489 results sorted by ID
On SIS-problem-based random Feistel ciphers and its statistical evaluation of resistance against differential cryptanalysis
Yu Morishima, Masahiro Kaminaga
Secret-key cryptography
Provable security based on a robust mathematical framework is the gold standard for security evaluation in cryptography.
Several provable secure cryptosystems have been studied for public key cryptography. However, provably secure symmetric-key cryptography has received little attention.
Although there are known provably secure symmetric-key cryptosystems based on the hardness of factorization and discrete logarithm problems, they are not only slower than conventional block ciphers but can...
Information-theoretic security with asymmetries
Tim Beyne, Yu Long Chen
Secret-key cryptography
In this paper, we study the problem of lower bounding any
given cost function depending on the false positive and false negative
probabilities of adversaries against indistinguishability security notions in symmetric-key cryptography. We take the cost model as an input, so that this becomes a purely information-theoretical question.
We propose power bounds as an easy-to-use alternative for advantage bounds in the context of indistinguishability with asymmetric cost functions. We show...
Hash-based Direct Anonymous Attestation
Liqun Chen, Changyu Dong, Nada El Kassem, Christopher J.P. Newton, Yalan Wang
Cryptographic protocols
Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) was designed for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and versions using RSA and elliptic curve cryptography have been included in the TPM specifications and in ISO/IEC standards. These standardised DAA schemes have their security based on the factoring or discrete logarithm problems and are therefore insecure against quantum attackers. Research into quantum-resistant DAA has resulted in several lattice-based schemes. Now in this paper, we propose the first...
Sphinx-in-the-Head: Group Signatures from Symmetric Primitives
Liqun Chen, Changyu Dong, Christopher J. P. Newton, Yalan Wang
Cryptographic protocols
Group signatures and their variants have been widely used in privacy-sensitive scenarios such as anonymous authentication and attestation. In this paper, we present a new post-quantum group signature scheme from symmetric primitives. Using only symmetric primitives makes the scheme less prone to unknown attacks than basing the design on newly proposed hard problems whose security is less well-understood. However, symmetric primitives do not have rich algebraic properties, and this makes it...
Determination of cryptographic tables and properties related to the revised boomerang and its application to a fundamental S-box
Said Eddahmani, Sihem Mesnager
Attacks and cryptanalysis
In symmetric cryptography, vectorial Boolean functions over finite fields F2n derive strong S-boxes. To this end, the S-box should satisfy a list of tests to resist existing attacks, such as the differential, linear, boomerang, and variants. Several tables are employed to measure an S- box’s resistance, such as the difference distribution table (DDT) and the boomerang connectivity table (BCT). Following the boomerang attacks recently revisited in terms of the boomerang switch effect, with a...
Shorter VOLEitH Signature from Multivariate Quadratic
Dung Bui
Cryptographic protocols
The VOLE-in-the-Head paradigm, recently introduced by Baum et al. (Crypto 2023), is a compiler that uses SoftspokenOT (Crypto 2022) to transfer any VOLE-based designated verifier zero-knowledge protocol into a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge protocol. Together with the Fiat-Shamir transformation, a new digital signature scheme FAEST (faest.info) is proposed, and it outperforms all MPC-in-the-Head signatures.
We propose a new candidate post-quantum signature scheme from the Multivariate...
Connecting Leakage-Resilient Secret Sharing to Practice: Scaling Trends and Physical Dependencies of Prime Field Masking
Sebastian Faust, Loïc Masure, Elena Micheli, Maximilian Orlt, François-Xavier Standaert
Implementation
Symmetric ciphers operating in (small or mid-size) prime fields have been shown to be promising candidates to maintain security against low-noise (or even noise-free) side-channel leakage.
In order to design prime ciphers that best trade physical security and implementation efficiency, it is essential to understand how side-channel security evolves with the field size (i.e., scaling trends).
Unfortunately, it has also been shown that such a scaling trend depends on the leakage functions...
On Central Primitives for Quantum Cryptography with Classical Communication
Kai-Min Chung, Eli Goldin, Matthew Gray
Foundations
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...
On the cryptosystems based on two Eulerian transfor-mations defined over the commutative rings $Z_{2^s}, s>1$.
Vasyl Ustimenko
Cryptographic protocols
We suggest the family of ciphers s^E^n, n=2,3,.... with the space of plaintexts (Z*_{2^s})^n, s >1 such that the encryption map is the composition of kind G=G_1A_1G_2A_2 where A_i are the affine transformations from AGL_n(Z_{2^s}) preserving the variety (Z*_{2^s)}^n , Eulerian endomorphism G_i , i=1,2 of K[x_1, x_2,...., x_n] moves x_i to monomial term ϻ(x_1)^{d(1)}(x_2)^{d(2)}...(x_n)^{d(n)} , ϻϵ Z*_{2^s} and act on (Z*_{2^s})^n as bijective transformations.
The cipher is...
Accelerating Training and Enhancing Security Through Message Size Optimization in Symmetric Cryptography
ABHISAR, Madhav Yadav, Girish Mishra
This research extends Abadi and Andersen's exploration of neural networks using secret keys for information protection in multiagent systems. Focusing on enhancing confidentiality properties, we employ end-to-end adversarial training with neural networks Alice, Bob, and Eve. Unlike prior work limited to 64-bit messages, our study spans message sizes from 4 to 1024 bits, varying batch sizes and training steps. An innovative aspect involves training model Bob to approach a minimal error value...
SoK: Parameterization of Fault Adversary Models - Connecting Theory and Practice
Dilara Toprakhisar, Svetla Nikova, Ventzislav Nikov
Secret-key cryptography
Since the first fault attack by Boneh et al. in 1997, various physical fault injection mechanisms have been explored to induce errors in electronic systems. Subsequent fault analysis methods of these errors have been studied, and successfully used to attack many cryptographic implementations. This poses a significant challenge to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms. To address this, numerous countermeasures have been proposed. Nevertheless, these countermeasures are...
Short Signatures from Regular Syndrome Decoding, Revisited
Dung Bui, Eliana Carozza, Geoffroy Couteau, Dahmun Goudarzi, Antoine Joux
Cryptographic protocols
We revisit the construction of signature scheme using the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, and focus in particular on constructions from the regular syndrome decoding assumption, a well-known variant of the syndrome decoding assumption. We obtain two main contributions:
– We observe that previous signatures in the MPC-in-the-head paradigm must rely on a salted version of the GGM puncturable pseudorandom function (PPRF) to avoid collision attacks. We design a new efficient PPRF construction...
Implementation of Cryptanalytic Programs Using ChatGPT
Nobuyuki Sugio
Secret-key cryptography
Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by the advanced AI tool ChatGPT in 2023, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating sentences, images, and program codes, driven by their development from extensive datasets. With over 100 million users worldwide, ChatGPT stands out as a leader among LLMs. Previous studies have shown its proficiency in generating program source codes for the symmetric-key block ciphers AES, CHAM, and ASCON. This study ventures into the implementation of...
Security of Symmetric Ratchets and Key Chains - Implications for Protocols like TLS 1.3, Signal, and PQ3
John Preuß Mattsson
Cryptographic protocols
Symmetric ratchets and one-way key chains play a vital role in numerous important security protocols such as TLS 1.3, DTLS 1.3, QUIC, Signal, MLS, EDHOC, OSCORE, and Apple PQ3. Despite the crucial role they play, very little is known about their security properties. This paper categorizes and examines different ratchet constructions, offering a comprehensive overview of their security. Our analysis reveals notable distinctions between different types of one-way key chains. Notably, the type...
QPP and HPPK: Unifying Non-Commutativity for Quantum-Secure Cryptography with Galois Permutation Group
Randy Kuang
Cryptographic protocols
In response to the evolving landscape of quantum computing and the heightened vulnerabilities in classical cryptographic systems, our paper introduces a comprehensive cryptographic framework. Building upon the pioneering work of Kuang et al., we present a unification of two innovative primitives: the Quantum Permutation Pad (QPP) for symmetric key encryption and the Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key (HPPK) for Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and Digital Signatures (DS). By harnessing...
Machine Learning based Blind Side-Channel Attacks on PQC-based KEMs - A Case Study of Kyber KEM
Prasanna Ravi, Dirmanto Jap, Shivam Bhasin, Anupam Chattopadhyay
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Kyber KEM, the NIST selected PQC standard for Public Key Encryption and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) has been subjected to a variety of side-channel attacks, through the course of the NIST PQC standardization process. However, all these attacks targeting the decapsulation procedure of Kyber KEM either require knowledge of the ciphertexts or require to control the value of ciphertexts for key recovery. However, there are no known attacks in a blind setting, where the attacker does not...
HiSE: Hierarchical (Threshold) Symmetric-key Encryption
Pousali Dey, Pratyay Mukherjee, Swagata Sasmal, Rohit Sinha
Cryptographic protocols
Threshold symmetric encryption (TSE), introduced by Agrawal et al. [DiSE, CCS 2018], provides scalable and decentralized solution for symmetric encryption by ensuring that the secret-key stays distributed at all times. They avoid having a single point of attack or failure, while achieving the necessary security requirements. TSE was further improved by Christodorescu et al. [ATSE, CCS 2021] to support an amortization feature which enables a “more privileged” client to encrypt records in bulk...
Broadcast Encryption using Sum-Product decomposition of Boolean functions
Aurélien Dupin, Simon Abelard
Cryptographic protocols
The problem of Broadcast Encryption (BE) consists in broadcasting an encrypted message to a large number of users or receiving devices in such a way that the emitter of the message can control which of the users can or cannot decrypt it.
Since the early 1990's, the design of BE schemes has received significant interest and many different concepts were proposed. A major breakthrough was achieved by Naor, Naor and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) by partitioning cleverly the set of authorized...
Optimizing Implementations of Boolean Functions
Meltem Sonmez Turan
Implementation
Symmetric cryptography primitives are constructed by iterative applications of linear and nonlinear layers. Constructing efficient circuits for these layers, even for the linear one, is challenging. In 1997, Paar proposed a heuristic to minimize the number of XORs (modulo 2 addition) necessary to implement linear layers. In this study, we slightly modify Paar’s heuristics to find implementations for nonlinear Boolean functions, in particular to homogeneous Boolean functions. Additionally, we...
HADES: Automated Hardware Design Exploration for Cryptographic Primitives
Fabian Buschkowski, Georg Land, Jan Richter-Brockmann, Pascal Sasdrich, Tim Güneysu
Implementation
While formal constructions for cryptographic schemes have steadily evolved and emerged over the past decades, the design and implementation of efficient and secure hardware instances is still a mostly manual, tedious, and intuition-driven process. With the increasing complexity of modern cryptography, e.g., Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes, and consideration of physical implementation attacks, e.g., Side-Channel Analysis (SCA), the design space often grows exorbitantly without...
Efficient Instances of Docked Double Decker With AES, and Application to Authenticated Encryption
Christoph Dobraunig, Krystian Matusiewicz, Bart Mennink, Alexander Tereschenko
Secret-key cryptography
A tweakable wide blockcipher is a construction which behaves in the same way as a tweakable blockcipher, with the difference that the actual block size is flexible. Due to this feature, a tweakable wide blockcipher can be directly used as a strong encryption scheme that provides full diffusion when encrypting plaintexts to ciphertexts and vice versa. Furthermore, it can be the basis of authenticated encryption schemes fulfilling the strongest security notions. In this paper, we present two...
CrISA-X: Unleashing Performance Excellence in Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography for Extendable and Deeply Embedded Processors
Oren Ganon, Itamar Levi
Implementation
The selection of a Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) algorithm is crucial for resource limited applications. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) leads this process, which involves a thorough evaluation of the algorithms’ cryptanalytic strength. Furthermore, careful consideration is given to factors such as algorithm latency, code size, and hardware implementation area. These factors are critical in determining the overall performance of cryptographic solutions at edge...
