Title
The Phantom Of Differential Characteristics
Abstract
For differential cryptanalysis under the single-key model, the key schedules hardly need to be exploited in constructing the characteristics, which is based on the hypothesis of stochastic equivalence. In this paper, we study a profound effect of the key schedules on the validity of the differential characteristics. Noticing the sensitivity in the probability of the characteristics to specific keys, we label the keys where a characteristic has nonzero probability byeffective keys. We propose the concept ofsingular characteristicswhich are characteristics with no effective keys, and exploit an algorithm to sieve them out by studying the key schedule. We show by a differential characteristic of PRINCE whose expected differential probability is much larger than that of a random permutation, i.e., 2(-35) vs. 2(-64). Yet, it is indeed singular which could be mis-used to mount a differential attack. Singular characteristics are found for 3-round AES and 3-round Midori-128 as well. Furthermore, taking the possible mismatches of the effective keys in a number of differential characteristics into consideration, we presentsingular clusterswhich indicates an empty intersection of the corresponding effective keys, and this is evidenced by showing two differential characteristics of the 2-round AES. We also show that characteristics are tightly linked to the key schedule, as shown in the paper, a valid characteristic in the AES-128 can be singular for the AES-192. Our results indicate a gap over the perspectives of the designers and the attackers, which warns the latter to validate the theoretically-built distinguishers. Therefore, a closer look into the characteristics is inevitable before any attack is claimed.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/s10623-020-00782-3
DESIGNS CODES AND CRYPTOGRAPHY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Differential cryptanalysis, Key schedule, Effective keys, Singular characteristic, Singular cluster, AES, PRINCE
Journal
88
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
11
0925-1022
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yunwen Liu154.26
Wenying Zhang264.83
Bing Sun315419.76
Lars R. Knudsen4908.42
Guo-qiang Liu573.20
Chao Li632046.22
Shaojing Fu711225.39
Meichun Cao800.34