Serpent (cipher)
 Serpent's linear mixing stage
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| General | |
|---|---|
| Designers | Ross Anderson, Eli Biham, Lars Knudsen |
| First published | 1998-08-21 |
| Derived from | Square |
| Certification | AES finalist |
| Cipher detail | |
| Key sizes | 128, 192 or 256 bits |
| Block sizes | 128 bits |
| Structure | Substitution-permutation network |
| Rounds | 32 |
| Best public cryptanalysis | |
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All publicly known attacks are computationally infeasible, and none of them affect the full 32-round Serpent. A 2011 attack breaks 11 round Serpent (all key sizes) with 2116 known plaintexts, 2107.5 time and 2104 memory (as described in ). The same paper also describes two attacks which break 12 rounds of Serpent-256. The first requires 2118 known plaintexts, 2228.8 time and 2228 memory. The other attack requires 2116 known plaintexts and 2121 memory but also requires 2237.5 time. |
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All publicly known attacks are computationally infeasible, and none of them affect the full 32-round Serpent. A 2011 attack breaks 11 round Serpent (all key sizes) with 2116 known plaintexts, 2107.5 time and 2104 memory (as described in ).
Serpent is a symmetric key block cipher that was a finalist in the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) contest, where it was ranked second to Rijndael. Serpent was designed by Ross Anderson, Eli Biham, and Lars Knudsen.
Like other AES submissions, Serpent has a block size of 128 bits and supports a key size of 128, 192 or 256 bits. The cipher is a 32-round substitution-permutation network operating on a block of four 32-bit words. Each round applies one of eight 4-bit to 4-bit S-boxes 32 times in parallel. Serpent was designed so that all operations can be executed in parallel, using 32 bit slices. This maximizes parallelism, but also allows use of the extensive cryptanalysis work performed on DES.
Serpent took a conservative approach to security, opting for a large security margin: the designers deemed 16 rounds to be sufficient against known types of attack, but specified 32 rounds as insurance against future discoveries in cryptanalysis. The official NIST report on AES competition classified Serpent as having a high security margin along with MARS and Twofish, in contrast to the adequate security margin of RC6 and Rijndael (currently AES). In final voting, Serpent had the least number of negative votes among the finalists, but scored second place overall because Rijndael had substantially more positive votes, the deciding factor being that Rijndael allowed for a far more efficient software implementation.
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