86 results sorted by ID
The Committing Security of MACs with Applications to Generic Composition
Ritam Bhaumik, Bishwajit Chakraborty, Wonseok Choi, Avijit Dutta, Jérôme Govinden, Yaobin Shen
Secret-key cryptography
Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are ubiquitous primitives deployed in multiple flavors through standards such as HMAC, CMAC, GMAC, LightMAC, and many others. Its versatility makes it an essential building block in applications necessitating message authentication and integrity checks, in authentication protocols, authenticated encryption schemes, or as a pseudorandom or key derivation function. Its usage in this variety of settings makes it susceptible to a broad range of attack...
The Insecurity of SHA2 under the Differential Fault Characteristic of Boolean Functions
Weiqiong Cao, Hua Chen, Hongsong Shi, Haoyuan Li, Jian Wang
Attacks and cryptanalysis
SHA2 is widely used in various traditional public key ryptosystems, post-quantum cryptography, personal identification, and network communication protocols. Therefore, ensuring its robust security is of critical importance. Several differential fault attacks based on random word fault have targeted SHA1 and SHACAL-2. However, extending such random word-based fault attacks to SHA2 proves to be much more difficult due to the increased complexity of the Boolean functions in SHA2.
In this...
Threshold Garbled Circuits with Low Overhead
Schuyler Rosefield, abhi shelat, LaKyah Tyner
Cryptographic protocols
The folklore approach to designing a threshold variant of symmetric
cryptographic algorithms involves applying generic MPC methods to se-
cret sharing techniques: the MPC first combines participant input shares
using the secret sharing scheme, and then evaluates the cryptographic
function on the reconstructed key. Hardening this secure against n − 1
malicious parties requires some mechanism to ensure input consistency,
e.g., adding MACs to inputs, which consequently, increases the...
2024/063
Last updated: 2024-03-04
A Study of Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks on Secure Hash Algorithms
Julien Maillard, Thomas Hiscock, Maxime Lecomte, Christophe Clavier
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Hashing algorithms are one-way functions that are used in cryptographic protocols as Pseudo Random Functions (PRF), to assess data integrity or to create a Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC). In many cryptographic constructions, secret data is processed with hashing functions. In these cases, recovering the input given to the hashing algorithm allows retrieving secret data. In this paper, we investigate the application of Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks (SASCA), based on a...
About “$k$-bit security” of MACs based on hash function Streebog
Vitaly Kiryukhin
Secret-key cryptography
Various message authentication codes (MACs), including HMAC-Streebog and Streebog-K, are based on the keyless hash function Streebog. Under the assumption that the compression function of Streebog is resistant to the related key attacks, the security proofs of these algorithms were recently presented at CTCrypt 2022.
We carefully detail the resources of the adversary in the related key settings, revisit the proof, and obtain tight security bounds. Let $n$ be the bit length of the hash...
When Messages are Keys: Is HMAC a dual-PRF?
Matilda Backendal, Mihir Bellare, Felix Günther, Matteo Scarlata
Secret-key cryptography
In Internet security protocols including TLS 1.3, KEMTLS, MLS and Noise, HMAC is being assumed to be a dual-PRF, meaning a PRF not only when keyed conventionally (through its first input), but also when "swapped" and keyed (unconventionally) through its second (message) input. We give the first in-depth analysis of the dual-PRF assumption on HMAC.
For the swap case, we note that security does not hold in general, but completely characterize when it does; we show that HMAC is swap-PRF...
Keyed Streebog is a secure PRF and MAC
Vitaly Kiryukhin
Secret-key cryptography
One of the most popular ways to turn a keyless hash function into a keyed one is the HMAC algorithm. This approach is too expensive in some cases due to double hashing. Excessive overhead can sometimes be avoided by using certain features of the hash function itself. The paper presents a simple and safe way to create a keyed cryptoalgorithm (conventionally called "Streebog-K") from hash function Streebog $\mathsf{H}(M)$. Let $K$ be a secret key, then $\mathsf{KH}(K,M)=\mathsf{H}(K||M)$ is a...
Related-key attacks on the compression function of Streebog
Vitaly Kiryukhin
Secret-key cryptography
Related-key attacks against block ciphers are often considered unrealistic. In practice, as far as possible, the existence of a known "relation" between the secret encryption keys is avoided. Despite this, related keys arise directly in some widely used keyed hash functions. This is especially true for HMAC-Streebog, where known constants and manipulated parameters are added to the secret key. The relation is determined by addition modulo $2$ and $2^{n}$. The security of HMAC reduces to the...
Streebog compression function as PRF in secret-key settings
Vitaly Kiryukhin
Secret-key cryptography
Security of the many keyed hash-based cryptographic constructions (such as HMAC) depends on the fact that the underlying compression function $g(H,M)$ is a pseudorandom function (PRF). This paper presents key-recovery algorithms for 7 rounds (of 12) of Streebog compression function. Two cases were considered, as a secret key can be used: the previous state $H$ or the message block $M$. The proposed methods implicitly show that Streebog compression function has a large security margin as PRF...
On Tight Quantum Security of HMAC and NMAC in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
Akinori Hosoyamada, Tetsu Iwata
Secret-key cryptography
HMAC and NMAC are the most basic and important constructions to convert Merkle-Damgård hash functions into message authentication codes (MACs) or pseudorandom functions (PRFs).
In the quantum setting, at CRYPTO 2017, Song and Yun showed that HMAC and NMAC are quantum pseudorandom functions (qPRFs) under the standard assumption that the underlying compression function is a qPRF.
Their proof guarantees security up to $O(2^{n/5})$ or $O(2^{n/8})$ quantum queries when the output length of HMAC...
A New and Improved Reduction Proof of Cascade PRF
Mridul Nandi
Foundations
The prefix-free PRF (pseudorandom function) security of a cascade function based on a compression function $f$ against a $q$-query distinguisher is reduced to a $q$-query PRF security of $f$ with a tightness gap $lq$ where $l$ represents the length of the longest query among all $q$ queries. In this paper, we have shown a reduction which is also applicable to multiuser setup and improves the tightness gap for both adaptive and non-adaptive distinguishers. As an immediate application of our...
Information-Theoretic Security of Cryptographic Channels
Marc Fischlin, Felix Günther, Philipp Muth
Cryptographic protocols
We discuss the setting of information-theoretically secure channel protocols where confidentiality of transmitted data should hold against unbounded adversaries. We argue that there are two possible scenarios: One is that the adversary is currently bounded, but stores today's communication and tries to break confidentiality later when obtaining more computational power or time. We call channel protocols protecting against such attacks future-secure. The other scenario is that the adversary...
DAPA: Differential Analysis aided Power Attack on (Non-)Linear Feedback Shift Registers (Extended version)
Siang Meng Sim, Dirmanto Jap, Shivam Bhasin
Secret-key cryptography
Differential power analysis (DPA) is a form of side-channel analysis (SCA) that performs statistical analysis on the power traces of cryptographic computations. DPA is applicable to many cryptographic primitives, including block ciphers, stream ciphers and even hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). At COSADE 2017, Dobraunig~et~al. presented a DPA on the fresh re-keying scheme Keymill to extract the bit relations of neighbouring bits in its shift registers, reducing the internal...
Security of Streaming Encryption in Google's Tink Library
Viet Tung Hoang, Yaobin Shen
Secret-key cryptography
We analyze the multi-user security of the streaming encryption in Google's Tink library
via an extended version of the framework of nonce-based online authenticated encryption of Hoang et al. (CRYPTO'15) to support random-access decryption. We show that Tink's design choice of using random nonces and a nonce-based key-derivation function indeed improves the concrete security bound. We then give two better alternatives that are more robust against randomness failure. In addition, we show how...
Extending NIST's CAVP Testing of Cryptographic Hash Function Implementations
Nicky Mouha, Christopher Celi
Implementation
This paper describes a vulnerability in Apple's CoreCrypto library, which affects 11 out of the 12 implemented hash functions: every implemented hash function except MD2 (Message Digest 2), as well as several higher-level operations such as the Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) and the Ed25519 signature scheme. The vulnerability is present in each of Apple's CoreCrypto libraries that are currently validated under FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standard). For inputs of...
Substitution Attacks against Message Authentication
Marcel Armour, Bertram Poettering
Secret-key cryptography
This work introduces Algorithm Substitution Attacks (ASAs) on message authentication schemes. In light of revelations concerning mass surveillance, ASAs were initially introduced by Bellare, Paterson and Rogaway as a novel attack class against the confidentiality of encryption schemes. Such an attack replaces one or more of the regular scheme algorithms with a subverted version that aims to reveal information to an adversary (engaged in mass surveillance), while remaining undetected by...
A Study on the Applicability of the Lesamnta-LW Lightweight Hash Function to TPMS
Yuhei Watanabe, Hideki Yamamoto, Hirotaka Yoshida
Secret-key cryptography
The Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) is used to monitor the pressure of the tires and to inform the driver of it. This equipment is mandatory for vehicles in US and EU. To ensure the security of TPMS, it is important to reduce the cost of the cryptographic mechanisms implemented in resourced-constrained devices. To address this problem, previous work has proposed countermeasures employing lightweight block ciphers such as PRESENT, SPECK, or KATAN. However, it is not clear to us that...
A Survey on Authenticated Encryption -- ASIC Designer's Perspective
Elif Bilge Kavun, Hristina Mihajloska, Tolga Yalcin
Implementation
Authenticated encryption (AE) has been a vital operation in cryptography due to its ability to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity at the same time. Its use has soared in parallel with widespread use of the Internet and has led to several new schemes. There have been studies investigating software performance of various schemes. However, the same is yet to be done for hardware. We present a comprehensive survey of hardware (specifically ASIC) performance of the most commonly...
