Towards a Unifying View of Block Cipher Cryptanalysis

We introduce commutative diagram cryptanalysis, a framework for expressing certain kinds of attacks on product ciphers. We show that many familiar attacks, including linear cryptanalysis, differential cryptanalysis, differential-linear cryptanalysis, mod n attacks, truncated differential cryptanalysis, impossible differential cryptanalysis, higherorder differential cryptanalysis, and interpolation attacks can be expressed within this framework. Thus, we show that commutative diagram attacks provide a unifying view into the field of block cipher cryptanalysis