Paper 2026/757

Integral Distinguishers and a 4-Round Key-Recovery Attack on Kuznyechik Without Initial Key Whitening

Ranit Dutta, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur

Bimal Mandal, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur

Abstract

Kuznyechik is a 128-bit block cipher standardized in GOST~R~34.12--2015. In this paper We study Kuznyechik from the viewpoint of integral cryptanalysis, i.e., we track how structured multisets of chosen plaintexts propagate through the round functions. Starting from a first-order structure of $2^8$ plaintexts (one byte takes all $256$ values while the remaining bytes are fixed), we obtain a 2-round distinguisher: after two rounds, every byte position is balanced, meaning that the XOR-sum over the $256$ texts equals zero. Next, in the setting without initial key-whitening, we extend this distinguisher to three rounds by applying one inverse round to the original structure to construct a new input set. Finally, we turn the 3-round balanced property into a 4-round key-recovery attack by partially inverting the last round and filtering last-round key-byte guesses using the balanced test; multiple independent structures remove false candidates.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/757,
      author = {Nitish Kumar and Ranit Dutta and Bimal Mandal},
      title = {Integral Distinguishers and a 4-Round Key-Recovery Attack on Kuznyechik Without Initial Key Whitening},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/757},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/757}
}