Paper 2009/005

Impossible Differential Cryptanalysis of Pelican, MT-MAC-AES and PC-MAC-AES

Wei Wang, Xiaoyun Wang, and Guangwu Xu

Abstract

In this paper, the impossible differential cryptanalysis is extended to MAC algorithms \textsc{Pelican}, MT-MAC and PC-MAC based on AES and 4-round AES. First, we collect message pairs that produce the inner near-collision with some specific differences by the birthday attack. Then the impossible differential attack on 4-round AES is implemented using a 3-round impossible differential property. For \textsc{Pelican}, our attack can recover the internal state, which is an equivalent subkey. For MT-MAC-AES, the attack turns out to be a subkey recovery attack directly. The data complexity of the two attacks is $2^{85.5}$ chosen messages, and the time complexity is about $2^{85.5}$ queries. For PC-MAC-AES, we can recover the 256-bit key with $2^{85.5}$ chosen messages and $2^{128}$ queries.