A Related-Key Attack on TREYFER

TREYFER is a lightweight cipher designed for resource constrained environments. In this paper, we present a related-key attack that directly recovers the secret key of TREYFER using about 211 chosen plaintext encryptions. Our attack is based on a set of deterministic algebraic relationships between TREYFER ciphertexts corresponding to related plaintexts encrypted under circularly byte shifted versions of the same key. The attack complexity is independent of the number of rounds of the cipher.

1 Introduction

Despite its current implementation advances, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) [1] may not always be the optimal choice for applications with tight resource constraints such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and tiny sensor networks. In fact, with the widespread applications of these resource-constrained devices, the analysis and design of lightweight encryption algorithms have started to gain a new momentum (e.g [2], [3].)