Exercise 3.7 from Cryptography Engineering:
Describe an example system that uses DES but is insecure because of the DES complementation property. Specifically, describe the system, and then present an attack against that system; the attack should utilize the DES complementation property.
Complementation Property of DES
The complementation property of DES says that \(\overline{E_k(m)}=E_\overline k(\overline m)\), where \(E_k(m)\) is the value of \(m\) DES encrypted with key \(k\).
Example System
A multi-user file system where each file is DES encrypted with a single key, \(k\).
Attack
The attacker sends two 64-bit blocks to be written to the file system, \(b\) and \(\overline b\). The file system writes out two encrypted blocks to physical storage, \(E_k(b)\) and \(E_k(\overline b)\).
For each key candidate \(x\), compute \(E_x(\overline b)\). This is a single cryptographic operation. If the value is equal to \(E_k(\overline b)\), then \(x=k\) (i.e., the key was found).
Otherwise, compute the complement of the previous crypgraphic operation, namely \(\overline {E_x(\overline b)}\), which by the complementation property is \(E_\overline x(b)\). If \(E_\overline x(b)=E_k(b)\), then \(\overline x=k\) (i.e., the key was found).
The attack is thus able to check 2 key candidates for each cryptographic operation, reducing the attack on the \(2^{56}\) possible DES keys in half to \(2^{55}\).
References
The main idea for this answer is taken from fgrieu’s answer on Cryptography Stack Exchange.