Explanation of Linear Cryptanalysis

Question

Give a brief explanation of Linear Cryptanalysis.

Answer 1

Linear cryptanalysis was foremost devised by Yamagishi and Matsui in an attack on the FEAL. It was extended through the Matsui to attack DES. The Linear cryptanalysis is the recognized plaintext attack and uses linear approximation to illustrate the behavior of the block cipher. Given adequate pairs of plaintext and corresponding ciphertext, bits of information regarding the key can be obtained and raised amounts of data will generally give a higher possibility of success.