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17% Smaller DES S-box Circuits Found
solardiz writes "DES is still in use, brute-force key search remains the most effective attack on it, and it is an attractive building block for certain applications (the key size may be increased e.g. with 3DES). Openwall researchers, with funding from Rapid7, came up with 17% shorter Boolean expressions representing the DES S-boxes. Openwall's John the Ripper 1.7.8 tests over 20 million combinations against DES-based crypt(3) per second on a Core i7-2600K 3.4 GHz, which roughly corresponds to a DES encryption speed of 33 Gbps."
We were not the first to generate and try to optimize Boolean expressions for the S-boxes. Other researchers worked on this before, starting 1997 when Eli Biham wrote his classic paper on bitslice DES. 17% is our improvement compared to those previous results. To me, it is impressive that after 14 years and numerous attempts by others, including successful ones, it was still possible to improve on the previous best results by as much as 17% at once. My gut feeling is that further improvements, while definitely possible, will be more limited. But the again, some people I spoke to had thought that our 17% was not possible.