Yet Another Side Channel Cryptanalysis on SM3 Hash Algorithm
Christophe Clavier, Leo Reynaud, Antoine Wurcker
Public-key cryptography
SM3, the Chinese standard hash algorithm inspired from SHA2, can be
attacker by similar means than SHA2 up to an adaptation to its differences. But this
kind of attack is based on targeting point of interest of different kinds, some are end
of computation results, that are stored when others are in intermediate computational
data. The leakage effectiveness of the later could be subject to implementation choices,
device type or device type of leakage. In this paper, we propose a new approach...
Seedless Fruit is the Sweetest: Random Number Generation, Revisited
Sandro Coretti, Yevgeniy Dodis, Harish Karthikeyan, Stefano Tessaro
Foundations
The need for high-quality randomness in cryptography makes random-number generation one of its most fundamental tasks.
A recent important line of work (initiated by Dodis et al., CCS ’13) focuses on the notion of *robustness* for *pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) with inputs*—these are primitives that use various sources to accumulate sufficient entropy into a state, from which pseudorandom bits are extracted. Robustness ensures that PRNGs remain secure even under state compromise and...
Understanding Optimizations and Measuring Performances of PBKDF2
Andrea Francesco Iuorio, Andrea Visconti
Implementation
Password-based Key Derivation Functions (KDFs) are used to generate secure keys of arbitrary length implemented in many security-related systems.
The strength of these KDFs is the ability to provide countermeasures against brute-force/dictionary attacks.
One of the most implemented KDF is PBKDF2. In order to slow attackers down,
PBKDF2 uses a salt and introduces computational intensive operations based on an iterated pseudo-random function.
Since passwords are widely used to protect personal...
Integrative Acceleration of First-Order Boolean Masking for Embedded IoT Devices
Yuichi Komano, Hideo Shimizu, Hideyuki Miyake
Implementation
Physical attacks, especially side-channel attacks, are threats to IoT devices which are located everywhere in the field. For these devices, the authentic functionality is important so that the IoT system becomes correct, and securing this functionality against side-channel attacks is one of our emerging issues. Toward that, Coron et al. gave an efficient arithmetic-to-Boolean mask conversion algorithm which enables us to protect cryptographic algorithms including arithmetic operations, such...
Key Prediction Security of Keyed Sponges
Bart Mennink
Secret-key cryptography
The keyed sponge is a well-accepted method for message authentication. It processes data at a certain rate by sequential evaluation of an underlying permutation. If the key size $k$ is smaller than the rate, currently known bounds are tight, but if it exceeds the rate, state of the art only dictates security up to $2^{k/2}$. We take closer inspection at the key prediction security of the sponge and close the remaining gap in the existing security analysis: we confirm key security up to close...
Backdoored Hash Functions: Immunizing HMAC and HKDF
Marc Fischlin, Christian Janson, Sogol Mazaheri
Security of cryptographic schemes is traditionally measured as the inability of resource-constrained adversaries to violate a desired security goal. The security argument usually relies on a sound design of the underlying components. Arguably, one of the most devastating failures of this approach can be observed when considering adversaries such as intelligence agencies that can influence the design, implementation, and standardization of cryptographic primitives. While the most prominent...
An Analysis of the NIST SP 800-90A Standard
Joanne Woodage, Dan Shumow
We investigate the security properties of the three deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) mechanisms in the NIST SP 800-90A standard [2]. This standard received a considerable amount of negative attention, due to the controversy surrounding the now retracted DualEC-DRBG, which was included in earlier versions. Perhaps because of the attention paid to the DualEC, the other algorithms in the standard have received surprisingly patchy analysis to date, despite widespread deployment. This...
Exploiting an HMAC-SHA-1 optimization to speed up PBKDF2
Andrea Visconti, Federico Gorla
PBKDF2 [27] is a well-known password-based key derivation function. In order to slow attackers down, PBKDF2 introduces CPU-intensive operations based on an iterated pseudorandom function (in our case HMAC-SHA-1). If we are able to speed up a SHA-1 or an HMAC implementation, we are able to speed up PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-1. This means that a performance improvement might be exploited by regular users and attackers. Interestingly, FIPS 198-1 [31] suggests that it is possible to precompute first...
EM Analysis in the IoT Context: Lessons Learned from an Attack on Thread
Daniel Dinu, Ilya Kizhvatov
Applications
The distinguishing feature of the Internet of Things is that many devices get interconnected. The threat of side-channel attacks in this setting is less understood than the threat of traditional network and software exploitation attacks that are perceived to be more powerful.
This work is a case study of Thread, an emerging network and transport level stack designed to facilitate secure communication between heterogeneous IoT devices. We perform the first side-channel vulnerability analysis...
HACL*: A Verified Modern Cryptographic Library
Jean Karim Zinzindohoué, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Jonathan Protzenko, Benjamin Beurdouche
Implementation
HACL* is a verified portable C cryptographic library that implements modern cryptographic primitives such as the ChaCha20 and Salsa20 encryption algorithms, Poly1305 and HMAC message authentication, SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions, the Curve25519 elliptic curve, and Ed25519 signatures.
HACL* is written in the F* programming language and then compiled to readable C code. The F* source code for each crypto- graphic primitive is verified for memory safety, mitigations against timing...
Quantum Security of NMAC and Related Constructions
Fang Song, Aaram Yun
Foundations
We prove the security of NMAC, HMAC, AMAC, and the cascade construction with fixed input-length as quantum-secure pseudo-random functions (PRFs). Namely, they are indistinguishable from a random oracle against any polynomial-time quantum adversary that can make quantum superposition queries. In contrast, many blockcipher-based PRFs including CBC-MAC were recently broken by quantum superposition attacks.
Classical proof strategies for these constructions do not generalize to the quantum...
Modeling Random Oracles under Unpredictable Queries
Pooya Farshim, Arno Mittelbach
Secret-key cryptography
In recent work, Bellare, Hoang, and Keelveedhi (CRYPTO 2013) introduced a new abstraction called Universal Computational Extractors (UCEs), and showed how they can replace random oracles (ROs) across a wide range of cryptosystems. We formulate a new framework, called Interactive Computational Extractors (ICEs), that extends UCEs by viewing them as models of ROs under unpredictable (aka. high-entropy) queries. We overcome a number of limitations of UCEs in the new framework, and in particular...
Another Look at Tightness II: Practical Issues in Cryptography
Sanjit Chatterjee, Neal Koblitz, Alfred Menezes, Palash Sarkar
Cryptographic protocols
How to deal with large tightness gaps in security proofs is a vexing issue in cryptography. Even when analyzing protocols that are of practical importance, leading researchers often fail to treat this question with the seriousness that it deserves. We discuss nontightness in connection with complexity leveraging, HMAC, lattice-based cryptography, identity-based encryption, and hybrid encryption.
On the weaknesses of PBKDF2
Andrea Visconti, Simone Bossi, Hany Ragab, Alexandro Calò
Password-based key derivation functions are of particular interest in cryptography because they (a) input a password/passphrase (which usually is short and lacks enough entropy) and derive a cryptographic key; (b) slow down brute force and dictionary attacks as much as possible. In PKCS#5 [17], RSA Laboratories described a password based key derivation function called PBKDF2 that has been widely adopted in many security related applications [6, 7, 11]. In order to slow down brute force...
Symmetric and Dual PRFs from Standard Assumptions: A Generic Validation of a Prevailing Assumption
Mihir Bellare, Anna Lysyanskaya
Foundations
A two-input function is a dual PRF if it is a PRF when keyed by either of its inputs. Dual PRFs are assumed in the design and analysis of numerous primitives and protocols including HMAC, AMAC, TLS 1.3 and MLS. But, not only do we not know whether particular functions on which the assumption is made really are dual PRFs; we do not know if dual PRFs even exist. What if the goal is impossible? This paper addresses this with a foundational treatment of dual PRFs, giving constructions based on...
Generic Security of NMAC and HMAC with Input Whitening
Peter Gaži, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Stefano Tessaro
Secret-key cryptography
HMAC and its variant NMAC are the most popular approaches to
deriving a MAC (and more generally, a PRF) from a cryptographic hash
function. Despite nearly two decades of research, their exact
security still remains far from understood in many different
contexts. Indeed, recent works have re-surfaced interest for {\em
generic} attacks, i.e., attacks that treat the compression
function of the underlying hash function as a black box.
Generic security can be proved in a model where the...
The Pythia PRF Service
Adam Everspaugh, Rahul Chatterjee, Samuel Scott, Ari Juels, Thomas Ristenpart
Cryptographic protocols
Conventional cryptographic services such as hardware-security modules and software-based key-management systems offer the ability to apply a pseudorandom function (PRF) such as HMAC to inputs of a client’s choosing. These services are used, for example, to harden stored password hashes against offline brute-force attacks.
We propose a modern PRF service called PYTHIA designed to offer a level of flexibility, security, and ease- of-deployability lacking in prior approaches. The keystone of...
Cryptanalysis of HMAC/NMAC-Whirlpool
Jian Guo, Yu Sasaki, Lei Wang, Shuang Wu
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we present universal forgery and key recovery attacks on the most popular hash-based MAC constructions, e.g., HMAC and NMAC, instantiated with an AES-like hash function Whirlpool. These attacks work with Whirlpool reduced to 6 out of 10 rounds in single-key setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result on ``original'' key recovery for HMAC (previous works only succeeded in recovering the equivalent keys). Interestingly, the number of attacked rounds is...
Equivalent Key Recovery Attacks against HMAC and NMAC with Whirlpool Reduced to 7 Rounds
Jian Guo, Yu Sasaki, Lei Wang, Meiqin Wang, Long Wen
Secret-key cryptography
A main contribution of this paper is an improved analysis against HMAC instantiating with reduced Whirlpool. It recovers equivalent keys, which are often denoted as Kin and Kout, of HMAC with 7-round Whirlpool, while the previous best attack can work only for 6 rounds. Our approach is applying the meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on AES to recover MAC keys of Whirlpool. Several techniques are proposed to bypass different attack scenarios between a block cipher and a MAC, e.g., the chosen...
The Exact PRF-Security of NMAC and HMAC
Peter Gaži, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michal Rybár
Secret-key cryptography
NMAC is a mode of operation which turns a fixed input-length
keyed hash function f into a variable input-length function.
