PNB Based Differential Cryptanalysis of Salsa20 and ChaCha

This paper introduces significant improvements over the existing cryptanalysis approaches on Salsa20 and ChaCha stream ciphers. For the first time, we reduced the attack complexity on Salsa20/8 to the lowest possible margin. We introduced an attack on ChaCha7.25. It is the first attack of its type on ChaCha7.25/20. In our approach, we studied differential cryptanalysis of the Salsa20 and ChaCha stream ciphers based on a comprehensive analysis of probabilistic neutral bits (PNBs). The existing differential cryptanalysis approaches on Salsa20 and ChaCha stream ciphers first study the differential bias at specific input and output differential positions and then search for probabilistic neutral bits. However, the differ- ential bias and the set of PNBs obtained in this method are not always the ideal combination to conduct the attack against the ciphers. The researchers have not focused on the comprehensive analysis of the probabilistic neutrality measure of all key bits concerning all possible output difference positions at all possible internal rounds of Salsa20 and ChaCha stream ciphers. Moreover, the relationship between the neutrality measure and the number of inverse quarter rounds has not been scrutinized yet. To address these study gaps, we study the differential cryptanalysis based on the comprehensive analysis of probabilistic neutral bits on the reduced-round Salsa20 and ChaCha. At first, we comprehensively analyze the neutrality measure of 256 key bits positions. Afterward, we select the output difference bit position with the best average neutrality measure and look for the corresponding input differential with the best differential bias. Considering all aspects, we present an attack on Salsa20/8 with a time complexity of 2(241.62) and data complexity of 2(31.5), which is the best-known single bit differen- tial attack on Salsa20/8 and then, we introduced an attack on ChaCha7.25 rounds with a time complexity of 2(254.011) and data complexity of 2(51.81).