Cryptanalysis of FIDES

FIDES is a lightweight authenticated cipher, presented at CHES 2013. The cipher has two version, providing either 80-bit or 96bit security. In this paper, we describe internal state-recovery attacks on both versions of FIDES, and show that once we recover the internal state, we can use it to immediately forge any message. Our attacks are based on a guess-and-determine algorithm, exploiting the slow diffusion of the internal linear transformation of FIDES. The attacks have time complexities of 275 and 290 for FIDES-80 and FIDES-96, respectively, use a very small amount of memory, and their most distinctive feature is their very low data complexity: the attacks require at most 24 bytes of an arbitrary plaintext and its corresponding ciphertext, in order to break the cipher with probability 1.