Security Analysis of Lightweight IoT Cipher: Chaskey

This paper presents the differential cryptanalysis of ARX based cipher Chaskey using tree search based heuristic approach. ARX algorithms are suitable for resource-constrained devices such as IoT and very resistant to standard cryptanalysis such as linear or differential. To make a differential attack, it is important to make differential characteristics of the cipher. Finding differential characteristics in ARX is the most challenging task nowadays. Due to the bigger block size, it is infeasible to calculate lookup tables for non-linear components. Transition through the non-linear layer of cipher faces a huge state space problem. The problem of huge state space is a serious research topic in artificial intelligence (AI). The proposed heuristic tool use such methods inspired by Nested Tree-based sampling to find differential paths in ARX cipher and successfully applied to get a state of art results for differential cryptanalysis with a very fast and simpler framework. The algorithm can also be applied in different research areas in cryptanalysis where such huge state space is a problem.