Module Crypto.DES3

Description

The inadequate key size of DES has already been mentioned. One way to increase the key size is to pipe together several DES boxes with independent keys. It turns out that using two DES ciphers is not as secure as one might think, even if the key size of the combination is a respectable 112 bits.

The standard way to increase DES's key size is to use three DES boxes. The mode of operation is a little peculiar: the middle DES box is wired in the reverse direction. To encrypt a block with DES3, you encrypt it using the first 56 bits of the key, then decrypt it using the middle 56 bits of the key, and finally encrypt it again using the last 56 bits of the key. This is known as "ede" triple-DES, for "encrypt-decrypt-encrypt".

The "ede" construction provides some backward compatibility, as you get plain single DES simply by feeding the same key to all three boxes. That should help keeping down the gate count, and the price, of hardware circuits implementing both plain DES and DES3.

DES3 has a key size of 168 bits, but just like plain DES, useless parity bits are inserted, so that keys are represented as 24 octets (192 bits). As a 112 bit key is large enough to make brute force attacks impractical, some applications uses a "two-key" variant of triple-DES. In this mode, the same key bits are used for the first and the last DES box in the pipe, while the middle box is keyed independently. The two-key variant is believed to be secure, i.e. there are no known attacks significantly better than brute force.

Inherit DES3

inherit Nettle.DES3 : DES3