International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The iMessage PQ3 protocol is an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol designed for exchanging data in long-lived sessions between two devices. It aims to provide classical and post-quantum confidentiality for forward secrecy and post-compromise secrecy, as well as classical authentication. Its initial authenticated key exchange is constructed from digital signatures plus elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman and post-quantum key exchanges; to derive per-message keys on an ongoing basis, it employs an adaptation of the Signal double ratchet that includes a post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism. This paper presents the cryptographic details of the PQ3 protocol and gives a reductionist security analysis by adapting the multi-stage key exchange security analysis of Signal by Cohn-Gordon et al. (J. Cryptology, 2020). The analysis shows that PQ3 provides confidentiality with forward secrecy and post-compromise security against both classical and quantum adversaries, in both the initial key exchange as well as the continuous rekeying phase of the protocol.

Recent work has introduced the "Quantum-Computation Classical-Communication" (QCCC) (Chung et. al.) setting for cryptography. There has been some evidence that One Way Puzzles (OWPuzz) are the natural central cryptographic primitive for this setting (Khurana and Tomer). For a primitive to be considered central it should have several characteristics. It should be well behaved (which for this paper we will think of as having amplification, combiners, and universal constructions); it should be implied by a wide variety of other primitives; and it should be equivalent to some class of useful primitives. We present combiners, correctness and security amplifica- tion, and a universal construction for OWPuzz. Our proof of security amplification uses a new and cleaner version construction of EFI from OWPuzz (in comparison to the result of Khurana and Tomer) that generalizes to weak OWPuzz and is the most technically involved section of the paper. It was previously known that OWPuzz are implied by other primitives of interest including commitments, symmetric key encryp- tion, one way state generators (OWSG), and therefore pseudorandom states (PRS). However we are able to rule out OWPuzz’s equivalence to many of these primitives by showing a black box separation between general OWPuzz and a restricted class of OWPuzz (those with efficient verification, which we call EV − OWPuzz). We then show that EV − OWPuzz are also implied by most of these primitives, which separates them from OWPuzz as well. This separation also separates extending PRS from highly compressing PRS answering an open question of Ananth et. al.

This paper introduces the first adaptively secure streaming functional encryption (sFE) scheme for P/Poly. sFE stands as an evolved variant of traditional functional encryption (FE), catering specifically to contexts with vast and/or dynamically evolving data sets. sFE is designed for applications where data arrives in a streaming fashion and is computed on in an iterative manner as the stream arrives. Unlike standard FE, in sFE: (1) encryption is possible without knowledge of the full data set, (2) partial decryption is possible given only a prefix of the input. Guan, Korb, and Sahai introduced this concept in their recent publication [CRYPTO 2023], where they constructed an sFE scheme for P/Poly using a compact standard FE scheme for the same. However, their sFE scheme only achieved semi-adaptive-function-selective security, which constrains the adversary to obtain all functional keys prior to seeing any ciphertext for the challenge stream. This limitation severely limits the scenarios where sFE can be applied, and therefore fails to provide a suitable theoretical basis for sFE. In contrast, the adaptive security model empowers the adversary to arbitrarily interleave requests for functional keys with ciphertexts related to the challenge stream. Guan, Korb, and Sahai identified achieving adaptive security for sFE as the key question left open by their work. We resolve this open question positively by constructing an adaptively secure sFE construction from indistinguishability obfuscation for P/Poly and injective PRGs. By combining our work with that of Jain, Lin, and Sahai [STOC 2021, EUROCRYPT 2022], we obtain the first adaptively secure sFE scheme for P/Poly based on sub-exponential hardness of well-studied computational problems

Inspired by range-check trick from recent Latticefold paper we construct elliptic-curve based IVC capable of simulating non-native arithmetic efficiently.

We explain the general principle (which can be applied to both Protostar and Hypernova), and describe the Wrongfield ARithmetic for Protostar folding in details.

Our construction supports circuits over mutilple non-native fields simultaneously and allows interfacing between them using range-checked elements.

WARPfold can be used to warp between different proof systems and construct folding schemes over curves not admitting a dual partner (such as BLS12-381).

FuLeeca is a signature scheme submitted to the recent NIST call for additional signatures. It is an efficient hash-and-sign scheme based on quasi-cyclic codes in the Lee metric and resembles the lattice-based signature Falcon. FuLeeca proposes a so-called concentration step within the signing procedure to avoid leakage of secret-key information from the signatures. However, FuLeeca is still vulnerable to learning attacks, which were first observed for lattice-based schemes. We present three full key-recovery attacks by exploiting the proximity of the code-based FuLeeca scheme to lattice-based primitives. More precisely, we use a few signatures to extract an $n/2$-dimensional circulant sublattice of the given length-$n$ code, that still contains the exceptionally short secret-key vector. This significantly reduces the classical attack cost and, in addition, leads to a full key recovery in quantum-polynomial time. Furthermore, we exploit a bias in the concentration procedure to classically recover the full key for any security level with at most 175,000 signatures in less than an hour.

