The Improved 16th-Order Differential Attack on 10- Round Variant of Block Cipher PRESENT

We study the improved 16th-order differential attack on 10-round variant of PRESENT that is a 64-bit block cipher supporting 80-bit and 128-bit secret keys proposed by Bogdanov et al. in 2007. Higher-order differential attack is one of the cryptanalytic techniques exploiting a low algebraic degree of an encryption/decryption function. In 2013 Wu et al. reported the 16th-order differential attack on 10-round variant of PRESENT, which requires 222.4 pairs of plaintext and ciphertext, and 299.3 times of encryption operation. In this article we adopt partial sum technique to solve an attack equation, which leads to low computational complexity. As a result we show that 10-round variant of PRESENT can be attacked with 222.3 pairs of plaintext and ciphertext, and 281.3 times of encryption operation.