Boomerang Attack

Related Concepts

Adaptive Chosen Plaintext and Chosen Ciphertext Attack; Block Ciphers

Definition

The boomerang attack is a chosen plaintext and adaptive chosen ciphertext attack discovered by Wagner [7]. It is an extension of differential attack to two-stage differential–differential attack which is closely related to impossible differential attack as well as to the meet-in-the middle approach. The attack may use characteristics, differentials, as well as truncated differentials. The attack breaks constructions in which there are high-probability differential patterns propagating halfway through the cipher both from the top and from the bottom, but there are no good patterns that propagate through the full cipher.

Theory

The idea of the boomerang attack is to find good conventional (or truncated) differentials that cover half of the cipher but cannot necessarily be concatenated into a single differential covering the whole cipher. The attack starts with a pair of plaintexts P and \({P}^{{\prime}}\)...