  The cryptanalysis of simplified data encryption standard can be formulated as
NP-Hard combinatorial problem. The goal of this paper is two fold. First we
want to make a study about how evolutionary computation techniques can
efficiently solve the NP-Hard combinatorial problem. For achieving this goal we
test several evolutionary computation techniques like memetic algorithm,
genetic algorithm and simulated annealing for the cryptanalysis of simplified
data encryption standard problem (SDES). And second was a comparison between
memetic algorithm, genetic algorithm and simulated annealing were made in order
to investigate the performance for the cryptanalysis on SDES. The methods were
tested and extensive computational results show that memetic algorithm performs
better than genetic algorithms and simulated annealing for such type of NP-Hard
combinatorial problem. This paper represents our first effort toward efficient
memetic algorithm for the cryptanalysis of SDES.
