The Journey of Differential Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks (so far)

In this talk, we will start discussing the importance of symmetric cryptanalysis, and some of its main open problems.
Next, we will present differential MITM attacks, that were proposed in 2023, and provide the best know attacks on several families of primitives. We will discuss, from a high level point of view, this new type of cryptanalysis from its origins (meet-in-the-middle attacks), going through the rationale of different improvements (like biclique attacks), applications and comparison with other techniques.