A new criterion for avoiding the propagation of linear relations through an Sbox (Full version)
Résumé
In several cryptographic primitives, Sboxes of small size are used to provide nonlinearity. After several iterations, all the output bits of the primitive are ideally supposed to depend in a nonlinear way on all of the input variables. However, in some cases, it is possible to find some output bits that depend in an affine way on a small number of input bits if the other input bits are fixed to a well-chosen value. Such situations are for example exploited in cube attacks or in attacks like the one presented by Fuhr against the hash function Hamsi. Here, we define a new property for nonlinear Sboxes, named $(v,w)$-linearity, which means that $2^w$ components of an Sbox are affine on all cosets of a $v$-dimensional subspace. This property is related to the generalization of the so-called Maiorana-McFarland construction for Boolean functions. We show that this concept quantifies the ability of an Sbox to propagate affine relations. As a proof of concept, we exploit this new notion for analyzing and slightly improving Fuhr's attack against Hamsi and we show that its success strongly depends on the $(v,w)$-linearity of the involved Sbox.