A~practical single-key variant of NMAC called HMAC is a very
popular and widely deployed message authentication code
(MAC). Security proofs and attacks for NMAC can typically
be lifted to HMAC.
NMAC was introduced by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk
[Crypto'96], who proved it to be a secure pseudorandom
function (PRF), and thus also a MAC, assuming that
(1) f is a PRF...
Improved Generic Attacks Against Hash-based MACs and HAIFA
Itai Dinur, Gaëtan Leurent
Secret-key cryptography
The security of HMAC (and more general hash-based MACs) against state-recovery and universal forgery attacks was very recently shown to be suboptimal, following a series of surprising results by Leurent \emph{et al.} and Peyrin \emph{et al.}. These results have shown that such powerful attacks require much less than $2^{\ell}$ computations, contradicting the common belief (where $\ell$ denotes the internal state size). In this work, we revisit and extend these results, with a focus on...
New Generic Attacks Against Hash-based MACs
Gaëtan Leurent, Thomas Peyrin, Lei Wang
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper we study the security of hash-based MAC algorithms (such as HMAC and NMAC) above the birthday bound. Up to the birthday bound, HMAC and NMAC are proven to be secure under reasonable assumptions on the hash function. On the other hand, if an $n$-bit MAC is built from a hash function with a $l$-bit state ($l \ge n$), there is a well-known existential forgery attack with complexity $2^{l/2}$. However, the remaining security after $2^{l/2}$ computations is not well understood. In...
Generic Universal Forgery Attack on Iterative Hash-based MACs
Thomas Peyrin, Lei Wang
Secret-key cryptography
In this article, we study the security of iterative hash-based MACs, such as HMAC or NMAC, with regards to universal forgery attacks. Leveraging recent advances in the analysis of functional graphs built from the iteration of HMAC or NMAC, we exhibit the very first generic universal forgery attack against hash-based MACs. In particular, our work implies that the universal forgery resistance of an n-bit output HMAC construction is not 2^n queries as long believed by the community. The...
Key-Indistinguishable Message Authentication Codes
Joel Alwen, Martin Hirt, Ueli Maurer, Arpita Patra, Pavel Raykov
Secret-key cryptography
While standard message authentication codes (MACs) guarantee authenticity of messages, they do not, in general, guarantee the anonymity of the sender and recipient. For example it may be easy for an observer to determine whether or not two authenticated messages were sent by the same party even without any information about the secret key used. However preserving any uncertainty an attacker may have about the identities of honest parties engaged in authenticated communication is an important...
Automated Security Proofs for Almost-Universal Hash for MAC verification
Martin Gagné, Pascal Lafourcade, Yassine Lakhnech
Secret-key cryptography
Message authentication codes (MACs) are an essential primitive in cryptography. They are used to ensure the integrity and authenticity of a message, and can also be used as a building block for larger schemes, such as chosen-ciphertext secure encryption, or identity-based encryption. MACs are often built in two steps: first, the `front end' of the MAC produces a short digest of the long message, then the `back end' provides a mixing step to make the output of the MAC unpredictable for an...
To Hash or Not to Hash Again? (In)differentiability Results for H^2 and HMAC
Yevgeniy Dodis, Thomas Ristenpart, John Steinberger, Stefano Tessaro
We show that the second iterate H^2(M) = H(H(M)) of a random oracle H cannot achieve strong security in the sense of indifferentiability from a random oracle. We do so by proving that indifferentiability for H 2 holds only with poor concrete security by providing a lower bound (via an attack) and a matching upper bound (via a proof requiring new techniques) on the complexity of any successful simulator. We then investigate HMAC when it is used as a general-purpose hash function with...
Salvaging Indifferentiability in a Multi-stage Setting
Arno Mittelbach
Foundations
The indifferentiability framework by Maurer, Renner and Holenstein (MRH; TCC 2004) formalizes
a sufficient condition to safely replace a random oracle by a construction based on a
(hopefully) weaker assumption such as an ideal cipher. Indeed, many indifferentiable hash functions
have been constructed and could since be used in place of random oracles. Unfortunately,
Ristenpart, Shacham,
and Shrimpton (RSS; Eurocrypt 2011) discovered that for a large class of
security notions,
the MRH...
Another Look at Security Theorems for 1-Key Nested MACs
Neal Koblitz, Alfred Menezes
We prove a security theorem without collision-resistance for a class of 1-key hash-function-based MAC schemes that includes HMAC and Envelope MAC. The proof has some advantages over earlier proofs: it is in the uniform model, it uses a weaker related-key assumption, and it covers a broad class of MACs in a single theorem. However, we also explain why our theorem is of doubtful value in assessing the real-world security of these MAC schemes. In addition, we prove a theorem assuming...
A Closer Look at HMAC
Krzysztof Pietrzak
Secret-key cryptography
Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk~\cite{FOCS:BelCanKra96} show that cascading an $\eps$-secure (fixed input length) PRF gives an $O(\eps n q)$-secure (variable input length) PRF when making at most $q$ prefix-free queries of length $n$ blocks. We observe that this translates to the same bound for NMAC (which is the cascade without the prefix-free requirement but an additional application of the PRF at the end), and give a matching attack, showing this bound is tight. This contradicts the...
On secure embedded token design (Long Version) -- Quasi-looped Yao circuits and bounded leakage
Simon Hoerder, Kimmo Järvinen, Dan Page
Implementation
Within a broader context of mobile and embedded computing, the design of practical, secure tokens that can store and/or process security-critical information remains an ongoing challenge. One aspect of this challenge is the threat of information leakage through side-channel attacks, which is exacerbated by any resource constraints. Although any countermeasure can be of value, it seems clear that approaches providing robust guarantees are most attractive. Along these lines, this paper...
Generic Related-key Attacks for HMAC
Thomas Peyrin, Yu Sasaki, Lei Wang
Secret-key cryptography
In this article we describe new generic distinguishing and forgery attacks in the related-key scenario (using only a single related-key) for the HMAC construction. When HMAC uses a k-bit key, outputs an n-bit MAC, and is instantiated with an l-bit inner iterative hash function processing m-bit message blocks where m=k, our distinguishing-R attack requires about 2^{n/2} queries which improves over the currently best known generic attack complexity 2^{l/2} as soon as l>n. This means that...
Efficient Methods for Practical Fully Homomorphic Symmetric-key Encrypton, Randomization and Verification
Aviad Kipnis, Eliphaz Hibshoosh
Secret-key cryptography
We present high performance non-deterministic fully-homomorphic methods for practical randomization of data (over commutative ring), and symmetric-key encryption of random mod-N data (over ring of reidues mod-N) well suited for crypto applications. These methods secure, for example, the multivariate input or the coefficients of a polynomial function running in an open untrusted environment. We show that random plaintext is the sufficient condition for proof of security for the homomorphic...
Another look at HMAC
Neal Koblitz, Alfred Menezes
Secret-key cryptography
HMAC is the most widely-deployed cryptographic-hash-function-based message authentication code. First, we describe a security issue that arises because of inconsistencies in the standards and the published literature regarding keylength. We prove a separation result between two versions of HMAC, which we denote HMAC^{std} and HMAC^{Bel}, the former being the real-world version standardized by Bellare et al. in 1997 and the latter being the version described in Bellare's proof of security...
Breaking $H^2$-MAC Using Birthday Paradox
Fanbao Liu, Tao Xie, Changxiang Shen
Secret-key cryptography
$H^2$-MAC was proposed to increase efficiency over HMAC by omitting its outer key, and keep the advantage and security of HMAC at the same time. However, as pointed out by the designer, the security of $H^2$-MAC also depends on the secrecy of the intermediate value (the equivalent key) of the inner hashing. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to break $H^2$-MAC, by using a generalized birthday attack to recover the equivalent key, under the assumption that the underlying hash...
ROTIV: RFID Ownership Transfer with Issuer Verification
Kaoutar Elkhiyaoui, Erik-Oliver Blass, Refik Molva
Cryptographic protocols
RFID tags travel between partner sites in a supply chain. For privacy
reasons, each partner “owns” the tags present at his site, i.e.,
the owner is the only entity able to authenticate his tags. However,
when passing tags on to the next partner in the supply chain,
ownership of the old partner is “transferred” to the new partner.
In this paper, we propose ROTIV, a protocol that allows for secure
ownership transfer against some malicious owners. Furthermore,
ROTIV offers issuer verification...
Black-box property of Cryptographic Hash Functions
Michal Rjaško
We define a new black-box property for cryptographic hash function families $H:\{0,1\}^K\times\{0,1\}^*\rightarrow\{0,1\}^y$ which guarantees that for a randomly chosen hash function $H_K$ from the family, everything ``non-trivial'' we are able to compute having access to the key $K$, we can compute only with oracle access to $H_K$. If a hash function family is pseudo-random and has the black-box property then a randomly chosen hash function $H_K$ from the family is resistant to all...
Strong designated verifier signature scheme: new definition and construction
Zuhua Shao
Public-key cryptography
Recently, several strong designated verifier signature schemes have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we first point out that such so-called strong designated verifier signature scheme is just message authentication code HMAC. Without the key property, unforgeability, for signatures, these schemes cannot enable signers to have complete controls over their signatures as demanded by Chaum and Van Antwerpen originally. No signer would use such Designated Verifier Signature schemes...
Side-channel Analysis of Six SHA-3 Candidates
Olivier Benoit, Thomas Peyrin
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper we study six 2nd round SHA-3 candidates from a side-channel cryptanalysis point of view. For each of them, we give the exact procedure and appropriate choice of selection functions to perform the attack.
Depending on their inherent structure and the internal primitives used (Sbox, addition or XOR), some schemes are more prone to side channel analysis than others, as shown by our simulations.
