What a lovely hat

SLIM and LBCIoT are lightweight block ciphers proposed for IoT applications. We present differential meet-in-the-middle attacks on these ciphers and discuss several implementation variants and possible improvements of these attacks. Experimental validation also shows some results that may be of independent interest in the cryptanalysis of other ciphers. Namely, the problems with low-probability differentials and the questionable accuracy of standard complexity estimates of using filters.

In ASIACRYPT 2019, Andreeva et al. introduced a new symmetric key primitive called the $\textit{forkcipher}$, designed for lightweight applications handling short messages. A forkcipher is a keyed function with a public tweak, featuring fixed-length input and fixed-length (expanding) output. They also proposed a specific forkcipher, ForkSkinny, based on the tweakable block cipher SKINNY, and its security was evaluated through cryptanalysis. Since then, several efficient AEAD and MAC schemes...

APN functions offer optimal resistance to differential attacks and are instrumental in the design of block ciphers in cryptography. While finding APN functions is very difficult in general, a promising way to construct APN functions is through symmetric matrices called Quadratic APN matrices (QAM). It is known that the search space for the QAM method can be reduced by means of orbit partitions induced by linear equivalences. This paper builds upon and improves these approaches in the case of...

Boolean functions play an important role in designing and analyzing many cryptographic systems, such as block ciphers, stream ciphers, and hash functions, due to their unique cryptographic properties such as nonlinearity, correlation immunity, and algebraic properties. The secure evaluation of Boolean functions or Secure Boolean Evaluation (SBE) is an important area of research. SBE allows parties to jointly compute Boolean functions without exposing their private inputs. SBE finds...

ARADI is a low-latency block cipher proposed by the NSA (National Security Agency) in 2024 for memory encryption. Bellini et al. experimentally demonstrated that in specific cubes of 5-round ARADI, the cube sums are byte-wise equal, for example, to 0x9d9dc5c5. This paper modifies the MILP-based division property algorithm to prove this and observes that the rotation amount of 8 in ARADI causes cancellations of monomials, allowing us to extend the byte-wise equal property up to 8 rounds. As a...

Since designing a dedicated secure symmetric PRF is difficult, various works studied optimally secure PRFs from the sum of independent permutations (SoP). At CRYPTO'20, Gunsing and Mennink proposed the Summation-Truncation Hybrid (STH). While based on SoP, STH releases additional $a \leq n$ bits of the permutation calls and sums $n-a$ bits of them. Thus, it produces $n+a$ bits at $O(n-a/2)$-bit PRF security. Both SoP or STH can be used directly in encryption schemes or MACs in place of...

In two recent papers, we introduced and studied the notion of $k$th-order sum-freedom of a vectorial function $F:\mathbb F_2^n\to \mathbb F_2^m$. This notion generalizes that of almost perfect nonlinearity (which corresponds to $k=2$) and has some relation with the resistance to integral attacks of those block ciphers using $F$ as a substitution box (S-box), by preventing the propagation of the division property of $k$-dimensional affine spaces. In the present paper, we show that this...

Recently, Baudrin et al. analyzed a special case of Wagner's commutative diagram cryptanalysis, referred to as commutative cryptanalysis. For a family $(E_k)_k$ of permutations on a finite vector space $G$, commutative cryptanalysis exploits the existence of affine permutations $A,B \colon G \rightarrow G$, $I \notin \{A,B\}$ such that $E_k \circ A (x) = B \circ E_k(x)$ holds with high probability, taken over inputs $x$, for a significantly large set of weak keys $k$. Several attacks...

This paper describes a simple idea to improve (text) diffusion in block ciphers that use MDS codes but that take more than a single round to achieve full (text) diffusion. The Rijndael cipher family is used as an example since it comprises ciphers with different state sizes. A drawback of the new approach is the additional computational cost, but it is competitive compared to large MDS matrices used in the Khazad and Kuznyechik ciphers.

