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