Paper 2022/487

New Key Recovery Attack on Reduced-Round AES

Navid Ghaedi Bardeh and Vincent Rijmen

Abstract

A new fundamental 4-round property against AES, called the zero-difference property, was introduced by R{\o}njom, Bardeh and Helleseth at Asiacrypt 2017. Our work characterizes it in a simple way by exploiting the notion of related differences which was introduced and well analyzed by AES designers. We then are interested in the way of extending the 4-round property by considering some further properties of related differences over the AES linear layer, generalizing the zero-difference property. This results in a new key recovery attack on 7-round AES which is the first attack on 7-round AES by exploiting the zero-difference property.