A cautionary note on the use of Gurobi for cryptanalysis

Muhammad ElSheikh; Amr M.  Youssef

Paper 2020/1112

A cautionary note on the use of Gurobi for cryptanalysis

Muhammad ElSheikh and Amr M. Youssef

Abstract

Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is a powerful tool that helps to automate several cryptanalysis techniques for symmetric key primitives. $\textsf{Gurobi}$ is one of the most popular solvers used by researchers to obtain useful results from the MILP models corresponding to these cryptanalysis techniques. In this report, we provide a cautionary note on the use of $\textsf{Gurobi}$ in the context of bit-based division property integral attacks. In particular, we report four different examples in which $\textsf{Gurobi}$ gives contradictory results when solving the same MILP model by just changing the number of used threads or reordering some constraints.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Secret-key cryptography
Publication info: Preprint.
Contact author(s): m_elshei @ encs concordia ca
History: 2020-09-15: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2020/1112
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1112,
      author = {Muhammad ElSheikh and Amr M.  Youssef},
      title = {A cautionary note on the use of Gurobi for cryptanalysis},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/1112},
      year = {2020},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1112}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1112}
}