Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of the Lightweight Block Ciphers TEA, XTEA and HIGHT Jiazhe Chen1;2;3?, Meiqin Wang1;2;3??, and Bart Preneel2;3 1 Key Laboratory of Cryptologic Technology and Information Security, Ministry of Education, School of Mathematics, Shandong University, Jinan 250100, China 2 Department of Electrical Engineering ESAT/SCD-COSIC, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Kasteelpark Arenberg 10, B-3001 Heverlee, Belgium 3 Interdisciplinary Institute for BroadBand Technology (IBBT), Belgium
[email protected] Abstract. TEA, XTEA and HIGHT are lightweight block ciphers with 64-bit block sizes and 128-bit keys. The round functions of the three ci- phers are based on the simple operations XOR, modular addition and shift/rotation. TEA and XTEA are Feistel ciphers with 64 rounds de- signed by Needham and Wheeler, where XTEA is a successor of TEA, which was proposed by the same authors as an enhanced version of TEA. HIGHT, which is designed by Hong et al., is a generalized Feistel cipher with 32 rounds. These block ciphers are simple and easy to implement but their diffusion is slow, which allows us to find some impossible prop- erties. This paper proposes a method to identify the impossible differentials for TEA and XTEA by using the weak diffusion, where the impossible differential comes from a bit contradiction. Our method finds a 14-round impossible differential of XTEA and a 13-round impossible differential of TEA, which result in impossible differential attacks on 23-round XTEA and 17-round TEA, respectively. These attacks significantly improve the previous impossible differential attacks on 14-round XTEA and 11-round TEA given by Moon et al.