Improved Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks on Crypton and mCrypton

Crypton is a SP-network block cipher that attracts much attention because of its excellent performance on hardware. Based on Crypton, mCrypton is designed as a lightweight block cipher suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The security of Crypton and mCrypton under meet-in-the-middle attack is analyzed in this paper. By analyzing the differential properties of cell permutation, several differential characteristics are introduced to construct generalized d-sets. With the usage of a generalized delta-set and differential enumeration technique, a 6-round meet-in-the-middle distinguisher is proposed to give the first meet-in-the-middle attack on 9-round Crypton-192 and some improvements on the cryptanalysis of 10-round Crypton-256 are given. Combined with the properties of nibble permutation and substitution, an improved meet-in-the-middle attack on 8-round mCrypton is proposed and the first complete attack on 9-round mCrypton-96 is proposed.