Abstract. In this paper we present two related-key attacks on the full AES. For AES-256 we show the first key recovery attack that works for all the keys and has 2 99.5 time and data complexity, while the recent attack by Biryukov-Khovratovich-Nikolić works for a weak key class and has much higher complexity. The second attack is the first cryptanalysis of the full AES-192. Both our attacks are boomerang attacks, which are based on the recent idea of finding local collisions in block ciphers and enhanced with the boomerang switching techniques to gain free rounds in the middle.

Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are recommended to be changed frequently in order to increase transaction unlinkability.We present an efficient method to deanonymize Bitcoin users, which allows to link user pseudonyms to the IP addresses where the transactions are generated. Our techniques work for the most common and the most challenging scenario when users are behind NATs or firewalls of their ISPs. They allow to link transactions of a user behind a NAT and to distinguish connections and transactions of different users behind the same NAT. We also show that a natural countermeasure of using Tor or other anonymity services can be cut-off by abusing anti-DoS countermeasures of the Bitcoin network. Our attacks require only a few machines and have been experimentally verified. The estimated success rate is between 11% and 60% depending on how stealthy an attacker wants to be. We propose several countermeasures to mitigate these new attacks.

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Abstract. In this paper we construct a chosen-key distinguisher and a related-key attack on the full 256-bit key AES. We define a notion of differential q-multicollision and show that for AES-256 q-multicollisions can be constructed in time q · 2 67 and with negligible memory, while we prove that the same task for an ideal cipher of the same block size would require at128 ) time. Using similar approach and with the same complexity we can also construct q-pseudo collisions for AES-256 in Davies-Meyer hashing mode, a scheme which is provably secure in the ideal-cipher model. We have also computed partial q-multicollisions in time q · 2 37 on a PC to verify our results. These results show that AES-256 can not model an ideal cipher in theoretical constructions. Finally we extend our results to find the first publicly known attack on the full 14-round AES-256: a related-key distinguisher which works for one out of every 2 35 keys with 2 120 data and time complexity and negligible memory. This distinguisher is translated into a key-recovery attack with total complexity of 2 131 time and 2 65 memory.

Abstract. In 1980 Hellman introduced a general technique for breaking arbitrary block ciphers with N possible keys in time T and memory M related by the tradeoff curve T M 2 = N 2 for 1 ≤ T ≤ N . Recently, Babbage and Golic pointed out that a different T M = N tradeoff attack for 1 ≤ T ≤ D is applicable to stream ciphers, where D is the amount of output data available to the attacker. In this paper we show that a combination of the two approaches has an improved time/memory/data tradeoff for stream ciphers of the formIn addition, we show that stream ciphers with low sampling resistance have tradeoff attacks with fewer table lookups and a wider choice of parameters.

A5/1 is the strong version of the encryption algorithm used by about 130 million GSM customers in Europe to protect the overthe-air privacy of their cellular voice and data communication. The best published attacks against it require between 2 40 and 2 45 steps. This level of security makes it vulnerable to hardware-based attacks by large organizations, but not to software-based attacks on multiple targets by hackers. In this paper we describe new attacks on A5/1, which are based on subtle flaws in the tap structure of the registers, their noninvertible clocking mechanism, and their frequent resets. After a 2 48 parallelizable data preparation stage (which has to be carried out only once), the actual attacks can be carried out in real time on a single PC. The first attack requires the output of the A5/1 algorithm during the first two minutes of the conversation, and computes the key in about one second. The second attack requires the output of the A5/1 algorithm during about two seconds of the conversation, and computes the key in several minutes. The two attacks are related, but use different types of time-memory tradeoffs. The attacks were verified with actual implementations, except for the preprocessing stage which was extensively sampled rather than completely executed. REMARK: We based our attack on the version of the algorithm which was derived by reverse engineering an actual GSM telephone and published at http://www.scard.org. We would like to thank the GSM organization for graciously confirming to us the correctness of this unofficial description. In addition, we would like to stress that this paper considers the narrow issue of the cryptographic strength of A5/1, and not the broader issue of the practical security of fielded GSM systems, about which we make no claims.

Abstract. In this paper we study the long standing problem of information extraction from multiple linear approximations. We develop a formal statistical framework for block cipher attacks based on this technique and derive explicit and compact gain formulas for generalized versions of Matsui's Algorithm 1 and Algorithm 2. The theoretical framework allows both approaches to be treated in a unified way, and predicts significantly improved attack complexities compared to current linear attacks using a single approximation. In order to substantiate the theoretical claims, we benchmarked the attacks against reduced-round versions of DES and observed a clear reduction of the data and time complexities, in almost perfect correspondence with the predictions. The complexities are reduced by several orders of magnitude for Algorithm 1, and the significant improvement in the case of Algorithm 2 suggests that this approach may outperform the currently best attacks on the full DES algorithm.

In this paper we present a new cryptanalytic technique, based on impossible differentials, and use it to show that Skipjack reduced from 32 to 31 rounds can be broken by an attack which is faster than exhaustive search.