Kite attack: reshaping the cube attack for a flexible GPU-based maxterm search

Dinur and Shamir’s cube attack has attracted significant attention in the literature. Nevertheless, the lack of implementations achieving effective results casts doubts on its practical relevance. On the theoretical side, promising results have been recently achieved leveraging on division trails. The present paper follows a more practical approach and aims at giving new impetus to this line of research by means of a cipher-independent flexible framework that is able to carry out the cube attack on GPU/CPU clusters. We address all issues posed by a GPU implementation, providing evidence in support of parallel variants of the attack and identifying viable directions for solving open problems in the future. We report the results of running our GPU-based cube attack against round-reduced versions of three well-known ciphers: Trivium, Grain-128 and SNOW 3G. Our attack against Trivium improves the state of the art, permitting full key recovery for Trivium reduced to (up to) 781 initialization rounds (out of 1152) and finding the first-ever maxterm after 800 rounds. In this paper, we also present the first standard cube attack (i.e., neither dynamic nor tester) to yield maxterms for Grain-128 up to 160 initialization rounds on non-programmable hardware. We include a thorough evaluation of the impact of system parameters and GPU architecture on the performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the scalability of our solution on multi-GPU systems. We believe that our extensive set of results can be useful for the cryptographic engineering community at large and can pave the way to further results in the area.