In Africacrypt 2022, Gupta \etal introduced a 64-bit lightweight \mds matrix-based \spn-like block cipher designed to encrypt data in a single clock cycle with minimal implementation cost, particularly when unrolled. While various attack models were discussed, the security of the cipher in the related-key setting was not addressed. In this work, we bridge this gap by conducting a security analysis of the cipher under related-key attacks using \milp(Mixed Integer Linear Programming)-based...

We develop and implement AlgoROM, a tool to systematically analyze the security of a wide class of symmetric primitives in idealized models of computation. The schemes that we consider are those that can be expressed over an alphabet consisting of XOR and function symbols for hash functions, permutations, or block ciphers. We implement our framework in OCaml and apply it to a number of prominent constructions, which include the Luby–Rackoff (LR), key-alternating Feistel (KAF), and...

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are valuable assets, yet their public accessibility raises security concerns about parameter extraction by malicious actors. Recent work by Carlini et al. (Crypto’20) and Canales- Martínez et al. (Eurocrypt’24) has drawn parallels between this issue and block cipher key extraction via chosen plaintext attacks. Leveraging differential cryptanalysis, they demonstrated that all the weights and biases of black-box ReLU-based DNNs could be inferred using a polynomial...

This paper reveals a critical flaw in the design of ARADI, a recently proposed low-latency block cipher by NSA researchers -- Patricia Greene, Mark Motley, and Bryan Weeks. The weakness exploits the specific composition of Toffoli gates in the round function of ARADI's nonlinear layer, and it allows the extension of a given algebraic distinguisher to one extra round without any change in the data complexity. More precisely, we show that the cube-sum values, though depending on the secret key...

XCB, a tweakable enciphering mode, is part of IEEE Std. 1619.2 for shared storage media. We show that all versions of XCB are not secure through three plaintext recovery attacks. A key observation is that XCB behaves like an LRW1-type tweakable block cipher for single-block messages, which lacks CCA security. The first attack targets one-block XCB, using three queries to recover the plaintext. The second one requires four queries to recover the plaintext that excludes one block. The last one...

We present a tweakable wide block cipher called Mystrium and show it as the fastest such primitive on low-end processors that lack dedicated AES or other cryptographic instructions, such as ARM Cortex-A7. Mystrium is based on the provably secure double-decker mode, that requires a doubly extendable cryptographic keyed (deck) function and a universal hash function. We build a new deck function called Xymmer that for its compression part uses Multimixer-128, the fastest universal hash for...

Passive (leakage exploitation) and active (fault injection) physical attacks pose a significant threat to cryptographic schemes. Although leakage-resistant cryptography is well studied, there is little work on mode-level security in the presence of joint faults and leakage exploiting adversaries. In this paper, we focus on integrity for authenticated encryption (AE). First, we point out that there is an inherent attack in the fault-resilience model presented at ToSC 2023. This shows how...

The Feistel construction is a fundamental technique for building pseudorandom permutations and block ciphers. This paper shows that a simple adaptation of the construction is resistant, even to algorithm substitution attacks---that is, adversarial subversion---of the component round functions. Specifically, we establish that a Feistel-based construction with more than $337n/\log(1/\epsilon)$ rounds can transform a subverted random function---which disagrees with the original one at a small...

In this paper, we present the first third-party cryptanalysis of SCARF, a tweakable low-latency block cipher designed to thwart contention-based cache attacks through cache randomization. We focus on multiple-tweak differential attacks, exploiting biases across multiple tweaks. We establish a theoretical framework explaining biases for any number of rounds and verify this framework experimentally. Then, we use these properties to develop a key recovery attack on 7-round SCARF with a time...

An ongoing research challenge in symmetric cryptography is to design an authenticated encryption (AE) with a commitment to the secret key or preferably to the entire context. One way to achieve this is to use a transform on an existing AE scheme, if possible with no output length expansion. At EUROCRYPT'22, Bellare and Hoang proposed the HtE transform, which lifts key-commitment to context-commitment. In the same year at ESORICS'22, Chan and Rogaway proposed the CTX transform, which works on...

In recent years, ML based differential distinguishers have been explored and compared with the classical methods. Complexity of a key recovery attack on block ciphers is calculated using the probability of a differential distinguisher provided by classical methods. Since theoretical computations suffice to calculate the data complexity in these cases, so there seems no restrictions on the practical availability of computational resources to attack a block cipher using classical methods....

