Impossible Differential Attack on Reduced Round SPARX-128/256

Abstract

SPARX-128/256 is one of the two versions of the SPARX-128 block cipher family. It has 128-bit block size and 256-bit key size. SPARX has been developed using ARX-based S-boxes with the aim of achieving provable security against single-trail differential and linear cryptanalysis. In this letter, we propose 20-round impossible differential distinguishers for SPARX-128. Then, we utilize these distinguishers to attack 24 rounds (out of 40 rounds) of SPARX-128/256. Our attack has time complexity of 2²³² memory accesses, memory complexity of 2^160.81 128-bit blocks, and data complexity of 2¹⁰⁴ chosen plaintexts.