Implementation and improvement of the partial sum attack on 6-round AES

The Partial Sum Attack is one of the most powerful attacks, independent of the key schedule, developed in the last 15 years against reduced-round versions of AES. In this paper, we introduce a slight improvement to the basic attack which lowers the number of chosen plaintexts needed to successfully mount it. Our ver- sion of the attack on 6-round AES can be carried out completely in practice, as we demonstrate providing a full implementation. We also detail the structure of our implementation, showing the performances we achieve.