Template:Infobox block cipher In cryptography, Twofish is a symmetric key block cipher with a block size of 128 bits and key sizes up to 256 bits. It was one of the five finalists of the Advanced Encryption Standard contest, but was not selected for standardisation. Twofish is related to the earlier block cipher Blowfish.
Twofish's distinctive features are the use of pre-computed key-dependent S-boxes, and a relatively complex key schedule. One half of an n-bit key is used as the actual encryption key and the other half of the n-bit key is used to modify the encryption algorithm (key-dependent S-boxes). Twofish borrows some elements from other designs; for example, the pseudo-Hadamard transform (PHT) from the SAFER family of ciphers. Twofish uses the same Feistel structure as DES.
On most software platforms Twofish is slightly slower than Rijndael (the chosen algorithm for Advanced Encryption Standard) for 128-bit keys, but somewhat faster for 256-bit keys.[1]
Twofish was designed by Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Doug Whiting, David Wagner, Chris Hall, and Niels Ferguson; the "extended Twofish team" who met to perform further cryptanalysis of Twofish and other AES contest entrants included Stefan Lucks, Tadayoshi Kohno, and Mike Stay.
The Twofish cipher has not been patented and the reference implementation has been placed in the public domain. As a result, the Twofish algorithm is free for anyone to use without any restrictions whatsoever. It is one of a few ciphers included in the OpenPGP standard (RFC 4880). However, Twofish has seen less widespread usage than Blowfish, which has been available for a longer period of time.
Cryptanalysis[]
In 1999, Niels Ferguson published an impossible differential attack that breaks 6 rounds out of 16 of the 256-bit key version using 2256 steps.[2]
As of 2010 , the best published cryptanalysis on the Twofish block cipher is a truncated differential cryptanalysis of the full 16-round version. The paper claims that the probability of truncated differentials is 2-57.3 per block and that it will take roughly 251 chosen plaintexts (32 petabytes worth of data) to find a good pair of truncated differentials.[3]
Bruce Schneier responds in a 2005 blog entry that this paper does not present a full cryptanalytic attack, but only some hypothesized differential characteristics: "But even from a theoretical perspective, Twofish isn't even remotely broken. There have been no extensions to these results since they were published in 2000."[4]
References[]
- Template:Cite paper
- Template:Cite book
See also[]
External links[]
- Twofish web page with full specifications, free source code, and other Twofish resources.
- David Wagner's sci.crypt post recommending AES over Twofish — Wagner was one of the designers of Twofish.
- SCAN's entry for Twofish
- [1] List of products using TwoFish
| |||||
ca:Twofish cs:Twofish de:Twofish es:Twofish fr:Twofish id:Twofish it:Twofish nl:Twofish-encryptiealgoritme ja:Twofish pl:Twofish pt:Twofish ru:Twofish simple:Twofish fi:Twofish sv:Twofish tg:Twofish uk:Twofish