UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Ciphertext-only attacks and weak long-term keys in T-310

Courtois, NT; Oprisanu, M-B; (2018) Ciphertext-only attacks and weak long-term keys in T-310. Cryptologia , 42 (4) pp. 316-336. 10.1080/01611194.2017.1362065. Green open access

[thumbnail of T310_vanishing_ucry.pdf]
Preview
Text
T310_vanishing_ucry.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (804kB) | Preview

Abstract

T-310 is an important Cold War cipher (Schmeh 2006 Schmeh, K. 2006. The East German encryption machine T-310 and the algorithm it used. Cryptologia, 30(3):251–257. [Taylor & Francis Online], , [Google Scholar] ). It was the principal encryption algorithm used to protect various state communication lines in Eastern Germany in the 1980s. The cipher is quite robust, and it outputs extremely few bits from the internal state. In this article, the authors study the choice of the long-term key in T-310. They show that if a key is faulty, for example if they omit to check just one condition which the keys should satisfy, and more or less each time the round function is not bijective, communications can be decrypted in a ciphertext-only scenario. The authors provide mathematical proofs that the main historical key classes KT1 and KT2 are secure against such attacks.

Type: Article
Title: Ciphertext-only attacks and weak long-term keys in T-310
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1080/01611194.2017.1362065
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1080/01611194.2017.1362065
Language: English
Additional information: This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
Keywords: Block ciphers, ciphertext-only attacks, Cold War, correlation attacks, differential cryptanalysis, T-310, Unbalanced Feistel ciphers, weak key attacks
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10071505
Downloads since deposit
276Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item