Algebraic Pseudorandom Functions with Improved Efficiency from the Augmented Cascade
Dan Boneh, Hart Montgomery, Ananth Raghunathan
Foundations
We construct an algebraic pseudorandom function (PRF) that is more efficient than the classic Naor- Reingold algebraic PRF. Our PRF is the result of adapting the cascade construction, which is the basis of HMAC, to the algebraic settings. To do so we define an augmented cascade and prove it secure when the underlying PRF satisfies a property called parallel security. We then use the augmented cascade to build new algebraic PRFs. The algebraic structure of our PRF leads to an efficient...
Generic Collision Attacks on Narrow-pipe Hash Functions Faster than Birthday Paradox, Applicable to MDx, SHA-1, SHA-2, and SHA-3 Narrow-pipe Candidates
Vlastimil Klima, Danilo Gligoroski
Secret-key cryptography
In this note we show a consequence of the recent observation that narrow-pipe hash designs manifest an abberation from ideal random
functions for finding collisions for those functions with complexities much lower than the so called generic birthday paradox lower bound. The problem is generic for narrow-pipe designs including classic Merkle-Damgard designs but also recent narrow-pipe SHA-3 candidates. Our finding does not reduces the generic collision security of n/2 bits that narrow-pipe...
Practical consequences of the aberration of narrow-pipe hash designs from ideal random functions
Danilo Gligoroski, Vlastimil Klima
In a recent note to the NIST hash-forum list, the following
observation was presented: narrow-pipe hash functions differ
significantly from ideal random functions $H:\{0,1\}^{N} \rightarrow
\{0,1\}^n$ that map bit strings from a big domain where $N=n+m,\
m\geq n$ ($n=256$ or $n=512$). Namely, for an ideal random function
with a big domain space $\{0,1\}^{N}$ and a finite co-domain space
$Y=\{0,1\}^n$, for every element $y \in Y$, the probability
$Pr\{H^{-1}(y) = \varnothing\} \approx...
Cryptographic Extraction and Key Derivation: The HKDF Scheme
Hugo Krawczyk
Cryptographic protocols
In spite of the central role of key derivation functions (KDF) in applied cryptography, there has been little formal work addressing the design and analysis of general multi-purpose KDFs. In practice, most KDFs (including those widely standardized) follow ad-hoc approaches that treat cryptographic hash functions as perfectly random functions. In this paper we close some gaps between theory and practice by contributing to the study and engineering of KDFs in several ways. We provide detailed...
Distinguishing Attacks on MAC/HMAC Based on A New Dedicated Compression Function Framework
Zheng Yuan, Xiaoqiu Ren
A new distinguishing attack on HMAC and NMAC based
on a dedicated compression function framework H, proposed in ChinaCrypt2008, is first presented in this paper, which distinguish the HMAC/NMAC-H from HMAC/NMAC with a random function. The attack needs 2^{17}
chosen messages and 223 queries, with a success rate of 0.873. Furthermore, according to distinguishing attack on SPMAC-H, a key recovery attack on the SPMAC-H is present, which recover all 256-bit key with 2^{17)chosen messages, 2^{19}...
Cryptanalysis of ESSENCE
Maria Naya-Plasencia, Andrea Röck, Jean-Philippe Aumasson, Yann Laigle-Chapuy, Gaëtan Leurent, Willi Meier, Thomas Peyrin
Secret-key cryptography
ESSENCE is a hash function submitted to the NIST Hash Competition that stands out as a hardware-friendly and highly parallelizable design. Previous analysis showed some non-randomness in the compression function which could not be extended to an attack on the hash function and ESSENCE remained unbroken. Preliminary analysis in its documentation argues that it resists standard differential cryptanalysis. This paper disproves this claim, showing that advanced techniques can be used to...
Revisiting the Indifferentiability of PGV Hash Functions
Yiyuan Luo, Zheng Gong, Ming Duan, Bo Zhu, Xuejia Lai
Foundations
In this paper, first we point out some flaws in the existing indifferentiability simulations of the pf-MD and the NMAC constructions, and provide new differentiable attacks on the hash functions based these schemes. Afterthat, the indifferentiability of
the 20 collision resistant PGV hash functions, which are padded
under the pf-MD, the NMAC/HMAC and the chop-MD constructions, are
reconsidered. Moreover, we disclose that there exist 4 PGV schemes
can be differentiable from a random oracle...
A Full Key Recovery Attack on HMAC-AURORA-512
Yu Sasaki
Secret-key cryptography
In this note, we present a full key recovery attack on HMAC-AURORA-512 when
512-bit secret keys are used and the MAC length is 512-bit long.
Our attack requires $2^{257}$ queries and the off-line complexity is $2^{259}$ AURORA-512 operations,
which is significantly less than the complexity of the exhaustive search for a 512-bit key.
The attack can be carried out with a negligible amount of memory.
Our attack can also recover the inner-key of HMAC-AURORA-384 with almost the same complexity as...
The $F_f$-Family of Protocols for RFID-Privacy and Authentication
Erik-Oliver Blass, Anil Kurmus, Refik Molva, Guevara Noubir, Abdullatif Shikfa
In this paper, we present the design of the lightweight $F_f$ family
of privacy-preserving authentication protocols for RFID-systems.
$F_f$ is based on a new algebraic framework for reasoning about and
analyzing this kind of authentication protocols. $F_f$ offers
user-adjustable, strong authenticity and privacy against known
algebraic and also recent SAT-solving attacks. In contrast to related
work, $F_f$ achieves these two security properties without requiring
an expensive cryptographic...
Various Security Analysis of a pfCM-MD Hash Domain Extension and Applications based on the Extension
Donghoon Chang, Seokhie Hong, Jaechul Sung, Sangjin Lee
Secret-key cryptography
We propose a new hash domain extension \textit{a prefix-free-Counter-Masking-MD (pfCM-MD)}. And, among security notions for the hash function, we focus on the indifferentiable security notion by which we can check whether the structure of a given hash function has any weakness or not. Next, we consider the security of HMAC, two new prf constructions, NIST SP 800-56A key derivation function, and the randomized hashing in NIST SP 800-106, where all of them are based on the pfCM-MD. Especially,...
A Synthetic Indifferentiability Analysis of Some Block-Cipher-Based Hash Functions
Zheng Gong, Xuejia Lai, Kefei Chen
At ASIACRYPT 2006, Chang et al. analyzed the indifferentiability of some popular hash functions based on block ciphers, namely, the twenty collision resistant PGV, the MDC2 and the PBGV hash functions, etc. In particular, two indifferentiable attacks were presented on the four of the twenty collision resistant PGV and the PBGV hash functions with the prefix-free padding. In this article, a synthetic indifferentiability analysis of some block-cipher-based hash functions is considered. First,...
Analysis of Underlying Assumptions in NIST DRBGs
Wilson Kan
Applications
In \cite{NIST}, four different DRBGs are recommended for cryptographic purpose. Each generator is based on some underlying cryptographic concept. The article examines each of the concept to determine what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the DRBG to be secured in its generation process. In addition, the effects of failure of typical cryptographic requirements of each underlying concept are discussed.
From \cite{MC}, permutation based DRBGs are never indistinguishable from a...
Combined Differential, Linear and Related-Key Attacks on Block Ciphers and MAC Algorithms
Jongsung Kim
Secret-key cryptography
Differential and linear attacks are the most widely used
cryptanalytic tools to evaluate the security of symmetric-key
cryptography. Since the introduction of differential and linear
attacks in the early 1990's, various variants of these attacks have
been proposed such as the truncated differential attack, the
impossible differential attack, the square attack, the boomerang
attack, the rectangle attack, the differential-linear attack, the
multiple linear attack, the nonlinear attack and the...
General Distinguishing Attacks on NMAC and HMAC with Birthday Attack Complexity
Donghoon Chang, Mridul Nandi
Kim {\em et al}. \cite{KiBiPrHo06} and Contini {\em et al}.
\cite{CoYi06} studied on the security of HMAC and NMAC based on
HAVAL, MD4, MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1. Especially, they considered the
distinguishing attacks. However, they did not describe generic
distinguishing attacks on NMAC and HMAC. In this paper, we describe
the generic distinguishers to distinguish NMAC and HMAC with the
birthday attack complexity and we prove the security bound when the
underlying compression function is the...
A New Concept of Hash Functions SNMAC Using a Special Block Cipher and NMAC/HMAC Constructions
Vlastimil KLIMA
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we present new security proofs of well-known hash constructions NMAC/HMAC proposed by Bellare et al. in 1996. We show that block ciphers should be used in hash functions in another way than it has been so far. We introduce a new cryptographic primitive called special block cipher (SBC) which is resistant to attacks specific for block ciphers used in hash functions. We propose to use SBC in the NMAC/HMAC constructions, what gives rise to the new concept of hash functions called...
Forgery and Partial Key-Recovery Attacks on HMAC and NMAC Using Hash Collisions
Scott Contini, Yiqun Lisa Yin
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we analyze the security of HMAC and NMAC, both of which are hash-based message authentication codes. We present distinguishing, forgery, and partial key recovery attacks on HMAC and NMAC using collisions of MD4, MD5, SHA-0, and reduced SHA-1. Our results demonstrate that the strength of a cryptographic scheme can be greatly weakened by the insecurity of the underlying hash function.
On Authentication with HMAC and Non-Random Properties
Christian Rechberger, Vincent Rijmen
Secret-key cryptography
MAC algorithms can provide cryptographically secure authentication services. One of the most popular algorithms in commercial applications is HMAC based on the hash functions MD5 or SHA-1. In the light of new collision search methods for members of the MD4 family including SHA-1, the security of HMAC based on these hash functions is reconsidered.
We present a new method to recover both the inner- and the outer key used in HMAC when instantiated with a concrete hash function by observing...
On the Security of HMAC and NMAC Based on HAVAL, MD4, MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1
Jongsung Kim, Alex Biryukov, Bart Preneel, Seokhie Hong
Secret-key cryptography
HMAC is a widely used message authentication code and a
pseudorandom function generator based on cryptographic hash
functions such as MD5 and SHA-1. It has been standardized by ANSI,
IETF, ISO and NIST. HMAC is proved to be secure as long as the
compression function of the underlying hash function is a
pseudorandom function. In this paper we devise two new
distinguishers of the structure of HMAC, called {\em differential}
and {\em rectangle distinguishers}, and use them to discuss...
