“…First, we analyze the relationship between a class of popular diffusion mechanisms and the DEA (α ∔ k) ⊕ (β ∔ k) = y by studying three example image ciphers [14,15,16]. It is also worth mentioning that the similar DEA can be found in many other designs [23,24,17,16,25,14,15,26,27,28] so the application of our analyses is not limited to the three case studies. Second, we analytically investigate the sufficient condition to solve (α ∔ k) ⊕ (β ∔ k) = y and we also experimentally present a simple KP attack to a variant of this DEA.…”