RSA Labs FAQ -- Q78: What is FEAL?

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### Question 79. What is FEAL?

The Fast Data Encipherment Algorithm (FEAL) was presented by Shimizu and Miyaguchi [SM88] as an alternative to DES. The original cipher (called FEAL-4) was a four-round cryptosystem with a 64-bit block size and a 64-bit key size and it was designed to give high performance in software. Soon a variety of attacks against FEAL-4 were announced including one attack that required only 20 chosen plaintexts [Mur90]. Several results in the cryptanalysis of FEAL-8 (eight-round version) led the designers to introduce a revised version, FEAL-N, where N denoted the number of rounds. Biham and Shamir [BS91b] developed differential cryptanalytic attacks against FEAL-N for up to 31 rounds. In 1994, Ohta and Aoki presented a linear cryptanalytic attack against FEAL-8 that required 225 known plaintexts [OA94], and other improvements [KR95a] followed. In the wake of these numerous attacks, FEAL and its derivatives should be considered insecure.