Impossible differential cryptanalysis of Piccolo lightweight block cipher

This paper analyzes the Piccolo family of lightweight block ciphers against the impossible differential cryptanalysis. A combination of some ploys such as decreasing the S-box computations, finding an appropriate propagation of differentials, utilizing hash tables and using the linearity of the key-schedule as well as disregarding subkeys of two rounds lead to 12-round and 13-round impossible differential attack on Piccolo-80 and 15-round attack on Piccolo-128. The time and data complexity of the attack against Piccolo-80 is 2
^55.18
and 2
^36.34
for 12-round and 2
^69.7
and 2
^43.25
for 13-round, respectively. Moreover, the time and data complexity for 15 rounds cryptanalysis of Piccolo-128 are 2
^125.4
and 2
^58.7
, respectively.