Masked Differential-linear Distinguishers and Quantum Approaches

We introduce masked auto-correlation, a new primitive for the cryptanalysis of symmetric-key primitives, together with a quantum attack pipeline built on it. For a permutation $f$, output masks $α,β$, and an input difference $w$, masked auto-correlation (MAC) measures the correlation between the masked outputs $α\cdot f(x)$ and $β\cdot f(x\oplus w)$. The associated masked differential-linear (MDL) approximations strictly generalize several classical techniques; ordinary linear cryptanalysis, differential-linear cryptanalysis, and the differential-linear connectivity table all arise as special cases. Our central object of study is the problem of finding mask pairs with large masked cross-correlation -- those that yield powerful distinguishers -- which we call MAC Fishing. We give a constant-query quantum algorithm that samples such pairs according to their squared correlation, and we prove an exponential classical lower bound of $Ω(N/\log N)$ queries, by adapting the hardness of Fourier Fishing. To our knowledge this is the first result pairing a quantum upper bound with a classical lower bound for the core task of identifying high-correlation approximations, making quantum algorithms an absolute necessity. Building on this, we analyse the distribution of masked auto-correlation for random permutations, and then construct capacity-based distinguishers and key-recovery attacks, both classically and with a quadratic quantum speed-up using amplitude estimation. We validate our claims with experiments on reduced-round mini-AES.