The impossible differential (ID) attack is one of the most important cryptanalytic techniques for block ciphers. There are two phases to finding an ID attack: searching for the distinguisher and building a key recovery upon it. Previous works only focused on automated distinguisher discovery, leaving key recovery as a manual post-processing task, which may lead to a suboptimal final complexity. At EUROCRYPT~2023, Hadipour et al. introduced a unified constraint programming (CP) approach based...

A fixed length tweakable enciphering scheme (TES) is the appropriate cryptographic functionality for low level disk encryption. Research on TES over the last two decades have led to a number of proposals many of which have already been implemented using FPGAs. This paper considers the FPGA implementations of two more recent and promising TESs, namely AEZ and FAST. The relevant architectures are described and simulation results on the Xilinx Virtex 5 and Virtex 7 FPGAs are presented. For...

Recently, the NSA has proposed a block cipher called ARADI and a mode of operation called LLAMA for memory encryption applications. In this note, we comment on this proposal, on its suitability for the intended application, and describe an attack on LLAMA that breaks confidentiality of ciphertext and allows a straightforward forgery attack breaking integrity of ciphertext (INT-CTXT) using a related-IV attack. Both attacks have negligible complexity.

Robust message authentication codes (MACs) and authenticated encryption (AE) schemes that provide authenticity in the presence of side-channel leakage are essential primitives. These constructions often rely on primitives designed for strong leakage protection, among others including the use of strong-unpredictable (tweakable) block-ciphers. This paper extends the strong-unpredictability security definition to the versatile and new forkcipher primitive. We show how to construct secure and...

In early August 2024, three NSA researchers -- Patricia Greene, Mark Motley, and Bryan Weeks -- published the technical specifications for a new low-latency block cipher, ARADI, along with its corresponding authenticated encryption mode, LLAMA, which is specifically designed for memory encryption applications. Their manuscript offered minimal security analysis of the design, only briefly discussing the differential, linear and algebraic properties of cipher's underlying components. In this...

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables multiple distrusting parties to jointly compute a function while keeping their inputs private. Computing the AES block cipher in MPC, where the key and/or the input are secret-shared among the parties is important for various applications, particularly threshold cryptography. In this work, we propose a family of dedicated, high-performance MPC protocols to compute the non-linear S-box part of AES in the honest majority setting. Our protocols...

In recent years a new class of symmetric-key primitives over $\mathbb{F}_p$ that are essential to Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs based protocols has emerged. Towards improving the efficiency of such primitives, a number of new block ciphers and hash functions over $\mathbb{F}_p$ were proposed. These new primitives also showed that following alternative design strategies to the classical Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) and Feistel Networks leads to more efficient...

Proving resistance to conventional attacks, e.g., differential, linear, and integral attacks, is essential for designing a secure symmetric-key cipher. Recent advances in automatic search and deep learning-based methods have made this time-consuming task relatively easy, yet concerns persist over expertise requirements and potential oversights. To overcome these concerns, Kimura et al. proposed neural network-based output prediction (NN) attacks, offering simplicity, generality, and reduced...

At CRYPTO 2019, A. Gohr introduced Neural Differential Cryptanalysis by applying deep learning to modern block cipher cryptanalysis. Surprisingly, the resulting neural differential distinguishers enabled a new state-of-the-art key recovery complexity for 11 rounds of SPECK32. As of May 2024, according to Google Scholar, Gohr’s article has been cited 178 times. The wide variety of targets, techniques, settings, and evaluation methodologies that appear in these follow-up works grants a careful...

\scarf, an ultra low-latency tweakable block cipher, is the first cipher designed for cache randomization. The block cipher design is significantly different from the other common tweakable block ciphers; with a block size of only 10 bits, and yet the input key size is a whopping $240$ bits. Notably, the majority of the round key in its round function is absorbed into the data path through AND operations, rather than the typical XOR operations. In this paper, we present a key-recovery...

