Abstract
The robustness of a cryptographic system should rely on the secrecy of its key rather than on the secrecy of its algorithm. As such, a strong assumption is that if an attacker knows the algorithm used, she should gain only a minimal advantage.
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Notes
- 1.
Military Cryptography (in French).
- 2.
From its inception, DES has resisted to an advanced cryptanalysis method called differential cryptanalysis. IBM’s Lucifer was not resistant to this attack. The modifications made DES resistant to differential cryptanalysis. Interestingly, the academic community did not find out about differential cryptanalysis until the late 1980s [154]. In 1994, Don Coppersmith, who was part of the design team of DES, confirmed that the NSA already knew about differential cryptanalysis in 1974 and that they had helped to make DES resistant to this “unknown” attack [155].
- 3.
DES was not optimized for efficient software implementations. Hardware implementations were straightforward and could be fast, but software implementations were laborious (for instance, due to the use of modulo 32 operations).
- 4.
One of the designers of the Keccak algorithm, Joan Daemen, is also one of the two designers of the AES.
- 5.
Depending on the licensing model, there may be some obligation to publish the modifications. For instance, an open source project licensed under GPL3 requires the publication of all derivative works.
- 6.
Designers of military applications may have a different opinion.
- 7.
For instance, for the DES algorithm.
- 8.
Of course, assuming that the method is legal.
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© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Diehl, E. (2016). Law 3: No Security Through Obscurity. In: Ten Laws for Security. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42641-9_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42641-9_3
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