Serpent: A Proposal for the Advanced Encryption Standard Ross Anderson1 Eli Biham2 Lars Knudsen3 1 Cambridge University, England; email
[email protected] 2 Technion, Haifa, Israel; email
[email protected] 3 University of Bergen, Norway; email
[email protected] Abstract. We propose a new block cipher as a candidate for the Ad- vanced Encryption Standard. Its design is highly conservative, yet still allows a very efficient implementation. It uses S-boxes similar to those of DES in a new structure that simultaneously allows a more rapid avalanche, a more efficient bitslice implementation, and an easy anal- ysis that enables us to demonstrate its security against all known types of attack. With a 128-bit block size and a 256-bit key, it is as fast as DES on the market leading Intel Pentium/MMX platforms (and at least as fast on many others); yet we believe it to be more secure than three-key triple-DES. 1 Introduction For many applications, the Data Encryption Standard algorithm is nearing the end of its useful life. Its 56-bit key is too small, as shown by a recent distributed key search exercise [28]. Although triple-DES can solve the key length problem, the DES algorithm was also designed primarily for hardware encryption, yet the great majority of applications that use it today implement it in software, where it is relatively inefficient. For these reasons, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology has issued a call for a successor algorithm, to be called the Advanced Encryption Standard or AES.