Introduced by

Martin Hellman Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his involvement with public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to ...

and Susan K. Langford in 1994, the differential-linear attack is a mix of both

linear cryptanalysis In cryptography, linear cryptanalysis is a general form of cryptanalysis based on finding affine approximations to the action of a cipher. Attacks have been developed for block ciphers and stream ciphers. Linear cryptanalysis is one of the two mos ...

and differential cryptanalysis. The attack utilises a differential characteristic over part of the cipher with a probability of 1 (for a few rounds—this probability would be much lower for the whole cipher). The rounds immediately following the differential characteristic have a linear approximation defined, and we expect that for each chosen plaintext pair, the probability of the linear approximation holding for one chosen plaintext but not the other will be lower for the correct key. Hellman and Langford have shown that this attack can recover 10 key bits of an 8-round DES with only 512 chosen plaintexts and an 80% chance of success. The attack was generalised by

Eli Biham Eli Biham ( he, אלי ביהם) is an Israeli cryptographer and cryptanalyst, currently a professor at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology Computer Science department. Starting from October 2008 and till 2013, Biham was the dean of t ...

et al. to use differential characteristics with probability less than 1. Besides DES, it has been applied to FEAL,

IDEA In common usage and in philosophy, ideas are the results of thought. Also in philosophy, ideas can also be mental representational images of some object. Many philosophers have considered ideas to be a fundamental ontological category of bei ...

Serpent Serpent or The Serpent may refer to: * Snake, a carnivorous reptile of the suborder Serpentes Mythology and religion * Sea serpent, a monstrous ocean creature * Serpent (symbolism), the snake in religious rites and mythological contexts * Serp ...

Camellia ''Camellia'' (pronounced or ) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Theaceae. They are found in eastern and southern Asia, from the Himalayas east to Japan and Indonesia. There are more than 220 described species, with some controv ...

, and even the stream cipher Phelix.

References

* * * * * * {{cryptography navbox , block Cryptographic attacks