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Top1. Introduction
With the rapid development of networks especially internet of things, security becomes an important issue. To dress this issue, cryptographic measures to different applications in pervasive, ubiquitous computing environments are needed, and this makes lightweight cryptography become a popular evolving and active area of research. Lightweight cryptographic primitives are designed to be efficient, yet secure, when limited hardware resources are available. Examples of these resource-constrained devices include mobile phones, smart cards, RFID tags and sensor networks, etc. Consequently, the main motive for current efforts of constructing lightweight cryptographic primitives is to maintain a reasonable trade-off between security, efficient hardware performance and low overall cost.
Lightweight block ciphers are considered vital primitives in constructing symmetric cryptographic schemes such as encryption algorithms, hash functions, authentication schemes, and pseudo-random number generators and so on. Many lightweight block ciphers are designed, for example, lightweight block ciphers include, but not limited to, PRESENT (Bogdanov & Knudsen, 2007), KATAN (Canniere, Dunkelman & Knezevic, 2009), KLEIN (Gong, Nikova & Law, 2011), LBlock (Wu & Zhang, 2011), SIMON(Beaulieu, Shors & Smith, 2015), PRINCE (Borghoff, Canteaut & Gűneysu, 2011), LED (Guo, Peyrin & Poschmann, 2011), LEA (Lee, & Kim & Kwon, 2014), Piccolo (Shibutani, Isobe & Hiwatari, 2011), EPCBC (Yap, Khoo & Poschmann, 2011), TWINE (Suzaki, Minematsu & Morioka, 2013), and ICEBERG (Standaert, Piret & Rouvroy, 2004).
The core security of these schemes depends on whether the ciphers can resist the known cryptanalytic techniques or not. So far, a variety of powerful cryptanalytic techniques have been proposed such as differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis, integral cryptanalysis, zero correlation linear cryptanalysis, impossible differential cryptanalysis, etc. Integral attack, one of the most effective attacks against AES (Galice & Minier, 2008), has also been used to analyze the security of other ciphers (Yeom, Park & Kim, 2002; Wu, Zhang & Feng, 2005). Till now, a number of these ideas have been exploited, such as square attack (Daemen, Knudsen & Rijmen, 1997; Ferguson, Kelsey, & Lucks, 2000), saturation attack (Wang, &Wang, 2008; Lucks, 2001), multi-set attack (Nakahara, Freitas, & Phan, 2005; Biryukov, & Shamir, 2001), and higher order differential attack (Knudsen, 1995) and so on.