The Retracing Boomerang Attack, with Application to Reduced-Round AES

Boomerang attacks are extensions of differential attacks that make it possible to combine two unrelated differential properties of the first and second part of a cryptosystem with probabilities p and q into a new differential-like property of the whole cryptosystem with probability p²q² (since each one of the properties has to be satisfied twice). In this paper, we describe a new version of boomerang attacks which uses the counterintuitive idea of throwing out most of the data in order to force equalities between certain values on the ciphertext side. In certain cases, this creates a correlation between the four probabilistic events, which increases the probability of the combined property to p²q and increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the resultant distinguisher. We call this variant a retracing boomerang attack since we make sure that the boomerang we throw follows the same path on its forward and backward directions. To demonstrate the power of the new technique, we apply it to the case of 5-round AES. This version of AES was repeatedly attacked by a large variety of techniques, but for twenty years its complexity had remained stuck at 2³². At Crypto’18, it was finally reduced to 2²⁴ (for full key recovery), and with our new technique, we can further reduce the complexity of full key recovery to the surprisingly low value of 2^16.5 (i.e., only 90, 000 encryption/decryption operations are required for a full key recovery). In addition to improving previous attacks, our new technique unveils a hidden relationship between boomerang attacks and two other cryptanalytic techniques, the yoyo game and the recently introduced mixture differentials.