Improved Differential Meet-in-the-Middle Cryptanalysis

. In this paper, we extend the applicability of differential meet-in-the-middle attacks, proposed at Crypto 2023, to truncated differentials, and in addition, we introduce three new ideas to improve this type of attack: we show how to add longer structures than the original paper, we show how to improve the key recovery steps by introducing some probability in them, and we combine this type of attacks with the state-test technique, that was introduced in the context of impossible differential attacks. Furthermore, we have developed a MILP-based tool to automate the search for a truncated differential-MITM attack with optimized overall complexity, incorporating some of the proposed improvements. Thanks to this, we can build the best known attacks on the cipher CRAFT , reaching 23 rounds against 21 previously; we provide a new attack on 23-round SKINNY-64-192 , and we improve the best attacks on SKINNY-128-384 .