The complexity of distinguishing distributions

Abstract

Cryptography often meets the problem of distinguishing distributions. In this paper we review techniques from hypothesis testing to express the advantage of the best distinguisher limited to a given number of samples. We link it with the Chernoff information and provide a useful approximation based on the squared Euclidean distance. We use it to extend linear cryptanalysis to groups with order larger than 2. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.