Weak keys and plaintext recovery for the Dhall-Pal Block Cipher
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Dhall-Pal Cipher (DPC) is a 128-bit block cipher with a 128-bit key introduced by Dhall and Pal in 2010. It is based on the substitution-permutation network (SPN) structure, and has elements in common with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The most significant differences between the DPC and the AES occur in the linear transformation stage, some components of which are key-dependent in the DPC. In this paper we identify a large set of weak keys for the DPC, and we describe practical attacks enabled by these weak keys. We first present fast distinguishing attacks that succeed for approximately 2124 out of the 2128 keys. We then describe two plaintext-recovery attacks that succeed for 2120 keys. One of these plaintext-recovery attacks can decrypt any ciphertext using only 211 encryptions on average.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it