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Thread: SSL enhancement with AES

  1. #1
    Join Date
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    SSL enhancement with AES

    [url]http://theregister.co.uk/content/6/26***.html[/url]


    Regards Data.

  2. #2
    Up N. Atum Guest

    Hmm

    "AES, which was approved as the official encryption standard for the US federal government..."

    Wonder if that means there's a backdoor to it?:-)

  3. #3
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    HI,



    It uses Rijandael-may be they found a break with a complexity of order of 2^40.

    Regards Data.

  4. #4
    Up N. Atum Guest
    Hi DATA.

    You're joking, right?

    I was half-joking. Actually I didn't know the US Government had an "official" encryption standard. The thinking is that any encryption *product* that is "endorsed" by the US Government will have a backdoor built into it, especially these days. Rijandael has a good reputation.

  5. #5
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    hi,



    Tjhere are no known attacks against Rijandael,How ever if the NSA insists that Rijandael is okay as govt. standard -that would surely raise a brow.
    When they had DES,they had DES crackers & one of the S-Boxes was later found to be skewed,though it immediately could not be converted into an attack,dunno if as successfull attack was later discovered.

    They can put a back door only in products they sell-buy crypto products built by hopefully trustable sources or write ur own code.


    Regards Data.

  6. #6
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    hi,


    Here is this months news of AES frm cryptogram,it indicates weaknesses in rijandael and possibly a complete break of AES in the near future.also the current scope of the cryptanalysis of rijandael results are not fully known.

    This would be reason enough for the paranoid to stop using rijandael and serpent.

    the news letter is pasted below.

    Regards Data.


    AES News



    AES may have been broken. Serpent, too. Or maybe not. In either
    case, there's no need to panic. Yet. But there might be soon. Maybe.

    Some of the confusion stems from different definitions of "attack." To
    a cryptographer, an attack is anything that breaks the algorithm faster
    than brute force, even if it is completely impractical. To an
    engineer, an attack is something that is practical, or at least might
    be practical in a few years. An attack that breaks AES to a
    cryptographer might not to an engineer. The rest of the confusion
    stems from not being sure the attack actually works.

    Let's start from the beginning. A few months ago, Courtois and
    Pieprzyk posted a paper outlining a new attack against Rijndael (AES)
    and Serpent. The authors used words like "optimistic evaluation" and
    "might be able to break" to soften their claims, but the paper
    described a better-than-brute-force attack against Serpent, and
    possibly one against Rijndael as well.

    Basically, the attack works by trying to express the entire algorithm
    as multivariate quadratic polynomials, and then using an innovative
    technique to treat the terms of those polynomials as individual
    variables. This gives you a system of linear equations in a
    quadratically large number of variables, which you have to
    solve. There are a bunch of minimization techniques, and several other
    clever tricks you can use to make the solution easier. (This is a
    gross oversimplification of the paper; read it for more detail.)

    The attack depends much more critically on the complexity of the
    nonlinear components than on the number of rounds. Ciphers with small
    S-boxes and simple structures are particularly vulnerable. Serpent has
    small S-boxes and a simple structure. AES has larger S-boxes, but a
    very simple algebraic description. (Twofish has small S-boxes, too,
    but a more complex nonlinear structure. No one has implemented the
    attack against Twofish, but I'm not willing to stand up and declare the
    cipher immune.)

    These are amazing results. Previously, the best attacks worked by
    breaking simplified variants of AES using very impractical attack
    models (e.g., requiring immense amounts of chosen plaintext). This
    paper claimed to break the entire algorithm, and with only one or two
    known plaintexts. Moreover, the first cipher broken was Serpent: the
    cipher universally considered to be the safest, most conservative
    choice.

    There was some buzz about the paper in the academic community, but it
    quickly died down. I believe the problem was that the paper was dense
    and hard to understand. The attack technique, something called XSL,
    was brand new. (It's based on another technique, called XL, presented
    at Eurocrypt 2000.) And the results were so startling -- an attack
    against Serpent! -- that they were just discounted.

    Meanwhile, Fuller and Millan released a paper showing that AES's
    8x8-bit S-box is really an 8x*-bit S-box. There's really only one
    piece of nonlinearity going on in the cipher; everything else is
    linear. Another paper came from Filiol. He claimed to have detected
    some biases in the Boolean functions of AES, which could possibly be
    used to break AES. But there are just too few details in the paper to
    make sense of this claim yet.

    At Crypto 2002, Murply and Robshaw published a surprising result,
    allowing all of AES to be expressed in a single field. They postulated
    a cipher called BES that treats each AES byte as an 8-byte vector. BES
    operates on blocks of *28 bytes; for a special subset of the plaintexts
    and keys, BES is isomorphic to AES. This representation has several
    nice properties that may make it easier to cryptanalyze.

