Paper 2020/523

The Strictly Zero-Correlation Attack with Application to the Full DES

Tomer Ashur and Raluca Posteuca and Danilo Šijačić and Stef D’haeseleer

Abstract

In this paper we introduce the strictly zero-correlation attack. We extend the work of Ashur and Posteuca in BalkanCryptSec 2018 and build a 0-correlation key-dependent linear trails covering the full DES. We show how this approximation can be used for a key recovery attack and empirically verify our claims through a series of experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to use this kind of property to leverage a meaningful attack against a symmetric-key algorithm.