On Mon, 27 Nov 1995 11:53:26 -0800, you wrote:

At 03:43 AM 11/24/95 +0100, Mats Bergstrom <asgaard@sos.sll.se> wrote:

...

According to a short article in a Swedish newspaper (DN) with the title 'Spy Code of KGB can make computers safe', JETICO INC., located in Finland (Tammerfors), introduced a new crypto system on the world market last week. It's based on GOST, the Russian federal standard algorithm.

[..]

From what I've read of GOST, it's really a family of cyphers with different sets of S-boxes - routine military gets one set, top secret gets another, civilian govt another, etc. Aside from possible differences in security level for the S-boxes, one motivation is that you can't take civilian govt decryptors and use them to read or forge top secret military crypto, etc. If this is correct, then some sets of S-boxes probably do have trapdoors (at least susceptibility to differential cryptanalysis_; how good are the ones that Jetico is selling, what credentials do they have to convince us their cryptanalysis is good enough, and why are they doing parts of it in hardware?

Based on the few articles I've read, S-Boxes are generated randomly, or (doubtful in this case) generated from the passphrase, making an even larger keyspace. --Rob