SASTA: Ambushing Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption Schemes with a Single Fault
Aikata Aikata, Ahaan Dabholkar, Dhiman Saha, Sujoy Sinha Roy
Attacks and cryptanalysis
The rising tide of data breaches targeting large data storage centres and servers has raised serious privacy and security concerns. Homomorphic Encryption schemes offer an effective defence against such attacks, but their adoption has been hindered by substantial computational and communication overheads, particularly on the client's side.
The Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HEE) protocol was developed to mitigate these issues. However, the susceptibility of HHE to strong attacks,...
Benchmark Performance of Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key Cryptography for Key Encapsulation and Digital Signature Schemes
Randy Kuang, Maria Perepechaenko, Dafu Lou, Brinda Tank
Public-key cryptography
This paper conducts a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of the performance of two innovative cryptographic schemes: Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key (HPPK)-Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and Digital Signature (DS), recently proposed by Kuang et al. These schemes represent a departure from traditional cryptographic paradigms, with HPPK leveraging the security of homomorphic symmetric encryption across two hidden rings without reliance on NP-hard problems. HPPK can be viewed as a...
PT-symmetric mapping of three states and its implementation on a cloud quantum processor
Yaroslav Balytskyi, Yevgen Kotukh, Gennady Khalimov, Sang-Yoon Chang
Applications
We develop a new PT-symmetric approach for mapping three pure qubit states, implement it by the dilation method, and demonstrate it with a superconducting quantum processor provided by the IBM Quantum Experience. We derive exact formulas for the population of the post-selected PT-symmetric subspace and show consistency with the Hermitian case, conservation of average projections on reference vectors, and Quantum Fisher Information. When used for discrimination of N = 2 pure states, our...
More Efficient Public-Key Cryptography with Leakage and Tamper Resilience
Shuai Han, Shengli Liu, Dawu Gu
Public-key cryptography
In this paper, we study the design of efficient signature and public-key encryption (PKE) schemes in the presence of both leakage and tampering attacks.
Firstly, we formalize the strong leakage and tamper-resilient (sLTR) security model for signature, which provides strong existential unforgeability, and deals with bounded leakage and restricted tampering attacks, as a counterpart to the sLTR security introduced by Sun et al. (ACNS 2019) for PKE.
Then, we present direct constructions...
Overview and Discussion of Attacks on CRYSTALS-Kyber
Stone Li
Attacks and cryptanalysis
This paper reviews common attacks in classical cryptography and plausible attacks in the post-quantum era targeted at CRYSTALS-Kyber. Kyber is a recently standardized post-quantum cryptography scheme that relies on the hardness of lattice problems. Although it has undergone rigorous testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), there have recently been studies that have successfully executed attacks against Kyber while showing their applicability outside of controlled...
One for All, All for Ascon: Ensemble-based Deep Learning Side-channel Analysis
Azade Rezaeezade, Abraham Basurto-Becerra, Léo Weissbart, Guilherme Perin
Attacks and cryptanalysis
In recent years, deep learning-based side-channel analysis (DLSCA) has become an active research topic within the side-channel analysis community. The well-known challenge of hyperparameter tuning in DLSCA encouraged the community to use methods that reduce the effort required to identify an optimal model. One of the successful methods is ensemble learning. While ensemble methods have demonstrated their effectiveness in DLSCA, particularly with AES-based datasets, their efficacy in analyzing...
Quantum Security of the UMTS-AKA Protocol and its Primitives, Milenage and TUAK
Paul Frixons, Sébastien Canard, Loïc Ferreira
Cryptographic protocols
The existence of a quantum computer is one of the most significant threats cryptography has ever faced. However, it seems that real world protocols received little attention so far with respect to their future security. Indeed merely relying upon post-quantum primitives may not suffice in order for a security protocol to be resistant in a full quantum world. In this paper, we consider the fundamental UMTS key agreement used in 3G but also in 4G (LTE), and in the (recently deployed) 5G...
Algebraic Attack on FHE-Friendly Cipher HERA Using Multiple Collisions
Fukang Liu, Abul Kalam, Santanu Sarkar, Willi Meier
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an advanced cryptography technique to allow computations (i.e., addition and multiplication) over encrypted data. After years of effort, the performance of FHE has been significantly improved and it has moved from theory to practice. The transciphering framework is another important technique in FHE to address the issue of ciphertext expansion and reduce the client-side computational overhead. To apply the transciphering framework to the CKKS FHE scheme,...
A Solution to a Conjecture on the Maps $\chi_n^{(k)}$
Kamil Otal
Foundations
The Boolean map $\chi_n^{(k)}:\mathbb{F}_{2^k}^n\rightarrow \mathbb{F}_{2^k}^n$, $x\mapsto u$ given by $u_i=x_i+(x_{(i+1)\ \mathrm{mod}\ n}+1)x_{(i+2)\ \mathrm{mod}\ n}$ appears in various permutations as a part of cryptographic schemes such as KECCAK-f, ASCON, Xoodoo, Rasta, and Subterranean (2.0). Schoone and Daemen investigated some important algebraic properties of $\chi_n^{(k)}$ in [IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2023/1708]. In particular, they showed that $\chi_n^{(k)}$ is not...
High-assurance zeroization
Santiago Arranz Olmos, Gilles Barthe, Ruben Gonzalez, Benjamin Grégoire, Vincent Laporte, Jean-Christophe Léchenet, Tiago Oliveira, Peter Schwabe
Implementation
In this paper we revisit the problem of erasing sensitive data from memory and registers during return from a cryptographic routine. While the problem and related attacker model is fairly easy to phrase, it turns out to be surprisingly hard to guarantee security in this model when implementing cryptography in common languages such as C/C++ or Rust. We revisit the issues surrounding zeroization and then present a principled solution in the sense that it guarantees that sensitive data is...
Algebraic properties of the maps $\chi_n$
Jan Schoone, Joan Daemen
Foundations
The Boolean map $\chi_n \colon \mathbb{F}_2^n \to \mathbb{F}_2^n,\ x \mapsto y$ defined by $y_i = x_i + (x_{i+1}+1)x_{i+2}$ (where $i\in \mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$) is used in various permutations that are part of cryptographic schemes, e.g., Keccak-f (the SHA-3-permutation), ASCON (the winner of the NIST Lightweight competition), Xoodoo, Rasta and Subterranean (2.0).
In this paper, we study various algebraic properties of this map.
We consider $\chi_n$ (through vectorial isomorphism) as a...
On Overidealizing Ideal Worlds: Xor of Two Permutations and its Applications
Wonseok Choi, Minki Hhan, Yu Wei, Vassilis Zikas
Secret-key cryptography
Security proofs of symmetric-key primitives typically consider an idealized world with access to a (uniformly) random function. The starting point of our work is the observation that such an ideal world can lead to underestimating the actual security of certain primitives. As a demonstrating example, $\mathsf{XoP2}$, which relies on two independent random permutations, has been proven to exhibit superior concrete security compared to $\mathsf{XoP}$, which employs a single permutation with...
On the cryptographic properties of weightwise affine and weightwise quadratic functions
Pierrick Méaux, Yassine Ozaim
Secret-key cryptography
Weightwise degree-d functions are Boolean functions that take the values of a function of degree at most d on each set of fixed Hamming weight. The class of weightwise affine functions encompasses both the symmetric functions and the Hidden Weight Bit Function (HWBF). The good cryptographic properties of the HWBF, except for the nonlinearity, motivates to investigate a larger class with functions that share the good properties and have a better nonlinearity. Additionally, the homomorphic...
QCB is Blindly Unforgeable
Jannis Leuther, Stefan Lucks
Secret-key cryptography
QCB is a proposal for a post-quantum secure, rate-one authenticated encryption with associated data scheme (AEAD) based on classical OCB3 and \(\Theta\)CB, which are vulnerable against a quantum adversary in the Q2 setting. The authors of QCB prove integrity under plus-one unforgeability, whereas the proof of the stronger definition of blind unforgeability has been left as an open problem. After a short overview of QCB and the current state of security definitions for authentication, this...
Crystalor: Recoverable Memory Encryption Mechanism with Optimized Metadata Structure
Rei Ueno, Hiromichi Haneda, Naofumi Homma, Akiko Inoue, Kazuhiko Minematsu
Applications
This study presents an efficient recoverable memory encryption mechanism, named Crystalor. Existing memory encryption mechanisms, such as Intel SGX integrity tree, offer neither crash consistency nor recoverability, which results in attack surfaces and causes a non-trivial limitation of practical availability. Although the crash consistency of encrypted memory has been studied in the research field of microarchitecture, existing mechanisms lack formal security analysis and cannot incorporate...
Lightweight but Not Easy: Side-channel Analysis of the Ascon Authenticated Cipher on a 32-bit Microcontroller
Léo Weissbart, Stjepan Picek
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Ascon is a recently standardized suite of symmetric cryptography for authenticated encryption and hashing algorithms designed to be lightweight.
The Ascon scheme has been studied since it was introduced in 2015 for the CAESAR competition, and many efforts have been made to transform this hardware-oriented scheme to work with any embedded device architecture.
Ascon is designed with side-channel resistance in mind and can also be protected with countermeasures against side-channel...
Realizing Flexible Broadcast Encryption: How to Broadcast to a Public-Key Directory
Rachit Garg, George Lu, Brent Waters, David J. Wu
Public-key cryptography
Suppose a user wants to broadcast an encrypted message to $K$ recipients. With public-key encryption, the sender would construct $K$ different ciphertexts, one for each recipient. The size of the broadcasted message then scales linearly with $K$. A natural question is whether the sender can encrypt the message with a ciphertext whose size scales sublinearly with the number of recipients.
Broadcast encryption offers one solution to this problem, but at the cost of introducing a central...
CryptoZoo: A Viewer for Reduction Proofs
Chris Brzuska, Christoph Egger, Kirthivaasan Puniamurthy
Cryptographers rely on visualization to effectively communicate cryptographic constructions with one another. Visual frameworks such as constructive cryptography (TOSCA 2011), the joy of cryptography (online book) and state-separating proofs (SSPs, Asiacrypt 2018) are useful to communicate not only the construction, but also their proof visually by representing a cryptographic system as graphs.
One SSP core feature is the re-use of code, e.g., a package of code might be used in a game...
Depth-Optimized Quantum Implementation of ARIA
Yujin Yang, Kyungbae Jang, Yujin Oh, Hwajeong Seo
Implementation
The advancement of large-scale quantum computers poses a threat to the security of current encryption systems.
In particular, symmetric-key cryptography significantly is impacted by general attacks using the Grover's search algorithm.
In recent years, studies have been presented to estimate the complexity of Grover's key search for symmetric-key ciphers and assess post-quantum security.
In this paper, we propose a depth-optimized quantum circuit implementation for ARIA, which is a...
Optimized Quantum Implementation of SEED
Yujin Oh, Kyungbae Jang, Yujin Yang, Hwajeong Seo
Implementation
With the advancement of quantum computers, it has been demonstrated that Shor's algorithm enables public key cryptographic attacks to be performed in polynomial time. In response, NIST conducted a Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization competition. Additionally, due to the potential reduction in the complexity of symmetric key cryptographic attacks to square root with Grover's algorithm, it is increasingly challenging to consider symmetric key cryptography as secure. In order to establish...
Finding Shortest Vector Using Quantum NV Sieve on Grover
Hyunji Kim, Kyoungbae Jang, Yujin Oh, Woojin Seok, Wonhuck Lee, Kwangil Bae, Ilkwon Sohn, Hwajeong Seo
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Quantum computers, especially those with over 10,000 qubits, pose a potential threat to current public key cryptography systems like RSA and ECC due to Shor's algorithms. Grover's search algorithm is another quantum algorithm that could significantly impact current cryptography, offering a quantum advantage in searching unsorted data. Therefore, with the advancement of quantum computers, it is crucial to analyze potential quantum threats.
