English

A simplified and generalized treatment of DES related ciphers

Group Theory 2012-06-05 v2 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

This work is a study of DES-like ciphers where the bitwise exclusive-or (XOR) operation in the underlying Feistel network is replaced by an arbitrary group operation. We construct a two round simplified version of DES that contains all the DES components and show that its set of encryption permutations is not a group under functional composition, it is not a pure cipher and its set of encryption permutations does not generate the alternating group. We present a non-computational proof that for n\leq6 the set of n-round Feistel permutations over an arbitrary group do not constitute a group under functional composition.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1205.5613,
  title  = {A simplified and generalized treatment of DES related ciphers},
  author = {Liljana Babinkostova and Alyssa M. Bowden and Andrew M. Kimball and Kameryn J. Williams},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1205.5613},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

24 pages, 2 figures