International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Universal hash functions based on univariate polynomials are well known, e.g. Poly1305 and GHASH. Using Horner’s rule to evaluate such hash functionsrequire l − 1 field multiplications for hashing a message consisting of l blocks where each block is one field element. A faster method is based on the class of Bernstein-Rabin-Winograd (BRW) polynomials which require ⌊l/2⌋ multiplications and ⌊lgl⌋ squarings for l≥3 blocks. Though this is significantly smaller than Horner’s rule based hashing, implementation of BRW polynomials for variable length messages present significant difficulties. In this work, we propose a two-level hash function where BRW polynomial based hashing is done at the lower level and Horner’s rule based hashing is done at the higher level. The BRW polynomial based hashing is applied to a fixed number of blocks and hence the difficulties in handling variable length messages is avoided. Even though the hash function has two levels, we show that it is sufficient to use a single field element as the hash key. The basic idea is instantiated to propose two new hash functions, one which hashes a single binary string and the other can hash a vector of binary strings. We describe two actual implementations, one over F2128 and the other over F2256 both using the pclmulqdq instruction available in modern Intel processors. On both the Haswell and Skylake processors, the implementation over F2128 is faster than both an implementation of GHASH by Gueron; and a highly optimised implementation, also by Gueron, of another polynomial based hash function called POLYVAL. We further show that the Fast Fourier Transform based field multiplication over F2256 proposed by Bernstein and Chou can be used to evaluate the new hash function at a cost of about at most 46 bit operations per bit of digest, but, unlike the Bernstein-Chou analysis, there is no hidden cost of generating the hash key. More generally, the new idea of building a two-level hash function having a single field element as the hash key can be applied to other finite fields to build new hash functions.

Classification of vectorial Boolean functions up to affine equivalence is used widely to analyze various cryptographic and implementation properties of symmetric-key algorithms. We show that there exist 75 affine equivalence classes of 5-bit quadratic permutations. Furthermore, we explore important cryptographic properties of these classes, such as linear and differential properties and degrees of their inverses, together with multiplicative complexity and existence of uniform threshold realizations.

In this article, we provide the first independent security analysis of Deoxys, a third-round authenticated encryption candidate of the CAESAR competition, and its internal tweakable block ciphers Deoxys-BC-256 and Deoxys-BC-384. We show that the related-tweakey differential bounds provided by the designers can be greatly improved thanks to a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) based search tool. In particular, we develop a new method to incorporate linear incompatibility in the MILP model. We use this tool to generate valid differential paths for reduced-round versions of Deoxys-BC-256 and Deoxys-BC-384, later combining them into broader boomerang or rectangle attacks. Here, we also develop a new MILP model which optimises the two paths by taking into account the effect of the ladder switch technique. Interestingly, with the tweak in Deoxys-BC providing extra input as opposed to a classical block cipher, we can even consider beyond full-codebook attacks. As these primitives are based on the TWEAKEY framework, we further study how the security of the cipher is impacted when playing with the tweak/key sizes. All in all, we are able to attack 10 rounds of Deoxys-BC-256 (out of 14) and 13 rounds of Deoxys-BC-384 (out of 16). The extra rounds specified in Deoxys-BC to balance the tweak input (when compared to AES) seem to provide about the same security margin as AES-128. Finally we analyse why the authenticated encryption modes of Deoxys mostly prevent our attacks on Deoxys-BC to apply to the authenticated encryption primitive.

Impossible differential attacks, which are taking advantage of differentials that cannot occur, are powerful attacks for block cipher primitives. The power of such attacks is often measured in terms of the advantage — number of key-bits found during the key sieving phase — which determines the time complexity of the exhaustive key search phase. The statistical model used to compute this advantage has been introduced in the seminal work about the resistance of the DEAL cipher to impossible differential attacks. This model, which has not been modified since the end of the 1990s, is implicitly based on the Poisson approximation of the binomial distribution. In this paper, we investigate this commonly used model and experimentally illustrate that random permutations do not follow it. Based on this observation, we propose more accurate estimates of the advantage of an impossible differential attack. The experiments illustrate the accuracy of the estimate derived from the multivariate hypergeometric distribution. The maximal advantage –using the full codebook– of an impossible differential attack is also derived.

Random number generators (RNGs) are essential for cryptographic applications. In most practical applications, the randomness of RNGs is provided by entropy sources. If the randomness is less than the expected, the security of cryptographic applications could be undermined. Accurate entropy estimation is a critical method for the evaluation of RNG security, and significant overestimation and underestimation are both inadvisable. The NIST Special Publication 800-90B is one of the most common certifications for entropy estimation. It makes no assumption of the entropy source and provides min-entropy estimation results by a set of entropy estimators. It estimates the entropy sources in two tracks: the IID (independent and identically distributed) track and non-IID track. In practice, non-IID entropy sources are more common, as physical phenomenon, sampling process or external perturbation could cause the dependency of the outputs. In this paper, we prove that the Collision Estimate and the Compression Estimate in non-IID track could provide significant underestimates in theory. In order to accurately estimate the min-entropy of non-IID sources, we provide a formula of minentropybased on conditional probability, and propose a new estimator to approximate the result of this formula. Finally, we perform experiments to compare our estimator with the NIST estimators using simulated non-IID data. Results show that our estimator gives close estimates to the real min-entropy.

Search for different types of distinguishers are common tasks in symmetrickey cryptanalysis. In this work, we employ the constraint programming (CP) technique to tackle such problems. First, we show that a simple application of the CP approach proposed by Gerault et al. leads to the solution of the open problem of determining the exact lower bound of the number of active S-boxes for 6-round AES-128 in the related-key model. Subsequently, we show that the same approach can be applied in searching for integral distinguishers, impossible differentials, zero-correlation linear approximations, in both the single-key and related-(twea)key model. We implement the method using the open source constraint solver Choco and apply it to the block ciphers PRESENT, SKINNY, and HIGHT (ARX construction). As a result, we find 16 related-tweakey impossible differentials for 12-round SKINNY-64-128 based on which we construct an 18-round attack on SKINNY-64-128 (one target version for the crypto competition https://sites.google.com/site/skinnycipher announced at ASK 2016). Moreover, we show that in some cases, when equipped with proper strategies (ordering heuristic, restart and dynamic branching strategy), the CP approach can be very efficient. Therefore, we suggest that the constraint programming technique should become a convenient tool at hand of the symmetric-key cryptanalysts.

