Abstract
This paper discusses a method of enhancing the security of block ciphers which use s-boxes, a group which includes the ciphers DES, CAST-128, and Blowfish. We focus on CAST-128 and consider Blowfish; Biham and Biryukov [2] have made some similar proposals for DES. The method discussed uses bits of the primary key to directly manipulate the s-boxes in such a way that their contents are changed but their cryptographic properties are preserved. Such a strategy appears to significantly strengthen the cipher against certain attacks, at the expense of a relatively modest one-time computational procedure during the set-up phase. Thus, a stronger cipher with identical encryption / decryption performance characteristics may be constructed with little additional overhead or computational complexity.
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References
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Harris, S., Adams, C. (1999). Key-Dependent S-Box Manipulations. In: Tavares, S., Meijer, H. (eds) Selected Areas in Cryptography. SAC 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1556. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48892-8_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48892-8_2
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