Improved Biclique Cryptanalysis of the Lightweight Cipher FUTURE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5753/jbcs.2026.5390Keywords:
Cryptanalysis, Symmetric Cryptography, Block Ciphers, Biclique CryptanalysisAbstract
In the past decade, lightweight cryptography has been of much interest in the academia, especially regarding the cryptanalysis of such ciphers. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is one of the entities responsible for this interest, given that they promoted in 2019 a public process to choose the American standard for lightweight cryptography. In 2022, the FUTURE cipher was published and has since been the target of much cryptanalysis, including integral, meet-in-the-middle and differential cryptanalysis in a very short period of time. The objective of this paper is to present four biclique attacks that are better than the one previously published, in terms of time, memory and data complexities, obtained through semi-automatic search. Our fastest attack requires 2124.38 full computations of the cipher to run, while requiring only 224 data pairs and negligible memory. We also present the fastest unbalanced biclique attack and star attack to our knowledge. Only one integral attack on FUTURE has been published that is faster than our attacks, 2123.70 without using the full codebook of data, i.e. less than 264 pairs of plaintexts/ciphertexts, requiring 263 pairs. Still, when compared to it, our attacks use much less data while being only slightly slower, which presents a good trade-off.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Gabriel de Carvalho, Luis Kowada
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