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Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security pp 772–773Cite as

Meet-in-the-Middle Attack

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Related Concepts

Block Ciphers; Hash Functions; Multiple Encryption

Definition

Meet-in-the-middle is a classical technique of cryptanalysis which applies to many constructions. The idea is that the attacker constructs patterns that propagate from both ends to the middle of the cipher, in some cases by partial key-guessing. If the events do not match in the middle, the key-guess was wrong and may be discarded. Such attack has been applied to seven-round DES (Data Encryption Standard) [1], and to structural cryptanalysis of multiple-encryption (e.g., two-key triple encryption) [2,  3]. Note that the technique can be mounted in memory-less mode [4,  5] using collision finding algorithms of Floyd or Nivasch.

A miss-in-the-middle attack may also be seen as a variant of the meet-in-the-middle technique in which the events in the middle should not match, and the keys that suggest a match in the middle are filtered as wrong keys.

Recently, this technique has been used to find pre-images for hash...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Chaum D, Evertse J-H (1986) Cryptanalysis of DES with a reduced number of rounds; sequence of linear factors in block ciphers. In: Williams HC (ed) Advances in cryptology – CRYPTO’85. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 218. Springer, Berlin, pp 192–211

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  2. Markle RC, Hellman ME (1981) On the security of multiple encryption. Commun ACM 24, 465–467

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  3. van Oorschot PC, Wiener MJ (1990) A known plaintext attack, on two-key triple encryption. In: Dawgard I (ed) Advances in cryptology – EUROCRYPT’90. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 473. Springer, Berlin, pp 318–325

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  4. Morita H, Ohta K, Miyaguchi S (1992) A switching closure test to analyze cryptosystems. In: Feigenbaum J (ed) CRYPTO 1991. LNCS, vol 576. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 183–193

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  5. Khovratovich D, Nikolic I, Weinmann R-P (2003) Meet-in-the-middle attacks on SHA-3 candidates. FSE 2009, pp 228–245

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  6. Mendel F, Rechberger C, Schläffer M, Thomsen SS (2009) The rebound attack: cryptanalysis of reduced whirlpool and grøstl. FSE 2009, pp 260–276

    Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. FDEF, Campus Limpertsberg, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Alex Biryukov Professor

Authors
  1. Alex Biryukov Professor
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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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Biryukov, A. (2011). Meet-in-the-Middle Attack. 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_597

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