Mixture Integral Attacks on Reduced-Round AES with a Known/Secret S-Box

In this work, we present new low-data secret-key distinguishers and key-recovery attacks on reduced-round AES.

The starting point of our work is “Mixture Differential Cryptanalysis” recently introduced at FSE/ToSC 2019, a way to turn the “multiple-of-8” 5-round AES secret-key distinguisher presented at Eurocrypt 2017 into a simpler and more convenient one (though, on a smaller number of rounds). By reconsidering this result on a smaller number of rounds, we present as our main contribution a new secret-key distinguisher on 3-round AES with the smallest data complexity in the literature (that does not require adaptive chosen plaintexts/ciphertexts), i.e. approximately half of the data necessary to set up a 3-round truncated differential distinguisher (which is currently the distinguisher in the literature with the lowest data complexity). E.g. for a probability of success of 95%, our distinguisher requires just 10 chosen plaintexts versus 20 chosen plaintexts necessary to set up the truncated differential one.

Besides that, we present new competitive low-data key-recovery attacks on 3- and 4-round AES, both in the case in which the S-Box is known and in the case in which it is secret.