New insights on impossible differential cryptanalysis

Abstract

Since its introduction, impossible differential cryptanalysis has been applied to many ciphers. Besides the specific application of the technique in various instances, there are some very basic results which apply to generic structures of ciphers, e.g., the well known 5-round impossible differential of Feistel ciphers with bijective round functions. In this paper we present a new approach for the construction and the usage of impossible differentials for Generalized Feistel structures. The results allow to extend some of the previous impossible differentials by one round (or more), answer an open problem about the ability to perform this kind of analysis, and tackle, for the first time the case of non-bijective round functions. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.