While many works focus on Grover’s attacks in...
A Total Break of the 3WISE Digital Signature Scheme
Daniel Smith-Tone
Attacks and cryptanalysis
A new batch of ``complete and proper'' digital signature scheme submissions has recently been published by NIST as part of its process for establishing post-quantum cryptographic standards. This note communicates an attack on the 3WISE digital signature scheme that the submitters did not wish to withdraw after NIST communicated it to them.
While the 3WISE digital signature scheme is based on a collection of cubic maps which are naturally modeled as symmetric 3-tensors and 3-tensor rank...
Identity-Based Matchmaking Encryption, Revisited: Strong Security and Practical Constructions from Standard Classical and Post-Quantum Assumptions
Sohto Chiku, Keitaro Hashimoto, Keisuke Hara, Junji Shikata
Public-key cryptography
Identity-based matchmaking encryption (IB-ME) [Ateniese et al. Crypto 2019] allows users to communicate privately in an anonymous and authenticated manner.
After the seminal paper by Ateniese et al., a lot of work has been done on the security and construction of IB-ME.
In this work, we revisit the security definitions and construction of IB-ME and provide the following three contributions.
-- First, we embark on the task of classifying the existing security notions of IB-ME.
We...
Popping “R-propping”: breaking hardness assumptions for matrix groups over F_{2^8}
Fernando Virdia
Attacks and cryptanalysis
A recent series of works (Hecht, IACR ePrint, 2020–2021) propose to build post-quantum public-key encapsulation, digital signatures, group key agreement and oblivious transfer from "R-propped" variants of the Symmetrical Decomposition and Discrete Logarithm problems for matrix groups over $\mathbb{F}_{2^8}$. We break all four proposals by presenting a linearisation attack on the Symmetrical Decomposition platform, a forgery attack on the signature scheme, and a demonstration of the...
Improving the Rectangle Attack on GIFT-64
Yincen Chen, Nana Zhang, Xuanyu Liang, Ling Song, Qianqian Yang, Zhuohui Feng
Attacks and cryptanalysis
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...
How to Recover a Cryptographic Secret From the Cloud
David Adei, Chris Orsini, Alessandra Scafuro, Tanner Verber
Cryptographic protocols
Clouds have replaced most local backup systems as they offer strong availability and reliability guarantees. Clouds, however, are not (and should not be) used as backup for cryptographic secrets. Cryptographic secrets might control financial assets (e.g., crypto wallets), hence, storing such secrets on the cloud corresponds to sharing ownership of the financial assets with the cloud, and makes the cloud a more attractive target for insider attacks.
Can we have the best of the two worlds,...
One-Message Secure Reductions: On the Cost of Converting Correlations
Yuval Ishai, Mahimna Kelkar, Varun Narayanan, Liav Zafar
Cryptographic protocols
Correlated secret randomness is a useful resource for secure computation protocols, often enabling dramatic speedups compared to protocols in the plain model. This has motivated a line of work on identifying and securely generating useful correlations.
Different kinds of correlations can vary greatly in terms of usefulness and ease of generation. While there has been major progress on efficiently generating oblivious transfer (OT) correlations, other useful kinds of correlations are...
Non-distributable key-sharing protocol with particular emphasis on the Internet of Things
Mario Mastriani
Cryptographic protocols
Quantum key distribution (QKD) constitutes the most widespread family of information preservation techniques in the context of Quantum Cryptography. However, these techniques must deal with a series of technological challenges that prevent their efficient implementation, in space, as well as in exclusively terrestrial configurations. Moreover, the current smallsat constellations of Low Earth Orbit (LEO with an altitude of approx. 500 km) added to other satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO),...
Fallen Sanctuary: A Higher-Order and Leakage-Resilient Rekeying Scheme
Rei Ueno, Naofumi Homma, Akiko Inoue, Kazuhiko Minematsu
Secret-key cryptography
This paper presents a provably secure, higher-order, and leakage-resilient (LR) rekeying scheme named LR Rekeying with Random oracle Repetition (LR4), along with a quantitative security evaluation methodology. Many existing LR primitives are based on a concept of leveled implementation, which still essentially require a leak-free sanctuary (i.e., differential power analysis (DPA)-resistant component(s)) for some parts. In addition, although several LR pseudorandom functions (PRFs) based on...
Composable Oblivious Pseudo-Random Functions via Garbled Circuits
Sebastian Faller, Astrid Ottenhues, Johannes Ottenhues
Cryptographic protocols
Oblivious Pseudo-Random Functions (OPRFs) are a central
tool for building modern protocols for authentication and distributed
computation. For example, OPRFs enable simple login protocols that do
not reveal the password to the provider, which helps to mitigate known
shortcomings of password-based authentication such as password reuse
or mix-up. Reliable treatment of passwords becomes more and more
important as we login to a multitude of services with different passwords
in our daily...
High-speed Implementation of AIM symmetric primitives within AIMer digital signature
Minwoo Lee, Kyungbae Jang, Hyeokdong Kwon, Minjoo Sim, Gyeongju Song, Hwajeong Seo
Implementation
Recently, as quantum computing technology develops, the importance of quantum resistant cryptography technology is increasing. AIMer is a quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm that was selected as the first candidate in the electronic signature section of the KpqC Contest, and uses symmetric primitive AIM. In this paper, we propose a high-speed implementation technique of symmetric primitive AIM and evaluate the performance of the implementation. The proposed techniques are two methods,...
Mask Compression: High-Order Masking on Memory-Constrained Devices
Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, Mélissa Rossi
Implementation
Masking is a well-studied method for achieving provable security against side-channel attacks. In masking, each sensitive variable is split into $d$ randomized shares, and computations are performed with those shares. In addition to the computational overhead of masked arithmetic, masking also has a storage cost, increasing the requirements for working memory and secret key storage proportionally with $d$.
In this work, we introduce mask compression. This conceptually simple technique is...
Optimized stream-cipher-based transciphering by means of functional-bootstrapping
Adda-Akram Bendoukha, Pierre-Emmanuel Clet, Aymen Boudguiga, Renaud Sirdey
Applications
Fully homomorphic encryption suffers from a large expansion in the size of encrypted data, which makes FHE impractical for low-bandwidth networks. Fortunately, transciphering allows to circumvent this issue by involving a symmetric cryptosystem which does not carry the disadvantage of a large expansion factor, and maintains the ability to recover an FHE ciphertext with the cost of extra homomorphic computations on the receiver side. Recent works have started to investigate the efficiency of...
An Efficient Unicode encoded in UTF-16 text cryptography based on the AES algorithm
Sushmit Jahan Rose, Umut Ozkaya, Sabina Yasmin, Suraiya Jabin, Robiul Hasan, Elias Kabir
Cryptographic protocols
Data security and secrecy from unwanted applications are the subjects of the science known as cryptography. The advanced encryption standard algorithm is the most used and secure algorithm to encrypt data. The AES algorithm is based on the symmetric algorithm and uses a single key to encrypt and decrypt data. The AES algorithm uses 128 bits length of plain text with 128 bits, 192 bits, or 256 bits key size to encrypt data. Latin script uses ASCII codes, and a single byte represents each...
$\mathcal{S}_0$-equivalent classes, a new direction to find better weightwise perfectly balanced functions, and more
Agnese Gini, Pierrick Méaux
Secret-key cryptography
We investigate the concept of $\mathcal{S}_0$-equivalent class, $n$-variable Boolean functions up to the addition of a symmetric function null in $0_n$ and $1_n$, as a tool to study weightwise perfectly balanced functions.
On the one hand we show that weightwise properties, such as being weightwise perfectly balanced, the weightwise nonlinearity and weightwise algebraic immunity, are invariants of these classes.
On the other hand we analyze the variation of global parameters inside the...
Depth-Optimized Implementation of ASCON Quantum Circuit
Yujin Oh, Kyungbae Jang, Anubhab Baksi, Hwajeong Seo
Implementation
The development of quantum computers, which employ a different paradigm of computation, is posing a threat to the security of cryptography. Narrowing down the scope to symmetric-key cryptography, the Grover search algorithm is probably the most influential in terms of its impact on security. Recently, there have been efforts to estimate the complexity of the Grover’s key search for symmetric key ciphers and evaluate their post-quantum security. In this paper, we present a depth-optimized...
An STP-based model toward designing S-boxes with good cryptographic properties
Zhenyu Lu, Sihem Mesnager, Tingting Cui, Yanhong Fan, Meiqin Wang
Secret-key cryptography
The substitution box (S-box) is an important nonlinear component in most symmetric cryptosystems and thus should have good properties. Its difference distribution table (DDT) and linear approximation table (LAT) affect the security of the cipher against differential and linear cryptanalysis. In most previous work, differential uniformity and linearity of an S-box are two primary cryptographic properties to impact the resistance against differential and linear attacks. In some cases, the...
On Provable White-Box Security in the Strong Incompressibility Model
Estuardo Alpirez Bock, Chris Brzuska, Russell W. F. Lai
Foundations
Incompressibility is a popular security notion for white-box cryptography and captures that a large encryption program cannot be compressed without losing functionality. Fouque, Karpman, Kirchner and Minaud (FKKM) defined strong incompressibility, where a compressed program should not even help to distinguish encryptions of two messages of equal length. Equivalently, the notion can be phrased as indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attacks and key-leakage (LK-IND-CPA), where the...
A note on ``a multi-instance cancelable fingerprint biometric based secure session key agreement protocol employing elliptic curve cryptography and a double hash function''
Zhengjun Cao, Lihua Liu
Attacks and cryptanalysis
We show that the key agreement scheme [Multim. Tools Appl. 80:799-829, 2021] is flawed. (1) The scheme is a hybrid which piles up various tools such as public key encryption, signature, symmetric key encryption, hash function, cancelable templates from thumb fingerprints, and elliptic curve cryptography. These tools are excessively used because key agreement is just a simple cryptographic primitive in contrast to public key encryption. (2) The involved reliance is very intricate....
$\textsf{PAE}$: Towards More Efficient and BBB-secure AE From a Single Public Permutation
Arghya Bhattacharjee, Ritam Bhaumik, Avijit Dutta, Eik List
Secret-key cryptography
Four recent trends have emerged in the evolution of authenticated encryption schemes:
(1) Regarding simplicity, the adoption of public permutations as primitives allows for sparing a key schedule and the need for storing round keys;
(2) using the sums of permutation outputs, inputs, or outputs has been a well-studied means to achieve higher security beyond the birthday bound;
(3) concerning robustness, schemes should provide graceful security degradation if a limited amount of nonces...
Conditional Cube Key Recovery Attack on Round-Reduced Xoodyak
Mohammad Vaziri, Vesselin Velichkov
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Since the announcement of the NIST call for a new lightweight
cryptographic standard, a lot of schemes have been proposed in response. Xoodyak is one of these schemes and is among the finalists of the NIST competition with a sponge structure very similar to the Keccak hash function – the winner of the SHA3 NIST competition. In this paper with conditional cube attack technique, we fully recover the key of Xoodyak reduced to 6 and 7 rounds with time complexity resp. 2^{42.58} and 2^{76.003}...
Generalized Initialization of the Duplex Construction
Christoph Dobraunig, Bart Mennink
Secret-key cryptography
The duplex construction is already well analyzed with many papers proving its security in the random permutation model. However, so far, the first phase of the duplex, where the state is initialized with a secret key and an initialization vector ($\mathit{IV}$), is typically analyzed in a worst case manner. More detailed, it is always assumed that the adversary is allowed to choose the $\mathit{IV}$ on its will. In this paper, we analyze how the security changes if restrictions on the choice...
