Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2019/540

A chosen key attack against the secret S-boxes of GOST

Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen

Abstract: I am making this work from August 1998 available for historical reasons. It has been cited as an unpublished manuscript'' more than two dozen times over the years -- even though it has not been publicly available anywhere for almost 20 years. The short memo describes a simple non-intrusive reverse engineering technique against Russian GOST chips. The technique is based on a slide attack. This may be historically interesting since slide attacks had not been invented yet'', at least in formal sense.

The brief original abstract: We show that a simple black box'' chosen-key attack against GOST can recover secret S-boxes with approximately $2^{32}$ encryptions.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / GOST, Magma, Slide Attack

Date: received 21 May 2019, last revised 22 May 2019

Contact author: mjos at iki fi

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Note: The August 1998 memo is included in its original form, prefaced by some historical notes.

Short URL: ia.cr/2019/540

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