355 results sorted by ID
Universal Context Commitment without Ciphertext Expansion
Arghya Bhattacharjee, Ritam Bhaumik, Chandranan Dhar
Secret-key cryptography
An ongoing research challenge in symmetric cryptography is to design an authenticated encryption (AE) with a commitment to the secret key or preferably to the entire context. One way to achieve this is to use a transform on an existing AE scheme, if possible with no output length expansion. At EUROCRYPT'22, Bellare and Hoang proposed the HtE transform, which lifts key-commitment to context-commitment. In the same year at ESORICS'22, Chan and Rogaway proposed the CTX transform, which works on...
Coral: Maliciously Secure Computation Framework for Packed and Mixed Circuits
Zhicong Huang, Wen-jie Lu, Yuchen Wang, Cheng Hong, Tao Wei, WenGuang Chen
Cryptographic protocols
Achieving malicious security with high efficiency in dishonest-majority secure multiparty computation is a formidable challenge. The milestone works SPDZ and TinyOT have spawn a large family of protocols in this direction. For boolean circuits, state-of-the-art works (Cascudo et. al, TCC 2020 and Escudero et. al, CRYPTO 2022) have proposed schemes based on reverse multiplication-friendly embedding (RMFE) to reduce the amortized cost. However, these protocols are theoretically described and...
Authenticity in the Presence of Leakage using a Forkcipher
Francesco Berti, François-Xavier Standaert, Itamar Levi
Secret-key cryptography
Robust message authentication codes (MACs) and authenticated encryption (AE) schemes that provide authenticity in the presence of side-channel leakage are essential primitives. These constructions often rely on primitives designed for strong leakage protection, among others including the use of strong-unpredictable (tweakable) block-ciphers.
This paper extends the strong-unpredictability security definition to the versatile and new forkcipher primitive. We show how to construct secure and...
Quantum-safe Signatureless DNSSEC
Aditya Singh Rawat, Mahabir Prasad Jhanwar
Cryptographic protocols
We present $\mathsf{SL\text{-}DNSSEC}$: a backward-compatible protocol that leverages a quantum-safe KEM and a MAC to perform signature-less $\mathsf{(SL)}$ DNSSEC validations in a single UDP query/response style. Our experiments targeting NIST level I security for QTYPE A query resolution show that $\mathsf{SL\text{-}DNSSEC}$ is practically equivalent to the presently deployed RSA-2048 in terms of bandwidth usage and resolution speeds. Compared to post-quantum signatures,...
A Constructive View of Homomorphic Encryption and Authenticator
Ganyuan Cao
Public-key cryptography
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a cutting-edge cryptographic technique that enables computations on encrypted data to be mirrored on the original data. This has quickly attracted substantial interest from the research community due to its extensive practical applications, such as in cloud computing and privacy-preserving machine learning.
In addition to confidentiality, the importance of authenticity has emerged to ensure data integrity during transmission and evaluation. To address...
On the Number of Restricted Solutions to Constrained Systems and their Applications
Benoît Cogliati, Jordan Ethan, Ashwin Jha, Mridul Nandi, Abishanka Saha
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we formulate a special class of systems of linear equations over finite fields that appears naturally in the provable security analysis of several MAC and PRF modes of operation. We derive lower bounds on the number of solutions for such systems adhering to some predefined restrictions, and apply these lower bounds to derive tight PRF security for several constructions. We show security up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries for the single-keyed variant of the Double-block Hash-then-Sum...
Collision Attacks on Galois/Counter Mode (GCM)
John Preuß Mattsson
Secret-key cryptography
Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) is the most widely used Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithm in the world. In this paper, we analyze the use of GCM with all the Initialization Vector (IV) constructions and lengths approved by NIST SP 800-38D when encrypting multiple plaintexts with the same key. We derive attack complexities in both ciphertext-only and known-plaintext models, with or without nonce hiding, for collision attacks...
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...
A new stand-alone MAC construct called SMAC
Dachao Wang, Alexander Maximov, Patrik Ekdahl, Thomas Johansson
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we present a new efficient stand-alone MAC construct based on processing using the FSM part of the stream cipher family SNOW, which in turn uses the AES round function. It offers a combination of very high speed in software and hardware with a truncatable tag. Three concrete versions of SMAC are proposed with different security levels, although other use cases are also possible. For example, SMAC can be combined with an external ciphering engine in AEAD mode. Every design...
Tight Security of Double-Block Nonce-Based MACs
Wonseok Choi, Jooyoung Lee, Yeongmin Lee
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we study the security of MAC constructions among those classified by Chen et al. in ASIACRYPT '21. Precisely, $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_2}$ (or $\mathsf{EWCDM}$ as named by Cogliati and Seurin in CRYPTO '16), $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_3}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_2}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_3}$ (all as named by Chen et al.) are proved to be fully secure up to $2^n$ MAC queries in the nonce-respecting setting, improving the previous bound of $\frac{3n}{4}$-bit security. In particular,...
Fast Parallelizable Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption: Low Latency (Decryption-Fast) SIV
Mustafa Khairallah
Secret-key cryptography
MRAE security is an important goal for many AEAD applications where the nonce uniqueness cannot be maintained and security risks are significant. However, MRAE schemes can be quite expensive. Two of the SoTA MRAE-secure schemes; Deoxys-II and AES-GCM-SIV rely on internal parallelism and special instructions to achieve competitive performance. However, they both suffer from the same bottleneck, they have at least one call to the underlying primitive that cannot be parallelized to any other...
Key Exchange with Tight (Full) Forward Secrecy via Key Confirmation
Jiaxin Pan, Doreen Riepel, Runzhi Zeng
Public-key cryptography
Weak forward secrecy (wFS) of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols is a passive variant of (full) forward secrecy (FS). A natural mechanism to upgrade from wFS to FS is the use of key confirmation messages which compute a message authentication code (MAC) over the transcript. Unfortunately, Gellert, Gjøsteen, Jacobson and Jager (GGJJ, CRYPTO 2023) show that this mechanism inherently incurs a loss proportional to the number of users, leading to an overall non-tight reduction, even if...
Fully Homomorphic Encryption beyond IND-CCA1 Security: Integrity through Verifiability
Mark Manulis, Jérôme Nguyen
Public-key cryptography
We focus on the problem of constructing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes that achieve some meaningful notion of adaptive chosen-ciphertext security beyond CCA1. Towards this, we propose a new notion, called security against verified chosen-ciphertext attack (vCCA). The idea behind it is to ascertain integrity of the ciphertext by imposing a strong control on the evaluation algorithm. Essentially, we require that a ciphertext obtained by the use of homomorphic evaluation must be...
Constructing Committing and Leakage-Resilient Authenticated Encryption
Patrick Struck, Maximiliane Weishäupl
Secret-key cryptography
The main goal of this work is to construct authenticated encryption (AE) that is both committing and leakage-resilient. As a first approach for this we consider generic composition as a well-known method for constructing AE schemes. While the leakage resilience of generic composition schemes has already been analyzed by Barwell et al. (AC'17), for committing security this is not the case. We fill this gap by providing a separate analysis of the generic composition paradigms with respect to...
When and How to Aggregate Message Authentication Codes on Lossy Channels?
Eric Wagner, Martin Serror, Klaus Wehrle, Martin Henze
Secret-key cryptography
Aggregation of message authentication codes (MACs) is a proven and efficient method to preserve valuable bandwidth in resource-constrained environments: Instead of appending a long authentication tag to each message, the integrity protection of multiple messages is aggregated into a single tag. However, while such aggregation saves bandwidth, a single lost message typically means that authentication information for multiple messages cannot be verified anymore. With the significant increase...
Dishonest Majority Multiparty Computation over Matrix Rings
Hongqing Liu, Chaoping Xing, Chen Yuan, Taoxu Zou
Cryptographic protocols
The privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) has gained growing importance over the last few years. One of the biggest challenges is to improve the efficiency of PPML so that the communication and computation costs of PPML are affordable for large machine learning models such as deep learning. As we know, linear algebra such as matrix multiplication occupies a significant part of the computation in the deep learning such as deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Thus, it is desirable to...
CompactTag: Minimizing Computation Overheads in Actively-Secure MPC for Deep Neural Networks
Yongqin Wang, Pratik Sarkar, Nishat Koti, Arpita Patra, Murali Annavaram
Cryptographic protocols
Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols enable secure evaluation of a circuit by several parties, even in the presence of an adversary who maliciously corrupts all but one of the parties. These MPC protocols are constructed using the well-known secret-sharing-based paradigm (SPDZ and SPD$\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$), where the protocols ensure security against a malicious adversary by computing Message Authentication Code (MAC) tags on the input shares and then evaluating the circuit with these...
On Overidealizing Ideal Worlds: Xor of Two Permutations and its Applications
Wonseok Choi, Minki Hhan, Yu Wei, Vassilis Zikas
Secret-key cryptography
Security proofs of symmetric-key primitives typically consider an idealized world with access to a (uniformly) random function. The starting point of our work is the observation that such an ideal world can lead to underestimating the actual security of certain primitives. As a demonstrating example, $\mathsf{XoP2}$, which relies on two independent random permutations, has been proven to exhibit superior concrete security compared to $\mathsf{XoP}$, which employs a single permutation with...
Forgery Attacks on Several Beyond-Birthday-Bound Secure MACs
Yaobin Shen, François-Xavier Standaert, Lei Wang
Secret-key cryptography
At CRYPTO'18, Datta et al. proposed nPolyMAC and proved the security up to 2^{2n/3} authentication queries and 2^{n} verification queries. At EUROCRYPT'19, Dutta et al. proposed CWC+ and showed the security up to 2^{2n/3} queries. At FSE'19, Datta et al. proposed PolyMAC and its key-reduced variant 2k-PolyMAC, and showed the security up to 2^{2n/3} queries. This security bound was then improved by Kim et al. (EUROCRYPT'20) and Datta et al (FSE'23) respectively to 2^{3n/4} and in the...
zk-SNARKs from Codes with Rank Metrics
Xuan-Thanh Do, Dang-Truong Mac, Quoc-Huy Vu
Cryptographic protocols
Succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are a type of non-interactive proof system enabling efficient privacy-preserving proofs of membership for NP languages. A great deal of works has studied candidate constructions that are secure against quantum attackers, which are based on either lattice assumptions, or post-quantum collision-resistant hash functions. In this paper, we propose a code-based zk-SNARK scheme, whose security is based on the rank support...
MAFIA: Protecting the Microarchitecture of Embedded Systems Against Fault Injection Attacks
Thomas Chamelot, Damien Couroussé, Karine Heydemann
Implementation
Fault injection attacks represent an effective threat to embedded systems. Recently, Laurent et al. have reported that fault injection attacks can leverage faults inside the microarchitecture. However, state-of-the-art counter-measures, hardware-only or with hardware support, do not consider the integrity of microarchitecture control signals that are the target of these faults.
We present MAFIA, a microarchitecture protection against fault injection attacks. MAFIA ensures integrity of...
Single-query Quantum Hidden Shift Attacks
Xavier Bonnetain, André Schrottenloher
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Quantum attacks using superposition queries are known to break many classically secure modes of operation. While these attacks do not necessarily threaten the security of the modes themselves, since they rely on a strong adversary model, they help us to draw limits on the provable security of these modes.
Typically these attacks use the structure of the mode (stream cipher, MAC or authenticated encryption scheme) to embed a period-finding problem, which can be solved with a dedicated...
