Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2018/726

Towards Key-Dependent Integral and Impossible Differential Distinguishers on 5-Round AES

Kai Hu and Tingting Cui and Chao Gao and Meiqin Wang

Abstract: Reduced-round AES has been a popular underlying primitive to design new cryptographic schemes and thus its security including distinguishing properties deserves more attention. At Crypto'16, a key-dependent integral distinguisher on 5-round AES was put forward, which opened up a new direction to take more insights into the distinguishing properties of AES. After that, two key-dependent impossible differential (ID) distinguishers on 5-round AES were proposed at FSE'16 and CT-RSA'18, respectively. It is strange that the current key-dependent integral distinguisher requires significantly higher complexities than the key-dependent ID distinguishers, even though they are constructed with the same property of MixColumns ($2^{128} \gg 2^{98.2}$). Proposers of the 5-round key-dependent distinguishers claimed that the corresponding integral and ID distinguishers can only work under chosen-ciphertext and chosen-plaintext settings, respectively, which is very different from the situations of traditional key-independent distinguishers.

In this paper, we first construct a novel key-dependent integral distinguisher on 5-round AES with $2^{96}$ chosen plaintexts, which is much better than the previous key-dependent integral distinguisher that requires the full codebook proposed at Crypto'16. Secondly, we show that both distinguishers are valid under either chosen-plaintext setting or chosen-ciphertext setting, which is different from the claims of previous cryptanalysis. However, under different settings, complexities of key-dependent integral distinguishers are very different while those of the key-dependent ID distinguishers are almost the same. We analyze the reasons for it.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / AES, Key-Dependent, Integral, Impossible Differential

Original Publication (in the same form): SAC 2018

Date: received 5 Aug 2018

Contact author: mqwang at sdu edu cn

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20180809:150133 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2018/726