SSL enhancement with AES

[DATA]

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


Regards Data.

[Up N. Atum]

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

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

[DATA]

HI,



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

Regards Data.

[Up N. Atum]

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.

[DATA]

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.

[DATA]

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:
<http://www.cryptosystem.net/aes/>

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

<http://eprint.iacr.org/2002/044/>

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

Filiol paper:

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

Murphy and Robshaw paper:

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

Rijndael analysis by the Twofish team from May 2000:

<http://www.counterpane.com/rijndael.html>

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.

[Abe]

NSA have one of the best

[DATA]

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.