Batchman and Robin: Batched and Non-batched Branching for Interactive ZK
Yibin Yang, David Heath, Carmit Hazay, Vladimir Kolesnikov, Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam
Cryptographic protocols
Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) supports fast and scalable interactive Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. Despite recent improvements to VOLE-based ZK, compiling proof statements to a control-flow oblivious form (e.g., a circuit) continues to lead to expensive proofs. One useful setting where this inefficiency stands out is when the statement is a disjunction of clauses L1 ∨ · · · ∨ LB. Typically, ZK requires paying the price to handle all B branches. Prior works have shown how to avoid...
LOL: A Highly Flexible Framework for Designing Stream Ciphers
Dengguo Feng, Lin Jiao, Yonglin Hao, Qunxiong Zheng, Wenling Wu, Wenfeng Qi, Lei Zhang, Liting Zhang, Siwei Sun, Tian Tian
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we propose LOL, a general framework for designing blockwise stream ciphers, to achieve ultrafast software implementations for the ubiquitous virtual networks in 5G/6G environments and high-security level for post-quantum cryptography. The LOL framework is structurally strong, and all its components as well as the LOL framework itself enjoy high flexibility with various extensions. Following the LOL framework, we propose new stream cipher designs named LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE...
All You Need Is Fault: Zero-Value Attacks on AES and a New $\lambda$-Detection M&M
Haruka Hirata, Daiki Miyahara, Victor Arribas, Yang Li, Noriyuki Miura, Svetla Nikova, Kazuo Sakiyama
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Deploying cryptography on embedded systems requires security against physical attacks. At CHES 2019, M&M was proposed as a combined countermeasure applying masking against SCAs and information-theoretic MAC tags against FAs.
In this paper, we show that one of the protected AES implementations in the M&M paper is vulnerable to a zero-value SIFA2-like attack. A practical attack is demonstrated on an ASIC board.
We propose two versions of the attack: the first follows the SIFA approach to...
A Note on ``A Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement Protocol for Internet of Drones Environment''
Zhengjun Cao, Lihua Liu
Attacks and cryptanalysis
We show that the key agreement scheme [IEEE Internet Things J., 9(12), 2022, 9918--9933] is flawed. In order to authenticate each other, all participants use message authentication code (MAC) to generate tags for exchanged data. But MAC is a cryptographic technique which requires that the sender and receiver share a symmetric key. The scheme tries to establish a new shared key by using an old shared key, which results in a vicious circle. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time...
Improved Multi-User Security Using the Squared-Ratio Method
Yu Long Chen, Wonseok Choi, Changmin Lee
Secret-key cryptography
Proving security bounds in contexts with a large number of users is one of the central problems in symmetric-key cryptography today. This paper introduces a new method for information-theoretic multi-user security proofs,
called ``the Squared-Ratio Method''. At its core, the method requires the expectation of the square of the ratio of observing the so-called good transcripts (from Patarin's H-coefficient technique) in the real and the ideal world. Central to the method is the...
Subversion-Resilient Authenticated Encryption without Random Oracles
Pascal Bemmann, Sebastian Berndt, Denis Diemert, Thomas Eisenbarth, Tibor Jager
Secret-key cryptography
In 2013, the Snowden revelations have shown subversion of cryptographic implementations to be a relevant threat.
Since then, the academic community has been pushing the development of models and constructions
to defend against adversaries able to arbitrarily subvert cryptographic implementations.
To capture these strong capabilities of adversaries, Russell, Tang, Yung, and Zhou (CCS'17) proposed CPA-secure encryption in a model that utilizes a trusted party called a watchdog testing an...
Reconsidering Generic Composition: the modes A10, A11 and A12 are insecure
Francesco Berti
Secret-key cryptography
Authenticated Encryption (AE) achieves privacy and authenticity
with a single scheme. It is possible to obtain an AE scheme
gluing together an encryption scheme (privacy secure) and a Message Authentication
Code (authenticity secure). This approach is called generic
composition and its security has been studied by Namprempre et al. [NRS14].
They looked into all the possible gluings of an encryption scheme with a
secure MAC to obtain a nonce-based AE-scheme. The encryption scheme
is...
Additional Modes for ASCON
Rhys Weatherley
Secret-key cryptography
NIST selected the A SCON family of cryptographic primitives for standardization in February 2023 as the final step in the Lightweight Cryptography Competition. The ASCON submission to the competition provided Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), hashing, and Extensible Output Function (XOF) modes. Real world cryptography systems often need more than packet encryption and simple hashing. Keyed message authentication, key derivation, cryptographically secure pseudo-random...
Robust and Reusable Fuzzy Extractors and their Application to Authentication from Iris Data
Somnath Panja, Nikita Tripathi, Shaoquan Jiang, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini
Cryptographic protocols
Fuzzy extractors (FE) are cryptographic primitives that establish a shared secret between two parties who have similar samples of a random source, and can communicate over a public channel. An example for this is that Alice has a stored biometric at a server and wants to have authenticated communication using a new reading of her biometric on her device. Reusability and robustness of FE, respectively, guarantee that security holds when FE is used with multiple samples, and the communication...
On the Post-Quantum Security of Classical Authenticated Encryption Schemes
Nathalie Lang, Stefan Lucks
Attacks and cryptanalysis
We study the post-quantum security of authenticated encryption (AE) schemes, designed with classical security in mind. Under superposition attacks, many CBC-MAC variants have been broken, and AE modes employing those variants, such as EAX and GCM, thus fail at authenticity. As we show, the same modes are IND-qCPA insecure, i.e., they fail to provide privacy under superposition attacks. However, a constrained version of GCM is IND-qCPA secure, and a nonce-based variant of the CBC-MAC is...
Almost Tight Multi-User Security under Adaptive Corruptions & Leakages in the Standard Model
Shuai Han, Shengli Liu, Dawu Gu
Public-key cryptography
In this paper, we consider tight multi-user security under adaptive corruptions, where the adversary can adaptively corrupt some users and obtain their secret keys. We propose generic constructions for a bunch of primitives, and the instantiations from the matrix decision Diffie-Hellman (MDDH) assumptions yield the following schemes:
(1) the first digital signature (SIG) scheme achieving almost tight strong EUF-CMA security in the multi-user setting with adaptive corruptions in the...
Putting the Online Phase on a Diet: Covert Security from Short MACs
Sebastian Faust, Carmit Hazay, David Kretzler, Benjamin Schlosser
Cryptographic protocols
An important research direction in secure multi-party computation (MPC) is to improve the efficiency of the protocol. One idea that has recently received attention is to consider a slightly weaker security model than full malicious security -- the so-called setting of $\textit{covert security}$. In covert security, the adversary may cheat but only is detected with certain probability. Several works in covert security consider the offline/online approach, where during a costly offline phase...
Quantum Attacks on Beyond-Birthday-Bound MACs
Hong-Wei Sun, Bin-Bin Cai, Su-Juan Qin, Qiao-Yan Wen, Fei Gao
Attacks and cryptanalysis
In this paper, we investigate the security of several recent MAC constructions with provable security beyond the birthday bound (called BBB MACs) in the quantum setting. On the one hand, we give periodic functions corresponding to targeted MACs (including PMACX, PMAC with parity, HPxHP, and HPxNP), and we can recover secret states using Simon algorithm, leading to forgery attacks with complexity $O(n)$. This implies our results realize an exponential speedup compared with the classical...
Careful with MAc-then-SIGn: A Computational Analysis of the EDHOC Lightweight Authenticated Key Exchange Protocol
Felix Günther, Marc Ilunga Tshibumbu Mukendi
Cryptographic protocols
EDHOC is a lightweight authenticated key exchange protocol for IoT communication, currently being standardized by the IETF. Its design is a trimmed-down version of similar protocols like TLS 1.3, building on the SIGn-then-MAc (SIGMA) rationale. In its trimming, however, EDHOC notably deviates from the SIGMA design by sending only short, non-unique credential identifiers, and letting recipients perform trial verification to determine the correct communication partner. Done naively, this can...
ISAP+: ISAP with Fast Authentication
Arghya Bhattacharjee, Avik Chakraborti, Nilanjan Datta, Cuauhtemoc Mancillas-López, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
This paper analyses the lightweight, sponge-based NAEAD mode $\textsf{ISAP}$, one of the finalists of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardisation project, that achieves high-throughput with inherent protection against differential power analysis (DPA). We observe that $\textsf{ISAP}$ requires $256$-bit capacity in the authentication module to satisfy the NIST LWC security criteria. In this paper, we study the analysis carefully and observe that this is primarily due to the...
Understanding the Duplex and Its Security
Bart Mennink
Secret-key cryptography
At SAC 2011, Bertoni et al. introduced the keyed duplex construction as a tool to build permutation based authenticated encryption schemes. The construction was generalized to full-state absorption by Mennink et al. (ASIACRYPT 2015). Daemen et al. (ASIACRYPT 2017) generalized it further to cover much more use cases, and proved security of this general construction, and Dobraunig and Mennink (ASIACRYPT 2019) derived a leakage resilience security bound for this construction. Due to its...
A Modular Approach to the Security Analysis of Two-Permutation Constructions
Yu Long Chen
Secret-key cryptography
Constructions based on two public permutation calls are very common in today’s cryptographic community. However, each time a new construction is introduced, a dedicated proof must be carried out to study the security of the construction. In this work, we propose a new tool to analyze the security of these constructions in a modular way. This tool is built on the idea of the classical mirror theory for block cipher based constructions, such that it can be used for security proofs in the ideal...
Towards Tight Security Bounds for OMAC, XCBC and TMAC
Soumya Chattopadhyay, Ashwin Jha, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
OMAC --- a single-keyed variant of CBC-MAC by Iwata and Kurosawa --- is a widely used and standardized (NIST FIPS 800-38B, ISO/IEC 29167-10:2017) message authentication code (MAC) algorithm. The best security bound for OMAC is due to Nandi who proved that OMAC's pseudorandom function (PRF) advantage is upper bounded by $ O(q^2\ell/2^n) $, where $ n $, $ q $, and $ \ell $, denote the block size of the underlying block cipher, the number of queries, and the maximum permissible query length (in...
Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Exchange in the Standard Model
You Lyu, Shengli Liu, Shuai Han, Dawu Gu
Cryptographic protocols
Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Exchange (PPAKE) provides protection both for the session keys and the identity information of the involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the concept of robustness into PPAKE. Robustness enables each user to confirm whether itself is the target recipient of the first round message in the protocol. With the help of robustness, a PPAKE protocol can successfully avoid the heavy redundant communications and computations caused by the ambiguity of...
On the Security of Keyed Hashing Based on Public Permutations
Jonathan Fuchs, Yann Rotella, Joan Daemen
Secret-key cryptography
Doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed functions (deck) generalize the concept of message authentication codes (MAC) and stream ciphers in that they support variable-length strings as input and return variable-length strings as output. A prominent example of building deck functions is Farfalle, which consists of a set of public permutations and rolling functions that are used in its compression and expansion layers. By generalizing the compression layer of Farfalle, we prove its universality...
Secure Message Authentication in the Presence of Leakage and Faults
Francesco Berti, Chun Guo, Thomas Peters, Yaobin Shen, François-Xavier Standaert
Secret-key cryptography
Security against side-channels and faults is a must for the deployment of embedded cryptography. A wide body of research has investigated solutions to secure implementations against these attacks at different abstraction levels. Yet, to a large extent, current solutions focus on one or the other threat. In this paper, we initiate a mode-level study of cryptographic primitives that can ensure security in a (new and practically-motivated) adversarial model combining leakage and faults. Our...
