On the primitivity of PRESENT and other lightweight ciphers

Abstract: We provide two sufficient conditions to guarantee that the round functions of a translation based cipher generate a primitive group. Furthermore, under the same hypotheses, and assuming that a round of the cipher is strongly proper and consists of m-bit S-Boxes, with m = 3; 4 or 5, we prove that such a group is the alternating group. As an immediate consequence, we deduce that the round functions of some lightweight translation based ciphers, such as the PRESENT cipher, generate the alternating group.