A cryptanalytic attack on Knapsack cipher using Differential Evolution algorithm

The paper presents a cryptanalytic attack on Merkle-Hellman Knapsack cipher using Differential Evolution. The Differential Evolution is a stochastic, population based optimization search strategy and uses three typical operators, mutation, crossover and selection, to search the solution space. An initial population is created and a new generation is generated by applying the operators until the solution is obtained. The results of Differential Evolution are compared with the results of Genetic Algorithm (GA) for cryptanalysis of the knapsack cipher. Experimental results show that cryptanalysis of Merkle Hellman Knapsack cipher using Differential Evolution is a better technique than using Genetic Algorithm for this purpose.