Hidden Stream Ciphers and TMTO Attacks on TLS 1.3, DTLS 1.3, QUIC, and Signal
John Preuß Mattsson
Cryptographic protocols
Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and the Signal protocol are very important and widely used security protocols. We show that the key update function in TLS 1.3 and the symmetric key ratchet in Signal can be modeled as non-additive synchronous stream ciphers. This means that the efficient Time Memory Tradeoff Attacks for stream ciphers can be applied. The implication is that TLS 1.3, QUIC, DTLS 1.3, and Signal offer a lower security level against TMTO attacks than expected from the key...
Leaking-Cascade: an Optimal Construction for KEM Hybridization
Céline Chevalier, Guirec Lebrun, Ange Martinelli
Public-key cryptography
Hybrid post-quantum cryptography is a cautious approach that aims to guard against the threat posed by the quantum computer, through the simultaneous use of Post-Quantum (PQ) and classical (i.e. pre-quantum) cryptosystems, should the post-quantum schemes used prove insecure.
Regarding the hybridization of Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs), most recent studies focus on safely combining the symmetric keys out- put by a parallel execution of classical and post-quantum KEMs. While this...
Conjunctive Searchable Symmetric Encryption from Hard Lattices
Debadrita Talapatra, Sikhar Patranabis, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
Cryptographic protocols
Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) supports efficient keyword searches over encrypted outsourced document collections while minimizing information leakage. All practically efficient SSE schemes supporting conjunctive queries rely crucially on quantum-broken cryptographic assumptions (such as discrete-log hard groups) to achieve compact storage and fast query processing. On the other hand, quantum-safe SSE schemes based on purely symmetric-key crypto-primitives either do not support...
Improved Multi-User Security Using the Squared-Ratio Method
Yu Long Chen, Wonseok Choi, Changmin Lee
Secret-key cryptography
Proving security bounds in contexts with a large number of users is one of the central problems in symmetric-key cryptography today. This paper introduces a new method for information-theoretic multi-user security proofs,
called ``the Squared-Ratio Method''. At its core, the method requires the expectation of the square of the ratio of observing the so-called good transcripts (from Patarin's H-coefficient technique) in the real and the ideal world. Central to the method is the...
Secure Logging in between Theory and Practice: Security Analysis of the Implementation of Forward Secure Log Sealing in Journald
Felix Dörre, Astrid Ottenhues
Applications
This paper presents a security analysis of forward secure log sealing in the journald logging system, which is part of systemd and used in modern Linux distributions. Forward secure log sealing is a cryptographic technique used to ensure the integrity of past log entries even in the event of a full system compromise. We analyze the implementation of this technique in journald, identifying multiple security vulnerabilities resulting from a gap between the model of the cryptographic primitives...
Cryptanalysis of Symmetric Primitives over Rings and a Key Recovery Attack on Rubato
Lorenzo Grassi, Irati Manterola Ayala, Martha Norberg Hovd, Morten Øygarden, Håvard Raddum, Qingju Wang
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Symmetric primitives are a cornerstone of cryptography, and have traditionally been defined over fields, where cryptanalysis is now well understood. However, a few symmetric primitives defined over rings Z_q for a composite number q have recently been proposed, a setting where security is much less studied. In this paper we focus on studying established algebraic attacks typically defined over fields and the extent of their applicability to symmetric primitives defined over the ring of...
Optimally Secure Tweakable Block Ciphers with a Large Tweak from n-bit Block Ciphers
Yaobin Shen, François-Xavier Standaert
Secret-key cryptography
We consider the design of a tweakable block cipher from a block cipher whose inputs and outputs are of size $n$ bits. The main goal is to achieve $2^n$ security with a large tweak (i.e., more than $n$ bits). Previously, Mennink at FSE'15 and Wang et al. at Asiacrypt'16 proposed constructions that can achieve $2^n$ security. Yet, these constructions can have a tweak size up to $n$-bit only. As evident from recent research, a tweakable block cipher with a large tweak is generally helpful as a...
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Last updated: 2024-05-06
An Anonymous Multireceiver Hybrid Signcryption for Broadcast Communication
Alia Umrani, Apurva K Vangujar, Paolo Palmieri
Public-key cryptography
Confidentiality, authentication, and anonymity are the basic security requirements in broadcast communication, that can be achieved by Digital Signature (DS), encryption, and pseudo-identity (PID) techniques. Signcryption offers both DS and encryption more efficiently than "sign-then-encrypt,". However, compared to hybrid signcryption, it has higher computational and communication costs. Our paper proposes an Anonymous Multi-receiver Certificateless Hybrid Signcryption (AMCLHS) for secure...
Subversion-Resilient Authenticated Encryption without Random Oracles
Pascal Bemmann, Sebastian Berndt, Denis Diemert, Thomas Eisenbarth, Tibor Jager
Secret-key cryptography
In 2013, the Snowden revelations have shown subversion of cryptographic implementations to be a relevant threat.
Since then, the academic community has been pushing the development of models and constructions
to defend against adversaries able to arbitrarily subvert cryptographic implementations.
To capture these strong capabilities of adversaries, Russell, Tang, Yung, and Zhou (CCS'17) proposed CPA-secure encryption in a model that utilizes a trusted party called a watchdog testing an...
SEC: Fast Private Boolean Circuit Evaluation from Encrypted Look-ups
Debadrita Talapatra, Nimish Mishra, Arnab Bag, Sikhar Patranabis, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay
Cryptographic protocols
Encrypted computation has over the past thirty years, turned into one of the holy grails of modern cryptography especially with the advent of cloud computing. Modern cryptographic techniques like Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allow arbitrary Boolean circuit evaluation with encrypted inputs. However, the prohibitively high computation and storage overhead coupled with high communication bandwidth of
FHE severely limit its scalability in practical applications like real-time analytics or...
On APN functions whose graphs are maximal Sidon sets
Claude Carlet
Secret-key cryptography
The graphs ${\cal G}_F=\{(x,F(x)); x\in \mathbb{F}_2^n\}$ of those $(n,n)$-functions $F:\mathbb{F}_2^n\mapsto \mathbb{F}_2^n$ that are almost perfect nonlinear (in brief, APN; an important notion in symmetric cryptography) are, equivalently to their original definition by K. Nyberg, those Sidon sets (an important notion in combinatorics) $S$ in $({\Bbb F}_2^n\times {\Bbb F}_2^n,+)$ such that, for every $x\in {\Bbb F}_2^n$, there exists a unique $y\in {\Bbb F}_2^n$ such that $(x,y)\in S$....
Cryptanalysis of Strong Physically Unclonable Functions
Liliya Kraleva, Mohammad Mahzoun, Raluca Posteuca, Dilara Toprakhisar, Tomer Ashur, Ingrid Verbauwhede
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are being proposed as a low cost alternative to permanently store secret keys or provide device authentication without requiring non-volatile memory, large e-fuses or other dedicated processing steps. In the literature, PUFs are split into two main categories. The so-called strong PUFs are mainly used for authentication purposes, hence also called authentication PUFs. They promise to be lightweight by avoiding extensive digital post-processing and...
Pseudorandomness with Proof of Destruction and Applications
Amit Behera, Zvika Brakerski, Or Sattath, Omri Shmueli
Foundations
Two fundamental properties of quantum states that quantum information theory explores are pseudorandomness and provability of destruction.
We introduce the notion of quantum pseudorandom states
with proofs of destruction (PRSPD) that combines both these properties.
Like standard pseudorandom states (PRS), these are efficiently
generated quantum states that are indistinguishable from random, but they can also be measured to create a classical string. This string is
verifiable (given the...
GeT a CAKE: Generic Transformations from Key Encaspulation Mechanisms to Password Authenticated Key Exchanges
Hugo Beguinet, Céline Chevalier, David Pointcheval, Thomas Ricosset, Mélissa Rossi
Public-key cryptography
Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) have become a key building block in many security products as they provide interesting efficiency/security trade-offs. Indeed, a PAKE allows to dispense with the heavy public key infrastructures and its efficiency and portability make it well suited for applications such as Internet of Things or e-passports.
With the emerging quantum threat and the effervescent development of post-quantum public key algorithms in the last five years, one would...
Four Attacks and a Proof for Telegram
Martin R. Albrecht, Lenka Mareková, Kenneth G. Paterson, Igors Stepanovs
Cryptographic protocols
We study the use of symmetric cryptography in the MTProto 2.0 protocol, Telegram's equivalent of the TLS record protocol. We give positive and negative results. On the one hand, we formally and in detail model a slight variant of Telegram's "record protocol" and prove that it achieves security in a suitable bidirectional secure channel model, albeit under unstudied assumptions; this model itself advances the state-of-the-art for secure channels. On the other hand, we first motivate our...
Multi-Instance Randomness Extraction and Security against Bounded-Storage Mass Surveillance
Jiaxin Guan, Daniel Wichs, Mark Zhandry
Foundations
Consider a state-level adversary who observes and stores large amounts of encrypted data from all users on the Internet, but does not have the capacity to store it all. Later, it may target certain "persons of interest" in order to obtain their decryption keys. We would like to guarantee that, if the adversary's storage capacity is only (say) $1\%$ of the total encrypted data size, then even if it can later obtain the decryption keys of arbitrary users, it can only learn something about the...
TurboSHAKE
Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Seth Hoffert, Michaël Peeters, Gilles Van Assche, Ronny Van Keer, Benoît Viguier
Secret-key cryptography
In a recent presentation, we promoted the use of 12-round instances of Keccak, collectively called “TurboSHAKE”, in post-quantum cryptographic schemes, but without defining them further. The goal of this note is to fill this gap: The definition of the TurboSHAKE family simply consists in exposing and generalizing the primitive already defined inside KangarooTwelve.
An Analysis of the Post Quantum and Classical Security of 4x4 and 16x4 S-Boxes and Their Implementations in Simplified-AES
Christopher Dunne
Secret-key cryptography
Grover’s algorithm is a quantum searching algorithm that poses a threat to symmetric cryptography. Due to their smaller key sizes, lightweight cryptographic algorithms such as Simplified-AES face a much more immediate threat from Grover’s algorithm than traditional cryptographic algorithms. By analyzing different S-boxes, it was discovered that the S-box 946C753AE8FBD012 may be more quantum resistant than the S-box that Simplified-AES uses, 94ABD1856203CEF7. In addition to this, 16x4 S-boxes...
Quantum Implementation of AIM: Aiming for Low-Depth
Kyungbae Jang, Dukyoung Kim, Yujin Oh, Sejin Lim, Yujin Yang, Hyunji Kim, Hwajeong Seo
Implementation
Security vulnerabilities in the symmetric-key primitives of a cipher can undermine the overall security claims of the cipher. With the rapid advancement of quantum computing in recent years, there is an increasing effort to evaluate the security of symmetric-key cryptography against potential quantum attacks.
This paper focuses on analyzing the quantum attack resistance of AIM, a symmetric-key primitive used in the AIMer digital signature scheme.
We presents the first quantum circuit...
The state diagram of $\chi$
Jan Schoone, Joan Daemen
Secret-key cryptography
In symmetric cryptography, block ciphers, stream ciphers and permutations often make use of a round function and many round functions consist of a linear and a non-linear layer.
One that is often used is based on the cellular automaton that is denoted by $\chi$ as a Boolean map on bi-infinite sequences, $\mathbb{F}^{\mathbb{Z}}$.
It is defined by $\sigma \mapsto \nu$ where each $\nu_i = \sigma_i + (\sigma_{i+1}+1)\sigma_{i+2}$.
A map $\chi_n$ is a map that operatos on $n$-bit arrays...
