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Key Structures: Improved Related-Key Boomerang Attack Against the Full AES-256

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Information Security and Privacy (ACISP 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13494))

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Abstract

This paper introduces structure to key, in the related-key attack settings. While the idea of structure has been long used in key-recovery attacks against block ciphers to enjoy the birthday effect, the same had not been applied to key materials due to the fact that key structure results in uncontrolled differences in key and hence affects the validity or probabilities of the differential trails. We apply this simple idea to improve the related-key boomerang attack against AES-256 by Biryukov and Khovratovich in 2009. Surprisingly, it turns out to be effective, i.e., both data and time complexities are reduced by a factor of about \(2^8\), to \(2^{92}\) and \(2^{91}\) respectively, at the cost of the amount of required keys increased from 4 to \(2^{19}\). There exist some tradeoffs between the data/time complexity and the number of keys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first essential improvement of the attack against the full AES-256 since 2009. It will be interesting to see if the structure technique can be applied to other AES-like block ciphers, and to tweaks rather than keys of tweakable block ciphers so the amount of required keys of the attack will not be affected.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Only a few papers are cited here as examples since there are simply too many results.

  2. 2.

    Besides those optimized brute-force style attacks, such as [12].

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore under Grant 04INS000397C230, Singapore’s Ministry of Education under Grants RG91/20 and MOE2019-T2-1-060, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants 62022036, 62132008, 62172410, 61732021), and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant 2018YFA0704704).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Jian Guo

  2. Jinan University, Guangzhou, China

    Ling Song

  3. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Haoyang Wang

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  1. Jian Guo
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  2. Ling Song
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Correspondence to Haoyang Wang .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Khoa Nguyen

  2. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Guomin Yang

  3. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Fuchun Guo

  4. University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, Australia

    Willy Susilo

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Guo, J., Song, L., Wang, H. (2022). Key Structures: Improved Related-Key Boomerang Attack Against the Full AES-256. In: Nguyen, K., Yang, G., Guo, F., Susilo, W. (eds) Information Security and Privacy. ACISP 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13494. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22301-3_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22301-3_1

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