This paper introduces the Koala PRF, which maps a variable-length sequence of $64$-bit input blocks to a single $257$-bit output block. Its design focuses on achieving low latency in its implementation in ASIC. To construct Koala, we instantiate the recently introduced Kirby construction with the Koala-P permutation and add an input encoding layer. The Koala-P permutation is obtained as the $8$-fold iteration of a simple round function inspired by that of Subterranean. Based on...

In our paper, we explore the consequences of replacing the commutative group operation used in Lai-Massey structures with a quasigroup operation. We introduce four quasigroup versions of the Lai-Massey structure, and prove that for quasigroups isotopic with a group $\mathbb{G}$, the complexity of launching a differential attack against these variants of the Lai-Massey structure is equivalent to attacking an alternative structure based on $\mathbb{G}$. Then we provide the conditions needed...

In this paper, we describe a low-latency block cipher (ARADI) and authenticated encryption mode (LLAMA) intended to support memory encryption applications.

At EUROCRYPT'20, Bao et al. have shown that three-round cascading of $\textsf{LRW1}$ construction, which they dubbed as $\textsf{TNT}$, is a strong tweakable pseudorandom permutation that provably achieves $2n/3$-bit security bound. Jha et al. showed a birthday bound distinguishing attack on $\textsf{TNT}$ and invalidated the proven security bound and proved a tight birthday bound security on the $\textsf{TNT}$ construction in EUROCRYPT'24. In a recent work, Datta et al. have...

The impossible boomerang (IB) attack was first introduced by Lu in his doctoral thesis and subsequently published at DCC in 2011. The IB attack is a variant of the impossible differential (ID) attack by incorporating the idea of the boomerang attack. In this paper, we revisit the IB attack, and introduce the incompatibility of two characteristics in boomerang to the construction of an IB distinguisher. With our methodology, all the constructions of IB distinguisher are represented in a...

The progression of quantum computing is considered a potential threat to traditional cryptography system, highlighting the significance of post-quantum security in cryptographic systems. Regarding symmetric key encryption, the Grover algorithm can approximately halve the search complexity. Despite the absence of fully operational quantum computers at present, the necessity of assessing the security of symmetric key encryption against quantum computing continues to grow. In this paper, we...

Quantum computers can model and solve several problems that have posed challenges for classical super computers, leveraging their natural quantum mechanical characteristics. A large-scale quantum computer is poised to significantly reduce security strength in cryptography. In this context, extensive research has been conducted on quantum cryptanalysis. In this paper, we present optimized quantum circuits for Korean block ciphers, HIGHT and LEA. Our quantum circuits for HIGHT and LEA...

The rectangle attack has shown to be a very powerful form of cryptanalysis against block ciphers. Given a rectangle distinguisher, one expects to mount key recovery attacks as efficiently as possible. In the literature, there have been four algorithms for rectangle key recovery attacks. However, their performance varies from case to case. Besides, numerous are the applications where the attacks lack optimality. In this paper, we delve into the rectangle key recovery and propose a unified and...

In this note, we introduce the MATTER Tweakable Block Cipher, designed principally for low latency in low-area hardware implementations, but that can also be implemented in an efficient and compact way in software. MATTER is a 512-bit wide balanced Feistel network with three to six rounds, using the ASCON permutation as the round function. The Feistel network defines a keyed, non-tweakable core, which is made tweakable by using the encryption of the tweak as its key. Key and tweak are...

In this paper, we formulate a special class of systems of linear equations over finite fields that appears naturally in the provable security analysis of several MAC and PRF modes of operation. We derive lower bounds on the number of solutions for such systems adhering to some predefined restrictions, and apply these lower bounds to derive tight PRF security for several constructions. We show security up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries for the single-keyed variant of the Double-block Hash-then-Sum...

The aim of an algebraic attack is to find the secret key by solving a collection of relations that describe the internal structure of a cipher for observations of plaintext/cipher-text pairs. Although algebraic attacks are addressed for cryptanalysis of block and stream ciphers, there is a limited understanding of the impact of algebraic representation of the cipher on the efficiency of solving the resulting collection of equations. In this paper, we investigate on how different S-box...

