Interpolation attack was presented by Jakobsen and Knudsen at FSE’97. Interpolation attack is effective against ciphers that
have a certain algebraic structure like the
$
\mathcal{P}\mathcal{U}\mathcal{R}\mathcal{E}
$
\mathcal{P}\mathcal{U}\mathcal{R}\mathcal{E}
cipher which is a prototype cipher, but it is difficult to apply the attack to real-world ciphers. This difficulty is due
to the difficulty of deriving a low degree polynomial relation between ciphertexts and plaintexts. In other words, it is difficult
to evaluate the security against interpolation attack. This paper generalizes the interpolation attack. The generalization
makes easier to evaluate the security against interpolation attack. We call the generalized interpolation attack
linear sum attack. We present an algorithm that efficiently evaluates the security of byte-oriented ciphers against linear sum attack. Moreover,
we show the relationship between linear sum attack and higher order differential attack. In addition, we show the security
of CRYPTON, E2, and RIJNDAEL against linear sum attack using the algorithm.