Whitebox cryptography aims to ensure the security of cryptographic algorithms in the whitebox model where the adversary has full access to the execution environment. To attain security in this setting is a challenging problem: Indeed, all published whitebox implementations of standard symmetric-key algorithms such as AES to date have been practically broken. However, as far as we know, no whitebox implementation in real-world products has suffered from a key recovery attack. This is due to the fact that commercial products deploy additional software protection mechanisms on top of the whitebox implementation. This makes practical attacks much less feasible in real-world applications. There are numerous software protection mechanisms which protect against standard whitebox attacks. One such technique is control flow obfuscation which randomizes the order of table lookups for each execution of the whitebox encryption module. Another technique is randomizing the locations of the various Look up tables (LUTs) in the memory address space. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of these countermeasures against two attack paradigms. The first known as Differential Computational Analysis (DCA) attack was developed by Bos, Hubain, Michiels and Teuwen in CHES 2016. The attack passively collects software execution traces for several plaintext encryptions and uses the collected data to perform an analysis similar to the well known differential power attacks (DPA) to recover the secret key. Since the software execution traces contain time demarcated physical addresses of memory locations being read/written into, they essentially leak the values of the inputs to the various LUTs accessed during the whitebox encryption operation, which as it turns out leaks sufficient information to perform the power attack. We found that if in addition to control flow obfuscation, one were to randomize the locations of the LUTs in the memory, then it is very difficult to perform the DCA on the resultant system using such table inputs and extract the secret key in reasonable time. As an alternative, we investigate the version of the DCA attack which uses the outputs of the tables instead of the inputs to mount the power analysis attack. This modified DCA is able to extract the secret key from the flow obfuscated and location randomized versions of several whitebox binaries available in crypto literature. We develop another attack called the Zero Difference Enumeration (ZDE) attack. The attack records software traces for several pairs of strategically selected plaintexts and performs a simple statistical test on the effective difference of the traces to extract the secret key. We show that ZDE is able to recover the keys of whitebox systems. Finally we propose a new countermeasure for protecting whitebox binaries based on insertion of random delays which aims to make both the ZDE and DCA attackspractically difficult by adding random noise in the information leaked to the attacker.

Discussions about the choice of a tree hash mode of operation for a standardization have recently been undertaken. It appears that a single tree mode cannot address adequately all possible uses and specifications of a system. In this paper, we review the tree modes which have been proposed, we discuss their problems and propose solutions. We make the reasonable assumption that communicating systems have different specifications and that software applications are of different types (securing stored content or live-streamed content). Finally, we propose new modes of operation that address the resource usage problem for three representative categories of devices and we analyse their asymptotic behavior.

We study the main cryptographic features of Boolean functions (balancedness, nonlinearity, algebraic immunity) when, for a given number n of variables, the input to these functions is restricted to some subset E of

This paper evaluates the secure level of authenticated encryption Ascon against cube-like method. Ascon submitted by Dobraunig et al. is one of 16 survivors of the 3rd round CAESAR competition. The cube-like method is first used by Dinur et al. to analyze Keccak keyed modes. At CT-RSA 2015, Dobraunig et al. applied this method to 5/6-round reduced Ascon, whose structure is similar to Keccak keyed modes. However, for Ascon the non-linear layer is more complex and state is much smaller, which make it hard for the attackers to select enough cube variables that do not multiply with each other after the first round. This seems to be the reason why the best previous key-recovery attack is on 6-round Ascon, while for Keccak keyed modes (Keccak-MAC and Keyak) the attacked round is no less than 7-round. In this paper, we generalize the conditional cube attack proposed by Huang et al., and find new cubes depending on some key bit conditions for 5/6-round reduced Ascon, and translate the previous theoretic 6-round attack with 266 time complexity to a practical one with 240 time complexity. Moreover, we propose the first 7-round key-recovery attack on Ascon. By introducing the cube-like key-subset technique, we divide the full key space into many subsets according to different key conditions. For each key subset, we launch the cube tester to determine if the key falls into it. Finally, we recover the full key space by testing all the key subsets. The total time complexity is about 2103.9. In addition, for a weak-key subset, whose size is 2117, the attack is more efficient and costs only 277 time complexity. Those attacks do not threaten the full round (12 rounds) Ascon.

In this paper, we show how to theoretically compute the step differential probability of RIPEMD-160 under the condition that only one internal variable contains difference and the difference is a power of 2. Inspired by the way of computing the differential probability, we can do message modification such that a step differential hold with probability 1. Moreover, we propose a semi-free-start collision attack on 48-step RIPEMD-160, which improves the best semi-free start collision by 6 rounds. This is mainly due to that some bits of the chaining variable in the i-th step can be computed by adding some conditions in advance, even though some chaining variables before step i are unknown. Therefore, the uncontrolled probability of the differential path is increased and the number of the needed starting points is decreased. Then a semi-free-start collision attack on 48-step RIPEMD-160 can be obtained based on the differential path constructed by Mendel et al. at ASIACRYPT 2013. The experiments confirm our reasoning and complexity analysis.

GOST 28147 is a 256-bit key 64-bit block cipher developed by the USSR, later adopted by the Russian government as a national standard. In 2010, GOST was suggested to be included in ISO/IEC 18033-3, but was rejected due to weaknesses found in its key schedule. In 2015, a new version of GOST was suggested with the purpose of mitigating such attacks. In this paper, we show that similar weaknesses exist in the new version as well. More specifically, we present a fixed-point attack on the full cipher with time complexity of 2237 encryptions. We also present a reflection attack with time complexity of 2192 for a key that is chosen from a class of 2224 weak keys. Finally, we discuss an impossible reflection attack which improves on exhaustive search by a factor of 2e, and several possible related-key attacks.

NORX is an authenticated encryption scheme with associated data being publicly scrutinized as part of the ongoing CAESAR competition, where 14 other primitives are also competing. It is based on the sponge construction and relies on a simple permutation that allows efficient and versatile implementations. Thanks to research on the security of the sponge construction, the design of NORX, whose permutation is inspired from the permutations used in BLAKE and ChaCha, has evolved throughout three main versions (v1.0, v2.0 and v3.0). In this paper, we investigate the security of the full NORX v2.0 primitive that has been accepted as third-round candidate in the CAESAR competition. We show that some non-conservative design decisions probably motivated by implementation efficiency considerations result in at least one strong structural distinguisher of the underlying sponge permutation that can be turned into an attack on the full primitive. This attack yields a ciphertext-only forgery with time and data complexity 266 (resp. 2130) for the variant of NORX v2.0 using 128-bit (resp. 256-bit) keys and breaks the designers’ claim of a 128-bit, resp. 256-bit security. Furthermore, we show that this forgery attack can be extended to a key-recovery attack on the full NORX v2.0 with the same time and data complexities. We have implemented and experimentally verified the correctness of the attacks on a toy version of NORX. We emphasize that the scheme has recently been tweaked to NORX v3.0 at the beginning of the third round of the CAESAR competition: the main change introduces some key-dependent internal operations, which make NORX v3.0 immune to our attacks. However, the structural distinguisher of the permutation persists.

