Analyzing symmetric cipher algorithms just became significantly easier! The Technology Innovation Institute’s (TII) Cryptography Research Center (CRC) has announced the release of a cryptanalysis tool called CLAASP – an acronym for a Cryptographic Library for the Automated Analysis of Symmetric Primitives.
Built upon the computer algebraic system SageMath, CLAASP took over four years to develop and leverages Python3 to automate the design analysis of symmetric primitives such as block ciphers, cryptographic permutations, hash functions, and stream ciphers by employing a cryptanalytic approach.
As the era of quantum computing becomes a reality, cryptographic libraries have quickly grown in importance to become critical assets for organizations ranging from governments to businesses and even individual researchers. CLAASP’s unparalleled maturity, generality, and completeness make it a crucial tool to ensure design sovereignty for organizations of their own symmetric ciphers.
Dr Najwa Aaraj, Chief Researcher TII’s Cryptography Research Center and Autonomous Robotics Researcher Center, said, “While CLAASP may not completely replace manual analysis, it still helps to mitigate the risks and decrease the time and effort associated with carrying it out – allowing cryptanalysts to focus on comparing cipher designs and to a lesser extent on implementation issues.”
Notably, in a bid to make it widely accessible to the public, CLAASP has been released as an open-source tool and carries a GPLv3 license.
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