Structural Cryptanalysis of SASAS

In this paper we consider the security of block ciphers which contain alternate layers of invertible S-boxes and affine mappings (there are many popular cryptosystems which use this structure, including the winner of the AES competition, Rijndael). We show that a five-layer scheme with 128-bit plaintexts and 8-bit S-boxes is surprisingly weak against what we call a multiset attack, even when all the S-boxes and affine mappings are key dependent (and thus completely unknown to the attacker). We tested the multiset attack with an actual implementation, which required just 2¹⁶ chosen plaintexts and a few seconds on a single PC to find the 2¹⁷ bits of information in all the unknown elements of the scheme.