At CT-RSA 2017, List and Nandi proposed two variable input length pseudorandom functions (VI-PRFs) called PMACx and PMAC2x, and a deterministic authenticated encryption scheme called SIVx. These schemes use a tweakable block cipher (TBC) as the underlying primitive, and are provably secure up to the query complexity of 2n, where n denotes the block length of the TBC. In this paper, we falsify the provable security claims by presenting concrete attacks. We show that with the query complexity of O(2n/2), i.e., with the birthday complexity, PMACx, PMAC2x, and SIVx are all insecure.

This paper studies the Keccak-based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme Ketje Sr against cube-like attacks. Ketje is one of the remaining 16 candidates of third round CAESAR competition, whose primary recommendation is Ketje Sr. Although the cube-like method has been successfully applied to Ketje’s sister ciphers, including Keccak-MAC and Keyak – another Keccak-based AE scheme, similar attacks are missing for Ketje. For Ketje Sr, the state (400-bit) is much smaller than Keccak-MAC and Keyak (1600-bit), thus the 128-bit key and cubes with the same dimension would occupy more lanes in Ketje Sr. Hence, the number of key bits independent of the cube sum is very small, which makes the divide-and-conquer method (it has been applied to 7-round attack on Keccak-MAC by Dinur et al.) can not be translated to Ketje Sr trivially. This property seems to be the barrier for the translation of the previous cube-like attacks to Ketje Sr. In this paper, we evaluate Ketje Sr against the divide-and-conquer method. Firstly, by applying the linear structure technique, we find some 32/64-dimension cubes of Ketje Sr that do not multiply with each other as well as some bits of the key in the first round. In addition, we introduce the new dynamic variable instead of the auxiliary variable (it was used in Dinur et al.’s divide-and-conquer attack to reduce the diffusion of the key) to reduce the diffusion of the key as well as the cube variables. Finally, we successfully launch a 6/7-round1 key recovery attack on Ketje Sr v1 and v2 (v2 is presented for the 3rd round CAESAR competition.). In 7-round attack, the complexity of online phase for Ketje Sr v1 is 2113, while for Ketje Sr v2, it is 297 (the preprocessing complexity is the same). We claim 7-round reduced Ketje Sr v2 is weaker than v1 against our attacks. In addition, some results on other Ketje instances and Ketje Sr with smaller nonce are given. Those are the first results on Ketje and bridge the gaps of cryptanalysis between its sister ciphers – Keyak and the Keccak keyed modes.

Near-MDS matrices provide better trade-offs between security and efficiency compared to constructions based on MDS matrices, which are favored for hardwareoriented designs. We present new designs of lightweight linear diffusion layers by constructing lightweight near-MDS matrices. Firstly generic n×n near-MDS circulant matrices are found for 5 ≤ n ≤9. Secondly, the implementation cost of instantiations of the generic near-MDS matrices is examined. Surprisingly, for n = 7, 8, it turns out that some proposed near-MDS circulant matrices of order n have the lowest XOR count among all near-MDS matrices of the same order. Further, for n = 5, 6, we present near-MDS matrices of order n having the lowest XOR count as well. The proposed matrices, together with previous construction of order less than five, lead to solutions of n×n near-MDS matrices with the lowest XOR count over finite fields F2m for 2 ≤ n ≤ 8 and 4 ≤ m ≤ 2048. Moreover, we present some involutory near-MDS matrices of order 8 constructed from Hadamard matrices. Lastly, the security of the proposed linear layers is studied by calculating lower bounds on the number of active S-boxes. It is shown that our linear layers with a well-chosen nonlinear layer can provide sufficient security against differential and linear cryptanalysis.

Many block ciphers use permutations defined over the finite field F22k with low differential uniformity, high nonlinearity, and high algebraic degree to provide confusion. Due to the lack of knowledge about the existence of almost perfect nonlinear (APN) permutations over F22k, which have lowest possible differential uniformity, when k > 3, constructions of differentially 4-uniform permutations are usually considered. However, it is also very difficult to construct such permutations together with high nonlinearity; there are very few known families of such functions, which can have the best known nonlinearity and a high algebraic degree. At Crypto’16, Perrin et al. introduced a structure named butterfly, which leads to permutations over F22k with differential uniformity at most 4 and very high algebraic degree when k is odd. It is posed as an open problem in Perrin et al.’s paper and solved by Canteaut et al. that the nonlinearity is equal to 22k−1−2k. In this paper, we extend Perrin et al.’s work and study the functions constructed from butterflies with exponent e = 2i + 1. It turns out that these functions over F22k with odd k have differential uniformity at most 4 and algebraic degree k +1. Moreover, we prove that for any integer i and odd k such that gcd(i, k) = 1, the nonlinearity equality holds, which also gives another solution to the open problem proposed by Perrin et al. This greatly expands the list of differentially 4-uniform permutations with good nonlinearity and hence provides more candidates for the design of block ciphers.

As a core component of SPN block cipher and hash function, diffusion layer is mainly introduced by matrices built from maximum distance separable (MDS) codes. Up to now, most MDS constructions require to perform an equivalent or even exhaustive search. In this paper, we study the cyclic structure of rotational-XOR diffusion layer, a commonly used diffusion primitive over (

We present a length doubler, LDT, that turns an n-bit tweakable block cipher into an efficient and secure cipher that can encrypt any bit string of length [n..2n − 1]. The LDT mode is simple, uses only two cryptographic primitive calls (while prior work needs at least four), and is a strong length-preserving pseudorandom permutation if the underlying tweakable block ciphers are strong tweakable pseudorandom permutations. We demonstrate that LDT can be used to neatly turn an authenticated encryption scheme for integral data into a mode for arbitrary-length data.

In this paper, we introduce Farfalle, a new permutation-based construction for building a pseudorandom function (PRF). The PRF takes as input a key and a sequence of arbitrary-length data strings, and returns an arbitrary-length output. It has a compression layer and an expansion layer, each involving the parallel application of a permutation. The construction also makes use of LFSR-like rolling functions for generating input and output masks and for updating the inner state during expansion. On top of the inherent parallelism, Farfalle instances can be very efficient because the construction imposes less requirements on the underlying primitive than, e.g., the duplex construction or typical block cipher modes. Farfalle has an incremental property: compression of common prefixes of inputs can be factored out. Thanks to its input-output characteristics, Farfalle is really versatile. We specify simple modes on top of it for authentication, encryption and authenticated encryption, as well as a wide block cipher mode. As a showcase, we present Kravatte, a very efficient instance of Farfalle based on Keccak-p[1600, nr] permutations and formulate concrete security claims against classical and quantum adversaries. The permutations in the compression and expansion layers of Kravatte have only 6 rounds apiece and the rolling functions are lightweight. We provide a rationale for our choices and report on software performance.