Post-Quantum Security of Tweakable Even-Mansour, and Applications
Gorjan Alagic, Chen Bai, Jonathan Katz, Christian Majenz, Patrick Struck
Secret-key cryptography
The tweakable Even-Mansour construction yields a tweakable block cipher from a public random permutation. We prove post-quantum security of tweakable Even-Mansour when attackers have quantum access to the random permutation but only classical access to the secretly-keyed construction, the relevant setting for most real-world applications. We then use our results to prove post-quantum security—in the same model—of the symmetric-key schemes Chaskey (an ISO-standardized MAC), Elephant (an AEAD...
Exploring Integrity of AEADs with Faults: Definitions and Constructions
Sayandeep Saha, Mustafa Khairallah, Thomas Peyrin
Secret-key cryptography
Implementation-based attacks are major concerns for modern cryptography. For symmetric-key cryptography, a significant amount of exploration has taken place in this regard for primitives such as block ciphers. Concerning symmetric-key operating modes, such as Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), the state- of-the-art mainly addresses the passive Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) in the form of leakage resilient cryptography. So far, only a handful of work address Fault Attacks (FA)...
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...
Building PRFs from TPRPs: Beyond the Block and the Tweak Length Bounds
Wonseok Choi, Jooyoung Lee, Yeongmin Lee
Secret-key cryptography
A secure $n$-bit tweakable block cipher~(TBC) using $t$-bit tweaks can be modeled as a tweakable uniform random permutation, where each tweak defines an independent random $n$-bit permutation. When an input to this tweakable permutation is fixed, it can be viewed as a perfectly secure $t$-bit random function.
On the other hand, when a tweak is fixed, it can be viewed as a perfectly secure $n$-bit random permutation, and it is well known that the sum of two random permutations is...
A Long Tweak Goes a Long Way: High Multi-user Security Authenticated Encryption from Tweakable Block Ciphers
Benoît Cogliati, Jérémy Jean, Thomas Peyrin, Yannick Seurin
Secret-key cryptography
We analyze the multi-user (mu) security of a family of nonce-based authentication encryption (nAE) schemes based on a tweakable block cipher (TBC). The starting point of our work is an analysis of the mu security of the SCT-2 mode which underlies the nAE scheme Deoxys-II, winner of the CAESAR competition for the defense-in-depth category. We extend this analysis in two directions, as we detail now.
First, we investigate the mu security of several TBC-based variants of the counter...
Structure-Preserving Compilers from New Notions of Obfuscations
Matteo Campanelli, Danilo Francati, Claudio Orlandi
Foundations
The dream of software obfuscation is to take programs, as they are, and then generically compile them into obfuscated versions that hide their secret inner workings. In this work we investigate notions of obfuscations weaker than virtual black-box (VBB) but which still allow obfuscating cryptographic primitives preserving their original functionalities as much as possible. In particular we propose two new notions of obfuscations, which we call oracle-differing-input obfuscation (odiO) and...
Key-Reduced Variants of 3kf9 with Beyond-Birthday-Bound Security
Yaobin Shen, Ferdinand Sibleyras
Secret-key cryptography
3kf9 is a three-key CBC-type MAC that enhances the standardized integrity algorithm f9 (3GPP-MAC). It has beyond-birthday-bound security and is expected to be a possible candidate in constrained environments when instantiated with lightweight blockciphers. Two variants 2kf9 and 1kf9 were proposed to reduce key size for efficiency, but recently, Leurent et al. (CRYPTO'18) and Shen et al. (CRYPTO'21) pointed out critical flaws on these two variants and invalidated their security proofs with...
SO-CCA Secure PKE in the Quantum Random Oracle Model or the Quantum Ideal Cipher Model
Shingo Sato, Junji Shikata
Public-key cryptography
Selective opening (SO) security is one of the most important security notions of public key encryption (PKE) in a multi-user setting. Even though messages and random coins used in some ciphertexts are leaked, SO security guarantees the confidentiality of the other ciphertexts. Actually, it is shown that there exist PKE schemes which meet the standard security such as indistinguishability against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA security) but do not meet SO security against chosen...
Algorithm Substitution Attacks against Receivers
Marcel Armour, Bertram Poettering
Implementation
This work describes a class of Algorithm Substitution Attack (ASA) generically targeting the receiver of a communication between two parties. Our work provides a unified framework that applies to any scheme where a secret key is held by the receiver; in particular, message authentication schemes (MACs), authenticated encryption (AEAD) and public key encryption (PKE). Our unified framework brings together prior work targeting MAC schemes and AEAD schemes; we extend prior work by showing that...
Secure Storage with Deduplication
John Best, Wayne Hineman, Steven Hetzler, Guerney Hunt, Charanjit S. Jutla
Secret-key cryptography
We describe a new secure storage scheme that facilitates deduplication. The scheme is also proved secure in the universal-composability model. It is a single server scheme, and the basic scheme does not prevent against off-line dictionary attacks if the server is compromised. However, if a global secret key is shared amongst users of the organization, and this key is never stored at the server, we also get protection against off-line dictionary attacks even if the server is compromised. The...
Property-Preserving Hash Functions and Combinatorial Group Testing
Kazuhiko Minematsu
Foundations
Property-preserving hash (PPH) function is a class of hash functions that allows an evaluation of the property of inputs from their hash values. Boyle et al. at ITCS 2019 recently introduced it and considered the robustness of PPH against an adversary who accesses the internal randomness of PPH, and proposed two robust PPH constructions for a weak form of Hamming distance predicate. The second construction received attention for its short hash value, although it relies on an ad-hoc security...
On the Security of TrCBC
Debrup Chakraborty, Samir Kundu
Attacks and cryptanalysis
TrCBC is a variant of CBC-MAC which appeared in Information Processing Letters, 112(7):302-307, 2012. The authors claimed TrCBC to be a secure message authentication code (MAC) with some interesting properties. If TrCBC is instantiated with a block cipher with block length n, then it requires ⌈λ/n⌉ block cipher calls for authenticating a λ-bit message and requires a single key, which is the block cipher key. The authors state that TrCBC can have tag lengths of size less than n/2. We show...
Poly Onions: Achieving Anonymity in the Presence of Churn
Megumi Ando, Miranda Christ, Anna Lysyanskaya, Tal Malkin
Onion routing is a popular approach towards anonymous communication. Practical implementations are widely used (for example, Tor has millions of users daily), but are vulnerable to various traffic correlation attacks, and the theoretical foundations, despite recent progress, still lag behind. In particular, all works that model onion routing protocols and prove their security only address a single run, where each party sends and receives a single message of fixed length, once. Moreover,...
A Note on the Security Framework of Two-key DbHtS MACs
Tingting Guo, Peng Wang
Secret-key cryptography
Double-block Hash-then-Sum (DbHtS) MACs are a class of MACs achieve beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security, including SUM-ECBC, PMAC_Plus, 3kf9 and LightMAC_Plus etc. Recently, Shen et al. (Crypto 2021) proposed a security framework for two-key DbHtS MACs in the multi-user setting, stating that when the underlying blockcipher is ideal and the universal hash function is regular and almost universal, the two-key DbHtS MACs achieve 2n/3-bit security. Unfortunately, the regular and universal...
Multi-User BBB Security of Public Permutations Based MAC
Yu Long Chen, Avijit Dutta, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
At CRYPTO 2019, Chen et al. have shown a beyond the birthday bound secure $n$-bit to $n$-bit PRF based on public random permutations. Followed by the work, Dutta and Nandi have proposed a beyond the birthday bound secure nonce based MAC $\textsf{nEHtM}_p$ based on public random permutation. In particular, the authors have shown that $\textsf{nEHtM}_p$ achieves tight $2n/3$-bit security ({\em with respect to the state size of the permutation}) in the single-user setting, and their proven...
Provably Secure Identity-Based Remote Password Registration
Csanád Bertók, Andrea Huszti, Szabolcs Kovács, Norbert Oláh
Cryptographic protocols
One of the most significant challenges is the secure user authentication. If it becomes breached, confidentiality and integrity of the data or services may be compromised. The most widespread solution for entity authentication is the password-based scheme. It is easy to use and deploy. During password registration typically users create or activate their account along with their password through their verification email, and service providers are authenticated based on their SSL/TLS...
On the Related-Key Attack Security of Authenticated Encryption Schemes
Sebastian Faust, Juliane Krämer, Maximilian Orlt, Patrick Struck
Secret-key cryptography
Related-key attacks (RKA) are powerful cryptanalytic attacks, where the adversary can tamper with the secret key of a cryptographic scheme. Since their invention, RKA security has been an important design goal in cryptography, and various works aim at designing cryptographic primitives that offer protection against related-key attacks. At EUROCRYPT'03, Bellare and Kohno introduced the first formal treatment of related-key attacks focusing on pseudorandom functions and permutations. This was...
Small MACs from Small Permutations
Maria Eichlseder, Ahmet Can Mert, Christian Rechberger, Markus Schofnegger
Secret-key cryptography
The concept of lightweight cryptography has gained in popularity recently, also due to various competitions and standardization efforts specifically targeting more efficient algorithms, which are also easier to implement.
One of the important properties of lightweight constructions is the area of a hardware implementation, or in other words, the size of the implementation in a particular environment. Reducing the area usually has multiple advantages like decreased production cost or lower...
Categorization of Faulty Nonce Misuse Resistant Message Authentication
Yu Long Chen, Bart Mennink, Bart Preneel
Secret-key cryptography
A growing number of lightweight block ciphers are proposed for environments such as the Internet of Things. An important contribution to the reduced implementation cost is a block length n of 64 or 96 bits rather than 128 bits. As a consequence, encryption modes and message authentication code (MAC) algorithms require security beyond the 2^{n/2} birthday bound. This paper provides an extensive treatment of MAC algorithms that offer beyond birthday bound PRF security for both nonce-respecting...
Rotational-Linear Attack: A New Framework of Cryptanalysis on ARX ciphers with Applications to Chaskey
Yaqi Xu, Baofeng Wu, Dongdai Lin
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we formulate a new framework of cryptanalysis called rotational-linear attack on ARX ciphers. We firstly build an efficient distinguisher for the cipher $ E$ consisted of the rotational attack and the linear attack together with some intermediate variables. Then a key recovery technique is introduced with which we can recover some bits of the last whitening key in the related-key scenario. To decrease data complexity of our attack, we also apply a new method, called bit...
Ascon PRF, MAC, and Short-Input MAC
Christoph Dobraunig, Maria Eichlseder, Florian Mendel, Martin Schläffer
Secret-key cryptography
The cipher suite Ascon v1.2 already provides authenticated encryption schemes, hash, and extendable output functions. Furthermore, the underlying permutation is also used in two instances of Isap v2.0, an authenticated encryption scheme designed to provide enhanced robustness against side-channel and fault attacks. In this paper, we enrich the functionality one can get out of Ascon's permutation by providing efficient Pseudorandom Functions (PRFs), a Message Authentication Code (MAC) and a...
Improved Security Bound of \textsf{(E/D)WCDM}
Nilanjan Datta, Avijit Dutta, Kushankur Dutta
Secret-key cryptography
In CRYPTO'16, Cogliati and Seurin proposed a block cipher based nonce based MAC, called {\em Encrypted Wegman-Carter with Davies-Meyer} (\textsf{EWCDM}), that gives $2n/3$ bit MAC security in the nonce respecting setting and $n/2$ bit security in the nonce misuse setting, where $n$ is the block size of the underlying block cipher. However, this construction requires two independent block cipher keys. In CRYPTO'18, Datta et al. came up with a single-keyed block cipher based nonce based MAC,...
