Lesson plan
DFC (cipher)
In cryptography, DFC (Decorrelated Fast Cipher) is a symmetric block cipher which was created in 1998 by a group of researchers from École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, and France Télécom (including Jacques Stern and Serge Vaudenay) and submitted to the AES competition. Like other AES candidates, DFC operates on blocks of 128 bits, using a key of 128, 192, or 256 bits. It uses an 8-round Feistel network. The round function uses a single 6×32-bit S-box, as well as an affine transformation mod 2 64 +13. DFC can actually use a key of any size up to 256 bits; the key schedule uses another 4-round Feistel network to generate a 1024-bit "expanded key". The arbitrary constants, including all entries of the S-box, are derived using the binary expansion of e as a source of "nothing up my sleeve numbers". Soon after DFC's publication, Ian Harvey raised the concern that reduction modulo a 65-bit number was beyond the native capabilities of most platforms, and that careful implementation would be required to protect against side-channel attacks, especially timing attacks. Although DFC was designed using Vaudenay's decorrelation theory to be provably secure against ordinary differential and linear cryptanalysis, in 1999 Lars Knudsen and Vincent Rijmen presented a differential chosen-ciphertext attack that breaks 6 rounds faster than exhaustive search. In 2000, Vaudenay, et al.…
Article summary
In cryptography, DFC (Decorrelated Fast Cipher) is a symmetric block cipher which was created in 1998 by a group of researchers from École Normale Supérieure, CNRS, and France Télécom (including Jacques Stern and Serge Vaudenay) and submitted to the AES competition. Like other AES candidates, DFC operates on blocks of 128 bits, using a key of 128, 192, or 256 bits. It uses an 8-round Feistel network. The round function uses a single 6×32-bit S-box, as well as an affine transformation mod 2 64 +13. DFC can actually use a key of any size up to 256 bits; the key schedule uses another 4-round Feistel network to generate a 1024-bit "expanded key". The arbitrary constants, including all entries of the S-box, are derived using the binary expansion of e as a source of "nothing up my sleeve numbers". Soon after DFC's publication, Ian Harvey raised the concern that reduction modulo a 65-bit number was beyond the native capabilities of most platforms, and that careful implementation would be required to protect against side-channel attacks, especially timing attacks. Although DFC was designed using Vaudenay's decorrelation theory to be provably secure against ordinary differential and linear cryptanalysis, in 1999 Lars Knudsen and Vincent Rijmen presented a differential chosen-ciphertext attack that breaks 6 rounds faster than exhaustive search. In 2000, Vaudenay, et al.…
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.