New Proofs for NMAC and HMAC: Security Without Collision-Resistance
Mihir Bellare
HMAC was proved by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk [2] to be a PRF assuming that (1)
the underlying compression function is a PRF, and (2) the iterated hash
function is weakly collision-resistant.
However, recent attacks show that assumption (2) is false for
MD5 and SHA-1,
removing the proof-based support for HMAC in these cases.
This paper proves that HMAC is a PRF
under the sole assumption that the compression function is a PRF. This recovers
a proof based guarantee since no known attacks...
2005/415
Last updated: 2007-04-03
A Presentation on VEST Hardware Performance, Chip Area Measurements, Power Consumption Estimates and Benchmarking in Relation to the AES, SHA-256 and SHA-512
Benjamin Gittins, Howard A. Landman, Sean O'Neil, Ron Kelson
Implementation
A wide-sweeping multi-dimensional analysis and comparison between VEST and the hardware implementations of the AES, AES-HMAC and SHA-2 primitives.
3C- A Provably Secure Pseudorandom Function and Message Authentication Code.A New mode of operation for Cryptographic Hash Function
Praveen Gauravaram, William Millan, Juanma Gonzalez Nieto, Edward Dawson
Secret-key cryptography
We propose a new cryptographic construction called 3C, which works as a pseudorandom function (PRF), message authentication code (MAC) and cryptographic hash function. The 3C-construction is obtained by modifying the Merkle-Damgard iterated construction used to construct iterated hash functions. We assume that the compression functions of Merkle-Damgard iterated construction realize a family of fixed-length-input pseudorandom functions (FI-PRFs). A concrete security analysis for the family...
Multiple forgery attacks against Message Authentication Codes
David A. McGrew, Scott R. Fluhrer
Secret-key cryptography
Some message authentication codes (MACs) are vulnerable to multiple forgery attacks, in which an attacker can gain information that allows her to succeed in forging multiple message/tag pairs. This property was first noted in MACs based on universal hashing, such as the Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) of operation for block ciphers. However, we show that CBC-MAC and HMAC also have this property, and for some parameters are more vulnerable than GCM. We present multiple-forgery attacks against...
Key Derivation and Randomness Extraction
Olivier Chevassut, Pierre-Alain Fouque, Pierrick Gaudry, David Pointcheval
Cryptographic protocols
Key derivation refers to the process by which an agreed upon large
random number, often named master secret, is used to derive keys to
encrypt and authenticate data. Practitioners and standardization
bodies have usually used the random oracle model to get key material
from a Diffie-Hellman key exchange. However, proofs in the standard model
require randomness extractors to formally extract the entropy of the
random master secret into a seed prior to derive other keys.
This paper first deals...
MD5 To Be Considered Harmful Someday
Dan Kaminsky
Foundations
Joux and Wang's multicollision attack has yielded collisions for several one-way hash algorithms. Of these, MD5 is the most problematic due to its heavy deployment, but there exists a perception that the flaws identified have no applied implications. We show that the appendability of Merkle-Damgard allows us to add any payload to the proof-of-concept hashes released by Wang et al. We then demonstrate a tool, Stripwire, that uses this capability to create two files -- one which executes an...
The Power of Verification Queries in Message Authentication and Authenticated Encryption
Mihir Bellare, Oded Goldreich, Anton Mityagin
Secret-key cryptography
This paper points out that, contrary to popular belief,
allowing a message authentication adversary multiple verification attempts
towards forgery is NOT equivalent to allowing it a single one, so that
the notion of security that most message authentication schemes are proven to
meet does not guarantee their security in practice. We then show, however, that
the equivalence does hold for STRONG unforgeability. Based on this we
recover security of popular classes of message authentication...
The Mundja Streaming MAC
Philip Hawkes, Michael Paddon, Gregory G. Rose
Secret-key cryptography
Mundja is a MAC generation algorithm that has been designed for use
together with a stream cipher. Mundja accumulates the message onto
two independent registers: the first is a Cyclic Redundancy Checksum (CRC) that uses linear feedback; the second is a strengthened version of the SHA-256 register that uses nonlinear feedback. Mundja is fast (asymptotically about 4 times the speed of HMAC-SHA-256), and can generate MACs of any desired length. Mundja is designed to be secure at the equivalent...
Musings on the Wang et al. MD5 Collision
Philip Hawkes, Michael Paddon, Gregory G. Rose
Secret-key cryptography
Wang et al. caused great excitement at CRYPTO2004
when they announced a collision for MD5~\cite{R92_MD5}.
This paper is examines the internal differences and conditions
required for the attack to be successful. There are a large number
of conditions that must be satisfied, thus indicating Wang at al. have found a
clever way to generate message pairs for which the conditions are
satisfied.
The large number of conditions suggests that an attacker cannot use these differentials to
cause second...
Analysis of the WinZip encryption method
Tadayoshi Kohno
Applications
WinZip is a popular compression utility for Microsoft Windows computers, the latest version of which is advertised as having "easy-to-use AES encryption to protect your sensitive data." We exhibit several attacks against WinZip's new encryption method, dubbed "AE-2" or "Advanced Encryption, version two." We then discuss secure alternatives. Since at a high level the underlying WinZip encryption method appears secure (the core is exactly Encrypt-then-Authenticate using AES-CTR and...
Tail-MAC: A Message Authentication Scheme for Stream Ciphers
Bartosz Zoltak
Secret-key cryptography
Tail-MAC, A predecessor to the VMPC-MAC, algorithm for computing Message Authentication Codes for stream ciphers is described along with the analysis of its security. The proposed algorithm was designed to employ some of the data already computed by the underlying stream cipher in the purpose of minimizing the computational cost of the
operations required by the MAC algorithm. The performed analyses indicate several problems with the security of the scheme and lead to a new design which...
An Efficient MAC for Short Messages
Sarvar Patel
Secret-key cryptography
HMAC is the internet standard for message authentication. What
distinguishes HMAC from other MAC algorithms is that it provides
proofs of security assuming that the underlying cryptographic hash
(e.g. SHA-1) has some reasonable properties. HMAC is efficient for
long messages, however, for short messages the nested construction
results in a significant inefficiency. For example to MAC a message
shorter than a block, HMAC requires at least two calls to the
compression function rather than...
Message Authentication Codes (MACs) are ubiquitous primitives deployed in multiple flavors through standards such as HMAC, CMAC, GMAC, LightMAC, and many others. Its versatility makes it an essential building block in applications necessitating message authentication and integrity checks, in authentication protocols, authenticated encryption schemes, or as a pseudorandom or key derivation function. Its usage in this variety of settings makes it susceptible to a broad range of attack...
SHA2 is widely used in various traditional public key ryptosystems, post-quantum cryptography, personal identification, and network communication protocols. Therefore, ensuring its robust security is of critical importance. Several differential fault attacks based on random word fault have targeted SHA1 and SHACAL-2. However, extending such random word-based fault attacks to SHA2 proves to be much more difficult due to the increased complexity of the Boolean functions in SHA2. In this...
The folklore approach to designing a threshold variant of symmetric cryptographic algorithms involves applying generic MPC methods to se- cret sharing techniques: the MPC first combines participant input shares using the secret sharing scheme, and then evaluates the cryptographic function on the reconstructed key. Hardening this secure against n − 1 malicious parties requires some mechanism to ensure input consistency, e.g., adding MACs to inputs, which consequently, increases the...
Hashing algorithms are one-way functions that are used in cryptographic protocols as Pseudo Random Functions (PRF), to assess data integrity or to create a Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC). In many cryptographic constructions, secret data is processed with hashing functions. In these cases, recovering the input given to the hashing algorithm allows retrieving secret data. In this paper, we investigate the application of Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks (SASCA), based on a...
Various message authentication codes (MACs), including HMAC-Streebog and Streebog-K, are based on the keyless hash function Streebog. Under the assumption that the compression function of Streebog is resistant to the related key attacks, the security proofs of these algorithms were recently presented at CTCrypt 2022. We carefully detail the resources of the adversary in the related key settings, revisit the proof, and obtain tight security bounds. Let $n$ be the bit length of the hash...
In Internet security protocols including TLS 1.3, KEMTLS, MLS and Noise, HMAC is being assumed to be a dual-PRF, meaning a PRF not only when keyed conventionally (through its first input), but also when "swapped" and keyed (unconventionally) through its second (message) input. We give the first in-depth analysis of the dual-PRF assumption on HMAC. For the swap case, we note that security does not hold in general, but completely characterize when it does; we show that HMAC is swap-PRF...
One of the most popular ways to turn a keyless hash function into a keyed one is the HMAC algorithm. This approach is too expensive in some cases due to double hashing. Excessive overhead can sometimes be avoided by using certain features of the hash function itself. The paper presents a simple and safe way to create a keyed cryptoalgorithm (conventionally called "Streebog-K") from hash function Streebog $\mathsf{H}(M)$. Let $K$ be a secret key, then $\mathsf{KH}(K,M)=\mathsf{H}(K||M)$ is a...
Related-key attacks against block ciphers are often considered unrealistic. In practice, as far as possible, the existence of a known "relation" between the secret encryption keys is avoided. Despite this, related keys arise directly in some widely used keyed hash functions. This is especially true for HMAC-Streebog, where known constants and manipulated parameters are added to the secret key. The relation is determined by addition modulo $2$ and $2^{n}$. The security of HMAC reduces to the...
Security of the many keyed hash-based cryptographic constructions (such as HMAC) depends on the fact that the underlying compression function $g(H,M)$ is a pseudorandom function (PRF). This paper presents key-recovery algorithms for 7 rounds (of 12) of Streebog compression function. Two cases were considered, as a secret key can be used: the previous state $H$ or the message block $M$. The proposed methods implicitly show that Streebog compression function has a large security margin as PRF...
