Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of Reduced-Round SKINNY.
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SKINNY is a new lightweight tweakable block cipher family proposed by Beierle et al. at CRYPTO 2016. SKINNY has 6 main variants where SKINNY-n-t is a block cipher that operates on n-bit blocks using t-bit tweakey (key and tweak) where \(n=64\) or 128 and \(t=n\), 2n, or 3n. In this paper, we present impossible differential attacks against reduced-round versions of all the 6 members of the SKINNY family in the single-tweakey model. More precisely, using an 11-round impossible differential distinguisher, we present impossible differential attacks against 18-round SKINNY-n-n, 20-round SKINNY-n-2n and 22-round SKINNY-n-3n (\(n=64\) or 128). To the best of our knowledge, these are the best attacks against these 6 variants in the single-tweakey model.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it