On the security of the Yen-Guo's domino signal encryption algorithm (DSEA)

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the security flaws of the DSEA domino signal encryption algorithm, revealing vulnerabilities to brute-force, ciphertext-only, and known-plaintext attacks, and discusses potential countermeasures.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive security analysis of DSEA, demonstrating its weaknesses and proposing improvements to enhance its robustness against various attack methods.

Findings

DSEA is vulnerable to ciphertext-only attacks with minimal ciphertext.

Known-plaintext attacks can recover the secret key from a small data segment.

The security of DSEA against brute-force attacks was overestimated.

Abstract

Recently, a new domino signal encryption algorithm (DSEA) was proposed for digital signal transmission, especially for digital images and videos. This paper analyzes the security of DSEA, and points out the following weaknesses: 1) its security against the brute-force attack was overestimated; 2) it is not sufficiently secure against ciphertext-only attacks, and only one ciphertext is enough to get some information about the plaintext and to break the value of a sub-key; 3) it is insecure against known/chosen-plaintext attacks, in the sense that the secret key can be recovered from a number of continuous bytes of only one known/chosen plaintext and the corresponding ciphertext. Experimental results are given to show the performance of the proposed attacks, and some countermeasures are discussed to improve DSEA.