International Association
for Cryptologic Research

GIFT is a family of lightweight block ciphers based on SPN structure and composed of two versions named GIFT-64 and GIFT-128. In this paper, we reevaluate the security of GIFT-64 against the rectangle attack under the related-key setting. Investigating the previous rectangle key recovery attack on GIFT-64, we obtain the core idea of improving the attack——trading off the time complexity of each attack phase. We flexibly guess part of the involved subkey bits to balance the time cost of each phase so that the overall time complexity of the attack is reduced. Moreover, the reused subkey bits are identified according to the linear key schedule of GIFT-64 and bring additional advantages for our attacks. Furthermore, we incorporate the above ideas and propose a dedicated MILP model for finding the best rectangle key recovery attack on GIFT-64. As a result, we get the improved rectangle attacks on 26-round GIFT-64, which are the best attacks on it in terms of time complexity so far.

Von Ahn, Hopper and Langford introduced the notion of steganographic a.k.a. covert computation, to capture distributed computation where the attackers must not be able to distinguish honest parties from entities emitting random bitstrings. This indistinguishability should hold for the duration of the computation except for what is revealed by the intended outputs of the computed functionality. An important case of covert computation is mutually authenticated key exchange, a.k.a. mutual authentication. Mutual authentication is a fundamental primitive often preceding more complex secure protocols used for distributed computation. However, standard authentication implementations are not covert, which allows a network adversary to target or block parties who engage in authentication. Therefore, mutual authentication is one of the premier use cases of covert computation and has numerous real-world applications, e.g., for enabling authentication over steganographic channels in a network controlled by a discriminatory entity.

We improve on the state of the art in covert authentication by presenting a protocol that retains covertness and security under concurrent composition, has minimal message complexity, and reduces protocol bandwidth by an order of magnitude compared to previous constructions. To model the security of our scheme we develop a UC model which captures standard features of secure mutual authentication but extends them to covertness. We prove our construction secure in this UC model. We also provide a proof-of-concept implementation of our scheme.

Quantum computers hold the potential to solve problems that are intractable for classical computers, thereby driving increased interest in the development of new cryptanalytic ciphers. In NIST's post-quantum standardization process, the security categories are defined by the costs of quantum key search against AES. However, the cost estimates provided by Grassl et al. for the search are high. NIST has acknowledged that these initial classifications should be approached cautiously, since the costs of the most advanced attacks can be significantly reduced. Therefore, accurate resource estimations are crucial for evaluating the security of ciphers against quantum adversaries. This paper presents a set of generic techniques for implementing AES quantum oracles, which are essential for quantum attacks such as Grover's algorithms. Firstly, we introduce the mixing-XOR technique to reuse the ancilla qubits. At ASIACRYPT 2022, Huang et al. proposed an S-box structure with 120 ancilla qubits. We are able to reduce the number of ancilla qubits to 83 without increasing the T-depth. Secondly, we propose the combined pipeline architecture with the share technique to combine the S-box and its reverse, which achieves it with only 98 ancilla qubits, resulting in a significant reduction of 59% compared to the independent structure. Thirdly, we use a general algorithm to determine the depth of quantum circuits, searching for the in-place circuit of AES MixColumns with depth 16. Applying these improvements, we achieve the lower quantum depth of AES circuits, obtaining more precise resource estimates for Grover's algorithm. For AES-128, -192, and -256, we only require the depth of 730, 876, and 1,018, respectively. Recently, the community has also focused on the trade-off of the time and space cost of quantum circuits for AES. In this regard, we present quantum implementations of AES circuits with a lower DW-cost on the zig-zag architecture. Compared with the circuit proposed by Huang et al., the DW-cost is reduced by 35%.

Gentry and Wichs proved that adaptively sound SNARGs for hard languages need non-falsifiable assumptions. Lipmaa and Pavlyk claimed Gentry-Wichs is tight by constructing a non-adaptively sound zk-SNARG FANA for NP from falsifiable assumptions. We show that FANA is flawed. We define and construct a fully algebraic $F$-position-binding vector commitment scheme VCF. We construct a concretely efficient commit-and-prove zk-SNARK Punic, a version of FANA with an additional VCF commitment to the witness. Punic satisfies semi-adaptive black-box $G$-knowledge-soundness, a new natural knowledge-soundness notion for commit-and-prove SNARKs. We use a new proof technique to achieve global consistency using a functional somewhere-extractable commitment scheme to extract vector commitment's local proofs.