CNF Characterization of Sets over $\mathbb{Z}_2^n$ and Its Applications in Cryptography
Hu Xiaobo, Xu Shengyuan, Tu Yinzi, Feng Xiutao
Attacks and cryptanalysis
In recent years, the automatic search has been widely used to search differential characteristics and linear approximations with high probability/correlation. Among these methods, the automatic search with the Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT, in short) gradually becomes a powerful cryptanalysis tool in symmetric ciphers. A key problem in the automatic search method is how to fully characterize a set $S \subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ with as few Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF, in short) clauses as...
Improved Heuristics for Low-latency Implementations of Linear Layers
Qun Liu, Zheng Zhao, Meiqin Wang
In many applications, low area and low latency are required for the chip-level implementation of cryptographic primitives. The low-cost implementations of linear layers usually play a crucial role for symmetric ciphers. Some heuristic methods, such as the forward search and the backward search, minimize the number of XOR gates of the linear layer under the minimum latency limitation.
For the sake of achieving further optimization for such implementation of the linear layer, we put forward...
Optimizing the depth of quantum implementations of linear layers
Chengkai Zhu, Zhenyu Huang
Secret-key cryptography
Synthesis and optimization of quantum circuits are important and fundamental research topics in quantum computation, due to the fact that qubits are very precious and decoherence time which determines the computation time available is very limited. Specifically in cryptography, identifying the minimum quantum resources for implementing an encryption process is crucial in evaluating the quantum security of symmetric-key ciphers. In this work, we investigate the problem of optimizing the depth...
Gate-Level Masking of Streamlined NTRU Prime Decapsulation in Hardware
Georg Land, Adrian Marotzke, Jan Richter-Brockmann, Tim Güneysu
Implementation
Streamlined NTRU Prime is a lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism
(KEM) that is, together with X25519, currently the default algorithm in OpenSSH 9. Being based on lattice assumptions, it is assumed to be secure also against attackers with access to large-scale quantum computers. While Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes have been subject to extensive research in the recent years, challenges remain with respect to protection mechanisms against attackers that have additional...
Quantum-Safe Protocols and Application in Data Security of Medical Records
Adrian-Daniel Stefan, Ionut-Petrisor Anghel, Emil Simion
Cryptographic protocols
The use of traditional cryptography based on symmetric keys has been replaced with the revolutionary idea discovered by Diffie and Hellman in 1976 that fundamentally changed communication systems by ensuring a secure transmission of information over an insecure channel. Nowadays public key cryptography is frequently used for authentication in e-commerce, digital signatures and encrypted communication. Most of the public key cryptosystems used in practice are based on integer factorization...
RISC-V Instruction Set Extensions for Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography
Hao Cheng, Johann Großschädl, Ben Marshall, Dan Page, Thinh Pham
Implementation
The NIST LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) selection process aims to standardise cryptographic functionality which is suitable for resource-constrained devices. Since the outcome is likely to have significant, long-lived impact, careful evaluation of each submission with respect to metrics explicitly outlined in the call is imperative. Beyond the robustness of submissions against cryptanalytic attack, metrics related to their implementation (e.g., execution latency and memory footprint) form an...
Authenticated Encryption with Key Identification
Julia Len, Paul Grubbs, Thomas Ristenpart
Secret-key cryptography
Authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) forms the core of much of symmetric cryptography, yet the standard techniques for modeling AEAD assume recipients have no ambiguity about what secret key to use for decryption. This is divorced from what occurs in practice, such as in key management services, where a message recipient can store numerous keys and must identify the correct key before decrypting. To date there has been no formal investigation of their security properties or...
Quantum Rebound Attacks on Reduced-Round ARIA-Based Hash Functions
Seungjun Baek, Jongsung Kim
Attacks and cryptanalysis
ARIA is a block cipher proposed by Kwon et al. at ICISC 2003, and it is widely used as the national standard block cipher in the Republic of Korea. In this study, we identify some flaws in the quantum rebound attack on 7-round ARIA-DM proposed by Dou et al., and we reveal that the limit of this attack is up to 5-round. Our revised attack applies not only to ARIA-DM but also to ARIA-MMO and ARIA-MP among the PGV models, and it is valid for all key lengths of ARIA. Moreover, we present...
WrapQ: Side-Channel Secure Key Management for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen
Implementation
Transition to PQC brings complex challenges to builders of secure cryptographic hardware. PQC keys usually need to be stored off-module and protected via symmetric encryption and message authentication codes. Only a short, symmetric Key-Encrypting Key (KEK) can be managed on-chip with trusted non-volatile key storage. For secure use, PQC key material is handled in masked format; as randomized shares. Due to the masked encoding of the key material, algorithm-specific techniques are needed to...
AIM: Symmetric Primitive for Shorter Signatures with Stronger Security (Full Version)
Seongkwang Kim, Jincheol Ha, Mincheol Son, Byeonghak Lee, Dukjae Moon, Joohee Lee, Sangyub Lee, Jihoon Kwon, Jihoon Cho, Hyojin Yoon, Jooyoung Lee
Public-key cryptography
Post-quantum signature schemes based on the MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) paradigm are recently attracting significant attention as their security solely depends on the one-wayness of the underlying primitive, providing diversity for the hardness assumption in post-quantum cryptography. Recent MPCitH-friendly ciphers have been designed using simple algebraic S-boxes operating on a large field in order to improve the performance of the resulting signature schemes. Due to their simple algebraic...
Agile Cryptography: A Universally Composable Approach
Christian Badertscher, Michele Ciampi, Aggelos Kiayias
Foundations
Being capable of updating cryptographic algorithms is an inevitable and essential practice in cryptographic engineering. This cryptographic agility, as it has been called, is a fundamental desideratum for long term cryptographic system security that still poses significant challenges from a modeling perspective. For instance, current formulations of agility fail to express the fundamental security that is expected to stem from timely implementation updates, namely the fact that the system...
Invertibility of multiple random functions and its application to symmetric ciphers
Xiutao Feng, Xiaoshan GAO, Zhangyi WANG, Xiangyong ZENG
Foundations
The invertibility of a random function (IRF, in short) is an important problem and has wide applications in cryptography. For ex- ample, searching a preimage of Hash functions, recovering a key of block ciphers under the known-plaintext-attack model, solving discrete loga- rithms over a prime field with large prime, and so on, can be viewed as its instances. In this work we describe the invertibility of multiple random functions (IMRF, in short), which is a generalization of the IRF. In...
Typing High-Speed Cryptography against Spectre v1
Basavesh Ammanaghatta Shivakumar, Gilles Barthe, Benjamin Grégoire, Vincent Laporte, Tiago Oliveira, Swarn Priya, Peter Schwabe, Lucas Tabary-Maujean
Implementation
The current gold standard of cryptographic software is to write efficient libraries with systematic protections against timing attacks. In order to meet this goal, cryptographic engineers increasingly use high-assurance cryptography tools. These tools guide programmers and provide rigorous guarantees that can be verified independently by library users. However, high-assurance tools reason about overly simple execution models that elide micro-architectural leakage. Thus, implementations...
Differential Cryptanalysis of K-Cipher
Mohammad Mahzoun, Liliya Kraleva, Raluca Posteuca, Tomer Ashur
Attacks and cryptanalysis
K-Cipher is an ultra-low latency block cipher with variable-length parameters designed by Intel Labs. In this work, we analyze the security of K-Cipher and propose a differential cryptanalysis attack with the complexity of $2^{29.7}$ for a variant of K-Cipher with state size $n=24$ bits state and block size $m=8$ bits. Our attack recovers the secret key and secret randomizer values with a total length of 240 bits in $\sim 30$ minutes on a standard desktop machine. We show that it is...
Post-Quantum Security of Tweakable Even-Mansour, and Applications
Gorjan Alagic, Chen Bai, Jonathan Katz, Christian Majenz, Patrick Struck
Secret-key cryptography
The tweakable Even-Mansour construction yields a tweakable block cipher from a public random permutation. We prove post-quantum security of tweakable Even-Mansour when attackers have quantum access to the random permutation but only classical access to the secretly-keyed construction, the relevant setting for most real-world applications. We then use our results to prove post-quantum security—in the same model—of the symmetric-key schemes Chaskey (an ISO-standardized MAC), Elephant (an AEAD...
Exploring Integrity of AEADs with Faults: Definitions and Constructions
Sayandeep Saha, Mustafa Khairallah, Thomas Peyrin
Secret-key cryptography
Implementation-based attacks are major concerns for modern cryptography. For symmetric-key cryptography, a significant amount of exploration has taken place in this regard for primitives such as block ciphers. Concerning symmetric-key operating modes, such as Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), the state- of-the-art mainly addresses the passive Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) in the form of leakage resilient cryptography. So far, only a handful of work address Fault Attacks (FA)...
Provable security based on a robust mathematical framework is the gold standard for security evaluation in cryptography. Several provable secure cryptosystems have been studied for public key cryptography. However, provably secure symmetric-key cryptography has received little attention. Although there are known provably secure symmetric-key cryptosystems based on the hardness of factorization and discrete logarithm problems, they are not only slower than conventional block ciphers but can...
In this paper, we study the problem of lower bounding any given cost function depending on the false positive and false negative probabilities of adversaries against indistinguishability security notions in symmetric-key cryptography. We take the cost model as an input, so that this becomes a purely information-theoretical question. We propose power bounds as an easy-to-use alternative for advantage bounds in the context of indistinguishability with asymmetric cost functions. We show...
Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) was designed for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and versions using RSA and elliptic curve cryptography have been included in the TPM specifications and in ISO/IEC standards. These standardised DAA schemes have their security based on the factoring or discrete logarithm problems and are therefore insecure against quantum attackers. Research into quantum-resistant DAA has resulted in several lattice-based schemes. Now in this paper, we propose the first...
Group signatures and their variants have been widely used in privacy-sensitive scenarios such as anonymous authentication and attestation. In this paper, we present a new post-quantum group signature scheme from symmetric primitives. Using only symmetric primitives makes the scheme less prone to unknown attacks than basing the design on newly proposed hard problems whose security is less well-understood. However, symmetric primitives do not have rich algebraic properties, and this makes it...
In symmetric cryptography, vectorial Boolean functions over finite fields F2n derive strong S-boxes. To this end, the S-box should satisfy a list of tests to resist existing attacks, such as the differential, linear, boomerang, and variants. Several tables are employed to measure an S- box’s resistance, such as the difference distribution table (DDT) and the boomerang connectivity table (BCT). Following the boomerang attacks recently revisited in terms of the boomerang switch effect, with a...
The VOLE-in-the-Head paradigm, recently introduced by Baum et al. (Crypto 2023), is a compiler that uses SoftspokenOT (Crypto 2022) to transfer any VOLE-based designated verifier zero-knowledge protocol into a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge protocol. Together with the Fiat-Shamir transformation, a new digital signature scheme FAEST (faest.info) is proposed, and it outperforms all MPC-in-the-Head signatures. We propose a new candidate post-quantum signature scheme from the Multivariate...
Symmetric ciphers operating in (small or mid-size) prime fields have been shown to be promising candidates to maintain security against low-noise (or even noise-free) side-channel leakage. In order to design prime ciphers that best trade physical security and implementation efficiency, it is essential to understand how side-channel security evolves with the field size (i.e., scaling trends). Unfortunately, it has also been shown that such a scaling trend depends on the leakage functions...
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...
We suggest the family of ciphers s^E^n, n=2,3,.... with the space of plaintexts (Z*_{2^s})^n, s >1 such that the encryption map is the composition of kind G=G_1A_1G_2A_2 where A_i are the affine transformations from AGL_n(Z_{2^s}) preserving the variety (Z*_{2^s)}^n , Eulerian endomorphism G_i , i=1,2 of K[x_1, x_2,...., x_n] moves x_i to monomial term ϻ(x_1)^{d(1)}(x_2)^{d(2)}...(x_n)^{d(n)} , ϻϵ Z*_{2^s} and act on (Z*_{2^s})^n as bijective transformations. The cipher is...
