Higher order differential attack of a CAST cipher

Abstract

This paper proposes a new higher order differential attack. The higher order differential attack proposed at FSE’97 by Jakobsen and Knudsen used exhaustive search for recovering the last round key. Our new attack improves the complexity to the cost of solving a linear system of equations. As an example we show the higher order differential attack of a CAST cipher with 5 rounds. The required number of chosen plaintexts is 217 and the required complexity is less than 225 times the computation of the round function. Our experimental results show that the last round key of the CAST cipher with 5 rounds can be recovered in less than 15 seconds on an UltraSPARC station.