    Most interestingly, the BES representation gives the XSL method a much
    more concise representation, and therefor sparser and simpler equations
    that are easier to solve. Moreover, there are intermediate versions of
    BES -- 2-byte vectors, 4-byte vectors, etc. -- decreasing in complexity
    as you head towards BES-8. These representations identified a bunch
    more quadratic equations that apply to AES and BES. When you throw
    them into the XSL mix, Courtois and Pieprzyk's attack now has a 2^*00
    complexity, as opposed to the wiffly waffly 2^200-or-so complexity
    claimed earlier.

    So, here's the current scorecard. Courtois and Pieprzyk claim a
    2^*00-ish attack against AES. They claim a 2^200-ish attack against
    Serpent. This is an enormously big deal.

    Assuming that it's real.

    We are in the era of completely theoretical cryptanalysis. Cipher key
    lengths have gotten so long that attacks simply can't be implemented;
    their complexity is just too great. But implementation is critical;
    some attacks have hidden problems when you try them out, and other
    attacks are more efficient than predicted. You can try the attack on
    simplified versions of the cipher -- fewer rounds, smaller block size
    -- but you can never be sure the attack scales as
    predicted. Differential cryptanalysis was developed this way; the
    attack was demonstrated on simpler variants of DES and then
    extrapolated to the full DES. (I don't believe that the attack has
    ever been implemented on the full DES.) Many of the attacks we use to
    break algorithms -- linear, boomerang, slide, mod n, etc. -- are more
    often mathematical arguments than computer demonstrations. I don't
    believe that we will learn in our lifetimes whether the 2^*00 attack on
    AES really works or not. And we need a lot more analysis and testing
    of the general XSL technique, on weaker algorithms and simplified
    variants of real algorithms.

    So we're in a quandary. We might have an amazing new cryptanalytic
    technique, but we don't know if there's an error in the analysis, and
    there's no way to test the technique empirically. We have to wait
    until others go over the same work. And to be sure, we have to wait
    until someone improves the attack to a practical point before we know
    if the algorithm was broken to begin with.

    In any case, there's no cause for alarm yet. These attacks can be no
    more implemented in the field than they can be tested in a lab. No AES
    (or Serpent) traffic can be decrypted using these techniques. No
    communications are at risk. No products need to be recalled. There's
    so much security margin in these ciphers that the attacks are
    irrelevant.

    But there is call for worry. If the attack really works, it can only
    get better. My fear is that we could see optimizations of the XSL
    attack breaking AES with a 2^80-ish complexity, in which case things
    starts to get dicey about ten years from now. That's the problem with
    theoretical cryptanalysis: we learn whether or not an attack works at
    the same time we learn whether or not we're at risk.

    The work is fascinating. During the AES process, everyone agreed that
    Rijndael was the risky choice, Serpent was the conservative choice, and
    Twofish was in the middle. To have Serpent be the first to fall
    (albeit marginally), and to have Rijndael fall so far so quickly, is
    something no one predicted. But it's how cryptography works. The
    community develops a series of algorithms for which there are no known
    attacks, and then new attack tools come out of the blue and strike a
    few of them down. We all scramble, and then the cycle repeats.

    We're starting to see the new attack tools that work against some of
    the AES finalists. It's an open question as to how long the tools will
    remain theoretical. But many cryptographers who previously felt good
    about AES are having second thoughts.


    Summary of recent AES results:
    <[url]http://www.cryptosystem.net/aes/[/url]>

    Preliminary version of the Courtois and Pieprzyk paper (final to be
    presented at Asiacrypt 2002):

    <[url]http://eprint.iacr.org/2002/044/[/url]>

    Fuller and Millan Paper
    :
    <[url]http://eprint.iacr.org/2002/***/[/url]>

    Filiol paper:

    <[url]http://eprint.iacr.org/2002/0**/[/url]>

    Murphy and Robshaw paper:

    <[url]http://www.isg.rhul.ac.uk/~mrobshaw/aes-crypto.pdf[/url]>

    Rijndael analysis by the Twofish team from May 2000:

    <[url]http://www.counterpane.com/rijndael.html[/url]>

    One effect of theoretical cryptanalysis is inconsistent standards for
    papers. Courtois and Pieprzyk submitted their paper to Crypto 2002, as
    did Murphy and Robshaw. For some reason, the latter was accepted and
    the former wasn't. In any case, the Courtois and Pieprzyk paper will
    appear at Asiacrypt later this year.

  7. #7
    Abe Guest

    ********

    NSA have one of the best

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jun 2001
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    398
    hi,

    This month Bruce Schenier said-there was no sucessfull attack on AES even for a few rounds.
    Some of the papers presented were based on assumptions and the attack was not practically demonsrtable.This should be a releif to a lot of people.

    Regards Data.

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