Perfect Trees: Designing Energy-Optimal Symmetric Encryption Primitives
Andrea Caforio, Subhadeep Banik, Yosuke Todo, Willi Meier, Takanori Isobe, Fukang Liu, Bin Zhang
Implementation
Energy efficiency is critical in battery-driven devices, and designing energy-
optimal symmetric-key ciphers is one of the goals for the use of ciphers in such
environments. In the paper by Banik et al. (IACR ToSC 2018), stream ciphers were
identified as ideal candidates for low-energy solutions. One of the main conclusions of
this paper was that Trivium, when implemented in an unrolled fashion, was by far the
most energy-efficient way of encrypting larger quantity of data. In fact, it was...
Noise-Tolerant Quantum Tokens for MAC
Amit Behera, Or Sattath, Uriel Shinar
Secret-key cryptography
Message Authentication Code or MAC, is a well-studied cryptographic primitive that is used in order to authenticate communication between two parties sharing a secret key. A Tokenized MAC or TMAC is a related cryptographic primitive, introduced by Ben-David & Sattath (QCrypt'17) which allows limited signing authority to be delegated to third parties via the use of single-use quantum signing tokens. These tokens can be issued using the secret key, such that each token can be used to sign at...
Partition Oracles from Weak Key Forgeries
Marcel Armour, Carlos Cid
Secret-key cryptography
In this work, we show how weak key forgeries against polynomial hash based Authenticated Encryption (AE) schemes, such as AES-GCM, can be leveraged to launch partitioning oracle attacks. Partitioning oracle attacks were recently introduced by Len et al. (Usenix'21) as a new class of decryption error oracle which, conceptually, takes a ciphertext as input and outputs whether or not the decryption key belongs to some known subset of keys. Partitioning oracle attacks allow an adversary to query...
Parallel Verification of Serial MAC and AE Modes
Kazuhiko Minematsu, Akiko Inoue, Katsuya Moriwaki, Maki Shigeri, Hiroyasu Kubo
Secret-key cryptography
A large number of the symmetric-key mode of operations, such as classical CBC-MAC, have serial structures. While a serial mode gives an implementation advantage in terms of required memory or footprint compared to the parallel counterparts, it wastes the capability of parallel process even when it is available. The problem is becoming more relevant as lightweight cryptography is going to be deployed in the real world. In this article, we propose an alternative implementation strategy for...
EasyPQC: Verifying Post-Quantum Cryptography
Manuel Barbosa, Gilles Barthe, Xiong Fan, Benjamin Grégoire, Shih-Han Hung, Jonathan Katz, Pierre-Yves Strub, Xiaodi Wu, Li Zhou
Public-key cryptography
EasyCrypt is a formal verification tool used extensively for formalizing concrete security proofs of cryptographic constructions. However, the EasyCrypt formal logics consider only classical attackers, which means that post-quantum security proofs cannot be formalized and machine-checked with this tool. In this paper we prove that a natural extension of the EasyCrypt core logics permits capturing a wide class of post-quantum cryptography proofs, settling a question raised by (Unruh, POPL...
Efficient Leakage-Resilient MACs without Idealized Assumptions
Francesco Berti, Chun Guo, Thomas Peters, François-Xavier Standaert
Secret-key cryptography
The security proofs of leakage-resilient MACs based on symmetric
building blocks currently rely on idealized assumptions that hardly translate into
interpretable guidelines for the cryptographic engineers implementing these schemes.
In this paper, we first present a leakage-resilient MAC that is both efficient
and secure under standard and easily interpretable black box and physical assumptions.
It only requires a collision resistant hash function and a single call per message...
Direct Product Hardness Amplification
David Lanzenberger, Ueli Maurer
Foundations
We revisit one of the most fundamental hardness amplification constructions, originally proposed by Yao (FOCS 1982).
We present a hardness amplification theorem for the direct product of certain games that is simpler, more general, and stronger than previously known hardness amplification theorems of the same kind.
Our focus is two-fold. First, we aim to provide close-to-optimal concrete bounds, as opposed to asymptotic ones. Second, in the spirit of abstraction and reusability, our goal is...
Computational Robust (Fuzzy) Extractors for CRS-dependent Sources with Minimal Min-entropy
Hanwen Feng, Qiang Tang
Foundations
Robust (fuzzy) extractors are very useful for, e.g., authenticated exchange from shared weak secret and remote biometric authentication against active adversaries. They enable two parties to extract the same uniform randomness with the ``helper'' string. More importantly, they have an authentication mechanism built in that tampering of the ``helper'' string will be detected. Unfortunately, as shown by Dodis and Wichs, in the information-theoretic setting, a robust extractor for an...
LedMAC: More Efficient Variants of LightMAC
Yaobin Shen, Lei Wang, Dawu Gu
Secret-key cryptography
LightMAC is a lightweight MAC designed by Luykx et al. and recently standardized by ISO/IEC. In this paper, we refine LightMAC and suggest two simple variants called LedMAC1 and LedMAC2. Compared to LightMAC, our first scheme LedMAC1 avoids unnecessary padding without sacrificing the security. Our second scheme LedMAC2 further reduces the number of keys from two to one, and achieves the same level security as that of LightMAC.
KDM Security for the Fujisaki-Okamoto Transformations in the QROM
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Ryo Nishimaki
Public-key cryptography
Key dependent message (KDM) security is a security notion that guarantees confidentiality of communication even if secret keys are encrypted.
KDM security has found a number of applications in practical situations such as hard-disk encryption systems, anonymous credentials, and bootstrapping of fully homomorphic encryptions. Recently, it also found an application in quantum delegation protocols as shown by Zhang (TCC 2019).
In this work, we investigate the KDM security of existing practical...
Downgradable Identity-Based Signatures and Trapdoor Sanitizable Signatures from Downgradable Affine MACs
Masahito Ishizaka, Shinsaku Kiyomoto
Public-key cryptography
Affine message authentication code (AMAC) (CRYPTO'14) is a group-based MAC with a specific algebraic structure. Downgradable AMAC (DAMAC) (CT-RSA'19) is an AMAC with a functionality that we can downgrade a message with an authentication tag while retaining validity of the tag. In this paper, we revisit DAMAC for two independent applications, namely downgradable identity-based signatures (DIBS) and trapdoor sanitizable signatures (TSS) (ACNS'08). DIBS are the digital signature analogue of...
Fine-tuning the ISO/IEC Standard LightMAC
Soumya Chattopadhyay, Ashwin Jha, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
LightMAC, by Luykx et al., is a block cipher based message authentication code (MAC). The simplicity of design and low overhead allows it to have very compact implementations. As a result, it has been recently chosen as an ISO/IEC standard MAC for lightweight applications. LightMAC has been shown to achieve query length independent security bound of $O(q^2/2^n)$ when instantiated with two independently keyed $n$-bit block ciphers, where $q$ denotes the number of MAC queries and the...
Analysis and Recommendations for MAC and Key Lengths in Delayed Disclosure GNSS Authentication Protocols
Ignacio Fernández-Hernández, Tomer Ashur, Vincent Rijmen
Implementation
Data and signal authentication schemes are being proposed to address Global Navigation Satellite Systems' (GNSS) vulnerability to spoofing. Due to the low power of their signals, the bandwidth available for authentication in GNSS is scarce. Since delayed-disclosure protocols, e.g., TESLA (timed-efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication), are efficient in terms of bandwidth and robust to signal impairments, they have been proposed and implemented by GNSS. The length of message...
HERMES: Scalable, Secure, and Privacy-Enhancing Vehicle Access System
Iraklis Symeonidis, Dragos Rotaru, Mustafa A. Mustafa, Bart Mennink, Bart Preneel, Panos Papadimitratos
Applications
We propose HERMES, a scalable, secure, and privacy-enhancing system for users to share and access vehicles. HERMES securely outsources operations of vehicle access token generation to a set of untrusted servers. It builds on an earlier proposal, namely SePCAR [1], and extends the system design for improved efficiency and scalability. To cater to system and user needs for secure and private computations, HERMES utilizes and combines several cryptographic primitives with secure multiparty...
The MAGIC Mode for Simultaneously Supporting Encryption, Message Authentication and Error Correction
Michael Kounavis, David Durham, Sergej Deutsch, Krystian Matusiewicz, David Wheeler
Foundations
We present MAGIC, a mode for authenticated encryption that simultaneously supports encryption, message authentication and error correction, all with the same code. In MAGIC, the same code employed for cryptographic integrity is also the parity used for error correction. To correct errors, MAGIC employs the Galois Hash transformation, which due to its bit linearity can perform corrections in a similar way as other codes do (e.g., Reed Solomon). To provide a cryptographically strong MAC, MAGIC...
Cryptographic Vulnerabilities and Other Shortcomings of the Nextcloud Server Side Encryption as implemented by the Default Encryption Module
Kevin "Kenny" Niehage
Applications
Nextcloud provides a server side encryption feature that is implemented by the Default Encryption Module. This paper presents cryptographic vulnerabilities that existed within the Default Encryption Module as well as other shortcomings that still need to be addressed. The vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to break the provided confidentiality and integrity protection guarantees. There is a high risk that ownCloud also contains some of the issues presented in this paper as it still has...
Quantum Period Finding against Symmetric Primitives in Practice
Xavier Bonnetain, Samuel Jaques
Secret-key cryptography
We present the first complete implementation of the offline Simon's algorithm, and estimate its cost to attack the MAC Chaskey, the block cipher PRINCE and the NIST lightweight candidate AEAD scheme Elephant.
These attacks require a reasonable amount of qubits, comparable to the number of qubits required to break RSA-2048. They are faster than other collision algorithms, and the attacks against PRINCE and Chaskey are the most efficient known to date. As Elephant has a key smaller than its...
ELM : A Low-Latency and Scalable Memory Encryption Scheme
Akiko Inoue, Kazuhiko Minematsu, Maya Oda, Rei Ueno, Naofumi Homma
Secret-key cryptography
Memory encryption with an authentication tree has received significant attentions due to the increasing threats of active attacks and the widespread use of non-volatile memories. It is also gradually deployed to real-world systems, as shown by SGX available in Intel processors. The topic of memory encryption has been recently extensively studied, most actively from the viewpoint of system architecture. In this paper, we study the topic from the viewpoint of provable secure symmetric-key...
QCB: Efficient Quantum-secure Authenticated Encryption
Ritam Bhaumik, Xavier Bonnetain, André Chailloux, Gaëtan Leurent, María Naya-Plasencia, André Schrottenloher, Yannick Seurin
Secret-key cryptography
It was long thought that symmetric cryptography was only mildly affected by quantum attacks, and that doubling the key length was sufficient to restore security. However, recent works have shown that Simon's quantum period finding algorithm breaks a large number of MAC and authenticated encryption algorithms when the adversary can query the MAC/encryption oracle with a quantum superposition of messages. In particular, the OCB authenticated encryption mode is broken in this setting, and no...
Interactive Aggregate Message Authentication Equipped with Detecting Functionality from Adaptive Group Testing
Shingo Sato, Junji Shikata
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we propose a formal security model and a construction methodology of interactive aggregate message authentication with detecting functionality (IAMD). The IAMD is an interactive aggregate MAC protocol which can identify invalid messages with a small amount of tag-size. Several aggregate MAC schemes that can specify invalid messages has been proposed so far by using non-adaptive group testing in the prior work. In this paper, we utilize adaptive group testing to construct IAMD...
Improved Security Analysis for Nonce-based Enhanced Hash-then-Mask MACs
Wonseok Choi, Byeonghak Lee, Yeongmin Lee, Jooyoung Lee
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we prove that the nonce-based enhanced hash-then-mask MAC ($\mathsf{nEHtM}$) is secure up to $2^{\frac{3n}{4}}$ MAC queries and $2^n$ verification queries (ignoring logarithmic factors) as long as the number of faulty queries $\mu$ is below $2^\frac{3n}{8}$, significantly improving the previous bound by Dutta et al. Even when $\mu$ goes beyond $2^{\frac{3n}{8}}$, $\mathsf{nEHtM}$ enjoys graceful degradation of security.
