Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis

This paper introduces a new chosen text attack on iterated cryptosystems, such as the Data Encryption Standard (DES). The attack is very efficient for 8-round DES,2 recovering 10 bits of key with 80% probability of success using only 512 chosen plaintexts. The probability of success increases to 95% using 768 chosen plaintexts. More key can be recovered with reduced probability of success. The attack takes less than 10 seconds on a SUN-4 workstation. While comparable in speed to existing attacks, this 8-round attack represents an order of magnitude improvement in the amount of required text.