Author(s)

Arash Karimi, Hadi Shahriar Shahhoseini

Electrical Engineering Department, Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, Iran.

In this paper we provide a novel approach for breaking a significant class of block ciphers, the so-called SPN ciphers, using the process of gene assembly in ciliates. Our proposed scheme utilizes, for the first time, the Turing-powerful potential of gene assembly procedure of ciliated protozoa into the real world computations and has a fewer number of steps than the other proposed schemes to break a cipher. We elaborate notions of formal language theory based on AIR systems, which can be thought of as a modified version of intramolecular scheme to model the ciliate bio-operations, for construction of building blocks necessary for breaking the cipher, and based on these nature-inspired constructions which are as powerful as Turing machines, we propose a theoretical approach for breaking SPN ciphers. Then, we simulate our proposed plan for breaking these ciphers on a sample block cipher based on this structure. Our results show that the proposed scheme has 51.5 percent improvement over the best previously proposed nature-inspired scheme for breaking a cipher.

Nature-Inspired Computation; Accepting Intramolecular Recombination (AIR) Systems; Cryptanalysis; Gene Assembly; Block Ciphers

A. Karimi and H. Shahhoseini, "Cryptanalysis of a Substitution-Permutation Network Using Gene Assembly in Ciliates," International Journal of Communications, Network and System Sciences, Vol. 5 No. 3, 2012, pp. 154-164. doi: 10.4236/ijcns.2012.53020.