Security Analysis of Cipher ICEBERG against Bit-pattern Based Integral Attack

Abstract

Significant progress in the development of lightweight symmetric cryptographic primitives has been made in recent years. Security of ciphers against current cryptanalysis methods should be carefully evaluated. Integral attack is one of the most effective attacks against block ciphers. However, traditional integral attack based on byte or word is not available for a bit-oriented cipher. Bit-pattern based integral attack technique, introduced by Z'aba et al. addresses this issue to some extent. In this paper, bit-pattern based integral attack is applied to ICEBERG—a lightweight block cipher efficient in reconfigurable hard-ware. By tracing the propagation of the plaintext structure at bit-level, the balance property is obtained and then key guesses are verified. The result shows that 3, 4 and 5 rounds ICEBERG are not immune to this attack. All attacks presented in this paper manage to recover the full subkeys of the final round.