Paper 2024/458

Classical and Quantum Generic Attacks on 6-round Feistel Schemes

Abstract

In this paper, we describe new quantum generic attacks on 6 rounds balanced Feistel networks with internal functions or internal permutations. In order to obtain our new quantum attacks, we revisit a result of Childs and Eisenberg that extends Ambainis' collision finding algorithm to the subset finding problem. In more details, we continue their work by carefully analyzing the time complexity of their algorithm. We also use four points structures attacks instead of two points structures attacks that leads to a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(2^{8n/5})$ instead of $\mathcal{O}(2^{2n})$. Moreover, we have also found a classical (i.e. non quantum) improved attack on $6$ rounds with internal permutations. The complexity here will be in $\mathcal{O}(2^{2n})$ instead of $\mathcal{O}(2^{3n})$ previously known.