I was reading an article about “Detecting Stingrays” at Schneier’s forum when I came across a post from Omar requesting a code review of an enhanced Rinjdael cipher developed in Iraq:
Omar A. Dawood, Abdul Monem S. Rahma, Abdul Mohssen J. Abdul Hossen,”New Symmetric Cipher Fast Algorithm of Revertible Operations’ Queen (FAROQ) Cipher”, International Journal of
Computer Network and Information Security(IJCNIS), Vol.9, No.4, pp. 29-36, 2017.DOI: 10.5815/ijcnis.2017.04.04
Details about the cipher can be found here (PDF):
It is a variant of AES/Rinjdael that uses S-Boxes, but with S-Box obfuscation.
My take:
Jared Hall • August 15, 2017 3:57 AM
Omar, You might gain better visibility posting your comment in one of Bruce’s Friday Squid posts.
I enjoyed your article. I’m not a mathematician or cryptoanalyst, but I have a couple of thoughts on FAROQ:
1) The weakness of Rijndael is the S-Box. While FAROQ seems to address this weakness, it’s use is still predictable and still an attack vector.
2) I am unclear where you gain the speed advantage over AES/Rinjdael.
I applaud your efforts and outstanding work. You’ve certainly created a better “mousetrap”. As for commercial viability, I think the market may perceive FAROQ as “just another mousetrap”.