Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Chiasmus (cipher)

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Designers
  
BSI

Key sizes
  
160 bits

Rounds
  
12

First published
  
Leaked 2013

Block sizes
  
64 bits

Structure
  
Substitution-permutation network

Chiasmus is a secret German government block cipher that was leaked by reverse engineering. It became notorious for its dilettant use in the BSI's software GSTOOL, which used it in insecure Electronic Codebook (ECB) mode and generated the key with a pseudo random number generator initialized to the current system time, which means an effective key length that can easily be broken by brute force. The BSI tried to prevent the publication of these findings with legal threats.

Chiasmus seems to be resistant against the most common cryptographic attacks (linear and differential cryptanalysis), but a lot slower than the openly available state of the art ciphers such as AES.

References

Chiasmus (cipher) Wikipedia