The Nostradamus attack was originally proposed as a security vulnerability for a hash function by Kelsey and Kohno at EUROCRYPT 2006. It requires the attacker to commit to a hash value y of an iterated hash function H. Subsequently, upon being provided with a message prefix P, the adversary’s task is to identify a suffix S such that H(P||S) equals y. Kelsey and Kohno demonstrated a herding attack requiring $O(\sqrt{n}\cdot 2^{2n/3})$ evaluations of the compression function of H, where n represents the output and state size of the hash, placing this attack between preimage attacks and collision searches in terms of complexity. At ASIACRYPT 2022, Benedikt et al. transform Kelsey and Kohno’s attack into a quantum variant, decreasing the time complexity from $O(\sqrt{n}\cdot 2^{2n/3})$ to $O(\sqrt[3]{n}\cdot 2^{3n/7})$. At ToSC 2023, Zhang et al. proposed the first dedicated Nostradamus attack on AES-like hashing in both classical and quantum settings. In this paper, we have made revisions to the multi-target technique incorporated into the meet-in-the-middle automatic search framework. This modification leads to a decrease in time complexity during the online linking phase, effectively reducing the overall attack time complexity in both classical and quantum scenarios. Specifically, we can achieve more rounds in the classical setting and reduce the time complexity for the same round in the quantum setting.

In this paper, we extend the applicability of differential meet- in-the-middle attacks, proposed at Crypto 2023, to truncated differen- tials, and in addition, we introduce three new ideas to improve this type of attack: we show how to add longer structures than the original pa- per, we show how to improve the key recovery steps by introducing some probability in them, and we combine this type of attacks with the state- test technique, that was introduced in the context of impossible differ- ential attacks. Furthermore, we have developed a MILP-based tool to automate the search for a truncated differential-MITM attack with op- timized overall complexity, incorporating some of the proposed improve- ments. Thanks to this, we can build the best known attacks on the cipher CRAFT, reaching 23 rounds against 21 previously; we provide a new at- tack on 23-round SKINNY-64-192, and we improve the best attacks on SKINNY-128-384.

As an ISO/IEC standard, the hash function RIPEMD-160 has been used to generate the Bitcoin address with SHA-256. However, due to the complex double-branch structure of RIPEMD-160, the best collision attack only reaches 36 out of 80 steps of RIPEMD-160, and the best semi-free-start (SFS) collision attack only reaches 40 steps. To improve the 36-step collision attack proposed at EUROCRYPT 2023, we explored the possibility of using different message differences to increase the number of attacked steps, and we finally identified one choice allowing a 40-step collision attack. To find the corresponding 40-step differential characteristic, we re-implement the MILP-based method to search for signed differential characteristics with SAT/SMT. As a result, we can find a colliding message pair for 40-step RIPEMD-160 in practical time, which significantly improves the best collision attack on RIPEMD-160. For the best SFS collision attack published at ToSC 2019, we observe that the bottleneck is the probability of the right-branch differential characteristics as they are fully uncontrolled in the message modification. To address this issue, we utilize our SAT/SMT-based tool to search for high-probability differential characteristics for the right branch. Consequently, we can mount successful SFS collision attacks on 41, 42 and 43 steps of RIPEMD-160, thus significantly improving the SFS collision attacks. In addition, we also searched for a 44-step differential characteristic, but the differential probability is too low to allow a meaningful SFS collision attack.

