This is not a direct answer, but a closely related problem is known to be NP-hard: > Das, Goodrich. "On the Complexity of Approximating and Illuminating Three-Dimensional Convex Polyhedra." 1995. ([ACM link][1]; [PDF download][2]) This paper establishes several results, including this: > <b>Theorem 4.2</b>. The problem of fitting a polyhedron with a minimum number of faces between two given nested convex polyhedra is NP-hard. This question was first posed by Victor Klee, and I coauthored a paper that provided an efficient algorithm in $\mathbb{R}^2$. But the above result shows it is already intractable in $\mathbb{R}^3$. I do not remember the Das-Goodrich proof well enough to know if it can achieve the same result with the outer polyhedron a cube. There are many approximation algorithms available, as this is an important practical problem. For example: > Mitchell, Suri. "Separation and approximation of polyhedral surfaces." In *Proc. 3rd ACM-SIAM Sympos. Discrete Algorithms*, pages 296-306, 1992. ([CiteSeer link][3]) [1]: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=645930.672852 [2]: http://ranger.uta.edu/~gdas/websitepages/preprints-papers/approx-illum.pdf [3]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.160.2500