CAST-128 is a block cipher used in a number of products, notably as the default cipher in some versions of GPG and PGP. It has been approved for Canadian government use by the Communications Security Establishment. Haruki Seki et al. found 2-round differential characteristics and they can attack 5-round CAST-128. In this paper, we studied the properties of round functions F₁ and F₃ in CAST-128, and identified differential characteristics for F₁ round function and F₃ round function. So we identified a 6-round differential characteristic with probability 2^-53 under 2^-23.8 of the total key space. Then based on 6-round differential characteristic, we can attack 8-round CAST-128 with key sizes greater than or equal to 72bits and 9-round CAST-128 with key sizes greater than or equal to 104bits. We give the summary of attacks on reduced-round CAST-128 in Table 10.

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A dual-mode pulse-triggered flip-flop design supporting functional versatility is presented. A low-complexity unified logic module, consisting of only five transistors, for dual-mode pulse generation is devised using pass transistor logic (PTL). Potential threshold voltage loss problem is successfully resolved to ensure the signal integrity. Despite the extra logic for dual-mode operations, the circuit complexity of the proposed design is comparable to those of the single mode designs. Simulations in different process corners and switching activities prove the competitive performance of proposed design against various single mode designs.

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Integer codes correct errors of a given type, which means that for a given communication channel and modulator we can choose the type of the errors (which are the most common) then construct integer code capable of correcting those errors. A new general construction of single (±1) error correctable integer codes will be presented. Comparison between single and multiple (±1) error correctable integer codes over AWGN channel using QAM scheme will be presented.

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