The SHA-2 family including SHA-224, SHA-256, SHA-384, SHA-512, SHA-512/224 and SHA512/256 is a U.S. federal standard pub- lished by NIST. Especially, there is no doubt that SHA-256 is one of the most important hash functions used in real-world applications. Due to its complex design compared with SHA-1, there is almost no progress in collision attacks on SHA-2 after ASIACRYPT 2015. In this work, we retake this challenge and aim to significantly improve collision attacks on the SHA-2 family. First, we observe from many existing attacks on SHA-2 that the current advanced tool to search for SHA-2 characteristics has reached the bottleneck. Specifically, longer differential characteristics could not be found, and this causes that the collision attack could not reach more steps. To address this issue, we adopt Liu et al.’s MILP-based method and implement it with SAT/SMT for SHA-2, where we also add more techniques to detect contradictions in SHA-2 characteristics. This answers an open problem left in Liu et al.’s paper to apply the technique to SHA-2. With this SAT/SMT-based tool, we search for SHA-2 charac- teristics by controlling its sparsity in a dedicated way. As a result, we successfully find the first practical semi-free-start (SFS) colliding message pair for 39-step SHA-256, improving the best 38-step SFS collision attack published at EUROCRYPT 2013. In addition, we also report the first practical free-start (FS) collision attack on 40-step SHA-224, while the previously best theoretic 40-step attack has time complexity 2110. More- over, for the first time, we can mount practical and theoretic collision attacks on 28-step and 31-step SHA-512, respectively, which improve the best collision attack only reaching 27 steps of SHA-512 at ASIACRYPT 2015. In a word, with new techniques to find SHA-2 characteristics, we have made some notable progress in the analysis of SHA-2 after the major achievements made at EUROCRYPT 2013 and ASIACRYPT 2015.

Nonlocal games are a foundational tool for understanding entanglement and constructing quantum protocols in settings with multiple spatially separated quantum devices. In this work, we continue the study initiated by Kalai et al. (STOC '23) of compiled nonlocal games, played between a classical verifier and a single cryptographically limited quantum device. Our main result is that the compiler proposed by Kalai et al. is sound for any two-player XOR game. A celebrated theorem of Tsirelson shows that for XOR games, the quantum value is exactly given by a semidefinite program, and we obtain our result by showing that the SDP upper bound holds for the compiled game up to a negligible error arising from the compilation. This answers a question raised by Natarajan and Zhang (FOCS '23), who showed soundness for the specific case of the CHSH game. Using our techniques, we obtain several additional results, including (1) tight bounds on the compiled value of parallel-repeated XOR games, (2) operator self-testing statements for any compiled XOR game, and (3) a ``nice" sum-of-squares certificate for any XOR game, from which operator rigidity is manifest.

In this paper, we present a new type of algebraic attack that applies to many recent arithmetization-oriented families of permutations, such as those used in Griffin, Anemoi, ArionHash, and XHash8, whose security relies on the hardness of the constrained-input constrained-output (CICO) problem. We introduce the FreeLunch approach: the monomial ordering is chosen so that the natural polynomial system encoding the CICO problem already is a Gröbner basis. In addition, we present a new dedicated resolution algorithm for FreeLunch systems of complexity lower than applicable state-of-the-art FGLM algorithms. We show that the FreeLunch approach challenges the security of fullround instances of Anemoi, Arion and Griffin. We confirm these theoretical results with experimental results on those three permutations. In particular, using the FreeLunch attack combined with a new technique to bypass 3 rounds of Griffin, we recover a CICO solution for 7 out of 10 rounds of Griffin in less than four hours on one core of AMD EPYC 7352 (2.3GHz).

Torus Fully Homomorphic Encryption (TFHE) is a probabilistic cryptosytem over the real torus which allows one to operate directly on encrypted data without first decrypting them. We present an aggregation protocol based on a variant of TFHE for computing the sum of sensitive data, working only with the corresponding ciphertexts. Our scheme is an ideal choice for a system of smart meters - electronic devices for measuring energy consumption - that demands consumers’ privacy. In contrast to some other solutions, our proposal does not require any communication among smart meters and it is quantum-safe.

At EUROCRYPT’23, Castryck and Decru, Maino et al., and Robert present efficient attacks against supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol (SIDH). Drawing inspiration from these attacks, Andrea Basso, Luciano Maino, and Giacomo Pope introduce FESTA, an isogeny-based trapdoor function, along with a corresponding IND-CCA secure public key encryption (PKE) protocol at ASIACRYPT’23. FESTA incorporates either a diagonal or circulant matrix into the secret key to mask torsion points. In this paper, we employ a side-channel attack to construct an auxiliary verification oracle. By querying this oracle, we propose an adaptive attack strategy to recover the secret key in FESTA when the secret matrix is circulant. Compared with existing attacks, our strategy is more efficient and formal. Leveraging these findings, we implement our attack algorithms to recover the circulant matrix in secret key. Finally, we demonstrate that if the secret matrix is circulant, then the adversary can successfully recover FESTA’s secret key with a polynomial number of decryption machine queries. Consequently, our paper illustrates that FESTA PKE protocol with secret circulant matrix does not achieve IND-CCA security.

