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Incryptography,modn cryptanalysis is anattack applicable toblock andstream ciphers. It is a form ofpartitioning cryptanalysis that exploits unevenness in how thecipher operates overequivalence classes (congruence classes)modulon. The method was first suggested in 1999 byJohn Kelsey,Bruce Schneier, andDavid Wagner and applied to RC5P (a variant ofRC5) andM6 (a family of block ciphers used in theFireWire standard). These attacks used the properties of binary addition and bit rotation modulo aFermat prime.
For RC5P, analysis was conducted modulo 3. It was observed that the operations in the cipher (rotation and addition, both on 32-bit words) were somewhat biased over congruence classes mod 3. To illustrate the approach, consider left rotation by a single bit:
Then, because
it follows that
Thus left rotation by a single bit has a simple description modulo 3. Analysis of other operations (data dependent rotation and modular addition) reveals similar, notable biases. Although there are some theoretical problems analysing the operations in combination, the bias can be detected experimentally for the entire cipher. In (Kelsey et al., 1999), experiments were conducted up to seven rounds, and based on this they conjecture that as many as 19 or 20 rounds of RC5P can bedistinguished from random using this attack. There is also a corresponding method for recovering the secretkey.
Against M6 there are attacks mod 5 and mod 257 that are even more effective.
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