Differential Cryptanalysis of DES-like Cryptosystems

The Data Encryption Standard (DES) is the best known and most widely used cryptosystem for civilian applications. It was developed at IBM and adopted by the National Buraeu of Standards in the mid 70’s, and has successfully withstood all the attacks published so far in the open literature. In this paper we develop a new type of cryptanalytic attack which can break DES with up to eight rounds in a few minutes on a PC and can break DES with up to 15 rounds faster than an exhaustive search. The new attack can be applied to a variety of DES-like substitution/permutation cryptosystems, and demonstrates the crucial role of the (unpublished) design rules.