Breaking DES in tile assembly models

The potential use of molecular computation in attacking the Data Encryption Standard (DES) is already known, but the used computing models are not autonomous and require many tedious laboratory steps to execute. In this paper, a description of attacking DES using tile self assembly models in Θ(1) distinct tile types is given theoretically. The computation takes advantage of tiles´ autonomy and the characteristic of highly distributed parallel computation. Each assembly configuration yields the ciphertext in linear time with respect to the times of the round function included in DES. The feasibility of finding the main key of DES in tile assembly models has been discussed. Analysis indicates that the tile assembly models might succeed by using a little of DNA under low error rate.