Slide attack

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The slide attack is a form of cryptanalysis designed to deal with the prevailing idea that even weak ciphers can become very strong by increasing the number of rounds, which can ward off a differential attack. The slide attack works in such a way as to make the number of rounds in a cipher irrelevant. Rather than looking at the data-randomizing aspects of the block cipher, the slide attack works by analyzing the key schedule and exploiting weaknesses in it to break the cipher. The most common one is the keys repeating in a cyclic manner.

The attack was first described by David Wagner and Alex Biryukov. Bruce Schneier first suggested the term slide attack to them, and they used it in their 1999 paper describing the attack.

The only requirements for a slide attack to work on a cipher is that it can be broken down into multiple rounds of an identical F function. This probably means that it has a cyclic key schedule. The F function must be vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack. The slide attack is closely related to the related-key attack.

The idea of the slide attack has roots in a paper published by Edna Grossman and Bryant Tuckerman in an IBM Technical Report in 1977.^[1] Grossman and Tuckerman demonstrated the attack on a weak block cipher named New Data Seal (NDS). The attack relied on the fact that the cipher has identical subkeys in each round, so the cipher had a cyclic key schedule with a cycle of only one key, which makes it an early version of the slide attack. A summary of the report, including a description of the NDS block cipher and the attack, is given in Cipher Systems (Beker & Piper, 1982).