HMAC and NMAC are the most basic and important constructions to convert Merkle-Damgård hash functions into message authentication codes (MACs) or pseudorandom functions (PRFs). In the quantum setting, at CRYPTO 2017, Song and Yun showed that HMAC and NMAC are quantum pseudorandom functions (qPRFs) under the standard assumption that the underlying compression function is a qPRF. Their proof guarantees security up to $O(2^{n/5})$ or $O(2^{n/8})$ quantum queries when the output length of HMAC...
The prefix-free PRF (pseudorandom function) security of a cascade function based on a compression function $f$ against a $q$-query distinguisher is reduced to a $q$-query PRF security of $f$ with a tightness gap $lq$ where $l$ represents the length of the longest query among all $q$ queries. In this paper, we have shown a reduction which is also applicable to multiuser setup and improves the tightness gap for both adaptive and non-adaptive distinguishers. As an immediate application of our...
We discuss the setting of information-theoretically secure channel protocols where confidentiality of transmitted data should hold against unbounded adversaries. We argue that there are two possible scenarios: One is that the adversary is currently bounded, but stores today's communication and tries to break confidentiality later when obtaining more computational power or time. We call channel protocols protecting against such attacks future-secure. The other scenario is that the adversary...
Differential power analysis (DPA) is a form of side-channel analysis (SCA) that performs statistical analysis on the power traces of cryptographic computations. DPA is applicable to many cryptographic primitives, including block ciphers, stream ciphers and even hash-based message authentication code (HMAC). At COSADE 2017, Dobraunig~et~al. presented a DPA on the fresh re-keying scheme Keymill to extract the bit relations of neighbouring bits in its shift registers, reducing the internal...
We analyze the multi-user security of the streaming encryption in Google's Tink library via an extended version of the framework of nonce-based online authenticated encryption of Hoang et al. (CRYPTO'15) to support random-access decryption. We show that Tink's design choice of using random nonces and a nonce-based key-derivation function indeed improves the concrete security bound. We then give two better alternatives that are more robust against randomness failure. In addition, we show how...
This paper describes a vulnerability in Apple's CoreCrypto library, which affects 11 out of the 12 implemented hash functions: every implemented hash function except MD2 (Message Digest 2), as well as several higher-level operations such as the Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) and the Ed25519 signature scheme. The vulnerability is present in each of Apple's CoreCrypto libraries that are currently validated under FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standard). For inputs of...
This work introduces Algorithm Substitution Attacks (ASAs) on message authentication schemes. In light of revelations concerning mass surveillance, ASAs were initially introduced by Bellare, Paterson and Rogaway as a novel attack class against the confidentiality of encryption schemes. Such an attack replaces one or more of the regular scheme algorithms with a subverted version that aims to reveal information to an adversary (engaged in mass surveillance), while remaining undetected by...
The Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) is used to monitor the pressure of the tires and to inform the driver of it. This equipment is mandatory for vehicles in US and EU. To ensure the security of TPMS, it is important to reduce the cost of the cryptographic mechanisms implemented in resourced-constrained devices. To address this problem, previous work has proposed countermeasures employing lightweight block ciphers such as PRESENT, SPECK, or KATAN. However, it is not clear to us that...
Authenticated encryption (AE) has been a vital operation in cryptography due to its ability to provide confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity at the same time. Its use has soared in parallel with widespread use of the Internet and has led to several new schemes. There have been studies investigating software performance of various schemes. However, the same is yet to be done for hardware. We present a comprehensive survey of hardware (specifically ASIC) performance of the most commonly...
SM3, the Chinese standard hash algorithm inspired from SHA2, can be attacker by similar means than SHA2 up to an adaptation to its differences. But this kind of attack is based on targeting point of interest of different kinds, some are end of computation results, that are stored when others are in intermediate computational data. The leakage effectiveness of the later could be subject to implementation choices, device type or device type of leakage. In this paper, we propose a new approach...
The need for high-quality randomness in cryptography makes random-number generation one of its most fundamental tasks. A recent important line of work (initiated by Dodis et al., CCS ’13) focuses on the notion of *robustness* for *pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs) with inputs*—these are primitives that use various sources to accumulate sufficient entropy into a state, from which pseudorandom bits are extracted. Robustness ensures that PRNGs remain secure even under state compromise and...
Password-based Key Derivation Functions (KDFs) are used to generate secure keys of arbitrary length implemented in many security-related systems. The strength of these KDFs is the ability to provide countermeasures against brute-force/dictionary attacks. One of the most implemented KDF is PBKDF2. In order to slow attackers down, PBKDF2 uses a salt and introduces computational intensive operations based on an iterated pseudo-random function. Since passwords are widely used to protect personal...
Physical attacks, especially side-channel attacks, are threats to IoT devices which are located everywhere in the field. For these devices, the authentic functionality is important so that the IoT system becomes correct, and securing this functionality against side-channel attacks is one of our emerging issues. Toward that, Coron et al. gave an efficient arithmetic-to-Boolean mask conversion algorithm which enables us to protect cryptographic algorithms including arithmetic operations, such...
The keyed sponge is a well-accepted method for message authentication. It processes data at a certain rate by sequential evaluation of an underlying permutation. If the key size $k$ is smaller than the rate, currently known bounds are tight, but if it exceeds the rate, state of the art only dictates security up to $2^{k/2}$. We take closer inspection at the key prediction security of the sponge and close the remaining gap in the existing security analysis: we confirm key security up to close...
Security of cryptographic schemes is traditionally measured as the inability of resource-constrained adversaries to violate a desired security goal. The security argument usually relies on a sound design of the underlying components. Arguably, one of the most devastating failures of this approach can be observed when considering adversaries such as intelligence agencies that can influence the design, implementation, and standardization of cryptographic primitives. While the most prominent...
We investigate the security properties of the three deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) mechanisms in the NIST SP 800-90A standard [2]. This standard received a considerable amount of negative attention, due to the controversy surrounding the now retracted DualEC-DRBG, which was included in earlier versions. Perhaps because of the attention paid to the DualEC, the other algorithms in the standard have received surprisingly patchy analysis to date, despite widespread deployment. This...
PBKDF2 [27] is a well-known password-based key derivation function. In order to slow attackers down, PBKDF2 introduces CPU-intensive operations based on an iterated pseudorandom function (in our case HMAC-SHA-1). If we are able to speed up a SHA-1 or an HMAC implementation, we are able to speed up PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-1. This means that a performance improvement might be exploited by regular users and attackers. Interestingly, FIPS 198-1 [31] suggests that it is possible to precompute first...
The distinguishing feature of the Internet of Things is that many devices get interconnected. The threat of side-channel attacks in this setting is less understood than the threat of traditional network and software exploitation attacks that are perceived to be more powerful. This work is a case study of Thread, an emerging network and transport level stack designed to facilitate secure communication between heterogeneous IoT devices. We perform the first side-channel vulnerability analysis...
HACL* is a verified portable C cryptographic library that implements modern cryptographic primitives such as the ChaCha20 and Salsa20 encryption algorithms, Poly1305 and HMAC message authentication, SHA-256 and SHA-512 hash functions, the Curve25519 elliptic curve, and Ed25519 signatures. HACL* is written in the F* programming language and then compiled to readable C code. The F* source code for each crypto- graphic primitive is verified for memory safety, mitigations against timing...
We prove the security of NMAC, HMAC, AMAC, and the cascade construction with fixed input-length as quantum-secure pseudo-random functions (PRFs). Namely, they are indistinguishable from a random oracle against any polynomial-time quantum adversary that can make quantum superposition queries. In contrast, many blockcipher-based PRFs including CBC-MAC were recently broken by quantum superposition attacks. Classical proof strategies for these constructions do not generalize to the quantum...
In recent work, Bellare, Hoang, and Keelveedhi (CRYPTO 2013) introduced a new abstraction called Universal Computational Extractors (UCEs), and showed how they can replace random oracles (ROs) across a wide range of cryptosystems. We formulate a new framework, called Interactive Computational Extractors (ICEs), that extends UCEs by viewing them as models of ROs under unpredictable (aka. high-entropy) queries. We overcome a number of limitations of UCEs in the new framework, and in particular...
How to deal with large tightness gaps in security proofs is a vexing issue in cryptography. Even when analyzing protocols that are of practical importance, leading researchers often fail to treat this question with the seriousness that it deserves. We discuss nontightness in connection with complexity leveraging, HMAC, lattice-based cryptography, identity-based encryption, and hybrid encryption.
Password-based key derivation functions are of particular interest in cryptography because they (a) input a password/passphrase (which usually is short and lacks enough entropy) and derive a cryptographic key; (b) slow down brute force and dictionary attacks as much as possible. In PKCS#5 [17], RSA Laboratories described a password based key derivation function called PBKDF2 that has been widely adopted in many security related applications [6, 7, 11]. In order to slow down brute force...
A two-input function is a dual PRF if it is a PRF when keyed by either of its inputs. Dual PRFs are assumed in the design and analysis of numerous primitives and protocols including HMAC, AMAC, TLS 1.3 and MLS. But, not only do we not know whether particular functions on which the assumption is made really are dual PRFs; we do not know if dual PRFs even exist. What if the goal is impossible? This paper addresses this with a foundational treatment of dual PRFs, giving constructions based on...
HMAC and its variant NMAC are the most popular approaches to deriving a MAC (and more generally, a PRF) from a cryptographic hash function. Despite nearly two decades of research, their exact security still remains far from understood in many different contexts. Indeed, recent works have re-surfaced interest for {\em generic} attacks, i.e., attacks that treat the compression function of the underlying hash function as a black box. Generic security can be proved in a model where the...
Conventional cryptographic services such as hardware-security modules and software-based key-management systems offer the ability to apply a pseudorandom function (PRF) such as HMAC to inputs of a client’s choosing. These services are used, for example, to harden stored password hashes against offline brute-force attacks. We propose a modern PRF service called PYTHIA designed to offer a level of flexibility, security, and ease- of-deployability lacking in prior approaches. The keystone of...
