  In this paper we analyze the cryptanalysis of the simplified data encryption
standard algorithm using meta-heuristics and in particular genetic algorithms.
The classic fitness function when using such an algorithm is to compare n-gram
statistics of a the decrypted message with those of the target message. We show
that using such a function is irrelevant in case of Genetic Algorithm, simply
because there is no correlation between the distance to the real key (the
optimum) and the value of the fitness, in other words, there is no hidden
gradient. In order to emphasize this assumption we experimentally show that a
genetic algorithm perform worse than a random search on the cryptanalysis of
the simplified data encryption standard algorithm.
