General Impossible Differential Attack on 7-Round AES

Impossible differential attack (IDA) uses impossible differential characteristics extracted from enough plaintext pairs to retrieve subkeys of the first and the last several rounds of AES. In this paper, a general IDA on 7-round AES is proposed. Such attack takes the number of all-zero columns of the 7th and the 6th round as parameters (α, β). And a trade-off relation between the number of plaintexts and times of encryptions in the process of the attack is derived, which makes only some values of (α, β) allowed in the attack for different key length.