Learn How to Break AES

  • David Wong hasn't been at NCC Cryptography for a long time, so I assume we'll be waiting a long time before we get to Linear and Differential cryptanalysis, but if that's a thing you're interested in, what you want is the Heys tutorial:

    http://www.cs.bc.edu/~straubin/crypto2017/heys.pdf

    My recommendation: print it out to a PDF with huge margins so you can make notes, and then work through all the worked examples.

  • Just in case anyone's wondering, AES - the regular AES-128, 192 or 256 - is not publicly broken (yet).

  • If you're interested in this sort of thing, I cannot recommend the cryptopals crypto challenges enough. They are a series of project that take you from XOR up through breaking AES and beyond:

    https://cryptopals.com/

  • Neat, I'm looking forward to the Differential Cryptanalysis portion! It's something I've tried to learn in the past but I've been struggling to find approachable resources.

  • This looks very nice! Thank you!

    I'm currently taking Cryptography at university and I find the resources online to be quite scarce. I mostly find myself reading Wikipedia. I don't know if I'm missing some background knowledge but some of the math notations tend to be quite difficult to understand. I have spent around 10 hours trying to understand Differential Cryptanalysis unsuccessfully!

  • Cool! Would be nice to also include side-channel attacks