In this paper, we present universal forgery and key recovery attacks on the most popular hash-based MAC constructions, e.g., HMAC and NMAC, instantiated with an AES-like hash function Whirlpool. These attacks work with Whirlpool reduced to 6 out of 10 rounds in single-key setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result on ``original'' key recovery for HMAC (previous works only succeeded in recovering the equivalent keys). Interestingly, the number of attacked rounds is...
A main contribution of this paper is an improved analysis against HMAC instantiating with reduced Whirlpool. It recovers equivalent keys, which are often denoted as Kin and Kout, of HMAC with 7-round Whirlpool, while the previous best attack can work only for 6 rounds. Our approach is applying the meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attack on AES to recover MAC keys of Whirlpool. Several techniques are proposed to bypass different attack scenarios between a block cipher and a MAC, e.g., the chosen...
NMAC is a mode of operation which turns a fixed input-length keyed hash function f into a variable input-length function. A~practical single-key variant of NMAC called HMAC is a very popular and widely deployed message authentication code (MAC). Security proofs and attacks for NMAC can typically be lifted to HMAC. NMAC was introduced by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk [Crypto'96], who proved it to be a secure pseudorandom function (PRF), and thus also a MAC, assuming that (1) f is a PRF...
The security of HMAC (and more general hash-based MACs) against state-recovery and universal forgery attacks was very recently shown to be suboptimal, following a series of surprising results by Leurent \emph{et al.} and Peyrin \emph{et al.}. These results have shown that such powerful attacks require much less than $2^{\ell}$ computations, contradicting the common belief (where $\ell$ denotes the internal state size). In this work, we revisit and extend these results, with a focus on...
In this paper we study the security of hash-based MAC algorithms (such as HMAC and NMAC) above the birthday bound. Up to the birthday bound, HMAC and NMAC are proven to be secure under reasonable assumptions on the hash function. On the other hand, if an $n$-bit MAC is built from a hash function with a $l$-bit state ($l \ge n$), there is a well-known existential forgery attack with complexity $2^{l/2}$. However, the remaining security after $2^{l/2}$ computations is not well understood. In...
In this article, we study the security of iterative hash-based MACs, such as HMAC or NMAC, with regards to universal forgery attacks. Leveraging recent advances in the analysis of functional graphs built from the iteration of HMAC or NMAC, we exhibit the very first generic universal forgery attack against hash-based MACs. In particular, our work implies that the universal forgery resistance of an n-bit output HMAC construction is not 2^n queries as long believed by the community. The...
While standard message authentication codes (MACs) guarantee authenticity of messages, they do not, in general, guarantee the anonymity of the sender and recipient. For example it may be easy for an observer to determine whether or not two authenticated messages were sent by the same party even without any information about the secret key used. However preserving any uncertainty an attacker may have about the identities of honest parties engaged in authenticated communication is an important...
Message authentication codes (MACs) are an essential primitive in cryptography. They are used to ensure the integrity and authenticity of a message, and can also be used as a building block for larger schemes, such as chosen-ciphertext secure encryption, or identity-based encryption. MACs are often built in two steps: first, the `front end' of the MAC produces a short digest of the long message, then the `back end' provides a mixing step to make the output of the MAC unpredictable for an...
We show that the second iterate H^2(M) = H(H(M)) of a random oracle H cannot achieve strong security in the sense of indifferentiability from a random oracle. We do so by proving that indifferentiability for H 2 holds only with poor concrete security by providing a lower bound (via an attack) and a matching upper bound (via a proof requiring new techniques) on the complexity of any successful simulator. We then investigate HMAC when it is used as a general-purpose hash function with...
The indifferentiability framework by Maurer, Renner and Holenstein (MRH; TCC 2004) formalizes a sufficient condition to safely replace a random oracle by a construction based on a (hopefully) weaker assumption such as an ideal cipher. Indeed, many indifferentiable hash functions have been constructed and could since be used in place of random oracles. Unfortunately, Ristenpart, Shacham, and Shrimpton (RSS; Eurocrypt 2011) discovered that for a large class of security notions, the MRH...
We prove a security theorem without collision-resistance for a class of 1-key hash-function-based MAC schemes that includes HMAC and Envelope MAC. The proof has some advantages over earlier proofs: it is in the uniform model, it uses a weaker related-key assumption, and it covers a broad class of MACs in a single theorem. However, we also explain why our theorem is of doubtful value in assessing the real-world security of these MAC schemes. In addition, we prove a theorem assuming...
Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk~\cite{FOCS:BelCanKra96} show that cascading an $\eps$-secure (fixed input length) PRF gives an $O(\eps n q)$-secure (variable input length) PRF when making at most $q$ prefix-free queries of length $n$ blocks. We observe that this translates to the same bound for NMAC (which is the cascade without the prefix-free requirement but an additional application of the PRF at the end), and give a matching attack, showing this bound is tight. This contradicts the...
Within a broader context of mobile and embedded computing, the design of practical, secure tokens that can store and/or process security-critical information remains an ongoing challenge. One aspect of this challenge is the threat of information leakage through side-channel attacks, which is exacerbated by any resource constraints. Although any countermeasure can be of value, it seems clear that approaches providing robust guarantees are most attractive. Along these lines, this paper...
In this article we describe new generic distinguishing and forgery attacks in the related-key scenario (using only a single related-key) for the HMAC construction. When HMAC uses a k-bit key, outputs an n-bit MAC, and is instantiated with an l-bit inner iterative hash function processing m-bit message blocks where m=k, our distinguishing-R attack requires about 2^{n/2} queries which improves over the currently best known generic attack complexity 2^{l/2} as soon as l>n. This means that...
We present high performance non-deterministic fully-homomorphic methods for practical randomization of data (over commutative ring), and symmetric-key encryption of random mod-N data (over ring of reidues mod-N) well suited for crypto applications. These methods secure, for example, the multivariate input or the coefficients of a polynomial function running in an open untrusted environment. We show that random plaintext is the sufficient condition for proof of security for the homomorphic...
HMAC is the most widely-deployed cryptographic-hash-function-based message authentication code. First, we describe a security issue that arises because of inconsistencies in the standards and the published literature regarding keylength. We prove a separation result between two versions of HMAC, which we denote HMAC^{std} and HMAC^{Bel}, the former being the real-world version standardized by Bellare et al. in 1997 and the latter being the version described in Bellare's proof of security...
$H^2$-MAC was proposed to increase efficiency over HMAC by omitting its outer key, and keep the advantage and security of HMAC at the same time. However, as pointed out by the designer, the security of $H^2$-MAC also depends on the secrecy of the intermediate value (the equivalent key) of the inner hashing. In this paper, we propose an efficient method to break $H^2$-MAC, by using a generalized birthday attack to recover the equivalent key, under the assumption that the underlying hash...
RFID tags travel between partner sites in a supply chain. For privacy reasons, each partner “owns” the tags present at his site, i.e., the owner is the only entity able to authenticate his tags. However, when passing tags on to the next partner in the supply chain, ownership of the old partner is “transferred” to the new partner. In this paper, we propose ROTIV, a protocol that allows for secure ownership transfer against some malicious owners. Furthermore, ROTIV offers issuer verification...
We define a new black-box property for cryptographic hash function families $H:\{0,1\}^K\times\{0,1\}^*\rightarrow\{0,1\}^y$ which guarantees that for a randomly chosen hash function $H_K$ from the family, everything ``non-trivial'' we are able to compute having access to the key $K$, we can compute only with oracle access to $H_K$. If a hash function family is pseudo-random and has the black-box property then a randomly chosen hash function $H_K$ from the family is resistant to all...
Recently, several strong designated verifier signature schemes have been proposed in the literature. In this paper, we first point out that such so-called strong designated verifier signature scheme is just message authentication code HMAC. Without the key property, unforgeability, for signatures, these schemes cannot enable signers to have complete controls over their signatures as demanded by Chaum and Van Antwerpen originally. No signer would use such Designated Verifier Signature schemes...
In this paper we study six 2nd round SHA-3 candidates from a side-channel cryptanalysis point of view. For each of them, we give the exact procedure and appropriate choice of selection functions to perform the attack. Depending on their inherent structure and the internal primitives used (Sbox, addition or XOR), some schemes are more prone to side channel analysis than others, as shown by our simulations.
We construct an algebraic pseudorandom function (PRF) that is more efficient than the classic Naor- Reingold algebraic PRF. Our PRF is the result of adapting the cascade construction, which is the basis of HMAC, to the algebraic settings. To do so we define an augmented cascade and prove it secure when the underlying PRF satisfies a property called parallel security. We then use the augmented cascade to build new algebraic PRFs. The algebraic structure of our PRF leads to an efficient...
In this note we show a consequence of the recent observation that narrow-pipe hash designs manifest an abberation from ideal random functions for finding collisions for those functions with complexities much lower than the so called generic birthday paradox lower bound. The problem is generic for narrow-pipe designs including classic Merkle-Damgard designs but also recent narrow-pipe SHA-3 candidates. Our finding does not reduces the generic collision security of n/2 bits that narrow-pipe...
In a recent note to the NIST hash-forum list, the following observation was presented: narrow-pipe hash functions differ significantly from ideal random functions $H:\{0,1\}^{N} \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$ that map bit strings from a big domain where $N=n+m,\ m\geq n$ ($n=256$ or $n=512$). Namely, for an ideal random function with a big domain space $\{0,1\}^{N}$ and a finite co-domain space $Y=\{0,1\}^n$, for every element $y \in Y$, the probability $Pr\{H^{-1}(y) = \varnothing\} \approx...
In spite of the central role of key derivation functions (KDF) in applied cryptography, there has been little formal work addressing the design and analysis of general multi-purpose KDFs. In practice, most KDFs (including those widely standardized) follow ad-hoc approaches that treat cryptographic hash functions as perfectly random functions. In this paper we close some gaps between theory and practice by contributing to the study and engineering of KDFs in several ways. We provide detailed...
