Paper 2024/1456

Crooked Indifferentiability of the Feistel Construction

Abstract

The Feistel construction is a fundamental technique for building pseudorandom permutations and block ciphers. This paper shows that a simple adaptation of the construction is resistant, even to algorithm substitution attacks---that is, adversarial subversion---of the component round functions. Specifically, we establish that a Feistel-based construction with more than $337n/\log(1/\epsilon)$ rounds can transform a subverted random function---which disagrees with the original one at a small fraction (denoted by $\epsilon$) of inputs---into an object that is \emph{crooked-indifferentiable} from a random permutation, even if the adversary is aware of all the randomness used in the transformation. Here, $n$ denotes the length of both the input and output of the round functions that underlie the Feistel cipher. We also provide a lower bound showing that the construction cannot use fewer than $2n/\log(1/\epsilon)$ rounds to achieve crooked-indifferentiable security.

Note: This is the extended version of the conference paper that will be presented at Asiacrypt2024. It includes proofs that were omitted from the conference paper due to page limitations.