This research extends Abadi and Andersen's exploration of neural networks using secret keys for information protection in multiagent systems. Focusing on enhancing confidentiality properties, we employ end-to-end adversarial training with neural networks Alice, Bob, and Eve. Unlike prior work limited to 64-bit messages, our study spans message sizes from 4 to 1024 bits, varying batch sizes and training steps. An innovative aspect involves training model Bob to approach a minimal error value...
Since the first fault attack by Boneh et al. in 1997, various physical fault injection mechanisms have been explored to induce errors in electronic systems. Subsequent fault analysis methods of these errors have been studied, and successfully used to attack many cryptographic implementations. This poses a significant challenge to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms. To address this, numerous countermeasures have been proposed. Nevertheless, these countermeasures are...
We revisit the construction of signature scheme using the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, and focus in particular on constructions from the regular syndrome decoding assumption, a well-known variant of the syndrome decoding assumption. We obtain two main contributions: – We observe that previous signatures in the MPC-in-the-head paradigm must rely on a salted version of the GGM puncturable pseudorandom function (PPRF) to avoid collision attacks. We design a new efficient PPRF construction...
Large language models (LLMs), exemplified by the advanced AI tool ChatGPT in 2023, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating sentences, images, and program codes, driven by their development from extensive datasets. With over 100 million users worldwide, ChatGPT stands out as a leader among LLMs. Previous studies have shown its proficiency in generating program source codes for the symmetric-key block ciphers AES, CHAM, and ASCON. This study ventures into the implementation of...
Symmetric ratchets and one-way key chains play a vital role in numerous important security protocols such as TLS 1.3, DTLS 1.3, QUIC, Signal, MLS, EDHOC, OSCORE, and Apple PQ3. Despite the crucial role they play, very little is known about their security properties. This paper categorizes and examines different ratchet constructions, offering a comprehensive overview of their security. Our analysis reveals notable distinctions between different types of one-way key chains. Notably, the type...
In response to the evolving landscape of quantum computing and the heightened vulnerabilities in classical cryptographic systems, our paper introduces a comprehensive cryptographic framework. Building upon the pioneering work of Kuang et al., we present a unification of two innovative primitives: the Quantum Permutation Pad (QPP) for symmetric key encryption and the Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key (HPPK) for Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and Digital Signatures (DS). By harnessing...
Kyber KEM, the NIST selected PQC standard for Public Key Encryption and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) has been subjected to a variety of side-channel attacks, through the course of the NIST PQC standardization process. However, all these attacks targeting the decapsulation procedure of Kyber KEM either require knowledge of the ciphertexts or require to control the value of ciphertexts for key recovery. However, there are no known attacks in a blind setting, where the attacker does not...
Threshold symmetric encryption (TSE), introduced by Agrawal et al. [DiSE, CCS 2018], provides scalable and decentralized solution for symmetric encryption by ensuring that the secret-key stays distributed at all times. They avoid having a single point of attack or failure, while achieving the necessary security requirements. TSE was further improved by Christodorescu et al. [ATSE, CCS 2021] to support an amortization feature which enables a “more privileged” client to encrypt records in bulk...
The problem of Broadcast Encryption (BE) consists in broadcasting an encrypted message to a large number of users or receiving devices in such a way that the emitter of the message can control which of the users can or cannot decrypt it. Since the early 1990's, the design of BE schemes has received significant interest and many different concepts were proposed. A major breakthrough was achieved by Naor, Naor and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) by partitioning cleverly the set of authorized...
Symmetric cryptography primitives are constructed by iterative applications of linear and nonlinear layers. Constructing efficient circuits for these layers, even for the linear one, is challenging. In 1997, Paar proposed a heuristic to minimize the number of XORs (modulo 2 addition) necessary to implement linear layers. In this study, we slightly modify Paar’s heuristics to find implementations for nonlinear Boolean functions, in particular to homogeneous Boolean functions. Additionally, we...
While formal constructions for cryptographic schemes have steadily evolved and emerged over the past decades, the design and implementation of efficient and secure hardware instances is still a mostly manual, tedious, and intuition-driven process. With the increasing complexity of modern cryptography, e.g., Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes, and consideration of physical implementation attacks, e.g., Side-Channel Analysis (SCA), the design space often grows exorbitantly without...
A tweakable wide blockcipher is a construction which behaves in the same way as a tweakable blockcipher, with the difference that the actual block size is flexible. Due to this feature, a tweakable wide blockcipher can be directly used as a strong encryption scheme that provides full diffusion when encrypting plaintexts to ciphertexts and vice versa. Furthermore, it can be the basis of authenticated encryption schemes fulfilling the strongest security notions. In this paper, we present two...
The selection of a Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) algorithm is crucial for resource limited applications. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) leads this process, which involves a thorough evaluation of the algorithms’ cryptanalytic strength. Furthermore, careful consideration is given to factors such as algorithm latency, code size, and hardware implementation area. These factors are critical in determining the overall performance of cryptographic solutions at edge...
The rising tide of data breaches targeting large data storage centres and servers has raised serious privacy and security concerns. Homomorphic Encryption schemes offer an effective defence against such attacks, but their adoption has been hindered by substantial computational and communication overheads, particularly on the client's side. The Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HEE) protocol was developed to mitigate these issues. However, the susceptibility of HHE to strong attacks,...
This paper conducts a comprehensive benchmarking analysis of the performance of two innovative cryptographic schemes: Homomorphic Polynomial Public Key (HPPK)-Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) and Digital Signature (DS), recently proposed by Kuang et al. These schemes represent a departure from traditional cryptographic paradigms, with HPPK leveraging the security of homomorphic symmetric encryption across two hidden rings without reliance on NP-hard problems. HPPK can be viewed as a...
We develop a new PT-symmetric approach for mapping three pure qubit states, implement it by the dilation method, and demonstrate it with a superconducting quantum processor provided by the IBM Quantum Experience. We derive exact formulas for the population of the post-selected PT-symmetric subspace and show consistency with the Hermitian case, conservation of average projections on reference vectors, and Quantum Fisher Information. When used for discrimination of N = 2 pure states, our...
In this paper, we study the design of efficient signature and public-key encryption (PKE) schemes in the presence of both leakage and tampering attacks. Firstly, we formalize the strong leakage and tamper-resilient (sLTR) security model for signature, which provides strong existential unforgeability, and deals with bounded leakage and restricted tampering attacks, as a counterpart to the sLTR security introduced by Sun et al. (ACNS 2019) for PKE. Then, we present direct constructions...
This paper reviews common attacks in classical cryptography and plausible attacks in the post-quantum era targeted at CRYSTALS-Kyber. Kyber is a recently standardized post-quantum cryptography scheme that relies on the hardness of lattice problems. Although it has undergone rigorous testing by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), there have recently been studies that have successfully executed attacks against Kyber while showing their applicability outside of controlled...
In recent years, deep learning-based side-channel analysis (DLSCA) has become an active research topic within the side-channel analysis community. The well-known challenge of hyperparameter tuning in DLSCA encouraged the community to use methods that reduce the effort required to identify an optimal model. One of the successful methods is ensemble learning. While ensemble methods have demonstrated their effectiveness in DLSCA, particularly with AES-based datasets, their efficacy in analyzing...
The existence of a quantum computer is one of the most significant threats cryptography has ever faced. However, it seems that real world protocols received little attention so far with respect to their future security. Indeed merely relying upon post-quantum primitives may not suffice in order for a security protocol to be resistant in a full quantum world. In this paper, we consider the fundamental UMTS key agreement used in 3G but also in 4G (LTE), and in the (recently deployed) 5G...
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an advanced cryptography technique to allow computations (i.e., addition and multiplication) over encrypted data. After years of effort, the performance of FHE has been significantly improved and it has moved from theory to practice. The transciphering framework is another important technique in FHE to address the issue of ciphertext expansion and reduce the client-side computational overhead. To apply the transciphering framework to the CKKS FHE scheme,...
The Boolean map $\chi_n^{(k)}:\mathbb{F}_{2^k}^n\rightarrow \mathbb{F}_{2^k}^n$, $x\mapsto u$ given by $u_i=x_i+(x_{(i+1)\ \mathrm{mod}\ n}+1)x_{(i+2)\ \mathrm{mod}\ n}$ appears in various permutations as a part of cryptographic schemes such as KECCAK-f, ASCON, Xoodoo, Rasta, and Subterranean (2.0). Schoone and Daemen investigated some important algebraic properties of $\chi_n^{(k)}$ in [IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2023/1708]. In particular, they showed that $\chi_n^{(k)}$ is not...
In this paper we revisit the problem of erasing sensitive data from memory and registers during return from a cryptographic routine. While the problem and related attacker model is fairly easy to phrase, it turns out to be surprisingly hard to guarantee security in this model when implementing cryptography in common languages such as C/C++ or Rust. We revisit the issues surrounding zeroization and then present a principled solution in the sense that it guarantees that sensitive data is...
The Boolean map $\chi_n \colon \mathbb{F}_2^n \to \mathbb{F}_2^n,\ x \mapsto y$ defined by $y_i = x_i + (x_{i+1}+1)x_{i+2}$ (where $i\in \mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$) is used in various permutations that are part of cryptographic schemes, e.g., Keccak-f (the SHA-3-permutation), ASCON (the winner of the NIST Lightweight competition), Xoodoo, Rasta and Subterranean (2.0). In this paper, we study various algebraic properties of this map. We consider $\chi_n$ (through vectorial isomorphism) as a...
Security proofs of symmetric-key primitives typically consider an idealized world with access to a (uniformly) random function. The starting point of our work is the observation that such an ideal world can lead to underestimating the actual security of certain primitives. As a demonstrating example, $\mathsf{XoP2}$, which relies on two independent random permutations, has been proven to exhibit superior concrete security compared to $\mathsf{XoP}$, which employs a single permutation with...
Weightwise degree-d functions are Boolean functions that take the values of a function of degree at most d on each set of fixed Hamming weight. The class of weightwise affine functions encompasses both the symmetric functions and the Hidden Weight Bit Function (HWBF). The good cryptographic properties of the HWBF, except for the nonlinearity, motivates to investigate a larger class with functions that share the good properties and have a better nonlinearity. Additionally, the homomorphic...
QCB is a proposal for a post-quantum secure, rate-one authenticated encryption with associated data scheme (AEAD) based on classical OCB3 and \(\Theta\)CB, which are vulnerable against a quantum adversary in the Q2 setting. The authors of QCB prove integrity under plus-one unforgeability, whereas the proof of the stronger definition of blind unforgeability has been left as an open problem. After a short overview of QCB and the current state of security definitions for authentication, this...
This study presents an efficient recoverable memory encryption mechanism, named Crystalor. Existing memory encryption mechanisms, such as Intel SGX integrity tree, offer neither crash consistency nor recoverability, which results in attack surfaces and causes a non-trivial limitation of practical availability. Although the crash consistency of encrypted memory has been studied in the research field of microarchitecture, existing mechanisms lack formal security analysis and cannot incorporate...
Ascon is a recently standardized suite of symmetric cryptography for authenticated encryption and hashing algorithms designed to be lightweight. The Ascon scheme has been studied since it was introduced in 2015 for the CAESAR competition, and many efforts have been made to transform this hardware-oriented scheme to work with any embedded device architecture. Ascon is designed with side-channel resistance in mind and can also be protected with countermeasures against side-channel...
