Sosemanuk is a new synchronous software-oriented stream cipher, corresponding to Profile 1 of the ECRYPT call for stream cipher primitives. Its key length is variable between 128 and 256 bits. It accommodates a 128-bit initial value. Any key length is claimed to achieve 128-bit security. The Sosemanuk cipher uses both some basic design principles from the stream cipher SNOW 2.0 and some transformations derived from the block cipher SERPENT. Sosemanuk aims at improving SNOW 2.0 both from the security and from the efficiency points of view. Most notably, it uses a faster IV-setup procedure. It also requires a reduced amount of static data, yielding better performance on several architectures.

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Abstract. In the last ten years, multivariate cryptography has emerged as a possible alternative to public key cryptosystems based on hard computational problems from number theory. Notably, the HFE scheme [17] appears to combine efficiency and resistance to attacks, as expected from any public key scheme. However, its security is not yet completely understood. On one hand, since the security is related to the hardness of solving quadratic systems of multivariate binary equations, an NP complete problem, there were hopes that the system could be immune to subexponential attacks. On the other hand, several lines of attacks have been explored, based on so-called relinearization techniques [12,5], or on the use of Gröbner basis algorithms [7]. The latter approach was used to break the first HFE Challenge 1 in 96 hours on a 833 MHz Alpha workstation with 4 Gbytes of memory. At a more abstract level, Faugère and Joux discovered an algebraic invariant that explains why the computation finishes earlier than expected. In the present paper, we pursue this line and study the asymptotic behavior of these Gröbner basis based attacks. More precisely, we consider the complexity of the decryption attack which uses Gröbner bases to recover the plaintext and the complexity of a related distinguisher. We show that the decryption attack has a quasipolynomial complexity, where quasipolynomial denotes an subexponential expression much smaller than the classical subexponential expressions encountered in factoring or discrete logarithm computations. The same analysis shows that the related distinguisher has provable quasipolynomial complexity.

Abstract. In this paper we propose a novel cryptanalytic method against multivariate schemes, which adapts differential cryptanalysis to this setting. In multivariate quadratic systems, the differential of the public key is a linear map and has invariants such as the dimension of the kernel. Using linear algebra, the study of this invariant can be used to gain information on the secret key. We successfully apply this new method to break the original Matsumoto-Imai cryptosystem using properties of the differential, thus providing an alternative attack against this scheme besides the attack devised by Patarin. Next, we present an attack against a randomised variant of the Matsumoto-Imai cryptosystem, called PMI. This scheme has recently been proposed by Ding, and according to the author, it resists all previously known attacks. We believe that differential cryptanalysis is a general and powerful method that can give additional insight on most multivariate schemes proposed so far.