Improved machine learning-aided linear cryptanalysis: application to DES

Abstract In CRYPTO 2019, Gohr built a bridge between machine learning and differential cryptanalysis, which show that machine learning-aided methods have advantages over classical differential cryptanalysis. Yet, for linear cryptanalysis, there is lack of effective works showing that machine learning-aided cryptanalysis can reach the benchmark of traditional counterparts and also lack of an effective universal framework using machine learning to assist linear cryptanalysis. In this paper, we mainly focus on machine learning-aided linear cryptanalysis and application to Des . First, we propose a machine learning-aided model to distinguish different Bernoulli distributions and demonstrate the validity of the model through experiments and theoretical analysis. Based on the model, we propose a new machine learning-aided linear cryptanalysis framework, which can be applied to one bit and multiple bits key-recovery attacks. As applications, we perform one bit attacks on 3-, 4-, 5-, 6-round Des and multiple bits attack on 8-round Des . Compared with the previous works about machine learning-aided linear cryptanalysis, the results improve the success rate and the complexity. Most importantly, more rounds are covered in our work. Besides, the work indicates that machine learning-aided cryptanalysis can achieve the same or marginally better performance than classical methods.