A possible intrinsic weakness of AES and other cryptosystems

Abstract

It has been suggested that the algebraic structure of AES (and other similar block ciphers) could lead to a weakness exploitable in new attacks. In this paper, we use the algebraic structure of AES-like ciphers to construct a novel cipher embedding where the ciphers may lose their non-linearity. We show some examples and we discuss the limitations of our approach.