The second result is to prove the security of PRF-based...
Security Analysis of Subterranean 2.0
Ling Song, Yi Tu, Danping Shi, Lei Hu
Secret-key cryptography
Subterranean 2.0 is a cipher suite that can be used for hashing, authenticated encryption, MAC computation, etc. It was designed by Daemen, Massolino, Mehrdad, and Rotella, and has been selected as a candidate in the second round of NIST's lightweight cryptography standardization process. Subterranean 2.0 is a duplex-based construction and utilizes a single-round permutation in the duplex. It is the simplicity of the round function that makes it an attractive target of cryptanalysis.
In...
How to Build Optimally Secure PRFs Using Block Ciphers
Benoît Cogliati, Ashwin Jha, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
In EUROCRYPT '96, Aiello and Venkatesan proposed two candidates for $ 2n $-bit to $ 2n $-bit pseudorandom functions (PRFs), called Benes and modified Benes (or mBenes), based on $ n $-bit to $ n $-bit PRFs. While Benes is known to be secure up to $ 2^n $ queries (Patarin, AFRICACRYPT '08), the security of mBenes has only been proved up to $ 2^{n(1-\epsilon)} $ queries for all $ \epsilon > 0 $ by Patarin and Montreuil in ICISC '05. In this work, we show that the composition of a $ 2n $-bit...
On the Adaptive Security of MACs and PRFs
Andrew Morgan, Rafael Pass, Elaine Shi
Foundations
We consider the security of two of the most commonly used cryptographic primitives—message authentication codes (MACs) and pseudorandom functions (PRFs)—in a multi-user setting with adaptive corruption. Whereas is it well known that any secure MAC or PRF is also multi-user secure under adaptive corruption, the trivial reduction induces a security loss that is linear in the number of users.
Our main result shows that black-box reductions from “standard” assumptions cannot be used to provide a...
EM-Side-Channel Resistant Symmetric-Key Authentication Mechanism for Small Devices
Rick Boivie, Charanjit S. Jutla, Daniel Friedman, Ghavam Shahidi
Secret-key cryptography
We provide a novel electro-magnetic (EM) side-channel resistant symmetric-key authentication mechanism for small devices that uses a Benes network to permute the on-board authentication-key before computing a MAC of a challenge with the key. The permutation itself is derived from the challenge using a hash function acting as a random oracle. The solution has interesting applications such as forgery detection of currency bills.
The Exact Security of PMAC with Three Powering-Up Masks
Yusuke Naito
Secret-key cryptography
PMAC is a rate-1, parallelizable, block-cipher-based message authentication code (MAC), proposed by Black and Rogaway (EUROCRYPT 2002). Improving the security bound is a main research topic for PMAC. In particular, showing a tight bound is the primary goal of the research, since Luykx et al.'s paper (EUROCRYPT 2016). Regarding the pseudo-random-function (PRF) security of PMAC, a collision of the hash function, or the difference between a random permutation and a random function offers the...
HACL×N: Verified Generic SIMD Crypto (for all your favorite platforms)
Marina Polubelova, Karthikeyan Bhargavan, Jonathan Protzenko, Benjamin Beurdouche, Aymeric Fromherz, Natalia Kulatova, Santiago Zanella-Béguelin
Implementation
We present a new methodology for building formally verified cryptographic libraries that are optimized for multiple architectures. In particular, we show how to write and verify generic crypto code in the F* programming language that exploits single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallelism. We show how this code can be compiled to platforms that supports vector instructions, including ARM Neon and Intel AVX, AVX2, and AVX512. We apply our methodology to obtain verified vectorized...
Rotational Cryptanalysis on MAC Algorithm Chaskey
Liliya Kraleva, Tomer Ashur, Vincent Rijmen
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper we analyse the algorithm Chaskey - a lightweight MAC algorithm for 32-bit micro controllers - with respect to rotational cryptanalysis. We perform a related-key attack over Chaskey and find a distinguisher by using rotational probabilities. Having a message $m$ we can forge and present a valid tag for some message under a related key with probability $2^{-57}$ for 8 rounds and $2^{-86}$ for all 12 rounds of the permutation for keys in a defined weak-key class. This attack can...
BBB Secure Nonce Based MAC Using Public Permutations
Avijit Dutta, Mridul Nandi
Secret-key cryptography
In the recent trend of CAESAR competition and NIST light-weight competition, cryptographic community have witnessed the submissions of several cryptographic schemes that are build on public random permutations. Recently, in CRYPTO 2019, Chen et al. have initiated an interesting research direction in designing beyond birthday bound PRFs from public random permutations and they proposed two instances of such PRFs. In this work, we extend this research direction by proposing a nonce-based MAC...
Combiners for AEAD
Bertram Poettering, Paul Rösler
Secret-key cryptography
The Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) primitive, which integrates confidentiality and integrity services under a single roof, found wide-spread adoption in industry and became indispensable in practical protocol design. Recognizing this, academic research put forward a large number of candidate constructions, many of which come with provable security guarantees. Nevertheless, the recent past has shaken up with the discovery of vulnerabilities, some of them fatal, in...
Design Space Exploration for Ultra-Low Energy and Secure IoT MCUs
Ehsan Aerabi, Milad Bohlouli, MohammadHasan Ahmadi Livany, Mahdi Fazeli, Athanasios Papadimitriou, David Hely
Applications
This paper explores the design space of secure communication in ultra-low-energy IoT devices based on Micro-Controller Units (MCUs). It tries to identify, evaluate and compare security-related design choices in a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded IoT system which contribute in the energy consumption. We conduct a study over a large group of software-implemented crypto algorithms: symmetric, stream, hash, AEAD, MAC, digital signature and key exchange. A comprehensive report of the...
PAKEs: New Framework, New Techniques and More Efficient Lattice-Based Constructions in the Standard Model
Shaoquan Jiang, Guang Gong, Jingnan He, Khoa Nguyen, Huaxiong Wang
Cryptographic protocols
Password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) allows two parties with a shared password to agree on a session key. In the last decade, the design of PAKE protocols from lattice assumptions has attracted lots of attention. However, existing solutions in the standard model do not have appealing efficiency. In this work, we first introduce a new PAKE framework. We then provide two realizations in the standard model, under the Learning With Errors (LWE) and Ring-LWE assumptions,...
Anonymous Symmetric-Key Communication
Fabio Banfi, Ueli Maurer
Secret-key cryptography
We study anonymity of probabilistic encryption (pE) and probabilistic authenticated encryption (pAE). We start by providing concise game-based security definitions capturing anonymity for both pE and pAE, and then show that the commonly used notion of indistinguishability from random ciphertexts (IND\($\)) indeed implies the anonymity notions for both pE and pAE. This is in contrast to a recent work of Chan and Rogaway (Asiacrypt 2019), where it is shown that IND\($\)-secure nonce-based...
A Compact and Scalable Hardware/Software Co-design of SIKE
Pedro Maat C. Massolino, Patrick Longa, Joost Renes, Lejla Batina
Implementation
We present efficient and compact hardware/software co-design implementations of the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In order to be better equipped for different post-quantum scenarios, our architectures were designed to feature high-flexibility by covering all the currently available parameter sets and with support for primes up to 1008 bits. In particular, any of the current SIKE parameters equivalent to the post-quantum...
Efficient Side-Channel Secure Message Authentication with Better Bounds
Chun Guo, François-Xavier Standaert, Weijia Wang, Yu Yu
Secret-key cryptography
We investigate constructing message authentication schemes from symmetric cryptographic primitives, with the goal of achieving security when most intermediate values during tag computation and verification are leaked (i.e., mode-level leakage-resilience). Existing efficient proposals typically follow the plain Hash-then-MAC paradigm $T=MAC_K(H(M))$. When the domain of the MAC function $MAC_K$ is $\{0,1\}^{128}$, e.g., when instantiated with the AES, forgery is possible within time $2^{64}$...
An ongoing research challenge in symmetric cryptography is to design an authenticated encryption (AE) with a commitment to the secret key or preferably to the entire context. One way to achieve this is to use a transform on an existing AE scheme, if possible with no output length expansion. At EUROCRYPT'22, Bellare and Hoang proposed the HtE transform, which lifts key-commitment to context-commitment. In the same year at ESORICS'22, Chan and Rogaway proposed the CTX transform, which works on...
Achieving malicious security with high efficiency in dishonest-majority secure multiparty computation is a formidable challenge. The milestone works SPDZ and TinyOT have spawn a large family of protocols in this direction. For boolean circuits, state-of-the-art works (Cascudo et. al, TCC 2020 and Escudero et. al, CRYPTO 2022) have proposed schemes based on reverse multiplication-friendly embedding (RMFE) to reduce the amortized cost. However, these protocols are theoretically described and...
Robust message authentication codes (MACs) and authenticated encryption (AE) schemes that provide authenticity in the presence of side-channel leakage are essential primitives. These constructions often rely on primitives designed for strong leakage protection, among others including the use of strong-unpredictable (tweakable) block-ciphers. This paper extends the strong-unpredictability security definition to the versatile and new forkcipher primitive. We show how to construct secure and...
We present $\mathsf{SL\text{-}DNSSEC}$: a backward-compatible protocol that leverages a quantum-safe KEM and a MAC to perform signature-less $\mathsf{(SL)}$ DNSSEC validations in a single UDP query/response style. Our experiments targeting NIST level I security for QTYPE A query resolution show that $\mathsf{SL\text{-}DNSSEC}$ is practically equivalent to the presently deployed RSA-2048 in terms of bandwidth usage and resolution speeds. Compared to post-quantum signatures,...
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a cutting-edge cryptographic technique that enables computations on encrypted data to be mirrored on the original data. This has quickly attracted substantial interest from the research community due to its extensive practical applications, such as in cloud computing and privacy-preserving machine learning. In addition to confidentiality, the importance of authenticity has emerged to ensure data integrity during transmission and evaluation. To address...
In this paper, we formulate a special class of systems of linear equations over finite fields that appears naturally in the provable security analysis of several MAC and PRF modes of operation. We derive lower bounds on the number of solutions for such systems adhering to some predefined restrictions, and apply these lower bounds to derive tight PRF security for several constructions. We show security up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries for the single-keyed variant of the Double-block Hash-then-Sum...
Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) is the most widely used Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithm in the world. In this paper, we analyze the use of GCM with all the Initialization Vector (IV) constructions and lengths approved by NIST SP 800-38D when encrypting multiple plaintexts with the same key. We derive attack complexities in both ciphertext-only and known-plaintext models, with or without nonce hiding, for collision attacks...
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...
In this paper, we present a new efficient stand-alone MAC construct based on processing using the FSM part of the stream cipher family SNOW, which in turn uses the AES round function. It offers a combination of very high speed in software and hardware with a truncatable tag. Three concrete versions of SMAC are proposed with different security levels, although other use cases are also possible. For example, SMAC can be combined with an external ciphering engine in AEAD mode. Every design...
In this paper, we study the security of MAC constructions among those classified by Chen et al. in ASIACRYPT '21. Precisely, $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_2}$ (or $\mathsf{EWCDM}$ as named by Cogliati and Seurin in CRYPTO '16), $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_3}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_2}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_3}$ (all as named by Chen et al.) are proved to be fully secure up to $2^n$ MAC queries in the nonce-respecting setting, improving the previous bound of $\frac{3n}{4}$-bit security. In particular,...
