The advanced encryption standard(AES) is the most widely used block cipher. Round-reduced variants of AES are employed as the core components of many cryptographic schemes. AES-256 is widely recognized as the version of AES capable of effectively resisting future quantum computing attacks because it provides robust security strength via a 256-bit key. Related differentials cryptanalysis is proposed by the designers of AES. The traditional differential cryptanalysis that only uses one differential is extended to use a pair of differentials where both the input and output have specific correlations. This technique has been applied to mount a key recovery attack on 7-round AES-128, which is one of the attacks with the longest number of rounds for AES-128. Currently, there are no results about the related differentials cryptanalysis on AES-256. Related differentials cryptanalysis is applied to AES‑256 to develop a related differentials key recovery attack for 8‑round AES‑256 with the data and memory complexities of 2110.24 and the time complexity of 2235.76 in this paper. This attack is the first result about the security evaluation of AES‑256 against related differentials cryptanalysis, filling the gap in the field of related differentials cryptanalysis on AES-256.
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