Algebraic Complexity Reduction and Cryptanalysis of GOST.
Nicolas T. Courtois · 2011
GOST 28147-89 is a well-known Russian government encryption standard. Its large key size of 256 bits at a particularly low implementation cost [59] make that it is widely implemented and used [48, 74, 44, 59, 64]. In 2010 GOST was submitted to ISO to become an international standard. GOST was analysed by Schneier, Biham, Biryukov, Dunkelman, Wagner, various Australian, Japanese, and Russian scientists, and all researchers seemed to agree that it looks quite secure. Though the internal structure of GOST seems quite weak compared to DES, and in particular the diffusion is not quite as good, it is always stipulated that this should be compensated by a large number of 32 rounds cf. [41, 71, 70, 4] and by the additional non-linearity and diffusion provided by modular additions [41, 60]. At Crypto 2008 the hash function based on this cipher was broken. Yet as far as traditional encryption applications with keys generated at random are concerned, until 2011 no cryptographically significant attack on GOST was found.