| General | |
|---|---|
| Designers | Joan Daemen |
| First published | 1994 |
| Successors | NOEKEON |
| Related to | 3-Way |
| Cipher detail | |
| Key sizes | 192 bits |
| Block sizes | 192 bits |
| Structure | Substitution-permutation network |
| Rounds | 11 |
| Best public cryptanalysis | |
| related-key attack, power analysis | |
In cryptography, BaseKing is a block cipher designed in 1994 by Joan Daemen. It is very closely related to 3-Way, as the two are variants of the same general cipher technique.
Cryptography or cryptology is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties called adversaries. More generally, cryptography is about constructing and analyzing protocols that prevent third parties or the public from reading private messages; various aspects in information security such as data confidentiality, data integrity, authentication, and non-repudiation are central to modern cryptography. Modern cryptography exists at the intersection of the disciplines of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, communication science, and physics. Applications of cryptography include electronic commerce, chip-based payment cards, digital currencies, computer passwords, and military communications.
In cryptography, a block cipher is a deterministic algorithm operating on fixed-length groups of bits, called blocks, with an unvarying transformation that is specified by a symmetric key. Block ciphers operate as important elementary components in the design of many cryptographic protocols, and are widely used to implement encryption of bulk data.
Joan Daemen is a Belgian cryptographer who co-designed the Rijndael cipher with Vincent Rijmen, which was selected as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in 2001. More recently, he co-designed the Keccak cryptographic hash, which was selected as the new SHA-3 hash by NIST in October 2012. He has also designed or co-designed the MMB, Square, SHARK, NOEKEON, 3-Way, and BaseKing block ciphers. In 2017 he won the Levchin Prize for Real World Cryptography "for the development of AES and SHA3".
BaseKing has a block size of 192 bits–twice as long as 3-Way, and notably not a power of two as with most block ciphers. The key length is also 192 bits. BaseKing is an 11-round substitution-permutation network.
In modern cryptography, symmetric key ciphers are generally divided into stream ciphers and block ciphers. Block ciphers operate on a fixed length string of bits. The length of this bit string is the block size. Both the input (plaintext) and output (ciphertext) are the same length; the output cannot be shorter than the input – this follows logically from the pigeonhole principle and the fact that the cipher must be reversible – and it is undesirable for the output to be longer than the input.
In Daemen's doctoral dissertation he presented an extensive theory of block cipher design, as well as a rather general cipher algorithm composed of a number of invertible transformations that may be chosen with considerable freedom. He discussed the security of this general scheme against known cryptanalytic attacks, and gave two specific examples of ciphers consisting of particular choices for the variable parameters. These ciphers are 3-Way and BaseKing.
Cryptanalysis is the study of analyzing information systems in order to study the hidden aspects of the systems. Cryptanalysis is used to breach cryptographic security systems and gain access to the contents of encrypted messages, even if the cryptographic key is unknown.
BaseKing is susceptible to the same kind of related-key attack as 3-Way. Daemen, Peeters, and Van Assche have also demonstrated potential vulnerabilities to differential power analysis, along with some techniques to increase the resistance of a given implementation of BaseKing to such an attack.
In cryptography, a related-key attack is any form of cryptanalysis where the attacker can observe the operation of a cipher under several different keys whose values are initially unknown, but where some mathematical relationship connecting the keys is known to the attacker. For example, the attacker might know that the last 80 bits of the keys are always the same, even though they don't know, at first, what the bits are. This appears, at first glance, to be an unrealistic model; it would certainly be unlikely that an attacker could persuade a human cryptographer to encrypt plaintexts under numerous secret keys related in some way.
