International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Plaintext structures are a commonly-used technique for improving differential cryptanalysis. Generally, there are two types of plaintext structures: multiple-differential structures and truncated-differential structures. Both types have been widely used in cryptanalysis of S-box-based ciphers while for SPECK, an Addition-Rotation-XOR (ARX) cipher, the truncated-differential structure has not been used so far. In this paper, we investigate the properties of modular addition and propose a method to construct truncated-differential structures for SPECK. Moreover, we show that a combination of both types of structures is also possible for SPECK. For recovering the key of SPECK, we propose dedicated algorithms and apply them to various differential distinguishers, which helps to obtain a series of improved attacks on all variants of SPECK. Notably, on SPECK128, the time complexity of the attack can be reduced by a factor up to 2^15. The results show that the combination of both structures helps to improve the data and time complexity at the same time, as in the cryptanalysis of S-box-based ciphers.