ICE (cipher)

ICE (cipher)

In cryptography, ICE (Information Concealment Engine) is a block cipher published by Kwan in 1997. The algorithm is similar in structure to DES, but with the addition of a key-dependent bit permutation in the round function. The key-dependent bit permutation is implemented efficiently in software. The ICE algorithm is not subject to patents, and the source code has been placed into the public domain.

ICE is a Feistel network with a block size of 64 bits. The standard ICE algorithm takes a 64-bit key and has 16 rounds. A fast variant, Thin-ICE, uses only 8 rounds. An open-ended variant, ICE-n, uses 16n rounds with 64n bit key.

Van Rompay et al. (1998) attempted to apply differential cryptanalysis to ICE. They described an attack on Thin-ICE which recovers the secret key using 223 chosen plaintexts with a 25% success probability. If 227 chosen plaintexts are used, the probability can be improved to 95%. For the standard version of ICE, an attack on 15 out of 16 rounds was found, requiring 256 work and at most 256 chosen plaintexts.