Higher Order Correlation Attacks, XL Algorithm and Cryptanalysis of Toyocrypt

Abstract

Many stream ciphers are built of a linear sequence generator and a non-linear output function f. There is an abundant literature on (fast) correlation attacks, that use linear approximations of f to attack the cipher. In this paper we explore higher degree approximations, much less studied. We reduce the cryptanalysis of a stream cipher to solving a system of multivariate equations that is overdefined (much more equations than unknowns). We adapt the XL method, introduced at Eurocrypt 2000 for overdefined quadratic systems, to solving equations of higher degree. Though the exact complexity of XL remains an open problem, there is no doubt that it works perfectly well for such largely overdefined systems as ours, and we confirm this by computer simulations. We show that using XL, it is possible to break stream ciphers that were known to be immune to all previously known attacks. For example, we cryptanalyse the stream cipher Toyocrypt accepted to the second phase of the Japanese government Cryptrec program. Our best attack on Toyocrypt takes 292 CPU clocks for a 128-bit cipher. The interesting feature of our XL-based higher order correlation attacks is, their very loose requirements on the known keystream needed. For example they may work knowing ONLY that the ciphertext is in English.