Forgery attacks on round-reduced ICEPOLE-128

Abstract

ICEPOLE is a family of authenticated encryptions schemes submitted to the ongoing CAESAR competition and in addition presented at CHES 2014. To justify the use of ICEPOLE, or to point out potential weaknesses, third-party cryptanalysis is needed. In this work, we evaluate the resistance of ICEPOLE-128 against forgery attacks. By using differential cryptanalysis, we are able to create forgeries from a known ciphertext-tag pair with a probability of 2-60.3 for a roundreduced version of ICEPOLE-128, where the last permutation is reduced to 4 (out of 6) rounds. This is a noticeable advantage compared to simply guessing the right tag, which works with a probability of 2-128. As far as we know, this is the first published attack in a nonce-respecting setting on round-reduced versions of ICEPOLE-128.