18 lines
1.1 KiB
Text
18 lines
1.1 KiB
Text
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Serpent was designed by Ross Anderson, Eli Biham and Lars Knudsen
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as a candidate for the Advanced Encryption Standard. It has been
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selected as one of the five finalists in the AES competition.
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Serpent is faster than DES and more secure than Triple DES. It
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provides users with a very high level of assurance that no shortcut
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attack will be found. To achieve this, the algorithm's designers
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limited themselves to well understood cryptography mechanisms, so
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that they could rely on the wide experience and proven techniques
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of block cipher cryptanalysis. The algorithm uses twice as many
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rounds as are necessary to block all currently known shortcut
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attacks. This means that Serpent should be safe against as yet
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unknown attacks that may be capable of breaking the standard 16
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rounds used in many types of encryption today. However, the fact
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that Serpent uses so many rounds means that it is the slowest of
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the five AES finalists. But this shouldn't be an issue because it
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still outperforms Triple DES. The algorithm's designers maintain
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that Serpent has a service life of at least a century.
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