Graph Representation Learning of Lightweight IoT Ciphers

SIMON and SIMECK belong to a family of Lightweight Cryptographic Algorithms (LCAs) based on the Feistel block cipher, designed for Internet of Things (IoT) devices. As with all Feistel ciphers, they are susceptible to differential cryptanalysis, necessitating rigorous resilience evaluations. While state-of-the-art techniques leverage heuristics and sampling to improve efficiency, little work has applied Machine Learning (ML) guided Graph Representation Learning (GRL) to efficiently identify and visualise high-probability differential clusters. We address this gap by introducing an efficient feature engineering strategy that extracts four differential attributes from a partial Difference Distribution Table (pDDT), revealing structural information concealed in raw differential data. Utilising the enriched features, we construct and compare three ML-guided directed graphs for SIMON32 and SIMECK32 using K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Decision Trees (DT), and Random Forests (RF). To the best of our knowledge, our framework produces the first graph-based visualisation of the differential clustering effect, in which high-probability single-bit differentials form geometrically close clusters in the learned embedding. All three models achieve a precision of 1.0 in identifying high-probability differentials, confirming zero false positives. KNN achieves the strongest cluster separation, the highest F1 score and the lowest graph construction time of approximately 2.3 seconds, while DT and RF produce optimal paths with near-perfect regression. The results are consistent across both LCAs, demonstrating the applicability of the framework to other AND-rotation LCA families.