In differential-like attacks, the process typically involves extending a distinguisher forward and backward with probability 1 for some rounds and recovering the key involved in the extended part. Particularly in rectangle attacks, a holistic key recovery strategy can be employed to yield the most efficient attacks tailored to a given distinguisher. In this paper, we treat the distinguisher and the extended part as an integrated entity and give a one-step framework for finding rectangle attacks with the purpose of reducing the overall complexity or attacking more rounds. In this framework, we propose to allow probabilistic differential propagations in the extended part and incorporate the holistic recovery strategy. Additionally, we introduce the ``split-and-bunch technique'' to further reduce the time complexity. Beyond rectangle attacks, we extend these foundational concepts to encompass differential attacks as well. To demonstrate the efficiency of our framework, we apply it to Deoxys-BC-384, SKINNY, ForkSkinny, and CRAFT, achieving a series of refined and improved rectangle attacks and differential attacks. Notably, we obtain the first 15-round attack on Deoxys-BC-384, narrowing its security margin to only one round. Furthermore, our differential attack on CRAFT extends to 23 rounds, covering two more rounds than the previous best attacks.

Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) is a trend in applied cryptography because it combine confidentiality, integrity, and authentication into one algorithm and is more efficient than using block ciphers and hash functions separately. The Ascon algorithm, as the winner in both the CAESAR competition and the NIST LwC competition, will soon become the AEAD standard for protecting the Internet of Things and micro devices with limited computing resources. We propose a partial differential fault analysis (PDFA) technology for the Ascon algorithm, using stuck-at fault and random-nibble fault models respectively. Theoretically, after 9.9 full-round fault injections or 263 single nibble fault injections, 128-bit key can be completely recovered. In addition, we conducted the first discussion of this analysis method under different nonce configurations. In the Nonce-respect case, an average of 130 additional Tag queries are required to complete the guessing of the faulty tag, afterwards equating this case with the Nonce-misuse case. Subsequent experimental results proved the correctness of the theoretical model. Finally we discuss some countermeasures against proposed attacks, and we propose a new S-box that can be used to replace the existing S-box in ASCON to render PDFA ineffective.

The cube attack extracts the information of secret key bits by recovering the coefficient called superpoly in the output bit with respect to a subset of plaintexts/IV, which is called a cube. While the division property provides an efficient way to detect the structure of the superpoly, superpoly recovery could still be prohibitively costly if the number of rounds is sufficiently high. In particular, Core Monomial Prediction (CMP) was proposed at ASIACRYPT 2022 as a scaled-down version of Monomial Prediction (MP), which sacrifices accuracy for efficiency but ultimately gets stuck at 848 rounds of \trivium.

In this paper, we provide new insights into CMP by elucidating the algebraic meaning to the core monomial trails. We prove that it is sufficient to recover the superpoly by extracting all the core monomial trails, an approach based solely on CMP, thus demonstrating that CMP can achieve perfect accuracy as MP does. We further reveal that CMP is still MP in essence, but with variable substitutions on the target function. Inspired by the divide-and-conquer strategy that has been widely used in previous literature, we design a meet-in-the-middle (MITM) framework, in which the CMP-based approach can be embedded to achieve a speedup.

To illustrate the power of these new techniques, we apply the MITM framework to \trivium, \grain and \kreyvium. As a result, not only can the previous computational cost of superpoly recovery be reduced (e.g., 5x faster for superpoly recovery on 192-round \grain), but we also succeed in recovering superpolies for up to 851 rounds of \trivium and up to 899 rounds of \kreyvium. This surpasses the previous best results by respectively 3 and 4 rounds. Using the memory-efficient M\"obius transform proposed at EUROCRYPT 2021, we can perform key recovery attacks on target ciphers, even though the superpoly may contain over $2^{40}$ monomials. This leads to the best cube attacks on the target ciphers.

We present VeriSimplePIR, a verifiable version of the state-of-the-art semi-honest SimplePIR protocol. VeriSimplePIR is a stateful verifiable PIR scheme guaranteeing that all queries are consistent with a fixed, well-formed database. It is the first efficient verifiable PIR scheme to not rely on an honest digest to ensure security; any digest, even one produced by a malicious server, is sufficient to commit to some database. This is due to our extractable verification procedure, which can extract the entire database from the consistency proof checked against each response.

Furthermore, VeriSimplePIR ensures this strong security guarantee without compromising the performance of SimplePIR. The online communication overhead is roughly $1.1$-$1.5\times$ SimplePIR, and the online computation time on the server is essentially the same. We achieve this low overhead via a novel one-time preprocessing protocol that generates a reusable proof that can verify any number of subsequent query-response pairs as long as no malicious behavior is detected. As soon as the verification procedure rejects a response from the server, the offline phase must be rerun to compute a new proof. VeriSimplePIR represents an approach to maliciously secure cryptography that is highly optimized for honest parties while maintaining security even in the presence of malicious adversaries.

