Quantum Guess and Determine Attack on Stream Ciphers.

This article focuses on the development and analysis of quantum guess and determine attacks on stream ciphers, presenting a general framework that extends classical guess and determine attacks into the quantum setting. It introduces three types of quantum guess and determine attacks—basic, with assumption, and with multiple data—demonstrating that quantum versions can significantly reduce the time complexity of recovering internal states compared to classical attacks. Applying these quantum attacks to SNOW-like stream ciphers reveals that SNOW 1.0 (128-bit key), SNOW 2.0 (128-bit key), and SOSEMANUK are vulnerable to quantum guess and determine attacks with complexities below generic quantum exhaustive search, while SNOW 3G, ZUC, and SNOW-V remain secure under current quantum assumptions. A detailed quantum resource estimation for the basic quantum guess and determine attack on SNOW 3G is provided, highlighting the substantial quantum computational costs involved. The study underscores the importance of designing quantum cryptanalytic techniques to accurately assess the post-quantum security of symmetric key stream ciphers.