On the computational power of the light: A plan for breaking data encryption standard

摘要

The successful of the light-based solutions for some NP-complete problems, such as Hamiltonian path problem, have demonstrated the power of light-based computing. The capabilities of the light-based computing such as massive parallelism of light, allow it to solve hard computational problems in polynomial time, while the conventional computers require exponential time. In this study we show how the light-based solution can be applied to break the Data Encryption Standard (DES). Under the assumption of having one given (plain-text, cipher-text) pair, our method recovers the DES key in a efficient time. We describe how to implement XOR gates, circular shifts, P-boxes, and S-boxes of DES in a light-based approach. The proposed solution encrypts the given plain-text with all possible keys and afterwards pair (Key; cipher-text) is extracted from them. We demonstrate that under chosen plain-text attack, it is possible to recover the DES key by providing all DES components in a reasonable time. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.