MRAE security is an important goal for many AEAD applications where the nonce uniqueness cannot be maintained and security risks are significant. However, MRAE schemes can be quite expensive. Two of the SoTA MRAE-secure schemes; Deoxys-II and AES-GCM-SIV rely on internal parallelism and special instructions to achieve competitive performance. However, they both suffer from the same bottleneck, they have at least one call to the underlying primitive that cannot be parallelized to any other...
Weak forward secrecy (wFS) of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols is a passive variant of (full) forward secrecy (FS). A natural mechanism to upgrade from wFS to FS is the use of key confirmation messages which compute a message authentication code (MAC) over the transcript. Unfortunately, Gellert, Gjøsteen, Jacobson and Jager (GGJJ, CRYPTO 2023) show that this mechanism inherently incurs a loss proportional to the number of users, leading to an overall non-tight reduction, even if...
We focus on the problem of constructing fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes that achieve some meaningful notion of adaptive chosen-ciphertext security beyond CCA1. Towards this, we propose a new notion, called security against verified chosen-ciphertext attack (vCCA). The idea behind it is to ascertain integrity of the ciphertext by imposing a strong control on the evaluation algorithm. Essentially, we require that a ciphertext obtained by the use of homomorphic evaluation must be...
The main goal of this work is to construct authenticated encryption (AE) that is both committing and leakage-resilient. As a first approach for this we consider generic composition as a well-known method for constructing AE schemes. While the leakage resilience of generic composition schemes has already been analyzed by Barwell et al. (AC'17), for committing security this is not the case. We fill this gap by providing a separate analysis of the generic composition paradigms with respect to...
Aggregation of message authentication codes (MACs) is a proven and efficient method to preserve valuable bandwidth in resource-constrained environments: Instead of appending a long authentication tag to each message, the integrity protection of multiple messages is aggregated into a single tag. However, while such aggregation saves bandwidth, a single lost message typically means that authentication information for multiple messages cannot be verified anymore. With the significant increase...
The privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) has gained growing importance over the last few years. One of the biggest challenges is to improve the efficiency of PPML so that the communication and computation costs of PPML are affordable for large machine learning models such as deep learning. As we know, linear algebra such as matrix multiplication occupies a significant part of the computation in the deep learning such as deep convolutional neural networks (CNN). Thus, it is desirable to...
Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocols enable secure evaluation of a circuit by several parties, even in the presence of an adversary who maliciously corrupts all but one of the parties. These MPC protocols are constructed using the well-known secret-sharing-based paradigm (SPDZ and SPD$\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$), where the protocols ensure security against a malicious adversary by computing Message Authentication Code (MAC) tags on the input shares and then evaluating the circuit with these...
Security proofs of symmetric-key primitives typically consider an idealized world with access to a (uniformly) random function. The starting point of our work is the observation that such an ideal world can lead to underestimating the actual security of certain primitives. As a demonstrating example, $\mathsf{XoP2}$, which relies on two independent random permutations, has been proven to exhibit superior concrete security compared to $\mathsf{XoP}$, which employs a single permutation with...
At CRYPTO'18, Datta et al. proposed nPolyMAC and proved the security up to 2^{2n/3} authentication queries and 2^{n} verification queries. At EUROCRYPT'19, Dutta et al. proposed CWC+ and showed the security up to 2^{2n/3} queries. At FSE'19, Datta et al. proposed PolyMAC and its key-reduced variant 2k-PolyMAC, and showed the security up to 2^{2n/3} queries. This security bound was then improved by Kim et al. (EUROCRYPT'20) and Datta et al (FSE'23) respectively to 2^{3n/4} and in the...
Succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are a type of non-interactive proof system enabling efficient privacy-preserving proofs of membership for NP languages. A great deal of works has studied candidate constructions that are secure against quantum attackers, which are based on either lattice assumptions, or post-quantum collision-resistant hash functions. In this paper, we propose a code-based zk-SNARK scheme, whose security is based on the rank support...
Fault injection attacks represent an effective threat to embedded systems. Recently, Laurent et al. have reported that fault injection attacks can leverage faults inside the microarchitecture. However, state-of-the-art counter-measures, hardware-only or with hardware support, do not consider the integrity of microarchitecture control signals that are the target of these faults. We present MAFIA, a microarchitecture protection against fault injection attacks. MAFIA ensures integrity of...
Quantum attacks using superposition queries are known to break many classically secure modes of operation. While these attacks do not necessarily threaten the security of the modes themselves, since they rely on a strong adversary model, they help us to draw limits on the provable security of these modes. Typically these attacks use the structure of the mode (stream cipher, MAC or authenticated encryption scheme) to embed a period-finding problem, which can be solved with a dedicated...
Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) supports fast and scalable interactive Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. Despite recent improvements to VOLE-based ZK, compiling proof statements to a control-flow oblivious form (e.g., a circuit) continues to lead to expensive proofs. One useful setting where this inefficiency stands out is when the statement is a disjunction of clauses L1 ∨ · · · ∨ LB. Typically, ZK requires paying the price to handle all B branches. Prior works have shown how to avoid...
In this paper, we propose LOL, a general framework for designing blockwise stream ciphers, to achieve ultrafast software implementations for the ubiquitous virtual networks in 5G/6G environments and high-security level for post-quantum cryptography. The LOL framework is structurally strong, and all its components as well as the LOL framework itself enjoy high flexibility with various extensions. Following the LOL framework, we propose new stream cipher designs named LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE...
Deploying cryptography on embedded systems requires security against physical attacks. At CHES 2019, M&M was proposed as a combined countermeasure applying masking against SCAs and information-theoretic MAC tags against FAs. In this paper, we show that one of the protected AES implementations in the M&M paper is vulnerable to a zero-value SIFA2-like attack. A practical attack is demonstrated on an ASIC board. We propose two versions of the attack: the first follows the SIFA approach to...
We show that the key agreement scheme [IEEE Internet Things J., 9(12), 2022, 9918--9933] is flawed. In order to authenticate each other, all participants use message authentication code (MAC) to generate tags for exchanged data. But MAC is a cryptographic technique which requires that the sender and receiver share a symmetric key. The scheme tries to establish a new shared key by using an old shared key, which results in a vicious circle. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time...
Proving security bounds in contexts with a large number of users is one of the central problems in symmetric-key cryptography today. This paper introduces a new method for information-theoretic multi-user security proofs, called ``the Squared-Ratio Method''. At its core, the method requires the expectation of the square of the ratio of observing the so-called good transcripts (from Patarin's H-coefficient technique) in the real and the ideal world. Central to the method is the...
In 2013, the Snowden revelations have shown subversion of cryptographic implementations to be a relevant threat. Since then, the academic community has been pushing the development of models and constructions to defend against adversaries able to arbitrarily subvert cryptographic implementations. To capture these strong capabilities of adversaries, Russell, Tang, Yung, and Zhou (CCS'17) proposed CPA-secure encryption in a model that utilizes a trusted party called a watchdog testing an...
Authenticated Encryption (AE) achieves privacy and authenticity with a single scheme. It is possible to obtain an AE scheme gluing together an encryption scheme (privacy secure) and a Message Authentication Code (authenticity secure). This approach is called generic composition and its security has been studied by Namprempre et al. [NRS14]. They looked into all the possible gluings of an encryption scheme with a secure MAC to obtain a nonce-based AE-scheme. The encryption scheme is...
NIST selected the A SCON family of cryptographic primitives for standardization in February 2023 as the final step in the Lightweight Cryptography Competition. The ASCON submission to the competition provided Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), hashing, and Extensible Output Function (XOF) modes. Real world cryptography systems often need more than packet encryption and simple hashing. Keyed message authentication, key derivation, cryptographically secure pseudo-random...
Fuzzy extractors (FE) are cryptographic primitives that establish a shared secret between two parties who have similar samples of a random source, and can communicate over a public channel. An example for this is that Alice has a stored biometric at a server and wants to have authenticated communication using a new reading of her biometric on her device. Reusability and robustness of FE, respectively, guarantee that security holds when FE is used with multiple samples, and the communication...
We study the post-quantum security of authenticated encryption (AE) schemes, designed with classical security in mind. Under superposition attacks, many CBC-MAC variants have been broken, and AE modes employing those variants, such as EAX and GCM, thus fail at authenticity. As we show, the same modes are IND-qCPA insecure, i.e., they fail to provide privacy under superposition attacks. However, a constrained version of GCM is IND-qCPA secure, and a nonce-based variant of the CBC-MAC is...
In this paper, we consider tight multi-user security under adaptive corruptions, where the adversary can adaptively corrupt some users and obtain their secret keys. We propose generic constructions for a bunch of primitives, and the instantiations from the matrix decision Diffie-Hellman (MDDH) assumptions yield the following schemes: (1) the first digital signature (SIG) scheme achieving almost tight strong EUF-CMA security in the multi-user setting with adaptive corruptions in the...
An important research direction in secure multi-party computation (MPC) is to improve the efficiency of the protocol. One idea that has recently received attention is to consider a slightly weaker security model than full malicious security -- the so-called setting of $\textit{covert security}$. In covert security, the adversary may cheat but only is detected with certain probability. Several works in covert security consider the offline/online approach, where during a costly offline phase...
In this paper, we investigate the security of several recent MAC constructions with provable security beyond the birthday bound (called BBB MACs) in the quantum setting. On the one hand, we give periodic functions corresponding to targeted MACs (including PMACX, PMAC with parity, HPxHP, and HPxNP), and we can recover secret states using Simon algorithm, leading to forgery attacks with complexity $O(n)$. This implies our results realize an exponential speedup compared with the classical...
EDHOC is a lightweight authenticated key exchange protocol for IoT communication, currently being standardized by the IETF. Its design is a trimmed-down version of similar protocols like TLS 1.3, building on the SIGn-then-MAc (SIGMA) rationale. In its trimming, however, EDHOC notably deviates from the SIGMA design by sending only short, non-unique credential identifiers, and letting recipients perform trial verification to determine the correct communication partner. Done naively, this can...
This paper analyses the lightweight, sponge-based NAEAD mode $\textsf{ISAP}$, one of the finalists of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardisation project, that achieves high-throughput with inherent protection against differential power analysis (DPA). We observe that $\textsf{ISAP}$ requires $256$-bit capacity in the authentication module to satisfy the NIST LWC security criteria. In this paper, we study the analysis carefully and observe that this is primarily due to the...
At SAC 2011, Bertoni et al. introduced the keyed duplex construction as a tool to build permutation based authenticated encryption schemes. The construction was generalized to full-state absorption by Mennink et al. (ASIACRYPT 2015). Daemen et al. (ASIACRYPT 2017) generalized it further to cover much more use cases, and proved security of this general construction, and Dobraunig and Mennink (ASIACRYPT 2019) derived a leakage resilience security bound for this construction. Due to its...
Constructions based on two public permutation calls are very common in today’s cryptographic community. However, each time a new construction is introduced, a dedicated proof must be carried out to study the security of the construction. In this work, we propose a new tool to analyze the security of these constructions in a modular way. This tool is built on the idea of the classical mirror theory for block cipher based constructions, such that it can be used for security proofs in the ideal...
OMAC --- a single-keyed variant of CBC-MAC by Iwata and Kurosawa --- is a widely used and standardized (NIST FIPS 800-38B, ISO/IEC 29167-10:2017) message authentication code (MAC) algorithm. The best security bound for OMAC is due to Nandi who proved that OMAC's pseudorandom function (PRF) advantage is upper bounded by $ O(q^2\ell/2^n) $, where $ n $, $ q $, and $ \ell $, denote the block size of the underlying block cipher, the number of queries, and the maximum permissible query length (in...
Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Exchange (PPAKE) provides protection both for the session keys and the identity information of the involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the concept of robustness into PPAKE. Robustness enables each user to confirm whether itself is the target recipient of the first round message in the protocol. With the help of robustness, a PPAKE protocol can successfully avoid the heavy redundant communications and computations caused by the ambiguity of...
Doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed functions (deck) generalize the concept of message authentication codes (MAC) and stream ciphers in that they support variable-length strings as input and return variable-length strings as output. A prominent example of building deck functions is Farfalle, which consists of a set of public permutations and rolling functions that are used in its compression and expansion layers. By generalizing the compression layer of Farfalle, we prove its universality...
Security against side-channels and faults is a must for the deployment of embedded cryptography. A wide body of research has investigated solutions to secure implementations against these attacks at different abstraction levels. Yet, to a large extent, current solutions focus on one or the other threat. In this paper, we initiate a mode-level study of cryptographic primitives that can ensure security in a (new and practically-motivated) adversarial model combining leakage and faults. Our...
The tweakable Even-Mansour construction yields a tweakable block cipher from a public random permutation. We prove post-quantum security of tweakable Even-Mansour when attackers have quantum access to the random permutation but only classical access to the secretly-keyed construction, the relevant setting for most real-world applications. We then use our results to prove post-quantum security—in the same model—of the symmetric-key schemes Chaskey (an ISO-standardized MAC), Elephant (an AEAD...
Implementation-based attacks are major concerns for modern cryptography. For symmetric-key cryptography, a significant amount of exploration has taken place in this regard for primitives such as block ciphers. Concerning symmetric-key operating modes, such as Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), the state- of-the-art mainly addresses the passive Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) in the form of leakage resilient cryptography. So far, only a handful of work address Fault Attacks (FA)...
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...
A secure $n$-bit tweakable block cipher~(TBC) using $t$-bit tweaks can be modeled as a tweakable uniform random permutation, where each tweak defines an independent random $n$-bit permutation. When an input to this tweakable permutation is fixed, it can be viewed as a perfectly secure $t$-bit random function. On the other hand, when a tweak is fixed, it can be viewed as a perfectly secure $n$-bit random permutation, and it is well known that the sum of two random permutations is...
We analyze the multi-user (mu) security of a family of nonce-based authentication encryption (nAE) schemes based on a tweakable block cipher (TBC). The starting point of our work is an analysis of the mu security of the SCT-2 mode which underlies the nAE scheme Deoxys-II, winner of the CAESAR competition for the defense-in-depth category. We extend this analysis in two directions, as we detail now. First, we investigate the mu security of several TBC-based variants of the counter...
The dream of software obfuscation is to take programs, as they are, and then generically compile them into obfuscated versions that hide their secret inner workings. In this work we investigate notions of obfuscations weaker than virtual black-box (VBB) but which still allow obfuscating cryptographic primitives preserving their original functionalities as much as possible. In particular we propose two new notions of obfuscations, which we call oracle-differing-input obfuscation (odiO) and...
3kf9 is a three-key CBC-type MAC that enhances the standardized integrity algorithm f9 (3GPP-MAC). It has beyond-birthday-bound security and is expected to be a possible candidate in constrained environments when instantiated with lightweight blockciphers. Two variants 2kf9 and 1kf9 were proposed to reduce key size for efficiency, but recently, Leurent et al. (CRYPTO'18) and Shen et al. (CRYPTO'21) pointed out critical flaws on these two variants and invalidated their security proofs with...
Selective opening (SO) security is one of the most important security notions of public key encryption (PKE) in a multi-user setting. Even though messages and random coins used in some ciphertexts are leaked, SO security guarantees the confidentiality of the other ciphertexts. Actually, it is shown that there exist PKE schemes which meet the standard security such as indistinguishability against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA security) but do not meet SO security against chosen...
This work describes a class of Algorithm Substitution Attack (ASA) generically targeting the receiver of a communication between two parties. Our work provides a unified framework that applies to any scheme where a secret key is held by the receiver; in particular, message authentication schemes (MACs), authenticated encryption (AEAD) and public key encryption (PKE). Our unified framework brings together prior work targeting MAC schemes and AEAD schemes; we extend prior work by showing that...
We describe a new secure storage scheme that facilitates deduplication. The scheme is also proved secure in the universal-composability model. It is a single server scheme, and the basic scheme does not prevent against off-line dictionary attacks if the server is compromised. However, if a global secret key is shared amongst users of the organization, and this key is never stored at the server, we also get protection against off-line dictionary attacks even if the server is compromised. The...
Property-preserving hash (PPH) function is a class of hash functions that allows an evaluation of the property of inputs from their hash values. Boyle et al. at ITCS 2019 recently introduced it and considered the robustness of PPH against an adversary who accesses the internal randomness of PPH, and proposed two robust PPH constructions for a weak form of Hamming distance predicate. The second construction received attention for its short hash value, although it relies on an ad-hoc security...
TrCBC is a variant of CBC-MAC which appeared in Information Processing Letters, 112(7):302-307, 2012. The authors claimed TrCBC to be a secure message authentication code (MAC) with some interesting properties. If TrCBC is instantiated with a block cipher with block length n, then it requires ⌈λ/n⌉ block cipher calls for authenticating a λ-bit message and requires a single key, which is the block cipher key. The authors state that TrCBC can have tag lengths of size less than n/2. We show...
Onion routing is a popular approach towards anonymous communication. Practical implementations are widely used (for example, Tor has millions of users daily), but are vulnerable to various traffic correlation attacks, and the theoretical foundations, despite recent progress, still lag behind. In particular, all works that model onion routing protocols and prove their security only address a single run, where each party sends and receives a single message of fixed length, once. Moreover,...
Double-block Hash-then-Sum (DbHtS) MACs are a class of MACs achieve beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security, including SUM-ECBC, PMAC_Plus, 3kf9 and LightMAC_Plus etc. Recently, Shen et al. (Crypto 2021) proposed a security framework for two-key DbHtS MACs in the multi-user setting, stating that when the underlying blockcipher is ideal and the universal hash function is regular and almost universal, the two-key DbHtS MACs achieve 2n/3-bit security. Unfortunately, the regular and universal...
At CRYPTO 2019, Chen et al. have shown a beyond the birthday bound secure $n$-bit to $n$-bit PRF based on public random permutations. Followed by the work, Dutta and Nandi have proposed a beyond the birthday bound secure nonce based MAC $\textsf{nEHtM}_p$ based on public random permutation. In particular, the authors have shown that $\textsf{nEHtM}_p$ achieves tight $2n/3$-bit security ({\em with respect to the state size of the permutation}) in the single-user setting, and their proven...
One of the most significant challenges is the secure user authentication. If it becomes breached, confidentiality and integrity of the data or services may be compromised. The most widespread solution for entity authentication is the password-based scheme. It is easy to use and deploy. During password registration typically users create or activate their account along with their password through their verification email, and service providers are authenticated based on their SSL/TLS...
Related-key attacks (RKA) are powerful cryptanalytic attacks, where the adversary can tamper with the secret key of a cryptographic scheme. Since their invention, RKA security has been an important design goal in cryptography, and various works aim at designing cryptographic primitives that offer protection against related-key attacks. At EUROCRYPT'03, Bellare and Kohno introduced the first formal treatment of related-key attacks focusing on pseudorandom functions and permutations. This was...
The concept of lightweight cryptography has gained in popularity recently, also due to various competitions and standardization efforts specifically targeting more efficient algorithms, which are also easier to implement. One of the important properties of lightweight constructions is the area of a hardware implementation, or in other words, the size of the implementation in a particular environment. Reducing the area usually has multiple advantages like decreased production cost or lower...
A growing number of lightweight block ciphers are proposed for environments such as the Internet of Things. An important contribution to the reduced implementation cost is a block length n of 64 or 96 bits rather than 128 bits. As a consequence, encryption modes and message authentication code (MAC) algorithms require security beyond the 2^{n/2} birthday bound. This paper provides an extensive treatment of MAC algorithms that offer beyond birthday bound PRF security for both nonce-respecting...
In this paper, we formulate a new framework of cryptanalysis called rotational-linear attack on ARX ciphers. We firstly build an efficient distinguisher for the cipher $ E$ consisted of the rotational attack and the linear attack together with some intermediate variables. Then a key recovery technique is introduced with which we can recover some bits of the last whitening key in the related-key scenario. To decrease data complexity of our attack, we also apply a new method, called bit...
The cipher suite Ascon v1.2 already provides authenticated encryption schemes, hash, and extendable output functions. Furthermore, the underlying permutation is also used in two instances of Isap v2.0, an authenticated encryption scheme designed to provide enhanced robustness against side-channel and fault attacks. In this paper, we enrich the functionality one can get out of Ascon's permutation by providing efficient Pseudorandom Functions (PRFs), a Message Authentication Code (MAC) and a...
In CRYPTO'16, Cogliati and Seurin proposed a block cipher based nonce based MAC, called {\em Encrypted Wegman-Carter with Davies-Meyer} (\textsf{EWCDM}), that gives $2n/3$ bit MAC security in the nonce respecting setting and $n/2$ bit security in the nonce misuse setting, where $n$ is the block size of the underlying block cipher. However, this construction requires two independent block cipher keys. In CRYPTO'18, Datta et al. came up with a single-keyed block cipher based nonce based MAC,...
Energy efficiency is critical in battery-driven devices, and designing energy- optimal symmetric-key ciphers is one of the goals for the use of ciphers in such environments. In the paper by Banik et al. (IACR ToSC 2018), stream ciphers were identified as ideal candidates for low-energy solutions. One of the main conclusions of this paper was that Trivium, when implemented in an unrolled fashion, was by far the most energy-efficient way of encrypting larger quantity of data. In fact, it was...
Message Authentication Code or MAC, is a well-studied cryptographic primitive that is used in order to authenticate communication between two parties sharing a secret key. A Tokenized MAC or TMAC is a related cryptographic primitive, introduced by Ben-David & Sattath (QCrypt'17) which allows limited signing authority to be delegated to third parties via the use of single-use quantum signing tokens. These tokens can be issued using the secret key, such that each token can be used to sign at...
In this work, we show how weak key forgeries against polynomial hash based Authenticated Encryption (AE) schemes, such as AES-GCM, can be leveraged to launch partitioning oracle attacks. Partitioning oracle attacks were recently introduced by Len et al. (Usenix'21) as a new class of decryption error oracle which, conceptually, takes a ciphertext as input and outputs whether or not the decryption key belongs to some known subset of keys. Partitioning oracle attacks allow an adversary to query...
A large number of the symmetric-key mode of operations, such as classical CBC-MAC, have serial structures. While a serial mode gives an implementation advantage in terms of required memory or footprint compared to the parallel counterparts, it wastes the capability of parallel process even when it is available. The problem is becoming more relevant as lightweight cryptography is going to be deployed in the real world. In this article, we propose an alternative implementation strategy for...
EasyCrypt is a formal verification tool used extensively for formalizing concrete security proofs of cryptographic constructions. However, the EasyCrypt formal logics consider only classical attackers, which means that post-quantum security proofs cannot be formalized and machine-checked with this tool. In this paper we prove that a natural extension of the EasyCrypt core logics permits capturing a wide class of post-quantum cryptography proofs, settling a question raised by (Unruh, POPL...
The security proofs of leakage-resilient MACs based on symmetric building blocks currently rely on idealized assumptions that hardly translate into interpretable guidelines for the cryptographic engineers implementing these schemes. In this paper, we first present a leakage-resilient MAC that is both efficient and secure under standard and easily interpretable black box and physical assumptions. It only requires a collision resistant hash function and a single call per message...
