Improved “Partial Sums”-based Square Attack on AES

Michael Tunstall

2012

Abstract

The Square attack as a means of attacking reduced round variants of AES was described in the initial description of the Rijndael block cipher. This attack can be applied to AES, with a relatively small number of chosen plaintext-ciphertext pairs, reduced to less than six rounds in the case of AES-128 and seven rounds otherwise and several extensions to this attack have been described in the literature. In this paper we describe new variants of these attacks that have a smaller time complexity than those present in the literature. Specifically, we demonstrate that the quantity of chosen plaintext-ciphertext pairs can be halved producing the same reduction in the time complexity. We also demonstrate that the time complexity can be halved again for attacks applied to AES-128 and reduced by a smaller factor for attacks applied to AES-192. This is achieved by eliminating hypotheses on-the-fly when bytes in consecutive subkeys are related because of the key schedule.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Tunstall M. (2012). Improved “Partial Sums”-based Square Attack on AES . In Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012) ISBN 978-989-8565-24-2, pages 25-34. DOI: 10.5220/0003990300250034

in Bibtex Style

@conference{secrypt12,
author={Michael Tunstall},
title={Improved “Partial Sums”-based Square Attack on AES},
booktitle={Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012)},
year={2012},
pages={25-34},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003990300250034},
isbn={978-989-8565-24-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the International Conference on Security and Cryptography - Volume 1: SECRYPT, (ICETE 2012)
TI - Improved “Partial Sums”-based Square Attack on AES
SN - 978-989-8565-24-2
AU - Tunstall M.
PY - 2012
SP - 25
EP - 34
DO - 10.5220/0003990300250034