## CryptoDB

### Paper: Latin Dances Reloaded: Improved Cryptanalysis against Salsa and ChaCha, and the proposal of Forró

Authors: Murilo Coutinho , University of Brasília Iago Passos , University of Brasília Juan Grados , Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi, UAE Fábio de Mendonça , University of Brasília Rafael Timóteo , University of Brasília Fábio Borges , Laboratório Nacional de Computação Científica Search ePrint Search Google Slides ASIACRYPT 2022 In this paper, we present 4 major contributions to ARX ciphers and in particular to the Salsa/ChaCha family of stream ciphers: a) We propose an improved differential-linear distinguisher against ChaCha. To do so, we propose a new way to approach the derivation of linear approximations by viewing the algorithm in terms of simpler subrounds. Using this idea we show that it is possible to derive almost all linear approximations from previous works from just 3 simple rules. Furthermore, we show that with one extra rule it is possible to improve the linear approximations proposed by Coutinho and Souza at Eurocrypt 2021. b) We propose a technique called Bidirectional Linear Expansions (BLE) to improve attacks against Salsa. While previous works only considered linear expansions moving forward into the rounds, BLE explores the expansion of a single bit in both forward and backward directions. Applying BLE, we propose the first differential-linear distinguishers ranging 7 and 8 rounds of Salsa and we improve PNB key-recovery attacks against 8 rounds of Salsa. c) Using all the knowledge acquired studying the cryptanalysis of these ciphers, we propose some modifications in order to provide better diffusion per round and higher resistance to cryptanalysis, leading to a new stream cipher named Forró. We show that Forró has higher security margin, this allows us to reduce the total number of rounds while maintaining the security level, thus creating a faster cipher in many platforms, specially in constrained devices. d) Finally, we developed CryptDances, a new tool for the cryptanalysis of Salsa, ChaCha, and Forró designed to be used in high performance environments with several GPUs. With CryptDances it is possible to compute differential correlations, to derive new linear approximations for ChaCha automatically, to automate the computation of the complexity of PNB attacks, among other features. We make CryptDances available for the community at https://github.com/MurCoutinho/cryptDances.
##### BibTeX
@inproceedings{asiacrypt-2022-32422,
title={Latin Dances Reloaded: Improved Cryptanalysis against Salsa and ChaCha, and the proposal of Forró},
publisher={Springer-Verlag},
author={Murilo Coutinho and Iago Passos and Juan Grados and Fábio de Mendonça and Rafael Timóteo and Fábio Borges},
year=2022
}