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MARS (cipher)
MARS is a block cipher that was IBM's submission to the Advanced Encryption Standard process. MARS was selected as an AES finalist in August 1999, after the AES2 conference in March 1999, where it was voted as the fifth and last finalist algorithm. The MARS design team included Don Coppersmith, who had been involved in the creation of the previous Data Encryption Standard (DES) twenty years earlier. The project was specifically designed to resist future advances in cryptography by adopting a layered, compartmentalized approach. IBM's official report stated that MARS and Serpent were the only two finalists to implement any form of safety net with regard to would-be advances in cryptographic mathematics. The Twofish team made a similar statement about its cipher. MARS has a 128-bit block size and a variable key size of between 128 and 448 bits (in 32-bit increments). Unlike most block ciphers, MARS has a heterogeneous structure: several rounds of a cryptographic core are "jac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AES Finalist
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the symmetric block cipher ratified as a standard by National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States (NIST), was chosen using a process lasting from 1997 to 2000 that was markedly more open and transparent than its predecessor, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). This process won praise from the open cryptographic community, and helped to increase confidence in the security of the winning algorithm from those who were suspicious of backdoors in the predecessor, DES. A new standard was needed primarily because DES has a relatively small 56-bit key which was becoming vulnerable to brute-force attacks. In addition, the DES was designed primarily for hardware and is relatively slow when implemented in software. While Triple-DES avoids the problem of a small key size, it is very slow even in hardware, it is unsuitable for limited-resource platforms, and it may be affected by potential security issues connected with the (today ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Encryption Standard Process
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the symmetric block cipher ratified as a standard by National Institute of Standards and Technology of the United States (NIST), was chosen using a process lasting from 1997 to 2000 that was markedly more open and transparent than its predecessor, the Data Encryption Standard (DES). This process won praise from the open cryptographic community, and helped to increase confidence in the security of the winning algorithm from those who were suspicious of backdoors in the predecessor, DES. A new standard was needed primarily because DES has a relatively small 56-bit key which was becoming vulnerable to brute-force attacks. In addition, the DES was designed primarily for hardware and is relatively slow when implemented in software. While Triple-DES avoids the problem of a small key size, it is very slow even in hardware, it is unsuitable for limited-resource platforms, and it may be affected by potential security issues connected with the (today ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Feistel Cipher
In cryptography, a Feistel cipher (also known as Luby–Rackoff block cipher) is a symmetric structure used in the construction of block ciphers, named after the German-born physicist and cryptographer Horst Feistel, who did pioneering research while working for IBM; it is also commonly known as a Feistel network. A large proportion of block ciphers use the scheme, including the US Data Encryption Standard, the Soviet/Russian GOST and the more recent Blowfish and Twofish ciphers. In a Feistel cipher, encryption and decryption are very similar operations, and both consist of iteratively running a function called a "round function" a fixed number of times. History Many modern symmetric block ciphers are based on Feistel networks. Feistel networks were first seen commercially in IBM's Lucifer cipher, designed by Horst Feistel and Don Coppersmith in 1973. Feistel networks gained respectability when the U.S. Federal Government adopted the DES (a cipher based on Lucifer, with changes mad ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Block Cipher
In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called ''blocks''. Block ciphers are specified cryptographic primitive, elementary components in the design of many cryptographic protocols and are widely used to encryption, encrypt large amounts of data, including in data exchange protocols. A block cipher uses blocks as an unvarying transformation. Even a secure block cipher is suitable for the encryption of only a single block of data at a time, using a fixed key. A multitude of block cipher modes of operation, modes of operation have been designed to allow their repeated use in a secure way to achieve the security goals of confidentiality and authentication, authenticity. However, block ciphers may also feature as building blocks in other cryptographic protocols, such as universal hash functions and pseudorandom number generators. Definition A block cipher consists of two paired algorithms, one for encryption, , and the othe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Don Coppersmith
Don Coppersmith (born 1950) is a cryptographer and mathematician. He was involved in the design of the Data Encryption Standard block cipher at IBM, particularly the design of the S-boxes, strengthening them against differential cryptanalysis. He also improved the quantum Fourier transform discovered by Peter Shor in the same year (1994). He has also worked on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms, the cryptanalysis of RSA, methods for rapid matrix multiplication (see Coppersmith–Winograd algorithm) and IBM's MARS cipher. Don is also a co-designer of the SEAL and Scream ciphers. In 1972, Coppersmith obtained a bachelor's degree in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Masters and Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1975 and 1977 respectively. He was a Putnam Fellow each year from 1968–1971, becoming the first four-time Putnam Fellow in history. In 1998, he started ''Ponder This'', an online monthly column on mathematical puz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Data Encryption Standard
