Cryptanalysis on PHOTON hash function using cube attack

Abstract

The lightweight hash function PHOTON has shown excellent hardware compactness which almost reaches the theoretical optimum and brings benefits for on-tag applications. Unlike cryptanalysis which tries to find collisions or build distinguishers on PHOTON, we apply cube attack for secret recovery of PHOTON. We focus on 1 to 3 round of PHOTON-128/16/16 in our experiments. Using cube attack, we show at least half of the message bits can be recovered. When more powerful computing capability is used, it is possible to recover more bits of the message in the same number of PHOTON rounds.