Triple DES

In cryptography, Triple DES (3DES or TDES), officially the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA or Triple DEA), is a symmetric-key block cipher, which applies the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher algorithm three times to each data block. At the time of its development, the 56-bit key size of DES was increasingly considered inadequate against newer cryptanalysis techniques, and rapid growth in computer performance, as predicted by the Moore's law, made brute-force attacks increasingly possible and practical. Triple DES increases the effective key size to 112 bits. A CVE released in 2016, CVE-2016-2183, disclosed a major security vulnerability in the DES and 3DES encryption algorithms. This CVE, combined with the inadequate key size of 3DES, led to NIST deprecating 3DES in 2019 and disallowing all uses (except processing already encrypted data) by the end of 2023. It has been replaced with the more secure, more robust Advanced Encryption Standard, the AES.

While US government and industry standards abbreviate the algorithm's name as TDES (Triple DES) and TDEA (Triple Data Encryption Algorithm), RFC 1851 referred to it as 3DES from the time it first promulgated the idea, and this namesake has since come into wide use by most vendors, users, and cryptographers.

History

In 1978, a triple encryption method using DES with two 56-bit keys was proposed by Walter Tuchman; in 1981, Merkle and Hellman proposed a more secure triple-key version of 3DES with 112 bits of security.

Standards

The Triple Data Encryption Algorithm is variously defined in several standards documents:

RFC 1851, The ESP Triple DES Transform (approved in 1995)

ANSI ANS X9.52-1998 Triple Data Encryption Algorithm Modes of Operation (approved in 1998, withdrawn in 2008)

FIPS PUB 46-3 Data Encryption Standard (DES) (approved in 1999, withdrawn in 2005)

NIST Special Publication 800-67 Revision 2 Recommendation for the Triple Data Encryption Algorithm (TDEA) Block Cipher (approved in 2017, withdrawn in 2024)

ISO/IEC 18033-3:2010: Part 3: Block ciphers (approved in 2005)

Algorithm

The original DES cipher's key size of 56 bits was considered generally sufficient when it was designed, but the availability of increasing computational power made brute-force attacks feasible. Triple DES provides a relatively simple method of increasing the key size of DES to protect against such attacks, without the need to design a completely new block cipher algorithm.

A naive approach to increase the strength of a block encryption algorithm with a short key length (like DES) would be to use two keys

(

K

1

,

K

2

)

{\displaystyle (K1,K2)}

instead of one, and encrypt each block twice:

E

K

2

(

E

K

1

(

plaintext

)

)

{\displaystyle E_{K2}(E_{K1}({\textrm {plaintext}}))}

.