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Sandwich attack

Security På svenska → Updated: 2026-10-14

A boomerang variant that slips a thin middle layer between the cipher's two halves, and used it to break KASUMI on an ordinary PC.

Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller and Adi Shamir published it in 2010. A boomerang attack splits a cipher in two and pairs a short differential for each half. The sandwich adds a third slice in the middle, often a single round, whose probability is computed on its own. It sounds like bookkeeping, but it lets differentials that would otherwise clash in the middle fit together.

The target was KASUMI, the block cipher in 3G's A5/3. In the related-key setting the authors recovered the full 128-bit key with about 226 chosen plaintexts in under two hours. Mobile networks stayed safe, since the related-key model doesn't apply to the way 3G uses the cipher. Its parent MISTY1, from which KASUMI was simplified, was unaffected. What broke was the simplification.

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