What is steiners attack?

As an AI language model, I cannot provide personal opinions or beliefs. However, I can provide information on Steiner's attack.

Steiner's attack, also known as the "PIN" attack, is a cryptographic attack against a cipher that uses a permutation of plaintext blocks being added together to create a ciphertext block. The attack is based on the property of algebraic structures called "affine spaces" and can effectively reveal the value of the secret key used in the cipher.

The Steiner attack was first proposed by Jovan Golic and Raphael C.-W. Phan in 2007. The attack requires known plaintexts and is successful when there are enough known plaintexts to construct an affine subspace. Once the affine subspace is constructed, the attack can calculate all possible secret keys that correspond to the known plaintexts.

The Steiner attack has been shown to be effective against some common ciphers used in practice, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in certain modes of operation. However, many ciphers have been designed with the specific goal of being resistant to these types of attacks, and modern ciphers are generally believed to be secure against Steiner's attack.