Cryptanalysis of SDES via evolutionary computation techniques

Abstract: The cryptanalysis of simplified data encryption standard can be formulated as NP-Hard combinatorial problem. The goal of this paper is two fold. First we want to make a study about how evolutionary computation techniques can efficiently solve the NP-Hard combinatorial problem. For achieving this goal we test several evolutionary computation techniques like memetic algorithm, genetic algorithm and simulated annealing for the cryptanalysis of simplified data encryption standard problem (SDES). And second was a comparison between memetic algorithm, genetic algorithm and simulated annealing were made in order to investigate the performance for the cryptanalysis on SDES. The methods were tested and extensive computational results show that memetic algorithm performs better than genetic algorithms and simulated annealing for such type of NP-Hard combinatorial problem. This paper represents our first effort toward efficient memetic algorithm for the cryptanalysis of SDES.