We revisit one of the most fundamental hardness amplification constructions, originally proposed by Yao (FOCS 1982). We present a hardness amplification theorem for the direct product of certain games that is simpler, more general, and stronger than previously known hardness amplification theorems of the same kind. Our focus is two-fold. First, we aim to provide close-to-optimal concrete bounds, as opposed to asymptotic ones. Second, in the spirit of abstraction and reusability, our goal is...
Robust (fuzzy) extractors are very useful for, e.g., authenticated exchange from shared weak secret and remote biometric authentication against active adversaries. They enable two parties to extract the same uniform randomness with the ``helper'' string. More importantly, they have an authentication mechanism built in that tampering of the ``helper'' string will be detected. Unfortunately, as shown by Dodis and Wichs, in the information-theoretic setting, a robust extractor for an...
LightMAC is a lightweight MAC designed by Luykx et al. and recently standardized by ISO/IEC. In this paper, we refine LightMAC and suggest two simple variants called LedMAC1 and LedMAC2. Compared to LightMAC, our first scheme LedMAC1 avoids unnecessary padding without sacrificing the security. Our second scheme LedMAC2 further reduces the number of keys from two to one, and achieves the same level security as that of LightMAC.
Key dependent message (KDM) security is a security notion that guarantees confidentiality of communication even if secret keys are encrypted. KDM security has found a number of applications in practical situations such as hard-disk encryption systems, anonymous credentials, and bootstrapping of fully homomorphic encryptions. Recently, it also found an application in quantum delegation protocols as shown by Zhang (TCC 2019). In this work, we investigate the KDM security of existing practical...
Affine message authentication code (AMAC) (CRYPTO'14) is a group-based MAC with a specific algebraic structure. Downgradable AMAC (DAMAC) (CT-RSA'19) is an AMAC with a functionality that we can downgrade a message with an authentication tag while retaining validity of the tag. In this paper, we revisit DAMAC for two independent applications, namely downgradable identity-based signatures (DIBS) and trapdoor sanitizable signatures (TSS) (ACNS'08). DIBS are the digital signature analogue of...
LightMAC, by Luykx et al., is a block cipher based message authentication code (MAC). The simplicity of design and low overhead allows it to have very compact implementations. As a result, it has been recently chosen as an ISO/IEC standard MAC for lightweight applications. LightMAC has been shown to achieve query length independent security bound of $O(q^2/2^n)$ when instantiated with two independently keyed $n$-bit block ciphers, where $q$ denotes the number of MAC queries and the...
Data and signal authentication schemes are being proposed to address Global Navigation Satellite Systems' (GNSS) vulnerability to spoofing. Due to the low power of their signals, the bandwidth available for authentication in GNSS is scarce. Since delayed-disclosure protocols, e.g., TESLA (timed-efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication), are efficient in terms of bandwidth and robust to signal impairments, they have been proposed and implemented by GNSS. The length of message...
We propose HERMES, a scalable, secure, and privacy-enhancing system for users to share and access vehicles. HERMES securely outsources operations of vehicle access token generation to a set of untrusted servers. It builds on an earlier proposal, namely SePCAR [1], and extends the system design for improved efficiency and scalability. To cater to system and user needs for secure and private computations, HERMES utilizes and combines several cryptographic primitives with secure multiparty...
We present MAGIC, a mode for authenticated encryption that simultaneously supports encryption, message authentication and error correction, all with the same code. In MAGIC, the same code employed for cryptographic integrity is also the parity used for error correction. To correct errors, MAGIC employs the Galois Hash transformation, which due to its bit linearity can perform corrections in a similar way as other codes do (e.g., Reed Solomon). To provide a cryptographically strong MAC, MAGIC...
Nextcloud provides a server side encryption feature that is implemented by the Default Encryption Module. This paper presents cryptographic vulnerabilities that existed within the Default Encryption Module as well as other shortcomings that still need to be addressed. The vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to break the provided confidentiality and integrity protection guarantees. There is a high risk that ownCloud also contains some of the issues presented in this paper as it still has...
We present the first complete implementation of the offline Simon's algorithm, and estimate its cost to attack the MAC Chaskey, the block cipher PRINCE and the NIST lightweight candidate AEAD scheme Elephant. These attacks require a reasonable amount of qubits, comparable to the number of qubits required to break RSA-2048. They are faster than other collision algorithms, and the attacks against PRINCE and Chaskey are the most efficient known to date. As Elephant has a key smaller than its...
Memory encryption with an authentication tree has received significant attentions due to the increasing threats of active attacks and the widespread use of non-volatile memories. It is also gradually deployed to real-world systems, as shown by SGX available in Intel processors. The topic of memory encryption has been recently extensively studied, most actively from the viewpoint of system architecture. In this paper, we study the topic from the viewpoint of provable secure symmetric-key...
It was long thought that symmetric cryptography was only mildly affected by quantum attacks, and that doubling the key length was sufficient to restore security. However, recent works have shown that Simon's quantum period finding algorithm breaks a large number of MAC and authenticated encryption algorithms when the adversary can query the MAC/encryption oracle with a quantum superposition of messages. In particular, the OCB authenticated encryption mode is broken in this setting, and no...
In this paper, we propose a formal security model and a construction methodology of interactive aggregate message authentication with detecting functionality (IAMD). The IAMD is an interactive aggregate MAC protocol which can identify invalid messages with a small amount of tag-size. Several aggregate MAC schemes that can specify invalid messages has been proposed so far by using non-adaptive group testing in the prior work. In this paper, we utilize adaptive group testing to construct IAMD...
In this paper, we prove that the nonce-based enhanced hash-then-mask MAC ($\mathsf{nEHtM}$) is secure up to $2^{\frac{3n}{4}}$ MAC queries and $2^n$ verification queries (ignoring logarithmic factors) as long as the number of faulty queries $\mu$ is below $2^\frac{3n}{8}$, significantly improving the previous bound by Dutta et al. Even when $\mu$ goes beyond $2^{\frac{3n}{8}}$, $\mathsf{nEHtM}$ enjoys graceful degradation of security. The second result is to prove the security of PRF-based...
Subterranean 2.0 is a cipher suite that can be used for hashing, authenticated encryption, MAC computation, etc. It was designed by Daemen, Massolino, Mehrdad, and Rotella, and has been selected as a candidate in the second round of NIST's lightweight cryptography standardization process. Subterranean 2.0 is a duplex-based construction and utilizes a single-round permutation in the duplex. It is the simplicity of the round function that makes it an attractive target of cryptanalysis. In...
In EUROCRYPT '96, Aiello and Venkatesan proposed two candidates for $ 2n $-bit to $ 2n $-bit pseudorandom functions (PRFs), called Benes and modified Benes (or mBenes), based on $ n $-bit to $ n $-bit PRFs. While Benes is known to be secure up to $ 2^n $ queries (Patarin, AFRICACRYPT '08), the security of mBenes has only been proved up to $ 2^{n(1-\epsilon)} $ queries for all $ \epsilon > 0 $ by Patarin and Montreuil in ICISC '05. In this work, we show that the composition of a $ 2n $-bit...
We consider the security of two of the most commonly used cryptographic primitives—message authentication codes (MACs) and pseudorandom functions (PRFs)—in a multi-user setting with adaptive corruption. Whereas is it well known that any secure MAC or PRF is also multi-user secure under adaptive corruption, the trivial reduction induces a security loss that is linear in the number of users. Our main result shows that black-box reductions from “standard” assumptions cannot be used to provide a...
We provide a novel electro-magnetic (EM) side-channel resistant symmetric-key authentication mechanism for small devices that uses a Benes network to permute the on-board authentication-key before computing a MAC of a challenge with the key. The permutation itself is derived from the challenge using a hash function acting as a random oracle. The solution has interesting applications such as forgery detection of currency bills.
PMAC is a rate-1, parallelizable, block-cipher-based message authentication code (MAC), proposed by Black and Rogaway (EUROCRYPT 2002). Improving the security bound is a main research topic for PMAC. In particular, showing a tight bound is the primary goal of the research, since Luykx et al.'s paper (EUROCRYPT 2016). Regarding the pseudo-random-function (PRF) security of PMAC, a collision of the hash function, or the difference between a random permutation and a random function offers the...
We present a new methodology for building formally verified cryptographic libraries that are optimized for multiple architectures. In particular, we show how to write and verify generic crypto code in the F* programming language that exploits single-instruction multiple data (SIMD) parallelism. We show how this code can be compiled to platforms that supports vector instructions, including ARM Neon and Intel AVX, AVX2, and AVX512. We apply our methodology to obtain verified vectorized...
In this paper we analyse the algorithm Chaskey - a lightweight MAC algorithm for 32-bit micro controllers - with respect to rotational cryptanalysis. We perform a related-key attack over Chaskey and find a distinguisher by using rotational probabilities. Having a message $m$ we can forge and present a valid tag for some message under a related key with probability $2^{-57}$ for 8 rounds and $2^{-86}$ for all 12 rounds of the permutation for keys in a defined weak-key class. This attack can...
In the recent trend of CAESAR competition and NIST light-weight competition, cryptographic community have witnessed the submissions of several cryptographic schemes that are build on public random permutations. Recently, in CRYPTO 2019, Chen et al. have initiated an interesting research direction in designing beyond birthday bound PRFs from public random permutations and they proposed two instances of such PRFs. In this work, we extend this research direction by proposing a nonce-based MAC...
The Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) primitive, which integrates confidentiality and integrity services under a single roof, found wide-spread adoption in industry and became indispensable in practical protocol design. Recognizing this, academic research put forward a large number of candidate constructions, many of which come with provable security guarantees. Nevertheless, the recent past has shaken up with the discovery of vulnerabilities, some of them fatal, in...
This paper explores the design space of secure communication in ultra-low-energy IoT devices based on Micro-Controller Units (MCUs). It tries to identify, evaluate and compare security-related design choices in a Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) embedded IoT system which contribute in the energy consumption. We conduct a study over a large group of software-implemented crypto algorithms: symmetric, stream, hash, AEAD, MAC, digital signature and key exchange. A comprehensive report of the...
Password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) allows two parties with a shared password to agree on a session key. In the last decade, the design of PAKE protocols from lattice assumptions has attracted lots of attention. However, existing solutions in the standard model do not have appealing efficiency. In this work, we first introduce a new PAKE framework. We then provide two realizations in the standard model, under the Learning With Errors (LWE) and Ring-LWE assumptions,...
We study anonymity of probabilistic encryption (pE) and probabilistic authenticated encryption (pAE). We start by providing concise game-based security definitions capturing anonymity for both pE and pAE, and then show that the commonly used notion of indistinguishability from random ciphertexts (IND\($\)) indeed implies the anonymity notions for both pE and pAE. This is in contrast to a recent work of Chan and Rogaway (Asiacrypt 2019), where it is shown that IND\($\)-secure nonce-based...
We present efficient and compact hardware/software co-design implementations of the Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). In order to be better equipped for different post-quantum scenarios, our architectures were designed to feature high-flexibility by covering all the currently available parameter sets and with support for primes up to 1008 bits. In particular, any of the current SIKE parameters equivalent to the post-quantum...
We investigate constructing message authentication schemes from symmetric cryptographic primitives, with the goal of achieving security when most intermediate values during tag computation and verification are leaked (i.e., mode-level leakage-resilience). Existing efficient proposals typically follow the plain Hash-then-MAC paradigm $T=MAC_K(H(M))$. When the domain of the MAC function $MAC_K$ is $\{0,1\}^{128}$, e.g., when instantiated with the AES, forgery is possible within time $2^{64}$...