[Ach] My review of the PDF ;)

[Manuel Koschuch]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 2:15 PM, David Durvaux
<david.durvaux at autopsit.org>wrote:

> [...]
>
>
> I would like to discuss briefly the AES key length.  I found back this
> reference on Bruce Schneier blog:
> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/07/another_new_aes.html.
>  It's from 2009 (so, what's the latest status on this?) but basically state
> that some attack where only affecting AES258 and broke up to 11 of the 14
> rounds.  AES256 is still safe but MAYBE that the key size in that
> particular example COULD BE counter effective.  As say in french "avec des
> si on met Paris en bouteille" ("With IF, you put Paris in a bottle"), there
> a a lot of conditions and open questions but maybe something we need to
> keep in mind.
>
>

The main idea behind this is that when doing crypto, basically everything
that's faster than brute-force is considered a more or less "sucessful"
attack, so the longer the key the more leeway there is of still being
2better than brute-force", while still being computationally infeasible.

Due to the Key-Schedule in AES (which was optimised for the 128-Bit
version), the 256-bit variant is in fact easier to break than the 128-bit
version using related-key attacks (but still practically infeasible with a
complexity of around 2^100).
But it doesnt't look like any variant of AES is currently even close to
being broken. [1]



>
>
> As an extra reference, the Hanbook of Applied Cryptography (
> http://cacr.uwaterloo.ca/hac/) which is freely available was (still the
> case) considered as an excellent reference during my studies (finished 6
> years ago :'().
>
>
>

Basically it still is for the underlying mathematics, some of the
recommendations regarding key-sizes or algorithms are of course a little
outdated by now...


Best regards
Manuel


[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/cryptanalysis/aesbc.pdf


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