A Note on the Empirical Evaluation of Security Margins against Algebraic Attacks (with Application to Low Cost-Ciphers LED and Piccolo)
Vincent Grosso, Christina Boura, Benoît Gérard, François‐Xavier Standaert · Digital Access to Libraries (Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), l'Université de Namur (UNamur) and the Université Saint-Louis (USL-B)) · 2012
Algebraic attacks are an important class of cryptanalytic techniques. Yet, precisely estimating the security margins that a block cipher may provide against them is generally difficult, as sound theoretical tools are missing for this purpose. Therefore, most recent block cipher proposals combine different heuristic arguments in order to argue about their practical security against such attacks. In this paper, we discuss the relevance and correlation of these arguments, with a practical case-study based on the lightweight ciphers LED and Piccolo.