In this paper, we study the security of Grain-like small state stream ciphers by fast correlation attacks, which are commonly regarded as classical cryptanalytic methods against LFSR-based stream ciphers. We extend the cascaded structure adopted in such primitives in general and show how to restore the full internal state part-by-part if the non-linear combining function meets some characteristic. As a case study, we present a key recovery attack against Fruit, a tweaked version of Sprout that employs key-dependent state updating in the keystream generation phase. Our attack requires 262.8 Fruit encryptions and 222.3 keystream bits to determine the 80-bit secret key. Practical simulations on a small-scale version confirmed our results.

We consider highly structured truncated differential paths to mount a new rebound attack on Grøstl-512, a hash functions based on two AES-like permutations, P1024 and Q1024, with non-square input and output registers. We explain how such differential paths can be computed using a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming approach. Together with a SuperSBox description, this allows us to build a rebound attack with a 6-round inbound phase whereas classical rebound attacks have 4-round inbound phases. This yields the first distinguishing attack on a 11-round version of P1024 and Q1024 with about 272 computations and a memory complexity of about 256 bytes, to be compared with the 296 computations required by the corresponding generic attack. Previous best results on this permutation reached 10 rounds with a computational complexity of about 2392 operations, to be compared with the 2448 computations required by the corresponding generic attack.

The related-key model is now considered an important scenario for block cipher security and many schemes were broken in this model, even AES-192 and AES-256. Recently were introduced efficient computer-based search tools that can produce the best possible related-key truncated differential paths for AES. However, one has to trust the implementation of these tools and they do not provide any meaningful information on how to design a good key schedule, which remains a challenge for the community as of today. We provide in this article the first human-readable proof on the minimal number of active Sboxes in the related-key model for AES-128, without any help from a computer. More precisely, we show that any related-key differential path for AES-128 will respectively contain at least 0, 1, 3 and 9 active Sboxes for 1, 2, 3 and 4 rounds. Our proof is tight, not trivial, and actually exhibits for the first time the interplay between the key state and the internal state of an AES-like block cipher with an AES-like key schedule. As application example, we leverage our proofs to propose a new key schedule, that is not only faster (a simple permutation on the byte positions) but also ensures a higher number of active Sboxes than AES-128’s key schedule. We believe this is an important step towards a good understanding of efficient and secure key schedule designs.

Side-channel attacks and in particular differential power analysis (DPA) attacks pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations. One approach to counteract such attacks are cryptographic schemes based on fresh re-keying. In settings of pre-shared secret keys, such schemes render DPA attacks infeasible by deriving session keys and by ensuring that the attacker cannot collect side-channel leakage on the session key during cryptographic operations with different inputs. While these schemes can be applied to secure standard communication settings, current re-keying approaches are unable to provide protection in settings where the same input needs to be processed multiple times. In this work, we therefore adapt the re-keying approach and present a symmetric authenticated encryption scheme that is secure against DPA attacks and that does not have such a usage restriction. This means that our scheme fully complies with the requirements given in the CAESAR call and hence, can be used like other noncebased authenticated encryption schemes without loss of side-channel protection. Its resistance against side-channel analysis is highly relevant for several applications in practice, like bulk storage settings in general and the protection of FPGA bitfiles and firmware images in particular.

This paper serves as a systematization of knowledge of linear cryptanalysis and provides novel insights in the areas of key schedule design and tweakable block ciphers. We examine in a step by step manner the linear hull theorem in a general and consistent setting. Based on this, we study the influence of the choice of the key scheduling on linear cryptanalysis, a – notoriously difficult – but important subject. Moreover, we investigate how tweakable block ciphers can be analyzed with respect to linear cryptanalysis, a topic that surprisingly has not been scrutinized until now.

Time-memory-data (TMD) tradeoff attacks limit the security level of many classical stream ciphers (like E0, A5/1, Trivium, Grain) to 1/2n, where n denotes the inner state length of the underlying keystream generator. In this paper, we present Lizard, a lightweight stream cipher for power-constrained devices like passive RFID tags. Its hardware efficiency results from combining a Grain-like design with the FP(1)-mode, a recently suggested construction principle for the state initialization of stream ciphers, which offers provable 2/3n-security against TMD tradeoff attacks aiming at key recovery. Lizard uses 120-bit keys, 64-bit IVs and has an inner state length of 121 bit. It is supposed to provide 80-bit security against key recovery attacks. Lizard allows to generate up to 218 keystream bits per key/IV pair, which would be sufficient for many existing communication scenarios like Bluetooth, WLAN or HTTPS.

Midori is a lightweight block cipher designed by Banik et al. at ASIACRYPT 2015 to achieve low energy consumption. One version of Midori uses a 64-bit state, another uses a 128-bit state and we denote these versions Midori64 and Midori128. Each of these versions uses a 128-bit key. In this paper, we focus on the key-recovery attacks on reduced-round Midori64 with meet-in-the-middle method. We use the differential enumeration, key-bridging and key-dependent sieve techniques which are popular to analyze AES to attack Midori64. Using key-bridging and key-dependent sieve techniques directly to achieve the complexity lower bound is almost impossible, we give the model on how to achieve the complexity lower bound using these techniques. We also propose the state-bridge technique to use some key relations that are quite complicated and divided by some rounds. With a 6-round distinguisher, we achieve a 10-round attack. After that, by adding one round at the end, we get an 11-round attack. Finally, with a 7-round distinguisher, we get an attack on 12-round Midori64. To the best of our knowledge, these are recently the best attacks on Midori64 in the single-key setting.

Current Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP)-based search against symmetric-key primitives with 8-bit S-boxes can only build word-wise model to search for truncated differential characteristics. In such a model, the properties of the Differential Distribution Table (DDT) are not considered. To take these properties into account, a bit-wise model is necessary, which can be generated by the H-representation of the convex hull or the logical condition modeling. However, the complexity of both approaches becomes impractical when the size of the S-box exceeds 5 bits. In this paper, we propose a new modeling for large (8-bit or more) S-boxes. In particular, we first propose an algorithm to generate a bit-wise model of the DDT for large S-boxes. We observe that the problem of generating constraints in logical condition modeling can be converted into the problem of minimizing the product-of-sum of Boolean functions, which is a well-studied problem. Hence, classical off-the-shelf solutions such as the Quine-McCluskey algorithm or the Espresso algorithm can be utilized, which makes building a bit-wise model, for 8-bit or larger S-boxes, practical. Then this model is further extended to search for the best differential characteristic by considering the probabilities of each propagation in the DDT, which is a much harder problem than searching for the lower bound on the number of active S-boxes. Our idea is to separate the DDT into multiple tables for each probability and add conditional constraints to control the behavior of these multiple tables. The proposed modeling is first applied to SKINNY-128 to find that there is no differential characteristic having probability higher than 2−128 for 14 rounds, while the designers originally expected that 15 rounds were required. We also applied the proposed modeling to two, arbitrarily selected, constructions of the seven AES round function based constructions proposed in FSE 2016 and managed to improve the lower bound on the number of the active S-boxes in one construction and the upper bound on the differential characteristic for the other.