We put forward a new approach for achieving non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIKZs) from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption (with subexponential modulus to noise ratio). We provide a LWE-based construction of a hidden bits generator that gives rise to a NIZK via the celebrated hidden bits paradigm. A noteable feature of our construction is its simplicity. Our construction employs lattice trapdoors, but beyond that uses only simple operations. Unlike prior solutions we do not rely on a correlation intractability argument nor do we utilize fully homomorphic encryption techniques. Our solution provides a new methodology that adds to the diversity of techniques for solving this fundamental problem.

Side channel attacks are devastating attacks targeting cryptographic implementations. To protect against these attacks, various countermeasures have been proposed -- in particular, the so-called masking scheme. Masking schemes work by hiding sensitive information via secret sharing all intermediate values that occur during the evaluation of a cryptographic implementation. Over the last decade, there has been broad interest in designing and formally analyzing such schemes. The random probing model considers leakage where the value on each wire leaks with some probability $\epsilon$. This model is important as it implies security in the noisy leakage model via a reduction by Duc et al. (Eurocrypt 2014). Noisy leakages are considered the "gold-standard" for analyzing masking schemes as they accurately model many real-world physical leakages. Unfortunately, the reduction of Duc et al. is non-tight, and in particular requires that the amount of noise increases by a factor of $|\mathbb{F}|$ for circuits that operate over $\mathbb{F}$ (where $\mathbb{F}$ is a finite field). In this work, we give a generic transformation from random probing to average probing, which avoids this loss of $|\mathbb{F}|$. Since the average probing is identical to the noisy leakage model (Eurocrypt 2014), this yields for the first time a security analysis of masked circuits where the noise parameter $\delta$ in the noisy leakage model is independent of $|\mathbb{F}|$. The latter is particularly important for cryptographic schemes operating over large fields, e.g., the AES or the recently standardized post-quantum schemes.

The XOR of two independent permutations (XoP) is a well-known construction for achieving security beyond the birthday bound when implementing a pseudorandom function using a block cipher (i.e., a pseudorandom permutation). The idealized construction (where the permutations are uniformly chosen and independent) and its variants have been extensively analyzed over nearly 25 years.

The best-known information-theoretic indistinguishability bound for the XoP construction (due to Dutta, Nandi and Saha~[IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory]) is about $q^2/2^{2n}$, where $q$ is the number of queries and $n$ is the block length. The XoP construction has also been recently analyzed in the multi-user setting and the best known bound for it (by Chen, Choi, and Lee~[CRYPTO'23]) is about $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}^2/2^{2n}$, where $u$ is the number of users and $q_{\max}$ is the number of queries per user.

A generalization of the XoP construction outputs the XOR of $r \geq 2$ independent permutations, and has also received significant attention. In this paper, we improve all previous bounds obtained in the literature for the (generalized) XoP construction when $q > 2^{n/2}$ (assuming $q < 2^{n}/2$). Specifically, for the basic XoP construction with $r=2$, we obtain an indistinguishability bound of $q/2^{1.5n}$ in the single-user setting and $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}/2^{1.5n}$ in the multi-user setting. Hence, if $q_{\max} = \Theta(2^{n})$ (and $q_{\max} < 2^{n}/2$), then our bound of $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}/2^{1.5n}$ implies that the adversary's advantage remains negligible as long as $u = o(2^n)$. On the other hand, with the previous bound of $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}^2/2^{2n}$, the adversary's advantage may already be a constant with a single user ($u=1$).

For the generalized XoP construction, we obtain a bound of $q/2^{(r - 0.5)n}$ in the single-user setting and $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}/2^{(r - 0.5)n}$ in the multi-user setting. Consequently, the gap between our results and the best previous ones increases sharply with $r$. For example, the best-known bound for $r = 3$, obtained by Choi et al. [ASIACRYPT'22] (in the multi-user setting), is about $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}^2/2^{2.5 n}$, while we obtain $\sqrt{u} q_{\max}/2^{2.5 n}$.

Since all of our bounds are matched (up to constant factors) for $q > 2^{n/2}$ by attacks published by Patarin in 2008 (and their generalizations to the multi-user setting), they are all tight. We obtain our results by Fourier analysis of Boolean functions. Yet, most of our technical work is not directly related to the analyzed cryptosystems. It rather involves analyzing fundamental Fourier properties of the density function associated with sampling without replacement from the domain $\{0,1\}^n$. We believe that this analysis is of broad interest.