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Related Key Attack

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Cryptography and Security

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Related Concepts

Block Ciphers; IDEA; Rijndael; Stream Cipher; Triple DES

Definition

The idea of the attack is that the attacker knows (or chooses) a relation between several keys (up to 256 in some recent attacks) and is given access to encryption functions with such related keys. The goal of the attacker is to find the keys themselves.

Background

The first attacks of this type were developed independently by Biham [1] and Knudsen [2], and the notion of a related key attack was defined by Biham [1].

Theory

The relation between the keys can be an arbitrary bijective function R (or even a family of such functions) chosen (or known) in advance by the adversary [3]. In the simplest form of this attack, this relation is just a XOR with a constant: \({K}_{\mathit{2}} = {K}_{\mathit{1}} + C\), where the constant C is chosen by the adversary. This type of relation allows the adversary to trace the propagation of XOR differences induced by the key difference Cthrough the key schedule of the...

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Recommended Reading

  1. Biham E (1994) New types of cryptanalytic attacks using related keys. Journal of Cryptol 4:229–246. In: Helleseth T (ed) An earlier version appeared in the proceedings of EUROCRYPT’93. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 765

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  2. Knudsen LR (1993) Cryptanalysis of LOKI91. In: Seberry J, Zheng Y (eds) Advances in cryptography – ASIACRYPT’92. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 718. Springer, Berlin, pp 22–35

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  3. Belare M, Khono T (2003) “A theoretical treatment of related-key attacks”, RKA-PRPs, RKA-PRFs, and Applications. In: Biham E (ed) Advances in cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2003. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 2656. Springer, Berlin, pp 491–506

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  4. Biryukov A, Khovratovich D (2009) Related-Key Attack on the Full AES-192 and AES-256. In: Halevi S (ed) Advances in cryptology – ASIACRYPT’09. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5912. Springer, Berlin, pp 1–18

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  5. Kelsey J, Schneier B, Wagner D (1996) Key-schedule cryptanalysis of IDEA, G-DES, GOST, SAFER, and Triple-DES. In: Koblitz N (ed) Advances in cryptology – CRYPTO’96. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1109. Springer, Berlin, pp 237–251

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  6. Kelsey J, Schneier B, Wagner D (1997) Related-key cryptanalysis of 3-WAY, Biham-DES, CAST, DES-X, NewDES, RC2, TEA. In: Han Y, Okamato T, Qing S (eds) International conference on information and communications security – ICICS’97. Lecture notes in computer science, vol 1334. Springer, Berlin

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  7. Fluhrer SR, Mantin I, Shamir A (2001) Weaknesses in the key scheduling algorithm of RC4. Selected areas in cryptography: pp 1–24

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  8. Biham E, Dunkelman O, Keller N (2005) A related-key rectangle attack on the full KASUMI. ASIACRYPT, pp 443–461

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  9. Biryukov A, Khovratovich D, Nikolic I (2009) Distinguisher and related-key attack on the full AES-256. CRYPTO, pp 231–249

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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
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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). Related Key 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_609

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