We examine how two parallel modes of operation for Authenticated Encryption (namely CTR+PMAC and OTR mode) work when evaluated in a multiparty computation engine. These two modes are selected because they suit the PRFs examined in previous works. In particular the modes are highly parallel, and do not require evaluation of the inverse of the underlying PRF. In order to use these modes one needs to convert them from their original instantiation of being defined on binary blocks of data, to working on elememts in a large prime finite field. The latter fitting the use case of many secret-sharing based MPC engines. In doing this conversion we examine the associated security proofs of PMAC and OTR, and show that they carry over to this new setting.

We propose new constructions of Message Authentication Codes (MACs) from tweakable or conventional block ciphers. Our new schemes are either stateless and deterministic, nonce-based, or randomized, and provably secure either in the standard model for tweakable block cipher-based ones, or in the ideal cipher model for block cipher-based ones. All our constructions are very efficient, requiring only one call to the underlying (tweakable) block cipher in addition to universally hashing the message. Moreover, the security bounds we obtain are quite strong: they are beyond the birthday bound, and nonce-based/randomized variants provide graceful security degradation in case of misuse, i.e., the security bound degrades linearly with the maximal number of repetitions of nonces/random values.

We present new techniques to efficiently scan the space of high-probability differential trails in bit-oriented ciphers. Differential trails consist in sequences of state patterns that we represent as ordered lists of basic components in order to arrange them in a tree. The task of generating trails with probability above some threshold starts with the traversal of the tree. Our choice of basic components allows us to efficiently prune the tree based on the fact that we can tightly bound the probability of all descendants for any node. Then we extend the state patterns resulting from the tree traversal into longer trails using similar bounding techniques. We apply these techniques to the 4 largest Keccak-f permutations, for which we are able to scan the space of trails with weight per round of 15. This space is orders of magnitude larger than previously best result published on Keccak-f[1600] that reached 12, which in turn is orders of magnitude larger than any published results achieved with standard tools, that reached at most 9. As a result we provide new and improved bounds for the minimum weight of differential trails on 3, 4, 5 and 6 rounds. We also report on new trails that are, to the best of our knowledge, the ones with the highest known probability.

At CCS 2015, Pereira et al. introduced a pragmatic model enabling the study of leakage-resilient symmetric cryptographic primitives based on the minimal use of a leak-free component. This model was recently used to prove the good integrity and confidentiality properties of an authenticated encryption scheme called DTE when the adversary is only given encryption leakages. In this paper, we extend this work by analyzing the case where decryption leakages are also available. We first exhibit attacks exploiting such leakages against the integrity of DTE (and variants) and show how to mitigate them. We then consider message confidentiality in a context where an adversary can observe decryption leakages but not the corresponding messages. The latter is motivated by applications such as secure bootloading and bitstream decryption. We finally formalize the confidentiality requirements that can be achieved in this case and propose a new construction satisfying them, while providing integrity properties with leakage that are as good as those of DTE.

Traditionally, modes of Message Authentication Codes(MAC) such as Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) are instantiated using block ciphers or keyed Pseudo Random Permutations(PRP). However, one can also use domain preserving keyed Pseudo Random Functions(PRF) to instantiate MAC modes. The very first security proof of CBC-MAC [BKR00], essentially modeled the PRP as a PRF. Until now very little work has been done to investigate the difference between PRP vs PRF instantiations. Only known result is the rather loose folklore PRP-PRF transition of any PRP based security proof, which looses a factor of Ο( σ2/2n ) (domain of PRF/PRP is {0, 1}n and adversary makes σ many PRP/PRF calls in total). This loss is significant, considering the fact tight Θ( q2/2n ) security bounds have been known for PRP based EMAC and ECBC constructions (where q is the total number of adversary queries). In this work, we show for many variations of encrypted CBC MACs (i.e. EMAC, ECBC, FCBC, XCBC and TCBC), random function based instantiation has a security bound Ο( qσ/2n ). This is a significant improvement over the folklore PRP/PRF transition. We also show this bound is optimal by providing an attack against the underlying PRF based CBC construction. This shows for EMAC, ECBC and FCBC, PRP instantiations are substantially more secure than PRF instantiations. Where as, for XCBC and TMAC, PRP instantiations are at least as secure as PRF instantiations.

In the present paper, we propose an automatic search algorithm for optimal differential trails in SIMON-like ciphers. First, we give a more accurate upper bound on the differential probability of SIMON-like round function. It is shown that when the Hamming weight of the input difference α , which is denoted by wt(α), is less than one half of the input size, the corresponding maximum differential probability of SIMON-like round function is less than or equal to 2−wt(α)−1. Based on this, we adapt Matsui’s algorithm and propose an efficient algorithm for searching for optimal differential trails. With the proposed algorithm, we find the provably optimal differential trails for 12, 16, 19, 28 and 37 rounds of SIMON32/48/64/96/128. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the provably optimal differential trails for SIMON64, SIMON96 and SIMON128 are reported. The provably optimal differential trails for 13, 19 and 25 rounds of SIMECK32/48/64 are also found respectively, which confirm the results given by Kölbl et al. [KR15]. Besides the optimal differential trails, we also find the 14, 17, 23, 31 and 41-round differentials for SIMON32/48/64/96/128, and 14, 21 and 27-round differentials for SIMECK32/48/64, respectively. As far as we know, these are the best differential distinguishers for SIMON and SIMECK so far. Compared with the approach based on SAT/SMT solvers used by K¨olbl et al., our algorithm is more efficient and more practical to evaluate the security against differential cryptanalysis in the design of SIMON-like ciphers.

