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How can you distinguish a cipher composed only of a Feistel network from a random function if it has only (a) one round, (b) two rounds?
For clarity, here is an image of such a cipher with two rounds:
A sequence of plaintext blocks M1, . . . , M8 is encrypted using DES into a sequence of ciphertext blocks. Where an IV is used, it is numbered C0. A transmission error occurs and one bit in ciphertext block C3 changes its value. As a consequence, the receiver obtains after decryption a corrupted plaintext block sequence M1′,…,M8′. For the discussed modes of operation (ECB, CBC), how many bits do you expect to be wrong in each block Mi′? (Hint: You may find it helpful to draw decryption block diagrams.)
Please motivate your answer.
As another example, which uses a larger block size, let's use an SPN that takes a 4-byte input x=[x1 || x2 || x3 || x4] and an 8-byte key k=[k1 || k2 || k3 || k4 || k5 || k6 || k7 || k8] as in this figure:
Note that in this 4-byte SPN, the permutation operates on all 4 bytes, similarly to the 2-byte SPN: that is, it shifts all bits four bits to the right.