Paper 2026/961

Delving Deep into Security Guarantees against Integral Distinguishers with Applications to PRESENT, TWINE and LBLOCK

Jiahui He, Shandong University

Kai Hu, Shandong University

Meiqin Wang, Shandong University

Abstract

Integral attacks pose a significant threat to block cipher security, yet providing guarantees against such attacks for a target block cipher is difficult. At ASIACRYPT 2021, Hebborn, Lambin, Leander, and Todo proposed the integral resistance property, which offers strong security guarantees for certain SPN and AND-RX block ciphers, assuming independent round keys. However, limitations remain: they proved a security bound for 13-round Present, while the longest known integral distinguisher covers only 9 rounds. Further, their method cannot tackle complex Feistel structures such as Twine and Lblock. A major challenge in their method is the difficulty of finding key monomials that lead to odd-number monomial trails. We observe that in the first and last parts of the target cipher, many interfering monomials exist that always produce interfering trails, which is a critical reason that makes it difficult to find odd-number monomial trails. Fortunately, we find that these interfering monomials are avoidable by a careful selection of the key monomials. Using this insight, we successfully prove the security of 11-round Present, improving the previous result by 2 rounds, and provide a partial analysis for 10-round Present. We also extend their integral-resistance property to general-Feistel-network (GFN) ciphers Twine and Lblock by proposing an equivalent key transformation method. Through acceleration strategies for identifying key monomials, we confirm, for the first time, that 20-round Twine (out of 36 rounds) and Lblock (out of 32 rounds) are resistant to integral distinguishers. We believe our observations and strategies provide gains to Hebborn et al.’s security guarantees for block ciphers.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2026/961,
      author = {Shuo Peng and Jiahui He and Kai Hu and Meiqin Wang},
      title = {Delving Deep into Security Guarantees against Integral Distinguishers with Applications to {PRESENT}, {TWINE} and {LBLOCK}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2026/961},
      year = {2026},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/961}
}