Cryptomeria cipher
block cipher
The Cryptomeria cipher, also called C2, is a proprietary block cipher defined and licensed by the 4C Entity. It is the successor to CSS algorithm (used for DVD-Video) and was designed for the CPRM/CPPM digital rights management scheme which are used by DRM-restricted Secure Digital cards and DVD-Audio discs.
Cipher details
The C2 symmetric key algorithm is a 10-round Feistel cipher. Like DES, it has a key size of 56 bits and a block size of 64 bits. The encryption and decryption algorithms are available for peer review, but implementations require the so-called "secret constant", the values of the substitution box (S-box), which are only available under a license from the 4C Entity.
The 4C Entity licenses a different set of S-boxes for each application (such as DVD-Audio, DVD-Video and CPRM).
Cryptanalysis
In 2008, an attack was published against a reduced 8-round version of Cryptomeria to discover the S-box in a chosen-key scenario. In a practical experiment, the attack succeeded in recovering parts of the S-box in 15 hours of CPU time, using 2 plaintext-ciphertext pairs.
A paper by Julia Borghoff, Lars Knudsen, Gregor Leander and Krystian Matusiewicz in 2009 breaks the full-round cipher in three different scenarios; it presents a 224 time complexity attack to recover the S-box in a chosen-key scenario, a 248 boomerang attack to recover the key with a known S-box using 244 adaptively chosen plaintexts/ciphertexts, and a 253.5 attack when both the key and S-box are unknown.
Distributed brute force cracking effort
Following an announcement by Japanese HDTV broadcasters that they would start broadcasting programs with the copy-once broadcast flag starting with 2004-04-05, a distributed Cryptomeria cipher brute force cracking effort was launched on 2003-12-21.
The public source identifies “Cryptomeria cipher” as block cipher. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cryptomeria, cipher and block.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2930732. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008, 2009, 2004 and 2003.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cryptomeria cipher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.