The Data Encryption Standard (DES ) is a symmetric-key algorithm for the encryption of digital data. Although its short key length of 56 bits makes it too insecure for modern applications, it has been highly influential in the advancement of cryptography. Developed in the early 1970s at IBM and based on an earlier design by Horst Feistel, the algorithm was submitted to the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) following the agency's invitation to propose a candidate for the protection of sensitive, unclassified electronic government data. In 1976, after consultation with the National Security Agency (NSA), the NBS selected a slightly modified version (strengthened against differential cryptanalysis, but weakened against brute-force attacks), which was published as an official Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) for the United States in 1977. The publication of an NSA-approved encryption standard led to its quick international adoption and widespread academic scrutiny. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serpent (cipher)
Serpent is a symmetric key block cipher that was a finalist in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) contest, where it was ranked second to Rijndael. Serpent was designed by Ross Anderson, Eli Biham, and Lars Knudsen. Like other AES submissions, Serpent has a block size of 128 bits and supports a key size of 128, 192 or 256 bits. The cipher is a 32-round substitution–permutation network operating on a block of four 32-bit words. Each round applies one of eight 4-bit to 4-bit S-boxes 32 times in parallel. Serpent was designed so that all operations can be executed in parallel, using 32 bit slices. This maximizes parallelism, but also allows use of the extensive cryptanalysis work performed on DES. Serpent took a conservative approach to security, opting for a large security margin: the designers deemed 16 rounds to be sufficient against known types of attack, but specified 32 rounds as insurance against future discoveries in cryptanalysis. The official NIST report on A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Twofish
In cryptography, Twofish is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits. It was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest, but it was not selected for standardization. Twofish is related to the earlier block cipher Blowfish. Twofish's distinctive features are the use of pre-computed key-dependent S-boxes, and a relatively complex key schedule. One half of an n-bit key is used as the actual encryption key and the other half of the n-bit key is used to modify the encryption algorithm (key-dependent S-boxes). Twofish borrows some elements from other designs; for example, the pseudo-Hadamard transform (PHT) from the SAFER family of ciphers. Twofish has a Feistel structure like DES. Twofish also employs a Maximum Distance Separable matrix. When it was introduced in 1998, Twofish was slightly slower than Rijndael (the chosen algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard) for 128-bit keys, but somewhat faster for 2 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Block Size (cryptography)
In modern cryptography, symmetric key ciphers are generally divided into stream ciphers and block ciphers. Block ciphers operate on a fixed length string of bits. The length of this bit string is the block size. Both the input (plaintext) and output (ciphertext) are the same length; the output cannot be shorter than the input this follows logically from the pigeonhole principle and the fact that the cipher must be reversibleand it is undesirable for the output to be longer than the input. Until the announcement of NIST's AES contest, the majority of block ciphers followed the example of the DES in using a block size of 64 bits (8 bytes). However the birthday paradox tells us that after accumulating a number of blocks equal to the square root of the total number possible, there will be an approximately 50% chance of two or more being the same, which would start to leak information about the message contents. Thus even when used with a proper encryption mode (e.g. CBC or OFB), only ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Key Size
In cryptography, key size, key length, or key space refer to the number of bits in a key used by a cryptographic algorithm (such as a cipher). Key length defines the upper-bound on an algorithm's security (i.e. a logarithmic measure of the fastest known attack against an algorithm), since the security of all algorithms can be violated by brute-force attacks. Ideally, the lower-bound on an algorithm's security is by design equal to the key length (that is, the security is determined entirely by the keylength, or in other words, the algorithm's design does not detract from the degree of security inherent in the key length). Indeed, most symmetric-key algorithms are designed to have security equal to their key length. However, after design, a new attack might be discovered. For instance, Triple DES was designed to have a 168-bit key, but an attack of complexity 2112 is now known (i.e. Triple DES now only has 112 bits of security, and of the 168 bits in the key the attack has rendered 5 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Key Whitening
In cryptography, key whitening is a technique intended to increase the security of an iterated block cipher. It consists of steps that combine the data with portions of the key. Details The most common form of key whitening is xor-encrypt-xor -- using a simple XOR before the first round and after the last round of encryption. The first block cipher to use a form of key whitening is DES-X, which simply uses two extra 64-bit keys for whitening, beyond the normal 56-bit key of DES. This is intended to increase the complexity of a brute force attack, increasing the effective size of the key without major changes in the algorithm. DES-X's inventor, Ron Rivest, named the technique ''whitening''. The cipher FEAL (followed by Khufu and Khafre) introduced the practice of key whitening using portions of the same key used in the rest of the cipher. This offers no additional protection from brute force attacks, but it can make other attacks more difficult. In a Feistel cipher or similar al ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
