Side-channel attacks and in particular differential power analysis (DPA) attacks pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations. One approach to counteract such attacks are cryptographic schemes based on fresh re-keying. In settings of pre-shared secret keys, such schemes render DPA attacks infeasible by deriving session keys and by ensuring that the attacker cannot collect side-channel leakage on the session key during cryptographic operations with different inputs. While these schemes can be applied to secure standard communication settings, current re-keying approaches are unable to provide protection in settings where the same input needs to be processed multiple times. In this work, we therefore adapt the re-keying approach and present a symmetric authenticated encryption scheme that is secure against DPA attacks and that does not have such a usage restriction. This means that our scheme fully complies with the requirements given in the CAESAR call and hence, can be used like other noncebased authenticated encryption schemes without loss of side-channel protection. Its resistance against side-channel analysis is highly relevant for several applications in practice, like bulk storage settings in general and the protection of FPGA bitfiles and firmware images in particular.

MANTIS is a lightweight tweakable block cipher published at CRYPTO 2016. In addition to the full 14-round version, MANTIS7, the designers also propose an aggressive 10-round version, MANTIS5. The security claim for MANTIS5 is resistance against “practical attacks”, defined as related-tweak attacks with data complexity 2d less than 230 chosen plaintexts (or 240 known plaintexts), and computational complexity at most 2126−d. We present a key-recovery attack against MANTIS5 with 228 chosen plaintexts and a computational complexity of about 238 block cipher calls, which violates this claim. Our attack is based on a family of differential characteristics and exploits several properties of the lightweight round function and tweakey schedule. To verify the validity of the attack, we also provide a practical implementation which recovers the full key in about 1 core hour using 230 chosen plaintexts.