Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2012/280

Improved ``Partial Sums"-based Square Attack on AES

Michael Tunstall

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.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography /

Date: received 17 May 2012

Contact author: tunstall at cs bris ac uk

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Version: 20120529:200713 (All versions of this report)

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