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Actually the article you link to does not says that a balanced Feistel cipher is less secure than an unbalanced one; it says that the security of an unbalanced Feistel cipher is more easily proven, given enough rounds. Luby and Rackoff have shown in 1988 that a balanced Feistel scheme with only 4 rounds is "perfectly" secure as long as the round functions ...

First of all, avalanche effect is a desirable effect: it means that a very small change in the inpout will lead to a very big change in the output. A security algorithm that doesn't provide this avalanche effect can lead to an easy statistical analysis: if the change of one bit from the input leads to the change of only one bit of the output, then it's easy ...

Enigma is not a Feistel cipher. A "Feistel cipher" is a block cipher with a specific structure, namely the whole business with the two halves, the combination of one half with a (one-way) function of the other half and a reversible operation (e.g. XOR), and the swap. See the Wikipedia page which has nice schematics. So considering Enigma as a kind of ...

No, it's not flawed. You're just running into a fact of life; differential cryptanalysis generally doesn't just give you the entire key (or even subkey) in one shot. It generally gives you partial information about the key, and if you want the entire key, well, you need to work at it more. In this phase of the attack, you know that the last round subkey ...

Luby and Rackoff published in 1986 a famous article on that subject. Namely, they showed that if the $F$ functions are pseudorandom, then four rounds are sufficient to achieve security. There are subtle details, though: Each round has its own $F$ function. We usually say that there is a single $F$ function indexed by the subkey for that round. In the ...

The question has morphed over time. I am answering the following. So to be sure, with DES, only when you encrypt something twice with a weak key. You get the back the original plaintext? That is correct as that is the definition of a DES weak key, a key for which encryption and decryption have the same effect. So when using DES in OFB mode with a ...

This will probably be OK. It does have some non-trivial side effects/caveats: The effective key length is reduced to 86 bits. Only the low 22 bits of each of the 4 key words will matter, so only 88 bits of the key material are relevant. Then, there are known equivalent-key properties of TEA that further reduce the effective key length to 86 bits. A ...

No, it's a rotor machine and more importantly, a stream cipher that operates on a character-by-character basis. Block ciphers operate on a chunk at a time. Feistel ciphers are a way to construct block ciphers. We could talk more about Feistel ciphers or more basically block ciphers, but that's not your question. At its most basic, Enigma is a stream cipher ...

There seem to be some errors or inconsistencies in the question. If $P \oplus P' = [0000\delta 000]$, and we use the 2-round structure shown in the picture, then the corresponding ciphertext pairs should satisfy $C \oplus C' = [xyzt\delta000]$. This is different from what you wrote (did you omit the final swap shown in the picture above?). If we let ...

A quick follow up, there is a problem with using DES in OFB mode when you are not using the full feedback register. The generated keystream will become cyclic with on average a period of the order $2^{32}$ instead of $2^{64}$. See (R.R. Jueneman, “Analysis of certain aspects of Output Feedback Mode,” Advances in Cryptology, Proceedings Crypto’82, D. ...