A new distinguishing attack on HMAC and NMAC based on a dedicated compression function framework H, proposed in ChinaCrypt2008, is first presented in this paper, which distinguish the HMAC/NMAC-H from HMAC/NMAC with a random function. The attack needs 2^{17} chosen messages and 223 queries, with a success rate of 0.873. Furthermore, according to distinguishing attack on SPMAC-H, a key recovery attack on the SPMAC-H is present, which recover all 256-bit key with 2^{17)chosen messages, 2^{19}...
ESSENCE is a hash function submitted to the NIST Hash Competition that stands out as a hardware-friendly and highly parallelizable design. Previous analysis showed some non-randomness in the compression function which could not be extended to an attack on the hash function and ESSENCE remained unbroken. Preliminary analysis in its documentation argues that it resists standard differential cryptanalysis. This paper disproves this claim, showing that advanced techniques can be used to...
In this paper, first we point out some flaws in the existing indifferentiability simulations of the pf-MD and the NMAC constructions, and provide new differentiable attacks on the hash functions based these schemes. Afterthat, the indifferentiability of the 20 collision resistant PGV hash functions, which are padded under the pf-MD, the NMAC/HMAC and the chop-MD constructions, are reconsidered. Moreover, we disclose that there exist 4 PGV schemes can be differentiable from a random oracle...
In this note, we present a full key recovery attack on HMAC-AURORA-512 when 512-bit secret keys are used and the MAC length is 512-bit long. Our attack requires $2^{257}$ queries and the off-line complexity is $2^{259}$ AURORA-512 operations, which is significantly less than the complexity of the exhaustive search for a 512-bit key. The attack can be carried out with a negligible amount of memory. Our attack can also recover the inner-key of HMAC-AURORA-384 with almost the same complexity as...
In this paper, we present the design of the lightweight $F_f$ family of privacy-preserving authentication protocols for RFID-systems. $F_f$ is based on a new algebraic framework for reasoning about and analyzing this kind of authentication protocols. $F_f$ offers user-adjustable, strong authenticity and privacy against known algebraic and also recent SAT-solving attacks. In contrast to related work, $F_f$ achieves these two security properties without requiring an expensive cryptographic...
We propose a new hash domain extension \textit{a prefix-free-Counter-Masking-MD (pfCM-MD)}. And, among security notions for the hash function, we focus on the indifferentiable security notion by which we can check whether the structure of a given hash function has any weakness or not. Next, we consider the security of HMAC, two new prf constructions, NIST SP 800-56A key derivation function, and the randomized hashing in NIST SP 800-106, where all of them are based on the pfCM-MD. Especially,...
At ASIACRYPT 2006, Chang et al. analyzed the indifferentiability of some popular hash functions based on block ciphers, namely, the twenty collision resistant PGV, the MDC2 and the PBGV hash functions, etc. In particular, two indifferentiable attacks were presented on the four of the twenty collision resistant PGV and the PBGV hash functions with the prefix-free padding. In this article, a synthetic indifferentiability analysis of some block-cipher-based hash functions is considered. First,...
In \cite{NIST}, four different DRBGs are recommended for cryptographic purpose. Each generator is based on some underlying cryptographic concept. The article examines each of the concept to determine what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the DRBG to be secured in its generation process. In addition, the effects of failure of typical cryptographic requirements of each underlying concept are discussed. From \cite{MC}, permutation based DRBGs are never indistinguishable from a...
Differential and linear attacks are the most widely used cryptanalytic tools to evaluate the security of symmetric-key cryptography. Since the introduction of differential and linear attacks in the early 1990's, various variants of these attacks have been proposed such as the truncated differential attack, the impossible differential attack, the square attack, the boomerang attack, the rectangle attack, the differential-linear attack, the multiple linear attack, the nonlinear attack and the...
Kim {\em et al}. \cite{KiBiPrHo06} and Contini {\em et al}. \cite{CoYi06} studied on the security of HMAC and NMAC based on HAVAL, MD4, MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1. Especially, they considered the distinguishing attacks. However, they did not describe generic distinguishing attacks on NMAC and HMAC. In this paper, we describe the generic distinguishers to distinguish NMAC and HMAC with the birthday attack complexity and we prove the security bound when the underlying compression function is the...
In this paper, we present new security proofs of well-known hash constructions NMAC/HMAC proposed by Bellare et al. in 1996. We show that block ciphers should be used in hash functions in another way than it has been so far. We introduce a new cryptographic primitive called special block cipher (SBC) which is resistant to attacks specific for block ciphers used in hash functions. We propose to use SBC in the NMAC/HMAC constructions, what gives rise to the new concept of hash functions called...
In this paper, we analyze the security of HMAC and NMAC, both of which are hash-based message authentication codes. We present distinguishing, forgery, and partial key recovery attacks on HMAC and NMAC using collisions of MD4, MD5, SHA-0, and reduced SHA-1. Our results demonstrate that the strength of a cryptographic scheme can be greatly weakened by the insecurity of the underlying hash function.
MAC algorithms can provide cryptographically secure authentication services. One of the most popular algorithms in commercial applications is HMAC based on the hash functions MD5 or SHA-1. In the light of new collision search methods for members of the MD4 family including SHA-1, the security of HMAC based on these hash functions is reconsidered. We present a new method to recover both the inner- and the outer key used in HMAC when instantiated with a concrete hash function by observing...
HMAC is a widely used message authentication code and a pseudorandom function generator based on cryptographic hash functions such as MD5 and SHA-1. It has been standardized by ANSI, IETF, ISO and NIST. HMAC is proved to be secure as long as the compression function of the underlying hash function is a pseudorandom function. In this paper we devise two new distinguishers of the structure of HMAC, called {\em differential} and {\em rectangle distinguishers}, and use them to discuss...
HMAC was proved by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk [2] to be a PRF assuming that (1) the underlying compression function is a PRF, and (2) the iterated hash function is weakly collision-resistant. However, recent attacks show that assumption (2) is false for MD5 and SHA-1, removing the proof-based support for HMAC in these cases. This paper proves that HMAC is a PRF under the sole assumption that the compression function is a PRF. This recovers a proof based guarantee since no known attacks...
A wide-sweeping multi-dimensional analysis and comparison between VEST and the hardware implementations of the AES, AES-HMAC and SHA-2 primitives.
We propose a new cryptographic construction called 3C, which works as a pseudorandom function (PRF), message authentication code (MAC) and cryptographic hash function. The 3C-construction is obtained by modifying the Merkle-Damgard iterated construction used to construct iterated hash functions. We assume that the compression functions of Merkle-Damgard iterated construction realize a family of fixed-length-input pseudorandom functions (FI-PRFs). A concrete security analysis for the family...
Some message authentication codes (MACs) are vulnerable to multiple forgery attacks, in which an attacker can gain information that allows her to succeed in forging multiple message/tag pairs. This property was first noted in MACs based on universal hashing, such as the Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) of operation for block ciphers. However, we show that CBC-MAC and HMAC also have this property, and for some parameters are more vulnerable than GCM. We present multiple-forgery attacks against...
Key derivation refers to the process by which an agreed upon large random number, often named master secret, is used to derive keys to encrypt and authenticate data. Practitioners and standardization bodies have usually used the random oracle model to get key material from a Diffie-Hellman key exchange. However, proofs in the standard model require randomness extractors to formally extract the entropy of the random master secret into a seed prior to derive other keys. This paper first deals...
Joux and Wang's multicollision attack has yielded collisions for several one-way hash algorithms. Of these, MD5 is the most problematic due to its heavy deployment, but there exists a perception that the flaws identified have no applied implications. We show that the appendability of Merkle-Damgard allows us to add any payload to the proof-of-concept hashes released by Wang et al. We then demonstrate a tool, Stripwire, that uses this capability to create two files -- one which executes an...
This paper points out that, contrary to popular belief, allowing a message authentication adversary multiple verification attempts towards forgery is NOT equivalent to allowing it a single one, so that the notion of security that most message authentication schemes are proven to meet does not guarantee their security in practice. We then show, however, that the equivalence does hold for STRONG unforgeability. Based on this we recover security of popular classes of message authentication...
Mundja is a MAC generation algorithm that has been designed for use together with a stream cipher. Mundja accumulates the message onto two independent registers: the first is a Cyclic Redundancy Checksum (CRC) that uses linear feedback; the second is a strengthened version of the SHA-256 register that uses nonlinear feedback. Mundja is fast (asymptotically about 4 times the speed of HMAC-SHA-256), and can generate MACs of any desired length. Mundja is designed to be secure at the equivalent...
Wang et al. caused great excitement at CRYPTO2004 when they announced a collision for MD5~\cite{R92_MD5}. This paper is examines the internal differences and conditions required for the attack to be successful. There are a large number of conditions that must be satisfied, thus indicating Wang at al. have found a clever way to generate message pairs for which the conditions are satisfied. The large number of conditions suggests that an attacker cannot use these differentials to cause second...
WinZip is a popular compression utility for Microsoft Windows computers, the latest version of which is advertised as having "easy-to-use AES encryption to protect your sensitive data." We exhibit several attacks against WinZip's new encryption method, dubbed "AE-2" or "Advanced Encryption, version two." We then discuss secure alternatives. Since at a high level the underlying WinZip encryption method appears secure (the core is exactly Encrypt-then-Authenticate using AES-CTR and...
Tail-MAC, A predecessor to the VMPC-MAC, algorithm for computing Message Authentication Codes for stream ciphers is described along with the analysis of its security. The proposed algorithm was designed to employ some of the data already computed by the underlying stream cipher in the purpose of minimizing the computational cost of the operations required by the MAC algorithm. The performed analyses indicate several problems with the security of the scheme and lead to a new design which...
HMAC is the internet standard for message authentication. What distinguishes HMAC from other MAC algorithms is that it provides proofs of security assuming that the underlying cryptographic hash (e.g. SHA-1) has some reasonable properties. HMAC is efficient for long messages, however, for short messages the nested construction results in a significant inefficiency. For example to MAC a message shorter than a block, HMAC requires at least two calls to the compression function rather than...