Paper 2006/401

On the cost of cryptanalytic attacks

Jean-Philippe Aumasson

Abstract

This note discusses the complexity evaluation of cryptanalytic attacks, with the example of exhaustive key search, illustrated with several ciphers from the eSTREAM project. A measure is proposed to evaluate the effective computational cost of cryptanalytic algorithms, based on the observation that the standard one is not precise enough.

Note: The benchmark results used may quickly become obsolete, please refer to the URL given in the paper for the most recent ones.