Slide Attack on Full-Round ULC Lightweight Block Cipher Designed for IoT

To meet the security demand for IoT devices, many new lightweight block ciphers are proposed. ULC is a lightweight block cipher designed for the IoT. It has many advantages in terms of memory use, efficiency, and security. In this paper, a slide attack on full-round ULC is proposed in a related key setting. First, two properties on ULC are discovered. The first property is presented to illustrate the property of a slid pair for ULC. The second property is introduced to construct a link between some round key bits and some master key bits. Based on these properties, a key recovery attack on ULC is proposed. In this attack, with the condition of one related key, all the 80 master key bits can be recovered with the data complexity of O(2(32)), the memory complexity of O(2(32)), and the time complexity of O(2(63)). The result of this paper indicates that ULC can't resist slide attack in related key settings.