Weak Keys and Cryptanalysis of a Cold War Block Cipher
This work addresses a historical cryptanalysis problem for security researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on prior attacks from 2018.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing the T-310 cipher, a Cold War-era encryption system, by studying its long-term keys to expose weaknesses that aid in designing attacks, though no specific results or numbers are provided.
T-310 is a cipher that was used for encryption of governmental communications in East Germany during the final years of the Cold War. Due to its complexity and the encryption process,there was no published attack for a period of more than 40 years until 2018 by Nicolas T. Courtois et al. in [10]. In this thesis we study the so called 'long term keys' that were used in the cipher, in order to expose weaknesses which will assist the design of various attacks on T-310.