System and method for constructing block ciphers

摘要

An efficient block cipher that operates on blocks of arbitrarily large size. A block is permuted by recursively using relatively small random functions in an N-round Feistel construction, where N is an integer. The security of the invention is closely related to the difficulty of solving the Numerical Matching with Target Sums problem, an NP Complete problem which cannot presently be solved analytically using known mathematical techniques. The memory required for the cipher's random functions increases linearly with block size, rather than exponentially as with known Feistel constructions. The invention can be efficiently and practically implemented in software at speeds comparable to the speeds of known ciphers.