Fuzzy Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (fuzzy PAKE) allows cryptographic keys to be generated from authentication data that is both fuzzy and of low entropy. The strong protection against offline attacks offered by fuzzy PAKE opens an interesting avenue towards secure biometric authentication, typo-tolerant password authentication, and automated IoT device pairing. Previous constructions of fuzzy PAKE are either based on Error Correcting Codes (ECC) or generic multi-party computation techniques such as Garbled Circuits. While ECC-based constructions are significantly more efficient, they rely on multiple special properties of error correcting codes such as maximum distance separability and smoothness. We contribute to the line of research on fuzzy PAKE in two ways. First, we identify a subtle but devastating gap in the security analysis of the currently most efficient fuzzy PAKE construction (Dupont et al., Eurocrypt 2018), allowing a man-in-the-middle attacker to test individual password characters. Second, we provide a new fuzzy PAKE scheme based on ECC and PAKE that provides a built-in protection against individual password character guesses and requires fewer, more standard properties of the underlying ECC. Additionally, our construction offers better error correction capabilities than previous ECC-based fuzzy PAKEs.

The differential-linear attack is one of the most effective attacks against ARX ciphers. However, two technical problems are preventing it from being more effective and having more applications: (1) there is no efficient method to search for good differential-linear approximations. Existing methods either have many constraints or are currently inefficient. (2) partitioning technique has great potential to reduce the time complexity of the key-recovery attack, but there is no general tool to construct partitions for ARX ciphers. In this work, we step forward in solving the two problems. First, we propose a novel idea for generating new good differential-linear approximations from known ones, based on which new searching algorithms are designed. Second, we propose a general tool named partition tree, for constructing partitions for ARX ciphers. Based on these new techniques, we present better attacks for two ISO/IEC standards, i.e., LEA and Speck. For LEA, we present the first 17-round distinguisher which is 1 round longer than the previous best distinguisher. Furthermore, we present the first key recovery attacks on 17-round LEA-128, 18-round LEA-192, and 18-round LEA-256, which attack 3, 4, and 3 rounds more than the previous best attacks. For Speck, we find better differential-linear distinguishers for Speck48 and Speck64. The first differential-linear distinguishers for Speck96 and Speck128 are also presented.

Multi-party private set union (MPSU) allows \(k(k\geq 3)\) parties, each holding a dataset of known size, to compute the union of their sets without revealing any additional information. Although two-party PSU has made rapid progress in recent years, applying its effective techniques to the multi-party setting would render information leakage and thus cannot be directly extended. Existing MPSU protocols heavily rely on computationally expensive public-key operations or generic secure multi-party computation techniques, which are not scalable.

In this work, we present a new efficient framework of MPSU from multi-party secret-shared shuffle and a newly introduced protocol called multi-query secret-shared private membership test (mq-ssPMT). Our MPSU is mainly based on symmetric-key operations and is secure against any semi-honest adversary that does not corrupt the leader and clients simultaneously. We also propose new frameworks for computing other multi-party private set operations (MPSO), such as the intersection, and the cardinality of the union and the intersection, meeting the same security requirements.

We demonstrate the scalability of our MPSU protocol with an implementation and a comparison with the state-of-the-art MPSU. Experiments show that when computing on datasets of \(2^{10}\) elements, our protocol is \(109\times\) faster than the state-of-the-art MPSU, and the improvement becomes more significant as the set size increases. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first protocol that reports on large-size experiments. For 7 parties with datasets of \(2^{20}\) elements each, our protocol requires only 46 seconds.

The main focus of this article is on an open problem, namely the Ring-SIS reduction problem.We first utilize a spatial isomorphism approach to reduce the Ring-SIS problem to the classic SIS problem in lattices, indirectly reducing it to the classic SIVP in lattices. This provides theoretical assurance to some extent for the difficulty and resistance against quantum attacks of the Ring-SIS problem.

Additionally, we reduce the Ring-LWE problem to the Ring-SIS problem, which guarantees the security of encryption schemes based on Ring-LWE to a certain degree. Finally, this article proves that the difficulty of the Ring-SIS problem and the Ring-LWE problem is relatively average with respect to the spatial dimension or polynomial degree.

Succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs) are a type of non-interactive proof system enabling efficient privacy-preserving proofs of membership for NP languages. A great deal of works has studied candidate constructions that are secure against quantum attackers, which are based on either lattice assumptions, or post-quantum collision-resistant hash functions. In this paper, we propose a code-based zk-SNARK scheme, whose security is based on the rank support learning (RSL) problem, a variant of the random linear code decoding problem in the rank metric. Our construction follows the general framework of Gennaro et al. (CCS'18), which is based on square span programs (SSPs). Due to the fundamental differences between the hardness assumptions, our proof of security cannot apply the techniques from the lattice-based constructions, and indeed, it distinguishes itself by the use of techniques from coding theory. We also provide the scheme with a set of concrete parameters.

The number theoretic transform (NTT) permits a very efficient method to perform multiplication of very large degree polynomials, which is the most time-consuming operation in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes and a class of non-interactive succinct zero-knowledge proof systems such as zk-SNARK. Efficient modular arithmetic plays an important role in the performance of NTT, and therefore it is studied extensively. The access pattern to the memory, on the other hand, may play much greater role, as the NTT execution time is mostly memory-bound due to large degree polynomials. In this paper, we propose two algorithms for fast computation of NTT on a class of graphical processing units (GPU) by optimizing the memory access patterns. We present an approach i) to optimize the number of accesses to slow global memory for thread synchronization, and ii) to make better use of spatial locality in global memory accesses. It turns out that by controlling certain parameters in CUDA platform for general-purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) such as kernel count, block size and block shape, we can affect the performance of NTT. To best of our knowledge, this work is unique for it suggests a recipe for selecting optimum CUDA parameters to obtain the best NTT performance for a given polynomial degree. Our implementation results on various GPU devices for all power-of-two polynomial degrees from $2^{12}$ to $2^{28}$ show that our algorithms compare favorably with the other state-of-the-art GPU implementations in the literature with the optimum selection of these three CUDA parameters.

We define and analyze the Commutative Isogeny Hidden Number Problem which is the natural analogue of the Hidden Number Problem in the CSIDH and CSURF setting. In short, the task is as follows: Given two supersingular elliptic curves \(E_A\), \(E_B\) and access to an oracle that outputs some of the most significant bits of the \({\mathsf{CDH}}\) of two curves, an adversary must compute the shared curve \(E_{AB}={\mathsf{CDH}}(E_A,E_B)\). We show that we can recover \(E_{AB}\) in polynomial time by using Coppersmith's method as long as the oracle outputs \({\frac{13}{24}} + \varepsilon \approx 54\%\) (CSIDH) and \({\frac{31}{41}} + \varepsilon \approx 76\%\) (CSURF) of the most significant bits of the \({\mathsf{CDH}}\), where $\varepsilon > 0$ is an arbitrarily small constant. To this end, we give a purely combinatorial restatement of Coppersmith's method, effectively concealing the intricate aspects of lattice theory and allowing for near-complete automation. By leveraging this approach, we attain recovery attacks with $\varepsilon$ close to zero within a few minutes of computation.

In this paper, we improve the cube attack by exploiting low-degree factors of the superpoly w.r.t. certain "special" index set of cube (ISoC). This can be viewed as a special case of the correlation cube attack proposed at Eurocrypt 2018, but under our framework more beneficial equations on the key variables can be obtained in the key-recovery phase. To mount our attack, one has two challenging problems: (1) effectively recover algebraic normal form of the superpoly and extract out its low-degree factors; and (2) efficiently search a large quantity of good ISoCs. We bring in new techniques to solve both of them.

First, we propose the variable substitution technique for middle rounds of a cipher, in which polynomials on the key variables in the algebraic expressions of internal states are substituted by new variables. This will improve computational complexity of the superpoly recovery and promise more compact superpolys that can be easily decomposed with respect to the new variables. Second, we propose the vector numeric mapping technique, which seeks out a tradeoff between efficiency of the numeric mapping technique (Crypto 2019) and accuracy of the monomial prediction technique (Asiacrypt 2020) in degree evaluation of superpolys. Combining with this technique, a fast pruning method is given and modeled by MILP to filter good ISoCs of which the algebraic degree satisfies some fixed threshold. Thanks to automated MILP solvers, it becomes practical to comprehensively search for good cubes across the entire search space.

