# Quadruple DES vs AES-128 security

I came across this question regarding the security of Quadruple DES (hypothetically DES done four times) in CBC encryption mode vs security of AES-128 in CBC encryption mode. What parameters help to decide the security, assuming 4 different keys (or other case with k1, k2, k3, k1) so the key length would be 224bits (3DES provides 100-bit security level) vs 128bits for AES.

• Specify which keys you're using. The same four time? Four different? K1,K2,K3,K1? – Binou Jul 27 '20 at 11:27
• Welcome to Cryptography. Where did you see this question? What is the source of this question? 3DES has more than 100-bit security, it has 112-bit security. See here Why is triple-DES using three different keys vulnerable to a meet-in-the-middle-attack?. 4DES with four independent key can have 112-bit security which is still less than AES's 128 bit security. – kelalaka Jul 27 '20 at 13:34

For example, assume a VPN in CBC mode using a fixed key. Assume an adversary injects known traffic consisting of a known repeated byte representing 99.9% of the payload for 64 GiB of reference ciphertext, then gets another 64 GiB of actual ciphertext. With good probability there is at least one match between one of the $$2^{33}$$ blocks (of 8 bytes) of the reference traffic and the $$2^{33}$$ blocks of the actual traffic. And any such matching block can be deciphered correctly with >99% probability.
If we want residual risk at most $$\epsilon$$ that this kind of attack succeeds, we need to limit the traffic with the same key to about $$2^{36}\,\sqrt\epsilon$$ bytes. For a residual risk of one in a million, that's about 64 MiB, not a lot by modern standards.