Cryptography (Oct 2021)

Investigating Deep Learning Approaches on the Security Analysis of Cryptographic Algorithms

  • Bang Yuan Chong,
  • Iftekhar Salam

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/cryptography5040030
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 5, no. 4
p. 30

Abstract

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This paper studies the use of deep learning (DL) models under a known-plaintext scenario. The goal of the models is to predict the secret key of a cipher using DL techniques. We investigate the DL techniques against different ciphers, namely, Simplified Data Encryption Standard (S-DES), Speck, Simeck and Katan. For S-DES, we examine the classification of the full key set, and the results are better than a random guess. However, we found that it is difficult to apply the same classification model beyond 2-round Speck. We also demonstrate that DL models trained under a known-plaintext scenario can successfully recover the random key of S-DES. However, the same method has been less successful when applied to modern ciphers Speck, Simeck, and Katan. The ciphers Simeck and Katan are further investigated using the DL models but with a text-based key. This application found the linear approximations between the plaintext–ciphertext pairs and the text-based key.

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