What is SEED the block cipher and who developed it?
SEED is a block cipher developed by the Korea Information Security Agency, known as KISA. It is used broadly throughout South Korean industry but seldom found elsewhere.
Questions about SEED
Short answers, pulled from the story.
Why was the SEED cipher created in South Korea?
SEED gained popularity in Korea because 40-bit encryption was not considered strong enough, so the Korea Information Security Agency developed its own standard. The decision historically limited the competition of web browsers in Korea.
How does the SEED block cipher work in its design?
SEED is a 16-round Feistel network with 128-bit blocks and a 128-bit key. It uses two 8 by 8 S-boxes derived from discrete exponentiation, x247 and x251, and generates thirty-two 32-bit subkeys through a fairly complex key schedule using round constants from the Golden ratio.
Why did SEED require ActiveX and Internet Explorer in Korea?
No major SSL libraries or web browsers supported the SEED algorithm, so Korean users needed an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer to reach secure websites. On the 1st of April 2015, the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning announced a plan to remove the ActiveX dependency from at least 90 percent of the country's top 100 websites by 2017.
Which standards and software support the SEED cipher?
SEED has been adopted by S/MIME in RFC 4010, TLS and SSL in RFC 4162, IPSec in RFC 4196, and ISO/IEC 18033-3:2010. The Linux kernel has supported SEED since 2007, Bloombase supports it across its data cryptography solutions, and Mozilla's NSS library still supports SEED-based cipher suites.
Why did Mozilla Firefox drop support for SEED?
Mozilla Firefox supported SEED as a TLS cipher starting with version 3.5.4 but dropped it by default in Firefox 27 and above. Mozilla reasoned that SEED support had no practical positive effect in helping South Korea migrate away from ActiveX-based e-commerce, and other browsers offered no SEED-based cipher suites.