Impact of Differentials in SIMON32 Algorithm for Lightweight Security of Internet of Things

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 19 Mar 2026] Impact of Differentials in SIMON32 Algorithm for Lightweight Security of Internet of Things Jonathan Cook, Sabih ur Rehman, M. Arif Khan SIMON and SPECK were among the first efficient encryption algorithms introduced for resource-constrained applications. SIMON is suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) devices and has rapidly attracted the attention of the research community to understand its structure and analyse its security. To analyse the security of an encryption algorithm, researchers often employ cryptanalysis techniques. However, cryptanalysis is a resource and time-intensive task. To improve cryptanalysis efficiency, state-of-the-art research has proposed implementing heuristic search and sampling methods. Despite recent advances, the cryptanalysis of the SIMON cypher remains inefficient. Contributing factors are the large size of the difference distribution tables utilised in cryptanalysis and the scarcity of differentials with a high transition probability. To address these limitations, we introduce an analysis of differential properties of the SIMON32 cypher, revealing differential characteristics that pave the way for future efficiency enhancements. Our analysis has further increased the number of targeted rounds by identifying high probability differentials within a partial difference distribution table of the SIMON cypher, exceeding existing state-of-the-art benchmarks. The code designed for this work is available at this https URL. Comments: Accepted at IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM) 2025 Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) Cite as: arXiv:2603.18455 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2603.18455v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.18455 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jonathan Cook [view email] [v1] Thu, 19 Mar 2026 03:34:32 UTC (370 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)