  In symmetric cryptography, the round functions used as building blocks for
iterated block ciphers are often obtained as the composition of different
layers providing confusion and diffusion. The study of the conditions on such
layers which make the group generated by the round functions of a block cipher
a primitive group has been addressed in the past years, both in the case of
Substitution Permutation Networks and Feistel Networks, giving to block cipher
designers the receipt to avoid the imprimitivity attack. In this paper a
similar study is proposed on the subject of the Lai-Massey scheme, a framework
which combines both Substitution Permutation Network and Feistel Network
features. Its resistance to the imprimitivity attack is obtained as a
consequence of a more general result in which the problem of proving the
primitivity of the Lai-Massey scheme is reduced to the simpler one of proving
the primitivity of the group generated by the round functions of a strictly
related Substitution Permutation Network.