Suppose a user wants to broadcast an encrypted message to $K$ recipients. With public-key encryption, the sender would construct $K$ different ciphertexts, one for each recipient. The size of the broadcasted message then scales linearly with $K$. A natural question is whether the sender can encrypt the message with a ciphertext whose size scales sublinearly with the number of recipients. Broadcast encryption offers one solution to this problem, but at the cost of introducing a central...
Cryptographers rely on visualization to effectively communicate cryptographic constructions with one another. Visual frameworks such as constructive cryptography (TOSCA 2011), the joy of cryptography (online book) and state-separating proofs (SSPs, Asiacrypt 2018) are useful to communicate not only the construction, but also their proof visually by representing a cryptographic system as graphs. One SSP core feature is the re-use of code, e.g., a package of code might be used in a game...
The advancement of large-scale quantum computers poses a threat to the security of current encryption systems. In particular, symmetric-key cryptography significantly is impacted by general attacks using the Grover's search algorithm. In recent years, studies have been presented to estimate the complexity of Grover's key search for symmetric-key ciphers and assess post-quantum security. In this paper, we propose a depth-optimized quantum circuit implementation for ARIA, which is a...
With the advancement of quantum computers, it has been demonstrated that Shor's algorithm enables public key cryptographic attacks to be performed in polynomial time. In response, NIST conducted a Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization competition. Additionally, due to the potential reduction in the complexity of symmetric key cryptographic attacks to square root with Grover's algorithm, it is increasingly challenging to consider symmetric key cryptography as secure. In order to establish...
Quantum computers, especially those with over 10,000 qubits, pose a potential threat to current public key cryptography systems like RSA and ECC due to Shor's algorithms. Grover's search algorithm is another quantum algorithm that could significantly impact current cryptography, offering a quantum advantage in searching unsorted data. Therefore, with the advancement of quantum computers, it is crucial to analyze potential quantum threats. While many works focus on Grover’s attacks in...
A new batch of ``complete and proper'' digital signature scheme submissions has recently been published by NIST as part of its process for establishing post-quantum cryptographic standards. This note communicates an attack on the 3WISE digital signature scheme that the submitters did not wish to withdraw after NIST communicated it to them. While the 3WISE digital signature scheme is based on a collection of cubic maps which are naturally modeled as symmetric 3-tensors and 3-tensor rank...
Identity-based matchmaking encryption (IB-ME) [Ateniese et al. Crypto 2019] allows users to communicate privately in an anonymous and authenticated manner. After the seminal paper by Ateniese et al., a lot of work has been done on the security and construction of IB-ME. In this work, we revisit the security definitions and construction of IB-ME and provide the following three contributions. -- First, we embark on the task of classifying the existing security notions of IB-ME. We...
A recent series of works (Hecht, IACR ePrint, 2020–2021) propose to build post-quantum public-key encapsulation, digital signatures, group key agreement and oblivious transfer from "R-propped" variants of the Symmetrical Decomposition and Discrete Logarithm problems for matrix groups over $\mathbb{F}_{2^8}$. We break all four proposals by presenting a linearisation attack on the Symmetrical Decomposition platform, a forgery attack on the signature scheme, and a demonstration of the...
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...
Clouds have replaced most local backup systems as they offer strong availability and reliability guarantees. Clouds, however, are not (and should not be) used as backup for cryptographic secrets. Cryptographic secrets might control financial assets (e.g., crypto wallets), hence, storing such secrets on the cloud corresponds to sharing ownership of the financial assets with the cloud, and makes the cloud a more attractive target for insider attacks. Can we have the best of the two worlds,...
Correlated secret randomness is a useful resource for secure computation protocols, often enabling dramatic speedups compared to protocols in the plain model. This has motivated a line of work on identifying and securely generating useful correlations. Different kinds of correlations can vary greatly in terms of usefulness and ease of generation. While there has been major progress on efficiently generating oblivious transfer (OT) correlations, other useful kinds of correlations are...
Quantum key distribution (QKD) constitutes the most widespread family of information preservation techniques in the context of Quantum Cryptography. However, these techniques must deal with a series of technological challenges that prevent their efficient implementation, in space, as well as in exclusively terrestrial configurations. Moreover, the current smallsat constellations of Low Earth Orbit (LEO with an altitude of approx. 500 km) added to other satellites in Medium Earth Orbit (MEO),...
This paper presents a provably secure, higher-order, and leakage-resilient (LR) rekeying scheme named LR Rekeying with Random oracle Repetition (LR4), along with a quantitative security evaluation methodology. Many existing LR primitives are based on a concept of leveled implementation, which still essentially require a leak-free sanctuary (i.e., differential power analysis (DPA)-resistant component(s)) for some parts. In addition, although several LR pseudorandom functions (PRFs) based on...
Oblivious Pseudo-Random Functions (OPRFs) are a central tool for building modern protocols for authentication and distributed computation. For example, OPRFs enable simple login protocols that do not reveal the password to the provider, which helps to mitigate known shortcomings of password-based authentication such as password reuse or mix-up. Reliable treatment of passwords becomes more and more important as we login to a multitude of services with different passwords in our daily...
Recently, as quantum computing technology develops, the importance of quantum resistant cryptography technology is increasing. AIMer is a quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm that was selected as the first candidate in the electronic signature section of the KpqC Contest, and uses symmetric primitive AIM. In this paper, we propose a high-speed implementation technique of symmetric primitive AIM and evaluate the performance of the implementation. The proposed techniques are two methods,...
Masking is a well-studied method for achieving provable security against side-channel attacks. In masking, each sensitive variable is split into $d$ randomized shares, and computations are performed with those shares. In addition to the computational overhead of masked arithmetic, masking also has a storage cost, increasing the requirements for working memory and secret key storage proportionally with $d$. In this work, we introduce mask compression. This conceptually simple technique is...
Fully homomorphic encryption suffers from a large expansion in the size of encrypted data, which makes FHE impractical for low-bandwidth networks. Fortunately, transciphering allows to circumvent this issue by involving a symmetric cryptosystem which does not carry the disadvantage of a large expansion factor, and maintains the ability to recover an FHE ciphertext with the cost of extra homomorphic computations on the receiver side. Recent works have started to investigate the efficiency of...
Data security and secrecy from unwanted applications are the subjects of the science known as cryptography. The advanced encryption standard algorithm is the most used and secure algorithm to encrypt data. The AES algorithm is based on the symmetric algorithm and uses a single key to encrypt and decrypt data. The AES algorithm uses 128 bits length of plain text with 128 bits, 192 bits, or 256 bits key size to encrypt data. Latin script uses ASCII codes, and a single byte represents each...
We investigate the concept of $\mathcal{S}_0$-equivalent class, $n$-variable Boolean functions up to the addition of a symmetric function null in $0_n$ and $1_n$, as a tool to study weightwise perfectly balanced functions. On the one hand we show that weightwise properties, such as being weightwise perfectly balanced, the weightwise nonlinearity and weightwise algebraic immunity, are invariants of these classes. On the other hand we analyze the variation of global parameters inside the...
The development of quantum computers, which employ a different paradigm of computation, is posing a threat to the security of cryptography. Narrowing down the scope to symmetric-key cryptography, the Grover search algorithm is probably the most influential in terms of its impact on security. Recently, there have been efforts to estimate the complexity of the Grover’s key search for symmetric key ciphers and evaluate their post-quantum security. In this paper, we present a depth-optimized...
The substitution box (S-box) is an important nonlinear component in most symmetric cryptosystems and thus should have good properties. Its difference distribution table (DDT) and linear approximation table (LAT) affect the security of the cipher against differential and linear cryptanalysis. In most previous work, differential uniformity and linearity of an S-box are two primary cryptographic properties to impact the resistance against differential and linear attacks. In some cases, the...
Incompressibility is a popular security notion for white-box cryptography and captures that a large encryption program cannot be compressed without losing functionality. Fouque, Karpman, Kirchner and Minaud (FKKM) defined strong incompressibility, where a compressed program should not even help to distinguish encryptions of two messages of equal length. Equivalently, the notion can be phrased as indistinguishability under chosen-plaintext attacks and key-leakage (LK-IND-CPA), where the...
We show that the key agreement scheme [Multim. Tools Appl. 80:799-829, 2021] is flawed. (1) The scheme is a hybrid which piles up various tools such as public key encryption, signature, symmetric key encryption, hash function, cancelable templates from thumb fingerprints, and elliptic curve cryptography. These tools are excessively used because key agreement is just a simple cryptographic primitive in contrast to public key encryption. (2) The involved reliance is very intricate....
Four recent trends have emerged in the evolution of authenticated encryption schemes: (1) Regarding simplicity, the adoption of public permutations as primitives allows for sparing a key schedule and the need for storing round keys; (2) using the sums of permutation outputs, inputs, or outputs has been a well-studied means to achieve higher security beyond the birthday bound; (3) concerning robustness, schemes should provide graceful security degradation if a limited amount of nonces...
Since the announcement of the NIST call for a new lightweight cryptographic standard, a lot of schemes have been proposed in response. Xoodyak is one of these schemes and is among the finalists of the NIST competition with a sponge structure very similar to the Keccak hash function – the winner of the SHA3 NIST competition. In this paper with conditional cube attack technique, we fully recover the key of Xoodyak reduced to 6 and 7 rounds with time complexity resp. 2^{42.58} and 2^{76.003}...
The duplex construction is already well analyzed with many papers proving its security in the random permutation model. However, so far, the first phase of the duplex, where the state is initialized with a secret key and an initialization vector ($\mathit{IV}$), is typically analyzed in a worst case manner. More detailed, it is always assumed that the adversary is allowed to choose the $\mathit{IV}$ on its will. In this paper, we analyze how the security changes if restrictions on the choice...
Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 and the Signal protocol are very important and widely used security protocols. We show that the key update function in TLS 1.3 and the symmetric key ratchet in Signal can be modeled as non-additive synchronous stream ciphers. This means that the efficient Time Memory Tradeoff Attacks for stream ciphers can be applied. The implication is that TLS 1.3, QUIC, DTLS 1.3, and Signal offer a lower security level against TMTO attacks than expected from the key...
Hybrid post-quantum cryptography is a cautious approach that aims to guard against the threat posed by the quantum computer, through the simultaneous use of Post-Quantum (PQ) and classical (i.e. pre-quantum) cryptosystems, should the post-quantum schemes used prove insecure. Regarding the hybridization of Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs), most recent studies focus on safely combining the symmetric keys out- put by a parallel execution of classical and post-quantum KEMs. While this...
Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) supports efficient keyword searches over encrypted outsourced document collections while minimizing information leakage. All practically efficient SSE schemes supporting conjunctive queries rely crucially on quantum-broken cryptographic assumptions (such as discrete-log hard groups) to achieve compact storage and fast query processing. On the other hand, quantum-safe SSE schemes based on purely symmetric-key crypto-primitives either do not support...
Proving security bounds in contexts with a large number of users is one of the central problems in symmetric-key cryptography today. This paper introduces a new method for information-theoretic multi-user security proofs, called ``the Squared-Ratio Method''. At its core, the method requires the expectation of the square of the ratio of observing the so-called good transcripts (from Patarin's H-coefficient technique) in the real and the ideal world. Central to the method is the...
This paper presents a security analysis of forward secure log sealing in the journald logging system, which is part of systemd and used in modern Linux distributions. Forward secure log sealing is a cryptographic technique used to ensure the integrity of past log entries even in the event of a full system compromise. We analyze the implementation of this technique in journald, identifying multiple security vulnerabilities resulting from a gap between the model of the cryptographic primitives...
Symmetric primitives are a cornerstone of cryptography, and have traditionally been defined over fields, where cryptanalysis is now well understood. However, a few symmetric primitives defined over rings Z_q for a composite number q have recently been proposed, a setting where security is much less studied. In this paper we focus on studying established algebraic attacks typically defined over fields and the extent of their applicability to symmetric primitives defined over the ring of...