To illustrate the power of our techniques, we apply all of them to Trivium stream cipher. As a result, we have recovered the superpolys of three cubes given by Kesarwani et al. in 2020, only to find they do not have zero-sum property up to 842 rounds as claimed in their paper. To our knowledge, the previous best practical key recovery attack was on 820-round Trivium with complexity $2^{53.17}$. We put forward 820-, 825- and 830-round practical key-recovery attacks, in which there are $\mathbf{2^{80}\times 87.8\%}$, $\mathbf{2^{80}\times 83\%}$ and $\mathbf{2^{80}\times 65.7\%}$ keys that could be practically recovered, respectively, if we consider $\mathbf{2^{60}}$ as the upper bound for practical computational complexity. Besides, even for computers with computational power not exceeding $\mathbf{2^{52}}$ (resp. $\mathbf{2^{55}}$), we can still recover $\mathbf{58\%}$ (resp. $\mathbf{46.6\%}$) of the keys in the key space for 820 rounds (resp. 830 rounds). Our attacks have led 10 rounds more than the previous best practical attack.

In this paper, we consider how to use fully homomorphic encryptions (FHEs) to solve the problem of secure computations over set intersection where one party holds a relatively set of size $N_s$ and the other party holds a relatively small set of size $N_r$ collaboratively compute some functionality over their set intersection without revealing other information. This problem has many applications for online collaboration, for example, fingerprint matching, online dating, and shareriding.

This paper introduces Sigmabus, a technique designed to enhance the efficiency of zero-knowledge circuits by relocating computationally expensive operations outside the circuit. Specifically, Sigmabus focuses on moving elliptic curve group operations, typically proven with expensive non-native field arithmetic, to external computations. By leveraging Sigma protocols, elliptic curve group operations are proven outside the circuit, while additional constraints are applied to the circuit to ensure correct execution of the Sigma protocol. This approach can achieve significant performance improvements in zero-knowledge circuits. This paper presents the Sigmabus protocol along with its security proofs, and demonstrates its practical implications through various use cases.

Succinct arguments allow a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of any statement in a language, with minimal communication and verifier's work. Among other approaches, lattice-based protocols offer solid theoretical foundations, post-quantum security, and a rich algebraic structure. In this work, we present some new approaches to constructing efficient lattice-based succinct arguments. Our main technical ingredient is a new commitment scheme based on vanishing polynomials, a notion borrowed from algebraic geometry. We analyse the security of such a commitment scheme, and show how to take advantage of the additional algebraic structure to build new lattice-based succinct arguments. A few highlights amongst our results are:

- The first recursive folding (i.e. Bulletproofs-like) protocol for linear relations with polylogarithmic verifier runtime. Traditionally, the verifier runtime has been the efficiency bottleneck for such protocols (regardless of the underlying assumptions). - The first verifiable delay function (VDF) based on lattices, building on a recently introduced sequential relation. - The first lattice-based \emph{linear-time prover} succinct argument for NP, in the preprocessing model. The soundness of the scheme is based on (knowledge)-k-R-ISIS assumption [Albrecht et al., CRYPTO'22].

Lucas sequences are constant-recursive integer sequences with a long history of applications in cryptography, both in the design of cryptographic schemes and cryptanalysis. In this work, we study the sequential hardness of computing Lucas sequences over an RSA modulus.

First, we show that modular Lucas sequences are at least as sequentially hard as the classical delay function given by iterated modular squaring proposed by Rivest, Shamir, and Wagner (MIT Tech. Rep. 1996) in the context of time-lock puzzles. Moreover, there is no obvious reduction in the other direction, which suggests that the assumption of sequential hardness of modular Lucas sequences is strictly weaker than that of iterated modular squaring. In other words, the sequential hardness of modular Lucas sequences might hold even in the case of an algorithmic improvement violating the sequential hardness of iterated modular squaring. Moreover, we note that modular Lucas sequences also yield a time-lock puzzle, similar to the classical construction of Rivest, Shamir and Wagner.

Second, we demonstrate the feasibility of constructing practically-efficient verifiable delay functions based on the sequential hardness of modular Lucas sequences. Our construction builds on the work of Pietrzak (ITCS 2019) by leveraging the intrinsic connection between the problem of computing modular Lucas sequences and exponentiation in an appropriate extension field.

