Breaking A Feistel-Type Block Cipher by Bacteria Engineering

Abstract

In this paper we propose a theoretical method for breaking a block cipher based on a Feistel structure which is a variant of DES (S-DES) using one pair of (plaintext, ciphertext). Our scheme utilizes bacterial computing for the first time in cryptanalysis. For this reason, we design and simulate an engineered gene regulatory network to break S-DES which possesses a superior performance than the other methods based on DNA computing because it utilizes the power of massive parallelism of DNA molecules as well as capability of cellular division of bacterial cells which gives our proposed S-DES cracker system the flavour of massive parallel processing.