Boomerang attack against AES better than blind chance

Cryptographic researchers have uncovered a chink in the armour of the widely used AES algorithm. The attacks pose no immediate threat to the security of AES, but they do illustrate a technique for extracting keys that is better than simply trying every possible key combination.

Instead of such a brute force approach, the researchers have derived a technique based on "finding local collisions in block ciphers and enhanced with the boomerang switching techniques to gain free rounds in the middle". Collisions in cryptographic happen when two different inputs produce the same output.

The approach, in this case, can be used to infer clues about the key used by the AES encryption cypher. AES is an encryption standard recently adopted by the US government, and widely used commercially as a result.