division property-based integral attack on reduced-round sand-128

Given the rapid evolution of emerging technologies, such as the internet of things (iot), there is a growing interest in lightweight block ciphers. this paper focuses on the security assessment of sand-128, a newly proposed lightweight block cipher based on simon, recognized for its reliance on s-box-based security evaluation approaches. by employing xiang’s milp-aided method for integral distinguisher search, this study utilizes a milp optimizer to identify a 16-round integral characteristic for sand-128 with nine balanced bits. furthermore, by extending the distinguisher to 17 rounds utilizing a novel idea without an increase in data complexity, we propose a comprehensive 20-round integral attack on sand-128, including the key recovery step. this attack leverages the partial sums technique, resulting in a time complexity of 2119, memory complexity of 276 bytes, and data complexity of 2127. this cryptanalysis is, to the best of our knowledge, the best integral attack on reduced-round sand-128 presented thus far.