Cryptanalysis of Simplified-AES Encrypted Communication

Genetic algorithm based Cryptanalysis has gained considerable attention due to its fast convergence time. This article proposes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based cryptanalysis scheme for breaking the key employed in Simplified- AES. The authors' proposed GA allows them to break the key using a Known Plaintext attack requiring a lower number of Plaintext-Ciphertext pairs compared to existing solutions. Moreover, their approach allows them to break the S-AES key using also a Ciphertext-only attack. As far as they are concerned, it is the first time that GAs are used to perform this kind of attack on S-AES. Experimental results prove that their proposed fitness function along with GA have drastically reduced the search space by a factor of 10 in case of Known plain text and 1.8 in case of Ciphertext only attack.