Impossible differential cryptanalysis

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In cryptography, impossible differential cryptanalysis is a form of differential cryptanalysis for block ciphers. While ordinary differential cryptanalysis tracks differences that propagate through the cipher with greater than expected probability, impossible differential cryptanalysis exploits differences that are impossible at various intermediate states of the algorithm.

Lars Knudsen was apparently the first to use a form of this attack, in the 1998 paper where he introduced his AES candidate DEAL. The first presentation to attract the attention of the cryptographic community was later the same year at the rump session of CRYPTO '98, in which Eli Biham, Alex Biryukov, and Adi Shamir coined the name "impossible differentials" and used them to break 31 out of 32 rounds of the NSA-designed cipher Skipjack. This development led noted cryptographer Bruce Schneier to speculate that the NSA had no previous knowledge of impossible differential cryptanalysis. The technique has since been applied to many other ciphers, including IDEA, Khufu and Khafre, E2, variants of Serpent, MARS, Twofish, Rijndael, CRYPTON, Zodiac, Hierocrypt-3, TEA, XTEA, Mini-AES, ARIA, Camellia, and SHACAL-2.

In 1999 the developers of the attack presented a new method for finding impossible differentials that they called a miss in the middle attack. This consists of finding "two events with probability one, whose conditions cannot be met together."

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