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Distinguishing Attacks

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Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

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Related Concepts

Statistical Testing; Stream Cipher

Definition

Generally speaking, a distinguishing attack is a testing algorithm that tries to exhibit a nonrandom behavior in a cryptosystem. This nonrandom behavior can provide some information to the attacker.

Theory

A distinguisher is a testing algorithm that is connected to either a perfect random procedure \(\mathcal{R}\) or to the cryptosystem (or a part of it) \(\mathcal{C}\) which is supposed to mimic \(\mathcal{R}\). If the distinguisher is able to tell them apart with a significant advantage, then it leads to a distinguishing attack. This is a very general setting that can apply to any cryptosystem but is more or less relevant to assess its security.

Applications

Ciphertext indistinguishability: At the basis of all ciphers are some deterministic functions (otherwise it would be difficult to decipher) which takes as a parameter a key and as an input a message. A plain application of the deterministic functions on the key and...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Goldwasser S, Micali S (1984) Probabilistic encryption. J Comput Syst Sci 28:270–299

    MATH  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  2. Rose G, Hawkes P (2002) On the applicability of distinguishing attacks against stream ciphers. In: Proceedings of the 3rd NESSIE Workshop 2002, Munich. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2002/142

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  3. Biham E, Shamir A (1993) Differential cryptanalysis of the data encryption standard. Springer, London

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Matsui M (1993) Linear cryptanalysis method for DES cipher. In: Advances in cryptology – Eurocrypt’93 (Lecture notes in computer science 765) Springer, Berlin, pp 386–397

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Henri Poincaré, Nancy 1/LORIA and ANSSI, 51 boulevard de la Tour-Maubourg, 75007, Paris, France

    Marion Videau

Authors
  1. Marion Videau
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Henk C. A. van Tilborg

  2. Center for Secure Information Systems, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, 22030-4422, USA

    Sushil Jajodia

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© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Videau, M. (2011). Distinguishing Attacks. In: van Tilborg, H.C.A., Jajodia, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-5906-5_345

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