A Twofish Retreat: Related-Key Attacks Against Reduced-Round Twofish

N. Ferguson, J. Kelsey, B. Schneier, and D. Whiting

Twofish Technical Report #6, February 14, 2000.

ABSTRACT: The Twofish AES submission document contains a partial chosen-key and a related-key attack against ten rounds of Twofish without whitening, using 256-bit keys. This attack does not work; it makes use of a postulated class of weak key pairs which has the S-box keys and eight successive round keys equal, but no such pairs exist. In this report we analyze the occurrence of this kind of weak key pair and describe how such pairs may be used both to mount attacks on reduced-round Twofish and to find properties of reduced-round Twofish that are not present in an ideal cipher. We find that related-key and chosen-key attacks are considerably less powerful against Twofish than was previously believed.

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Categories: Twofish

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.