## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2013/391

Key Recovery Attacks on 3-round Even-Mansour, 8-step LED-128, and Full $\mbox{AES}^{2}$

Itai Dinur and Orr Dunkelman and Nathan Keller and Adi Shamir

Abstract: The Even-Mansour (EM) encryption scheme received a lot of attention in the last couple of years due to its exceptional simplicity and tight security proofs. The original $1$-round construction was naturally generalized into $r$-round structures with one key, two alternating keys, and completely independent keys. In this paper we describe the first key recovery attack on the one-key 3-round version of EM which is asymptotically faster than exhaustive search (in the sense that its running time is $o(2^n)$ rather than $O(2^n)$ for an $n$-bit key). We then use the new cryptanalytic techniques in order to improve the best known attacks on several concrete EM-like schemes. In the case of LED-128, the best previously known attack could only be applied to 6 of its 12 steps. In this paper we develop a new attack which increases the number of attacked steps to 8, is slightly faster than the previous attack on 6 steps, and uses about a thousand times less data. Finally, we describe the first attack on the full $\mbox{AES}^{2}$ (which uses two complete AES-128 encryptions and three independent $128$-bit keys, and looks exceptionally strong) which is about 7 times faster than a standard meet-in-the-middle attack, thus violating its security claim.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography /

Original Publication (with minor differences): Extended version of the Asiacrypt 2013 paper

Date: received 14 Jun 2013, last revised 10 Sep 2013

Contact author: itai dinur at weizmann ac il

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2013/391

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