Extremely Lossy Functions (ELFs) are families of functions that, depending on the choice during key generation, either operate in injective mode or instead have only a polynomial image size. The choice of the mode is indistinguishable to an outsider. ELFs were introduced by Zhandry (Crypto 2016) and have been shown to be very useful in replacing random oracles in a number of applications.

One open question is to determine the minimal assumption needed to instantiate ELFs. While all constructions of ELFs depend on some form of exponentially-secure public-key primitive, it was conjectured that exponentially-secure secret-key primitives, such as one-way functions, hash functions or one-way product functions, might be sufficient to build ELFs. In this work we answer this conjecture mostly negative: We show that no primitive, which can be derived from a random oracle (which includes all secret-key primitives mentioned above), is enough to construct even moderately lossy functions in a black-box manner. However, we also show that (extremely) lossy functions themselves do not imply public-key cryptography, leaving open the option to build ELFs from some intermediate primitive between the classical categories of secret-key and public-key cryptography.

This paper offers a mathematical introduction to fully homomorphic encryption, a concept that enables computation on encrypted data. We trace the historical development of FHE, describe Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Torus (TFHE) and how it performs certain mathematical operations, and explore bootstrapping and the possibility for adjusting computational depth. This paper equips readers with a brief understanding of FHE's evolution and the essential mechanisms facilitating practical implementation.

Non-interactive key exchange (NIKE) schemes like the Diffie-Hellman key exchange are a widespread building block in several cryptographic protocols. Since the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is not post-quantum secure, it is important to investigate post-quantum alternatives.

We analyze the security of the LWE-based NIKE by Ding et al. (ePrint 2012) and Peikert (PQCrypt 2014) in a multi-user setting where the same public key is used to generate shared keys with multiple other users. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange achieves this security notion. The mentioned LWE-based NIKE scheme comes with an inherent correctness error (Guo et al., PKC 2020), and this has significant implications for the multi-user security, necessitating a closer examination.

Single-user security generically implies multi-user security when all users generate their keys honestly for NIKE schemes with negligible correctness error. However, the LWE-based NIKE requires a super-polynomial modulus to achieve a negligible correctness error, which makes the scheme less efficient. We show that - generically, single-user security does not imply multi-user security when the correctness error is non-negligible, but despite this - the LWE-based NIKE with polynomial modulus is multi-user secure for honest users when the number of users is fixed in advance. This result takes advantage of the leakage-resilience properties of LWE.

We then turn to a stronger model of multi-user security that allows adversarially generated public keys. For this model, we consider a variant of the LWE-based NIKE where each public key is equipped with a NIZKPoK of the secret key. Adding NIZKPoKs is a standard technique for this stronger model and Hesse et al. (Crypto 2018) showed that this is sufficient to achieve security in the stronger multi-user security model for perfectly correct NIKEs (which the LWE-based NIKE is not). We show that - for certain parameters that include all parameters with polynomial modulus, the LWE-based NIKE can be efficiently attacked with adversarially generated public keys, despite the use of NIZKPoKs, but - for suitable parameters (that require a super-polynomial modulus), this security notion is achieved by the LWE-based NIKE with NIZKPoKs. This stronger security notion has been previously achieved for LWE-based NIKE only in the QROM, while all our results are in the standard model.

Updatable public key encryption has recently been introduced as a solution to achieve forward-security in the context of secure group messaging without hurting efficiency, but so far, no efficient lattice-based instantiation of this primitive is known.

In this work, we construct the first LWE-based UPKE scheme with polynomial modulus-to-noise rate, which is CPA-secure in the standard model. At the core of our security analysis is a generalized reduction from the standard LWE problem to (a stronger version of) the Extended LWE problem. We further extend our construction to achieve stronger security notions by proposing two generic transforms. Our first transform allows to obtain CCA security in the random oracle model and adapts the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform to the UPKE setting. Our second transform allows to achieve security against malicious updates by adding a NIZK argument in the update mechanism. In the process, we also introduce the notion of Updatable Key Encapsulation Mechanism (UKEM), as the updatable variant of KEMs. Overall, we obtain a CCA-secure UKEM in the random oracle model whose ciphertext sizes are of the same order of magnitude as that of CRYSTALS-Kyber.