We consider the design of a tweakable block cipher from a block cipher whose inputs and outputs are of size $n$ bits. The main goal is to achieve $2^n$ security with a large tweak (i.e., more than $n$ bits). Previously, Mennink at FSE'15 and Wang et al. at Asiacrypt'16 proposed constructions that can achieve $2^n$ security. Yet, these constructions can have a tweak size up to $n$-bit only. As evident from recent research, a tweakable block cipher with a large tweak is generally helpful as a...
Confidentiality, authentication, and anonymity are the basic security requirements in broadcast communication, that can be achieved by Digital Signature (DS), encryption, and pseudo-identity (PID) techniques. Signcryption offers both DS and encryption more efficiently than "sign-then-encrypt,". However, compared to hybrid signcryption, it has higher computational and communication costs. Our paper proposes an Anonymous Multi-receiver Certificateless Hybrid Signcryption (AMCLHS) for secure...
In 2013, the Snowden revelations have shown subversion of cryptographic implementations to be a relevant threat. Since then, the academic community has been pushing the development of models and constructions to defend against adversaries able to arbitrarily subvert cryptographic implementations. To capture these strong capabilities of adversaries, Russell, Tang, Yung, and Zhou (CCS'17) proposed CPA-secure encryption in a model that utilizes a trusted party called a watchdog testing an...
Encrypted computation has over the past thirty years, turned into one of the holy grails of modern cryptography especially with the advent of cloud computing. Modern cryptographic techniques like Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allow arbitrary Boolean circuit evaluation with encrypted inputs. However, the prohibitively high computation and storage overhead coupled with high communication bandwidth of FHE severely limit its scalability in practical applications like real-time analytics or...
The graphs ${\cal G}_F=\{(x,F(x)); x\in \mathbb{F}_2^n\}$ of those $(n,n)$-functions $F:\mathbb{F}_2^n\mapsto \mathbb{F}_2^n$ that are almost perfect nonlinear (in brief, APN; an important notion in symmetric cryptography) are, equivalently to their original definition by K. Nyberg, those Sidon sets (an important notion in combinatorics) $S$ in $({\Bbb F}_2^n\times {\Bbb F}_2^n,+)$ such that, for every $x\in {\Bbb F}_2^n$, there exists a unique $y\in {\Bbb F}_2^n$ such that $(x,y)\in S$....
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) are being proposed as a low cost alternative to permanently store secret keys or provide device authentication without requiring non-volatile memory, large e-fuses or other dedicated processing steps. In the literature, PUFs are split into two main categories. The so-called strong PUFs are mainly used for authentication purposes, hence also called authentication PUFs. They promise to be lightweight by avoiding extensive digital post-processing and...
Two fundamental properties of quantum states that quantum information theory explores are pseudorandomness and provability of destruction. We introduce the notion of quantum pseudorandom states with proofs of destruction (PRSPD) that combines both these properties. Like standard pseudorandom states (PRS), these are efficiently generated quantum states that are indistinguishable from random, but they can also be measured to create a classical string. This string is verifiable (given the...
Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) have become a key building block in many security products as they provide interesting efficiency/security trade-offs. Indeed, a PAKE allows to dispense with the heavy public key infrastructures and its efficiency and portability make it well suited for applications such as Internet of Things or e-passports. With the emerging quantum threat and the effervescent development of post-quantum public key algorithms in the last five years, one would...
We study the use of symmetric cryptography in the MTProto 2.0 protocol, Telegram's equivalent of the TLS record protocol. We give positive and negative results. On the one hand, we formally and in detail model a slight variant of Telegram's "record protocol" and prove that it achieves security in a suitable bidirectional secure channel model, albeit under unstudied assumptions; this model itself advances the state-of-the-art for secure channels. On the other hand, we first motivate our...
Consider a state-level adversary who observes and stores large amounts of encrypted data from all users on the Internet, but does not have the capacity to store it all. Later, it may target certain "persons of interest" in order to obtain their decryption keys. We would like to guarantee that, if the adversary's storage capacity is only (say) $1\%$ of the total encrypted data size, then even if it can later obtain the decryption keys of arbitrary users, it can only learn something about the...
In a recent presentation, we promoted the use of 12-round instances of Keccak, collectively called “TurboSHAKE”, in post-quantum cryptographic schemes, but without defining them further. The goal of this note is to fill this gap: The definition of the TurboSHAKE family simply consists in exposing and generalizing the primitive already defined inside KangarooTwelve.
Grover’s algorithm is a quantum searching algorithm that poses a threat to symmetric cryptography. Due to their smaller key sizes, lightweight cryptographic algorithms such as Simplified-AES face a much more immediate threat from Grover’s algorithm than traditional cryptographic algorithms. By analyzing different S-boxes, it was discovered that the S-box 946C753AE8FBD012 may be more quantum resistant than the S-box that Simplified-AES uses, 94ABD1856203CEF7. In addition to this, 16x4 S-boxes...
Security vulnerabilities in the symmetric-key primitives of a cipher can undermine the overall security claims of the cipher. With the rapid advancement of quantum computing in recent years, there is an increasing effort to evaluate the security of symmetric-key cryptography against potential quantum attacks. This paper focuses on analyzing the quantum attack resistance of AIM, a symmetric-key primitive used in the AIMer digital signature scheme. We presents the first quantum circuit...
In symmetric cryptography, block ciphers, stream ciphers and permutations often make use of a round function and many round functions consist of a linear and a non-linear layer. One that is often used is based on the cellular automaton that is denoted by $\chi$ as a Boolean map on bi-infinite sequences, $\mathbb{F}^{\mathbb{Z}}$. It is defined by $\sigma \mapsto \nu$ where each $\nu_i = \sigma_i + (\sigma_{i+1}+1)\sigma_{i+2}$. A map $\chi_n$ is a map that operatos on $n$-bit arrays...
In recent years, the automatic search has been widely used to search differential characteristics and linear approximations with high probability/correlation. Among these methods, the automatic search with the Boolean Satisfiability Problem (SAT, in short) gradually becomes a powerful cryptanalysis tool in symmetric ciphers. A key problem in the automatic search method is how to fully characterize a set $S \subseteq \{0,1\}^n$ with as few Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF, in short) clauses as...
In many applications, low area and low latency are required for the chip-level implementation of cryptographic primitives. The low-cost implementations of linear layers usually play a crucial role for symmetric ciphers. Some heuristic methods, such as the forward search and the backward search, minimize the number of XOR gates of the linear layer under the minimum latency limitation. For the sake of achieving further optimization for such implementation of the linear layer, we put forward...
Synthesis and optimization of quantum circuits are important and fundamental research topics in quantum computation, due to the fact that qubits are very precious and decoherence time which determines the computation time available is very limited. Specifically in cryptography, identifying the minimum quantum resources for implementing an encryption process is crucial in evaluating the quantum security of symmetric-key ciphers. In this work, we investigate the problem of optimizing the depth...
Streamlined NTRU Prime is a lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) that is, together with X25519, currently the default algorithm in OpenSSH 9. Being based on lattice assumptions, it is assumed to be secure also against attackers with access to large-scale quantum computers. While Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) schemes have been subject to extensive research in the recent years, challenges remain with respect to protection mechanisms against attackers that have additional...
The use of traditional cryptography based on symmetric keys has been replaced with the revolutionary idea discovered by Diffie and Hellman in 1976 that fundamentally changed communication systems by ensuring a secure transmission of information over an insecure channel. Nowadays public key cryptography is frequently used for authentication in e-commerce, digital signatures and encrypted communication. Most of the public key cryptosystems used in practice are based on integer factorization...
The NIST LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) selection process aims to standardise cryptographic functionality which is suitable for resource-constrained devices. Since the outcome is likely to have significant, long-lived impact, careful evaluation of each submission with respect to metrics explicitly outlined in the call is imperative. Beyond the robustness of submissions against cryptanalytic attack, metrics related to their implementation (e.g., execution latency and memory footprint) form an...
Authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) forms the core of much of symmetric cryptography, yet the standard techniques for modeling AEAD assume recipients have no ambiguity about what secret key to use for decryption. This is divorced from what occurs in practice, such as in key management services, where a message recipient can store numerous keys and must identify the correct key before decrypting. To date there has been no formal investigation of their security properties or...
ARIA is a block cipher proposed by Kwon et al. at ICISC 2003, and it is widely used as the national standard block cipher in the Republic of Korea. In this study, we identify some flaws in the quantum rebound attack on 7-round ARIA-DM proposed by Dou et al., and we reveal that the limit of this attack is up to 5-round. Our revised attack applies not only to ARIA-DM but also to ARIA-MMO and ARIA-MP among the PGV models, and it is valid for all key lengths of ARIA. Moreover, we present...
Transition to PQC brings complex challenges to builders of secure cryptographic hardware. PQC keys usually need to be stored off-module and protected via symmetric encryption and message authentication codes. Only a short, symmetric Key-Encrypting Key (KEK) can be managed on-chip with trusted non-volatile key storage. For secure use, PQC key material is handled in masked format; as randomized shares. Due to the masked encoding of the key material, algorithm-specific techniques are needed to...
Post-quantum signature schemes based on the MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) paradigm are recently attracting significant attention as their security solely depends on the one-wayness of the underlying primitive, providing diversity for the hardness assumption in post-quantum cryptography. Recent MPCitH-friendly ciphers have been designed using simple algebraic S-boxes operating on a large field in order to improve the performance of the resulting signature schemes. Due to their simple algebraic...
Being capable of updating cryptographic algorithms is an inevitable and essential practice in cryptographic engineering. This cryptographic agility, as it has been called, is a fundamental desideratum for long term cryptographic system security that still poses significant challenges from a modeling perspective. For instance, current formulations of agility fail to express the fundamental security that is expected to stem from timely implementation updates, namely the fact that the system...
The invertibility of a random function (IRF, in short) is an important problem and has wide applications in cryptography. For ex- ample, searching a preimage of Hash functions, recovering a key of block ciphers under the known-plaintext-attack model, solving discrete loga- rithms over a prime field with large prime, and so on, can be viewed as its instances. In this work we describe the invertibility of multiple random functions (IMRF, in short), which is a generalization of the IRF. In...
The current gold standard of cryptographic software is to write efficient libraries with systematic protections against timing attacks. In order to meet this goal, cryptographic engineers increasingly use high-assurance cryptography tools. These tools guide programmers and provide rigorous guarantees that can be verified independently by library users. However, high-assurance tools reason about overly simple execution models that elide micro-architectural leakage. Thus, implementations...
K-Cipher is an ultra-low latency block cipher with variable-length parameters designed by Intel Labs. In this work, we analyze the security of K-Cipher and propose a differential cryptanalysis attack with the complexity of $2^{29.7}$ for a variant of K-Cipher with state size $n=24$ bits state and block size $m=8$ bits. Our attack recovers the secret key and secret randomizer values with a total length of 240 bits in $\sim 30$ minutes on a standard desktop machine. We show that it is...
The tweakable Even-Mansour construction yields a tweakable block cipher from a public random permutation. We prove post-quantum security of tweakable Even-Mansour when attackers have quantum access to the random permutation but only classical access to the secretly-keyed construction, the relevant setting for most real-world applications. We then use our results to prove post-quantum security—in the same model—of the symmetric-key schemes Chaskey (an ISO-standardized MAC), Elephant (an AEAD...
Implementation-based attacks are major concerns for modern cryptography. For symmetric-key cryptography, a significant amount of exploration has taken place in this regard for primitives such as block ciphers. Concerning symmetric-key operating modes, such as Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), the state- of-the-art mainly addresses the passive Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) in the form of leakage resilient cryptography. So far, only a handful of work address Fault Attacks (FA)...
