LOKI97

In

The LOKI97 round function (shown right) uses two columns each with multiple copies of two basic S-boxes. These S-boxes are designed to be highly non-linear and have a good XOR profile. The permutations before and between serve to provide auto-keying and to diffuse the S-box outputs as quickly as possible.

The authors have stated that, "LOKI97 is a non-proprietary algorithm, available for royalty-free use worldwide as a possible replacement for the DES or other existing block ciphers." It was intended to be an evolution of the earlier LOKI89 and LOKI91 block ciphers.

It was the first published candidate in the Advanced Encryption Standard competition, and was quickly analysed and attacked. An analysis of some problems with the LOKI97 design, which led to its rejection when shortlisting candidates, is given in a paper (Rijmen & Knudsen 1999). It was found to be susceptible to an effective theoretical differential cryptanalysis attack considerably faster than an exhaustive search.

See also

• LOKI
• Advanced Encryption Standard competition

References

• L. Brown, J. Pieprzyk: Introducing the new LOKI97 Block Cipher
• L.R. Knudsen and V. Rijmen
  , "Weaknesses in LOKI97", Proceedings of the 2nd AES Candidate Conference, Rome, March 22–23, 1999, pp. 168–174.
• Wenling Wu, Bao Li, Denguo Feng, Sihan Qing, "Cryptanalysis of some AES candidate algorithms", Information and Communication Security - ICICS'99, LNCS 1726, pp 13–21, V Varadharajan (ed), Springer-Verlag 1999.
• Wenling Wu, Bao Li, Denguo Feng, Sihan Qing, "Linear cryptanalysis of LOKI97", Journal of Software, vol 11 no 2, pp 202–6, Feb 2000.

• The LOKI97 homepage
• The design of LOKI97
• SCAN's entry for LOKI97
• John Savard's Description of LOKI97
• Online-implementation of LOKI97 at serversniff.net^{[permanent dead link]}