Forget FIPS - An Analysis of Russian and Chinese Cryptographic Standards

The talk surveys the cryptographic standards published by Russia and China, which are less familiar to Western practitioners even though they protect very large user populations. It starts with the Russian GOST family: the Magma block cipher, the Kuznyechik cipher, the Streebog hash, and the GOST R 34.10 signature scheme. For each, the speaker covers the structure, the published attacks, and how the standard came about, including Magma's long secrecy and the standardization of Kuznyechik.

A recurring theme is the S-box. Researchers in 2015 argued that the Kuznyechik and Streebog S-boxes, described as randomly generated, have a hidden algebraic substructure, and later work showed how to build comparable S-boxes through heuristic optimization. The Chinese half covers SM4 block cipher, SM3 hash, SM2 signatures and key exchange, which requires point validation, the pairing-based SM9 scheme, and the ZUC-256 stream cipher used in 4G and 5G. The speaker compares the public evaluations of each and notes that the main results are academic rather than practical, though some claims are contested.

The closing argument is that standards reflect national priorities. Russian designs tend to be conservative and resemble Western designs, while Chinese designs are more experimental, and both countries put heavy weight on backward compatibility. The takeaway for practitioners is that constant choice and transparency matter as much as raw cipher strength, and the speaker shares reference scripts for checking the curve and S-box properties.