Paper 2026/2304 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/2304 ↗

Gram Moments and Pairwise Mixing of AES

Abstract

We prove that $4k+4$ rounds of AES with independent uniform round keys are $2^{-14-61k}$-close to pairwise independent, improving on Hurst's announced bound of $2^{-3.82-48.03k}$. Here, closeness is measured by the total variation distance between the outputs on any two distinct plaintexts and those of a uniform random permutation, with the round keys sampled once and retained across evaluations. Consequently, 12, 16, and 20 rounds suffice for statistical accuracy $2^{-128}$, $2^{-192}$, and $2^{-256}$, respectively. Our bound also holds for the complete view of any algorithm making at most two adaptive classical forward queries. We develop a general bound for local difference channels acting on additive MDS codes, expressed through the second moment of a Gram matrix. This bound controls the dependencies created by diffusion and refines the activity-space analysis of previous work. Combining the resulting contraction estimate with a sharper analysis of the initial difference distributions yields the stated mixing bound.