The delicate issues of addition with respect to XOR differences

  • Authors:
  • Gaoli Wang;Nathan Keller;Orr Dunkelman

  • Affiliations:
  • School of Mathematics and System Sciences, Shandong University, Jinan, China;Einstein Institute of Mathematics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel;Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Dept. of Electrical Engineering ESAT/SCD-COSIC, Leuven-Heverlee, Belgium

  • Venue:
  • SAC'07 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Selected areas in cryptography
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

In this paper we analyze the previous attacks on the block cipher SHACAL-1 and show that all the differential-based attacks fail due to mistreatment of XOR differences through addition. We show that the previously published differential and rectangle attacks on SHACAL-1 fail as some of the underlying differentials are impossible. The related-key rectangle attacks on the cipher generally fail, but if some conditions are imposed on the key (i.e., for a weak key class) they work. After identifying the flaws in previous attacks, we present possible fixes to these attacks. We then present some modified differentials which lead to a related-key rectangle attack which can be applied to 2504 weak keys. Our observations are then used to improve a related-key rectangle attack on IDEA by a factor of 2.