Update on 3rd Skinny Cryptanalysis Competition

[siang meng Sim]

Dear all,

We would like to give an update on the 3rd Skinny cryptanalysis competition. This time, we want to try out something different from our previous competitions and put the focus on practical attacks.

The first challenge is to recover a secret 128-bit key from a small set of plaintext/ciphertext pairs (2^{20}) for round-reduced versions of Skinny-64 and Skinny-128. The team which breaks the most rounds of Skinny-64 or Skinny-128 will be announced as the winner. To date, the highest number of broken rounds are 12-round (out of 36) of Skinny-64 and 10-round (out of 40) of Skinny-128.

Additionally, we will reward the team which provides the most interesting/innovative cryptanalysis in this setting. This is independent of the key-recovery challenge. That is to say, anyone can still submit their cryptanalysis report (and stand a chance to win this category) even if they are not the first to recover the key for some reduced-round Skinny.

(**NEW**)Last but not least, we are adding a new category "Hacker's Code" and inviting everyone to submit their codes that could recover the secret key in the above setting.

You can find more information on the competition on our website: https://sites.google.com/site/skinnycipher/cryptanalysis-competition/2018-2019-competition

Note that the challenges will end on February 28, 2019, so hurry up and take part in the Skinny challenge now! :)

Regards,
The Skinny team.