Paper 2025/1918

Differential-MITM Attack on 14-round ARADI

Bastien Michel, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation

María Naya-Plasencia, French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation

Abstract

ARADI is a low-latency block cipher introduced by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for secure and efficient memory encryption applications. In contrast to most ciphers proposed in the academic community, the design rationale for ARADI has not been publicly disclosed, limiting external evaluation to independent cryptanalysis. Several such analyses have already been published, with the most effective attacks to date reaching up to 12 out of 16 rounds. In this work, we present a differential meet-in-the-middle attack on ARADI that incorporates several new optimizations and dedicated techniques, enabling, for the first time, an attack extending to 14 rounds of the cipher.

@misc{cryptoeprint:2025/1918,
      author = {Shibam Ghosh and Bastien Michel and María Naya-Plasencia},
      title = {Differential-{MITM} Attack on 14-round {ARADI}},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2025/1918},
      year = {2025},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1918}
}