Improved Cryptanalysis of the DECT Standard Cipher

The DECT Standard Cipher (DSC) is a 64-bit key stream cipher used in the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard to protect the confidentiality of the communications. In this paper we present an improved cryptanalysis approach which is more effective than the Nohl-Tews-Weinmann (NTW) attack and requires four times less plaintext material. Under the best conditions, our attack requires a 3 minutes long communication instead of more than 10 minutes for the NTW attack. Our approach is able to quickly recover the secret key with a success rate of more than 50% by analysing 2^13 keystreams and performing an exhaustive search over 2^31 keys. Additionally, the attack was successfully conducted against real intercepted communications when the plaintext was only 90% accurate. To the best of our knowledge, the approach we present in this paper is the most effective cryptanalysis published so far against the DSC cipher.

COISEL Iwen;  SANCHEZ MARTIN Jose Ignacio; 

2015-12-14

Springer Berlin Heidelberg

JRC95049

978-3-662-48323-7 (print),    978-3-662-48324-4 (online),   

http://rd.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-662-48324-4_14,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC95049,   

10.1007/978-3-662-48324-4_14,