Two-key triple encryption (Q1272336)

A problem of strengthening certain cryptosystems is studied. Particularly, cryptosystems that have proved to be very strong in practice but their keys are too small to resist a simple brute-force attack are considered (DES is used as a prime example of such cryptosystem). The idea of multiple encryption has been proposed in the past, however later on some attacks were published making practical improvement in strength smaller than expected. In the paper previous approaches to the problem based on multiple encryption are briefly surveyed and it is concluded that double encryption, triple encryption and known two-key triple encryption do not fulfil all the requirements for a secure system. Then, a variant of two-key triple encryption is proposed based on a new idea of generating three keys needed from two keys given. Particularly, the authors suggest to use given keys as a seed to pseudorandomly generate all the needed keys. Moreover, the generator used there is based on the security of underlying cryptosystem. First, the idea is described and some propositions on the success probability of an attack are proved. Then, a concrete two-key triple encryption construction with pseudorandomly expanded keys is proposed using DES as an underlying cryptosystem. It is argued that the construction meets all the security requirements and that under a given hypothesis resulting cryptosystem is at least on the same security level as its underlying system.