Distinguisher and Related-Key Attack on the Full AES-256 (Extended Version)

In this paper we construct a chosen-key distinguisher and a related-key attack on the full 256-bit key AES. We define a notion of differential q-multicollision and show that for AES-256 q-multicollisions can be constructed in time q ·2 and with negligible memory, while we prove that the same task for an ideal cipher of the same block size would require at least O(q · 2 q−1 q+1 ) time. Using similar approach and with the same complexity we can also construct q-pseudo collisions for AES-256 in Davies-Meyer hashing mode, a scheme which is provably secure in the ideal-cipher model. We have also computed partial q-multicollisions in time q ·2 on a PC to verify our results. These results show that AES-256 can not model an ideal cipher in theoretical constructions. Finally we extend our results to find the first publicly known attack on the full 14-round AES-256: a related-key distinguisher which works for one out of every 2 keys with 2 data and time complexity and negligible memory. This distinguisher is translated into a key-recovery attack with total complexity of 2 time and 2 memory.