Cryptographic modes built on top of a blockcipher usually rely on the assumption that this primitive behaves like a pseudorandom permutation (PRP). For many of these modes, including counter mode and GCM, stronger security guarantees could be derived if they were based on a PRF design. We propose a heuristic method of transforming a dedicated blockcipher design into a dedicated PRF design. Intuitively, the method consists of evaluating the blockcipher once, with one or more intermediate state values fed-forward. It shows strong resemblance with the optimally secure EDMD construction by Mennink and Neves (CRYPTO 2017), but the use of internal state values make their security analysis formally inapplicable. In support of its security, we give the rationale of relying on the EDMD function (as opposed to alternatives), and present analysis of simplified versions of our conversion method applied to the AES. We conjecture that our main proposal AES-PRF, AES with a feed-forward of the middle state, achieves close to optimal security. We apply the design to GCM and GCM-SIV, and demonstrate how it entails significant security improvements. We furthermore demonstrate how the technique extends to tweakable blockciphers and allows for security improvements in, for instance, PMAC1.

We study the synthesis of small functions used as building blocks in lightweight cryptographic designs in terms of hardware implementations. This phase most notably appears during the ASIC implementation of cryptographic primitives. The quality of this step directly affects the output circuit, and while general tools exist to carry out this task, most of them belong to proprietary software suites and apply heuristics to any size of functions. In this work, we focus on small functions (4- and 8-bit mappings) and look for their optimal implementations on a specific weighted instructions set which allows fine tuning of the technology. We propose a tool named LIGHTER, based on two related algorithms, that produces optimized implementations of small functions. To demonstrate the validity and usefulness of our tool, we applied it to two practical cases: first, linear permutations that define diffusion in most of SPN ciphers; second, non-linear 4-bit permutations that are used in many lightweight block ciphers. For linear permutations, we exhibit several new MDS diffusion matrices lighter than the state-of-the-art, and we also decrease the implementation cost of several already known MDS matrices. As for non-linear permutations, LIGHTER outperforms the area-optimized synthesis of the state-of-the-art academic tool ABC. Smaller circuits can also be reached when ABC and LIGHTER are used jointly.

To protect against side-channel attacks, many countermeasures have been proposed. A novel customized encoding countermeasure was published in FSE 2016. Customized encoding exploits knowledge of the profiled leakage of the device to construct an optimal encoding and minimize the overall side-channel leakage. This technique was originally applied on a basic table look-up. In this paper, we implement a full block cipher with customized encoding countermeasure and investigate its security under simulated and practical setting for a general purpose microcontroller. Under simulated setting, we can verify that customized encoding shows strong security properties under proper assumption of leakage estimation and noise variance. However, in practical setting, our general observation is that the side-channel leakage will mostly be present even if the encoding scheme is applied, highlighting some limitation of the approach. The results are supported by experiments on 8-bit AVR and 32-bit ARM microcontroller.

Preface to Volume 2017, Issue 1

In this paper, based on the work pioneered by Aumasson and Meier, Dinur et al., and Guo et al., we construct some new delicate structures from the roundreduced versions of Keccakhash function family. The new constructed structures are called cross-linear structures, because linear polynomials appear across in different equations of these structures. And we apply cross-linear structures to do preimage attacks on some instances of the round-reduced Keccak. There are three main contributions in this paper. First, we construct a kind of cross-linear structures by setting the statuses carefully. With these cross-linear structures, guessing the value of one linear polynomial could lead to three linear equations (including the guessed one). Second, for some special cases, e.g. the 3-round Keccakchallenge instance Keccak[r=240, c=160, nr=3], a more special kind of cross-linear structures is constructed, and these structures can be used to obtain seven linear equations (including the guessed) if the values of two linear polynomials are guessed. Third, as applications of the cross-linear structures, we practically found a preimage for the 3-round KeccakChallenge instance Keccak[r=240, c=160, nr=3]. Besides, by constructing similar cross-linear structures, the complexity of the preimage attack on 3-round Keccak-256/SHA3-256/SHAKE256 can be lowered to 2150/2151/2153 operations, while the previous best known result on Keccak-256 is 2192.

We make a number of remarks about the AES-GCM-SIV nonce-misuse resistant authenticated encryption scheme currently considered for standardization by the Crypto Forum Research Group (CFRG). First, we point out that the security analysis proposed in the ePrint report 2017/168 is incorrect, leading to overly optimistic security claims. We correct the bound and re-assess the security guarantees offered by the scheme for various parameters. Second, we suggest a simple modification to the key derivation function which would improve the security of the scheme with virtually no efficiency penalty.

The current paper studies the probability of differential characteristics for an unkeyed (or with a fixed key) construction. Most notably, it focuses on the gap between two probabilities of differential characteristics: probability with independent S-box assumption, pind, and exact probability, pexact. It turns out that pexact is larger than pind in Feistel network with some S-box based inner function. The mechanism of this gap is then theoretically analyzed. The gap is derived from interaction of S-boxes in three rounds, and the gap depends on the size and choice of the S-box. In particular the gap can never be zero when the S-box is bigger than six bits. To demonstrate the power of this improvement, a related-key differential characteristic is proposed against a lightweight block cipher RoadRunneR. For the 128-bit key version, pind of 2−48 is improved to pexact of 2−43. For the 80-bit key version, pind of 2−68 is improved to pexact of 2−62. The analysis is further extended to SPN with an almost-MDS binary matrix in the core primitive of the authenticated encryption scheme Minalpher: pind of 2−128 is improved to pexact of 2−96, which allows to extend the attack by two rounds.

In this paper we formulate a SAT/SMT model for Rotational-XOR (RX) cryptanalysis in ARX primitives for the first time. The model is successfully applied to the block cipher family Speck, and distinguishers covering more rounds than previously are found, as well as RX-characteristics requiring less data to detect. In particular, we present distinguishers for 10, 11 and 12 rounds for Speck32/64 which have better probabilities than the previously known 9-round differential characteristic, for a certain weak key class. For versions of Speck48, we present several distinguishers, among which the longest one covering 15 rounds, while the previously best differential characteristic only covered 11.

In CRYPTO’16, a new family of tweakable lightweight block ciphers - SKINNY was introduced. Denoting the variants of SKINNY as SKINNY-n-t, where n represents the block size and t represents the tweakey length, the design specifies t ∈ {n, 2n, 3n}. In this work, we evaluate the security of SKINNY against differential cryptanalysis in the related-tweakey model. First, we investigate truncated related-tweakey differential trails of SKINNY and search for the longest impossible and rectangle distinguishers where there is only one active cell in the input and the output. Based on the distinguishers obtained, 19, 23 and 27 rounds of SKINNY-n-n, SKINNY-n-2n and SKINNY-n-3n can be attacked respectively. Next, actual differential trails for SKINNY under related-tweakey model are explored and optimal differential trails of SKINNY-64 within certain number of rounds are searched with an indirect searching method based on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming. The results show a trend that as the number of rounds increases, the probability of optimal differential trails is much lower than the probability derived from the lower bounds of active Sboxes in SKINNY.

