Paper 2002/176

Theoretical Analysis of ``Correlations in RC6''

Masahiko Takenaka, Takeshi Shimoyama, Takeshi Koshiba

Abstract

In this paper, we give the theoretical analysis of Chi-square attack proposed by Knudsen and Meier on the RC6 block cipher. To this end, we propose the novel method of security evaluation against Chi-square attack precisely including key dependency by introducing a technique ``Transition Matrix Computing.'' On the other hand, the way of security evaluation against Chi-square attack has not been known except the computer experiment. We should note that it is the first results the way of security evaluation against Chi-square attack is shown theoretically. Using this method, we can obtain the ``weakest keys'' against the attack.