Implementation and Improvement of the Partial Sum Attack on 6-Round AES

Abstract

The Partial Sum Attack is one of the most powerful attacks, independent of the key schedule, developed in the last 15 years against reduced-round versions of AES. In this paper, we introduce a slight improvement to the basic attack which lowers the number of chosen plaintexts needed to successfully mount it. Our version of the attack on 6-round AES can be carried out completely in practice, as we demonstrate providing a full implementation. We also detail the structure of our implementation, showing the performances we achieve.

Base for algebraic cryptanalysis based on combined representation of S‐box

“…After the Partial Sum Attack was published, researchers like Tunstall [9] and Aldà et al [10] worked on finding further improvements on the number of sets of 2 32 encryptions. The main focus of these works is based on analysing more information per Δset.…”