This paper closes a definitional gap in the context of modeling cryptographic two-party channels. We note that, while most security models for channels consider exclusively unidirectional communication, real-world protocols like TLS and SSH are rather used for bidirectional interaction. The motivational question behind this paper is: Can analyses conducted with the unidirectional setting in mind—including the current ones for TLS and SSH—also vouch for security in the case of bidirectional channel usage? And, in the first place, what does security in the bidirectional setting actually mean? After developing confidentiality and integrity notions for bidirectional channels, we analyze a standard way of combining two unidirectional channels to realize one bidirectional channel. Although it turns out that this construction is, in general, not as secure as commonly believed, we confirm that for many practical schemes security is provided also in the bidirectional sense.

The iterated Even–Mansour (EM) ciphers form the basis of many blockcipher designs. Several results have established their security in the CPA/CCA models, under related-key attacks, and in the indifferentiability framework. In this work, we study the Even–Mansour ciphers under key-dependent message (KDM) attacks. KDM security is particularly relevant for blockciphers since non-expanding mechanisms are convenient in setting such as full disk encryption (where various forms of key-dependency might exist). We formalize the folklore result that the ideal cipher is KDM secure. We then show that EM ciphers meet varying levels of KDM security depending on the number of rounds and permutations used. One-round EM achieves some form of KDM security, but this excludes security against offsets of keys. With two rounds we obtain KDM security against offsets, and using different round permutations we achieve KDM security against all permutation-independent claw-free functions. As a contribution of independent interest, we present a modular framework that can facilitate the security treatment of symmetric constructions in models that allow for correlated inputs.

We study the security of symmetric primitives under the incorrect usage of keys. Roughly speaking, a key-robust scheme does not output ciphertexts/tags that are valid with respect to distinct keys. Key-robustness is a notion that is often tacitly expected/assumed in protocol design — as is the case with anonymous auction, oblivious transfer, or public-key encryption. We formalize simple, yet strong definitions of key robustness for authenticated-encryption, message-authentication codes and PRFs. We show standard notions (such as AE or PRF security) guarantee a basic level of key-robustness under honestly generated keys, but fail to imply keyrobustness under adversarially generated (or known) keys. We show robust encryption and MACs compose well through generic composition, and identify robust PRFs as the main primitive used in building robust schemes. Standard hash functions are expected to satisfy key-robustness and PRF security, and hence suffice for practical instantiations. We however provide further theoretical justifications (in the standardmodel) by constructing robust PRFs from (left-and-right) collision-resistant PRGs.

Recently a lot of attention is paid to the search for efficiently implementable MDS matrices for lightweight symmetric primitives. Most previous work concentrated on locally optimizing the multiplication with single matrix elements. Separate from this line of work, several heuristics were developed to find shortest linear straightline programs. Solving this problem actually corresponds to globally optimizing multiplications by matrices. In this work we combine those, so far largely independent lines of work. As a result, we achieve implementations of known, locally optimized, and new MDS matrices that significantly outperform all implementations from the literature. Interestingly, almost all previous locally optimized constructions behave very similar with respect to the globally optimized implementation. As a side effect, our work reveals the so far best implementation of the Aes Mix- Columns operation with respect to the number of XOR operations needed.

At CRYPTO 2011, Yasuda proposed the PMAC_Plus message authentication code based on an n-bit block cipher. Its design principle inherits the well known PMAC parallel network with a low additional cost. PMAC_Plus is a rate-1 construction like PMAC (i.e., one block cipher call per n-bit message block) but provides security against all adversaries (under black-box model) making queries altogether consisting of roughly upto 22n/3 blocks (strings of n-bits). Even though PMAC_Plus gives higher security than the standard birthday bound security, with currently available best bound, it provides weaker security than PMAC for certain choices of adversaries. Moreover, unlike PMAC, PMAC_Plus operates with three independent block cipher keys. In this paper, we propose 1k-PMAC_Plus, the first rate-1 single keyed block cipher based BBB (Beyond Birthday Bound) secure (in standard model) deterministic MAC construction without arbitrary field multiplications. 1k-PMAC_Plus, as the name implies, is a simple one-key variant of PMAC_Plus. In addition to the key reduction, we obtain a higher security guarantee than what was proved originally for PMAC_Plus, thus an improvement in two directions.

Randomness plays an important role in multiple applications in cryptography. It is required in fundamental tasks such as key generation, masking and hiding values, nonces and initialization vectors generation. Pseudo-random number generators have been studied by numerous authors, either to propose clear security notions and associated constructions or to point out potential vulnerabilities. In this systematization of knowledge paper, we present the three notions of generators that have been successively formalized: standard generators, stateful generators and generators with input. For each notion, we present expected security properties, where adversaries have increasing capabilities (including access to partial information on the internal variables) and we propose secure and efficient constructions, all based on the block cipher AES. In our description of generators with input, we revisit the notions of accumulator and extractor and we point out that security crucially relies on the independence between the randomness source and the seeds of the accumulator and the extractor. To illustrate this requirement, we identify a potential vulnerability of the NIST standard CTR_DRBG.

Lizard is a lightweight stream cipher proposed by Hamann, Krause and Meier in IACR ToSC 2017. It has a Grain-like structure with two state registers of size 90 and 31 bits. The cipher uses a 120-bit secret key and a 64-bit IV. The authors claim that Lizard provides 80-bit security against key recovery attacks and a 60-bit security against distinguishing attacks. In this paper, we present an assortment of results and observations on Lizard. First, we show that by doing 258 random trials it is possible to find a set of 264 triplets (K, IV0, IV1) such that the Key-IV pairs (K, IV0) and (K, IV1) produce identical keystream bits. Second, we show that by performing only around 228 random trials it is possible to obtain 264 Key-IV pairs (K0, IV0) and (K1, IV1) that produce identical keystream bits. Thereafter, we show that one can construct a distinguisher for Lizard based on IVs that produce shifted keystream sequences. The process takes around 251.5 random IV encryptions (with encryption required to produce 218 keystream bits) and around 276.6 bits of memory. Next, we propose a key recovery attack on a version of Lizard with the number of initialization rounds reduced to 223 (out of 256) based on IV collisions. We then outline a method to extend our attack to 226 rounds. Our results do not affect the security claims of the designers.

In this work we show the existence of special sets of inputs for which the sum of the images under SHA3 exhibits a symmetric property. We develop an analytical framework which accounts for the existence of these sets. The framework constitutes identification of a generic property of iterated SPN based functions pertaining to the round-constant addition and combining it with the notion of m−fold vectorial derivatives for differentiation over specially selected subspaces. Based on this we propose a new distinguisher called SymSum for the SHA3 family which penetrates up to 9 rounds and outperforms the ZeroSum distinguisher by a factor of four. Interestingly, the current work is the first analysis of SHA3/Keccak that relies on round-constants but is independent of their Hamming-weights.

