Earlier today some folks published a paper that claims the SIMON cipher from the NSA has been broken, at least for the 32/64 variant. I've spent the last hour reading the paper, https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/474.pdf , there's some really strange things in there ...
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The next section is basically the Chewbacca defense. Focus on Yi. There is no other mention of Yi in this paper. Is it a typo? Was it meant to be Xi? If so ... Xi is uniformly distributed, it says so right above, not binomially.pic.twitter.com/JHYdE6QJzT
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Is this next bit basically saying that if the key size and the block size are the same, then some keys must produce identical cipher texts? Under what conditions? Obviously this is not true of a crappy block cipher that just uses the key directly as the cipher block!pic.twitter.com/omzm3BvcBJ
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O.k. so https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10/pg10.txt … is 4,452,069 bytes long, that's 556,509 64-bit blocks. Should there really be some kind of analysis of Birthday bounds?pic.twitter.com/5y4ClVDcU3
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There's a few other typos, it says 54-bits in one place, for example. My point with these weirdnesses isn't that they are flat-out wrong, it's that they are imprecise and missing links, and if you just broke an encryption algorithm, it's not helpful to convince the reader!
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Btw "Alba" is just the Scottish Gaelic word for "Scotland" ... so Alba3 means "Scotland 3". The authors claim to be in Edinburgh, but they use "ize" suffixes throughout, like "optimize".
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If you fix a plaintext, a key maps to a single ciphertext. I think (3) is defined in terms of a fixed plaintext
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I think I remember hearing the cryptanalysis is dependent on having 2 plaintext ciphertext pairs, which would be your fixed (P, C)
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It makes perfect mathematical sense to define a function from keys to ciphertexts. They are just sets. This is done routinely in time-space tradeoffs, for instance.
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