Abstract

The advent of quantum computing necessitates a rigorous reassessment of classical cryptographic primitives, particularly lightweight block ciphers (LBCs) deployed in resource-constrained environments. This work presents a comprehensive quantum implementation and security analysis of the Feistel-based LBC MIBS against quantum cryptanalysis. Using the inherent reversibility of its structure, we develop a novel ancilla-free quantum circuit that optimizes qubit count and depth. For MIBS-64 and MIBS-80, our implementation achieves quantum costs of 23,371 and 24,363, requiring 128 and 144 qubits, respectively, with a depth of 4,768. We subsequently quantify the cipher’s vulnerability to Grover’s key-search algorithm under the NIST PQC security constraint 𝙼⁢𝙰⁢𝚇⁢𝙳⁢𝙴⁢𝙿⁢𝚃⁢𝙷 . By constructing Grover oracles using inner parallelization with multiple plaintext-ciphertext pairs to suppress false positives, we demonstrate total quantum attack costs of approximately 2^94 for MIBS-64 and 2^111 for MIBS-80. These values fall below NIST’s Level-1 security threshold (2^170), confirming the susceptibility of both MIBS variants to quantum key-recovery attacks despite their classical lightweight efficiency.