We study a generalization of the k-list problem, also known as the Generalized Birthday problem. In the k-list problem, one starts with k lists of binary vectors and has to find a set of vectors – one from each list – that sum to the all-zero target vector. In our generalized Approximate k-list problem, one has to find a set of vectors that sum to a vector of small Hamming weight ω. Thus, we relax the condition on the target vector and allow for some error positions. This in turn helps us to significantly reduce the size of the starting lists, which determines the memory consumption, and the running time as a function of ω. For ω = 0, our algorithm achieves the original k-list run-time/memory consumption, whereas for ω = n/2 it has polynomial complexity. As in the k-list case, our Approximate k-list algorithm is defined for all k = 2m,m > 1. Surprisingly, we also find an Approximate 3-list algorithm that improves in the runtime exponent compared to its 2-list counterpart for all 0 < ω < n/2. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such improvement of some variant of the notoriously hard 3-list problem. As an application of our algorithm we compute small weight multiples of a given polynomial with more flexible degree than with Wagner’s algorithm from Crypto 2002 and with smaller time/memory consumption than with Minder and Sinclair’s algorithm from SODA 2009.

This paper introduces QARMA, a new family of lightweight tweakable block ciphers targeted at applications such as memory encryption, the generation of very short tags for hardware-assisted prevention of software exploitation, and the construction of keyed hash functions. QARMA is inspired by reflection ciphers such as PRINCE, to which it adds a tweaking input, and MANTIS. However, QARMA differs from previous reflector constructions in that it is a three-round Even-Mansour scheme instead of a FX-construction, and its middle permutation is non-involutory and keyed. We introduce and analyse a family of Almost MDS matrices defined over a ring with zero divisors that allows us to encode rotations in its operation while maintaining the minimal latency associated to {0, 1}-matrices. The purpose of all these design choices is to harden the cipher against various classes of attacks. We also describe new S-Box search heuristics aimed at minimising the critical path. QARMA exists in 64- and 128-bit block sizes, where block and tweak size are equal, and keys are twice as long as the blocks. We argue that QARMA provides sufficient security margins within the constraints determined by the mentioned applications, while still achieving best-in-class latency. Implementation results on a state-of-the art manufacturing process are reported. Finally, we propose a technique to extend the length of the tweak by using, for instance, a universal hash function, which can also be used to strengthen the security of QARMA.

The security of a probabilistic Message Authentication Code (MAC) usually depends on the uniqueness of the random salt which restricts the security to birthday bound of the salt size due to the collision on random salts (e.g XMACR). To overcome the birthday bound limit, the natural approach to use (a) either a larger random salt (e.g MACRX3 uses 3n bits of random salt where n is the input and output size of the underlying non-compressing pseudorandom function or PRF) or (b) a PRF with increased domain size (e.g RWMAC or Randomized WMAC). Enhanced Hashthen- Mask (EHtM), proposed by Minematsu in FSE 2010, is the first probabilistic MAC scheme that provides beyond birthday bound security without increasing the randomness of the salt and the domain size of the non-compressing PRF. The author proved the security of EHtM as long as the number of MAC query is smaller than 22n/3 where n is the input size of the underlying non-compressing PRF. In this paper, we provide the exact security bound of EHtM and prove that this construction offers security up to 23n/4 MAC queries. The exactness is shown by demonstrating a matching attack.

CAESAR has caused a heated discussion regarding the merits of one-pass encryption and online ciphers. The latter is a keyed, length preserving function which outputs ciphertext blocks as soon as the respective plaintext block is available as input. The immediacy of an online cipher affords a clear performance advantage, but it comes at a price: ciphertext blocks cannot depend on later plaintext blocks, limiting diffusion and hence security. We show how one can attain the best of both worlds by providing provably secure constructions, achieving full cipher security, based on applications of an online cipher around blockwise reordering layers. Explicitly, we show that with just two calls to the online cipher, prp security up to the birthday bound is both attainable and maximal. Moreover, we demonstrate that three calls to the online cipher suffice to obtain beyond birthday bound security. We provide a full proof of this for a prp construction, and, in the ±prp setting, security against adversaries who make queries of any single length. As part of our investigation, we extend an observation by Rogaway and Zhang by further highlighting the close relationship between online ciphers and tweakable blockciphers with variable-length tweaks.

Modular design via a tweakable blockcipher (TBC) offers efficient authenticated encryption (AE) schemes (with associated data) that call a blockcipher once for each data block (of associated data or a plaintext). However, the existing efficient blockcipher-based TBCs are secure up to the birthday bound, where the underlying keyed blockcipher is a secure strong pseudorandom permutation. Existing blockcipher-based AE schemes with beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security are not efficient, that is, a blockcipher is called twice or more for each data block. In this paper, we present a TBC, XKX, that offers efficient blockcipher-based AE schemes with BBB security, by combining with efficient TBC-based AE schemes such as ΘCB3 and

The authenticated encryption scheme COLM is a third-round candidate in the CAESAR competition. Much like its antecedents COPA, ELmE, and ELmD, COLM consists of two parallelizable encryption layers connected by a linear mixing function. While COPA uses plain XOR mixing, ELmE, ELmD, and COLM use a more involved invertible mixing function. In this work, we investigate the integrity of the COLM structure when unverified plaintext is released, and demonstrate that its security highly depends on the choice of mixing function. Our results are threefold. First, we discuss the practical nonce-respecting forgery by Andreeva et al. (ASIACRYPT 2014) against COPA’s XOR mixing. Then we present a noncemisusing forgery against arbitrary mixing functions with practical time complexity. Finally, by using significantly larger queries, we can extend the previous forgery to be nonce-respecting.

There is an ongoing trend in the symmetric-key cryptographic community to construct highly secure modes and message authentication codes based on tweakable block ciphers (TBCs). Recent constructions, such as Cogliati et al.’s HaT or Iwata et al.’s ZMAC, employ both the n-bit plaintext and the t-bit tweak simultaneously for higher performance. This work revisits ZMAC, and proposes a simpler alternative finalization based on HaT. As a result, we propose HtTBC, and call its instantiation with ZHash as a hash function ZMAC+. Compared to HaT, ZMAC+ (1) requires only a single key and a single primitive. Compared to ZMAC, our construction (2) allows variable, per-query parametrizable output lengths. Moreover, ZMAC+ (3) avoids the complex finalization of ZMAC and (4) improves the security bound from Ο(σ2/2n+min(n,t)) to Ο(q/2n + q(q + σ)/2n+min(n,t)) while retaining a practical tweak space.