Paper 2025/677

Impossible Differential Attack on SAND-128

Abstract

Impossible differential attack is one of the major cryptanalytical methods for symmetric-key block ciphers. In this paper, we evaluate the security of SAND-128 against impossible differential attack. SAND is an AND-RX-based lightweight block cipher proposed by Chen et al. in Designs, Codes and Cryptography 2022. There are two variants of SAND, namely SAND-64 and SAND-128, due to structural differences. In this paper, we search for impossible differential distinguishers of SAND-128 using the Constraint Programming (CP) and reveal 14-round impossible differential distinguishers. The number of 14-round distinguishers is $2^{14} \times 7 = 114,688$. Furthermore, we demonstrate a key recovery attack on 21-round SAND-128. The complexities for the attack require $2^{124}$ data, $2^{127.2}$ encryptions, and $2^{122}$ bytes of memory, respectively. Although this result currently achieves the best attack on round-reduced SAND-128, this attack does not threaten the security of SAND-128 against impossible differential attack.