Differential cryptanalysis is a general technique for the analysis of symmetric cryptographic primitives, in particular of block ciphers and hash functions. It was first publicized in 1990 by Biham and Shamir [3, 4] with attacks against reduced-round variants of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) [14], and followed in 1991 by the first attack against DES which was faster than exhaustive key search [6].
Let P be a plaintext, and let C be the corresponding ciphertext encrypted under the (unknown) key K, such that \(C=E_K(P)\). Let \(P^*\) be a second plaintext, and let \(C^*\) be the corresponding ciphertext under the same (unknown) key K, \(C^*=E_K(P^*)\). We define the difference of the plaintexts as P′=P⊕P*, and the difference of the ciphertexts as C′=C⊕C*. Also for any intermediate data X during encryption (for example, the data after the third round, or the input to some operation in the fifth round), let the corresponding data during the encryption of \(P^*\) be denoted by \(X^*\),...
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References
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Biham, E. (2005). Differential Cryptanalysis. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA . https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-23483-7_108
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