Title
Improved Cryptanalysis of the DECT Standard Cipher.
Abstract
The DECT Standard Cipher (DSC) is a 64-bit key stream cipher used in the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard to protect the confidentiality of the communications. In this paper, we present an improved cryptanalysis of DSC that is more effective than the prior best known one introduced by Nohl–Tews–Weinmann (NTW). Our known plaintext attack requires less than 2.8 min of voice communication ((2^{14}) keystreams) compared to the more than 11 min ((2^{16}) keystreams) of the NTW attack to retrieve the key with an equivalent success rate. Our attack yields similar improvements using control data encrypted with the first 9 bits of the keystream, instead of voice, reaching a success rate of 50 % by analysing (2^{13}) keystreams in comparison with the (2^{15}) keystreams required by the NTW attack to achieve equivalent results. We have successfully applied our attack in a controlled environment against actual DECT communications. Furthermore, we have tuned our attack to work more effectively when the knowledge of plaintext is not 100 % accurate. On the basis of these results, we think that the most appropriate measure to secure the privacy of DECT voice communications is the effective roll-out of the DSC-2 cipher in DECT equipment.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/s13389-016-0127-4
J. Cryptographic Engineering
Keywords
DocType
Volume
DECT, Privacy, Security, Cryptanalysis, Stream cipher, Cryptography, Encryption, DSC
Journal
6
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
2190-8516
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
6
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Iwen Coisel1716.89
Sanchez, I.2153.74