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Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems

  • Published: January 1991
  • Volume 4, pages 3–72, (1991)
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Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems
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  • Eli Biham1 &
  • Adi Shamir1 
  • 19k Accesses

  • 1724 Citations

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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 Bureau of Standards in the mid 1970s, 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 personal computer and can break any reduced variant of DES (with up to 15 rounds) using less than 256 operations and chosen plaintexts. 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be applied to a variety of DES-like substitution/permutation cryptosystems, and demonstrates the crucial role of the (unpublished) design rules.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, The Weizmann Institute of Science, 76100, Rehovot, Israel

    Eli Biham & Adi Shamir

Authors
  1. Eli Biham
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  2. Adi Shamir
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Cite this article

Biham, E., Shamir, A. Differential cryptanalysis of DES-like cryptosystems. J. Cryptology 4, 3–72 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00630563

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  • Received: 12 July 1990

  • Revised: 05 February 1991

  • Issue Date: January 1991

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00630563

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Key words

  • Data Encryption Standard
  • Differential cryptanalysis
  • Iterated cryptosystems
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