New results on quantum boomerang attacks

SAC 2021, Frixons et al. proposed quantum boomerang attacks that can effectively recover the keys of block ciphers in the quantum setting. Based on their work, we further consider how to quantize the generic boomerang attacks proposed by Biham et al. at FSE 2002, so as to obtain more generic quantum boomerang attacks. Similar to Frixons et al.’s work, we only consider quantum key recovery attacks in the single-key setting. With the help of some famous quantum algorithms, this paper presents two methods to convert the attacks of Biham et al. into some new quantum key recovery attacks. In order to proof our methods, we apply our new ideas to attack Serpent-256 and ARIA-196. To sum up, for Serpent-256, we give valid 9-round and 10-round quantum key recovery attacks respectively. The quantum time complexity of 9-round and 10-round of Serpent-256 is 2^115.43 and 2^126.6 respectively. Furthermore, we show a valid quantum key attack on 6-round ARIA-196 which has a time complexity of 2^89.8 with negligible memory. The time complexity of the above quantum attacks are better than the corresponding classical attacks and quantum generic key recovery attack via Grover’s algorithm.