A practical-time related-key attack on the KASUMI cryptosystem used in gsm and 3G telephony

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Adi Shamir

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

98 Scopus citations

Abstract

The privacy of most GSM phone conversations is currently protected by the 20+ years old A5/1 and A5/2 stream ciphers, which were repeatedly shown to be cryptographically weak. They will soon be replaced by the new A5/3 (and the soon to be announced A5/4) algorithm based on the block cipher KASUMI, which is a modified version of MISTY. In this paper we describe a new type of attack called a sandwich attack, and use it to construct a simple distinguisher for 7 of the 8 rounds of KASUMI with an amazingly high probability of 2-14. By using this distinguisher and analyzing the single remaining round, we can derive the complete 128 bit key of the full KASUMI by using only 4 related keys, 226 data, 230 bytes of memory, and 232 time. These complexities are so small that we have actually simulated the attack in less than two hours on a single PC, and experimentally verified its correctness and complexity. Interestingly, neither our technique nor any other published attack can break MISTY in less than the 2128 complexity of exhaustive search, which indicates that the changes made by ETSI's SAGE group in moving from MISTY to KASUMI resulted in a much weaker cipher.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2010 - 30th Annual Cryptology Conference, Proceedings
Pages393-410
Number of pages18
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event30th Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2010 - Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Duration: 15 Aug 201019 Aug 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6223 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference30th Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2010
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara, CA
Period15/08/1019/08/10

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