A Brief Review on Methodology of Cryptanalysis

Abstract

Cryptanalysis comes into deferent forms in order to support that rigorous analysis of the structure cryptographic primitive to evaluate and verify its claimed security margins. This analysis will follow the attack models represented previously in order to exploit possible weakness in the primitive. Thus, achieving the associated attack goals which will vary from a distinguishing attack to a total break that is defined based on the security margins or claims of the primitive under study. For example, for a hash function, total break constitutes finding a collision or obtaining the message from the hash value. While in block ciphers it revolves around recovering the secret key. When it comes to the claimed security margins, the design approaches will follow certain security models as in provable security or practical security or a mixture of both. The role of cryptanalyst is to subject these primitives to different existing categories of cryptanalysis approaches and tailor new ones that will push the design’s security margins if possible to new limits where these attacks are not applicable any more This chapter will introduce the prominent methods of cryptanalysis that utilize certain behavior in the cipher structure. Such behavior disturbs the assumed randomness of the output or the cipher text. This Paper will explore the basic definitions of prominent cryptanalysis methods that targets the specific structure of a cipher namely differential and linear cryptanalysis and their different variants. It will also discuss other potential crytpanalytic methods that are usually used in symmetric-key ciphers analysis especially block ciphers.