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A note on quantum related-key attacks

Quantum Physics 2013-11-15 v2 Cryptography and Security Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

In a basic related-key attack against a block cipher, the adversary has access to encryptions under keys that differ from the target key by bit-flips. In this short note we show that for a quantum adversary such attacks are quite powerful: if the secret key is (i) uniquely determined by a small number of plaintext-ciphertext pairs, (ii) the block cipher can be evaluated efficiently, and (iii) a superposition of related keys can be queried, then the key can be extracted efficiently.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1306.2301,
  title  = {A note on quantum related-key attacks},
  author = {Martin Roetteler and Rainer Steinwandt},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.2301},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures; added figure of quantum circuit for related-key attack against block ciphers

R2 v1 2026-06-22T00:31:30.421Z