Simultaneous attacks in differential cryptanalysis (getting more pairs per encryption)

Abstract

One aspect of differential cryptanalysis that appears to have been largely overlooked is the use of several differences to attack a cipher simultaneously. While the use of quartets and octets have been briefly described by Biham and Shamir [1], this was not carried to its logical conclusion — namely, how many different attacks can you use and still get an improvement. The issues involved are briefly covered here.