Abstract

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is the best known and most widely used cryptosystem for civilian applications. It was developed at IBM and adopted by the National Buraeu of Standards in the mid 70's, and has successfully withstood all the attacks published so far in the open literature. In this paper we develop a new type of cryptanalytic attack which can break the reduced variant of DES with eight rounds in a few minutes on a PC and can break any reduced variant of DES (with up to 15 rounds) in less than 2 56 operations. The new attack can be applied to a variety of DES-like substitution/permutation cryptosystems, and demonstrates the crucial role of the (unpublished) design rules.

Citations