Key recovery attacks of practical complexity on AES-256 variants with up to 10 rounds

Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, Adi Shamir

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

AES is the best known and most widely used block cipher. Its three versions (AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256) differ in their key sizes (128 bits, 192 bits and 256 bits) and in their number of rounds (10, 12, and 14, respectively). While for AES-128, there are no known attacks faster than exhaustive search, AES-192 and AES-256 were recently shown to be breakable by attacks which require 2176 and 299.5 time, respectively. While these complexities are much faster than exhaustive search, they are completely non-practical, and do not seem to pose any real threat to the security of AES-based systems. In this paper we aim to increase our understanding of AES security, and we concentrate on attacks with practical complexity, i.e., attacks that can be experimentally verified. We show attacks on reduced-round variants of AES-256 with up to 10 rounds with complexity which is feasible. One of our attacks uses only two related keys and 239 time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version of AES-256 (the best previous attack on this variant required 4 related keys and 2120 time). Another attack can break a 10-round version of AES-256 in 245 time, but it uses a stronger type of related subkey attack (the best previous attack on this variant required 64 related keys and 2172 time). While the full AES-256 cannot be directly broken by these attacks, the fact that 10 rounds can be broken with such a low complexity raises serious concerns about the remaining safety margin offered by AES-256.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology - Eurocrypt 2010, 29th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Proceedings
Pages299-319
Number of pages21
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event29th in the Series of EuropeanConferences on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques, Eurocrypt 2010 - French Riviera, France
Duration: 30 May 20103 Jun 2010

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume6110 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference29th in the Series of EuropeanConferences on the Theory and Application of Cryptographic Techniques, Eurocrypt 2010
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityFrench Riviera
Period30/05/103/06/10

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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