Flaws in differential cryptanalysis of Skipjack

Louis Granboulan
In Mitsuru Matsui, editor, Fast Software Encryption: 8th International Workshop, Yokohama, Japan, 2-4 april 2001. LNCS 2355, Springer-Verlag.

Abstract: This paper is motivated by some results presented by Knudsen, Robshaw and Wagner at Crypto'99, that described many attacks of reduced versions of Skipjack, some of them being erroneous.
Differential cryptanalysis is based on distinguishers, any attack should prove that the events that triggers the analysis has not the same probability for the cipher than for a random function. In particular, the composition of differential for successive parts of a cipher should be done very carefully to lead to an attack.

Download the paper. [pdf] [ps.gz]
First version submitted Dec. 2000, revised Mar. 2001 for the pre-proceedings, revised May 2001 for the final proceedings.
The slides and pre-proceedings paper presented at FSE'01.
Report 2001/038 on the Cryptology ePrint Archive