Divisional Cryptanalysis of Symmetric-Key Ciphers

In symmetric-key cryptography, cryptanalysis is an important method to get confidence in the security of ciphers.

            Integral cryptanalysis is a cryptanalytic attack that is particularly applicable to block ciphers based on substitution-permutation networks. It was originally designed by Lars Knudsen as a dedicated attack against Square, so it is commonly known as the Square attack. It was also extended to a few other ciphers related to Square: CRYPTON, AES, and SHARK. Stefan Lucks generalized the attack to what he called a saturation attack and used it to attack Twofish, which is not at all similar to Square, having a radically different Feistel network structure. Forms of integral cryptanalysis have since been applied to a variety of ciphers, including Hierocrypt, IDEA, Camellia, Skipjack, MISTY1, MISTY2 and others.

            Divisional cryptanalysis, which can be seen as an extension of integral cryptanalysis, is based on the study of a new distinguishing property against block ciphers, called the division property, which was introduced by Todo at Eurocypt 2015