Advanced Encryption Standard in Galois/Counter Mode (AES-GCM) is the most widely used Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithm in the world. In this paper, we analyze the use of GCM with all the Initialization Vector (IV) constructions and lengths approved by NIST SP 800-38D when encrypting multiple plaintexts with the same key. We derive attack complexities in both ciphertext-only and known-plaintext models, with or without nonce hiding, for collision attacks...

This work describes vulnerabilities in the specification of the AEAD packets as introduced in the novel LibrePGP specification that is implemented by the widely used GnuPG application and the AES-based AEAD schemes as well as the Key Wrap Algorithm specified in the Cryptographic Message Syntax (CMS). These new attacks exploit the possibility to downgrade AEAD or AES Key Wrap ciphertexts to valid legacy CFB- or CBC-encrypted related ciphertexts and require that the attacker learns the...

Cryptography implementations of block cipher have been written in C language due to its strong features on system-friendly features. However, the C language is prone to memory safety issues, such as buffer overflows and memory leaks. On the other hand, Rust, novel system programming language, provides strict compile-time memory safety guarantees through its ownership model. This paper presents the implementation of LEA block cipher in Rust language, demonstrating features to prevent...

In this work, we take a look at the two recently proposed block ciphers, DEFAULT and BAKSHEESH, both of which are descendent of another block cipher named GIFT. We show that both ciphers can be interpreted within the partial non-linear layer category, thanks to the SBoxes having at least one non-trivial linear structure. We also reevaluate the security claim of DEFAULT.

The impossible boomerang attack (IBA) is a combination of the impossible differential attack and boomerang attack, which has demonstrated remarkable power in the security evaluation of AES and other block ciphers. However, this method has not received sufficient attention in the field of symmetric cipher analysis. The only existing search method for impossible boomerang distinguishers (IBD), the core of IBAs, is the $\mathcal{UB}\text{-method}$, but it is considered rather rudimentary given...

In this paper, we propose the Differential Fault Attack (DFA) on three Homomorphic Encryption (HE) friendly stream ciphers \textsf{Masta}, \textsf{Pasta}, and \textsf{Elisabeth}. Both \textsf{Masta} and \textsf{Pasta} are \textsf{Rasta}-like ciphers with publicly derived and pseudorandom affine layers. The design of \textsf{Elisabeth} is an extension of \textsf{FLIP} and \textsf{FiLIP}, following the group filter permutator paradigm. All these three ciphers operate on elements over...

Online authenticated encryption has been considered of practical relevance in light-weight environments due to low latency and constant memory usage. In this paper, we propose a new tweakable block cipher-based online authenticated encryption scheme, dubbed ZLR, and its domain separation variant, dubbed DS-ZLR. ZLR and DS-ZLR follow the Encrypt-MixEncrypt paradigm. However, in contrast to existing schemes using the same paradigm such as ELmE and CoLM, ZLR and DS-ZLR enjoy n-bit security by...

In this short paper we share our experience on instantiating the width-extension construct TLR3, based on a variety of tweakable block cipher constructs. As many of our attempts failed, we highlight the complexity of getting a practical tweakable block cipher and the gap between theory and practice.

We consider constructions that combine outputs of a single permutation $\pi:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$ using a public function. These are popular constructions for achieving security beyond the birthday bound when implementing a pseudorandom function using a block cipher (i.e., a pseudorandom permutation). One of the best-known constructions (denoted SXoP$[2,n]$) XORs the outputs of 2 domain-separated calls to $\pi$. Modeling $\pi$ as a uniformly chosen permutation, several previous...

In this research, we introduce MIND-Crypt, a novel attack framework that uses deep learning (DL) and transfer learning (TL) to challenge the indistinguishability of block ciphers, specifically SPECK32/64 encryption algorithm in CBC mode (Cipher Block Chaining) against Known Plaintext Attacks (KPA). Our methodology includes training a DL model with ciphertexts of two messages encrypted using the same key. The selected messages have the same byte-length and differ by only one bit at the binary...

We prove that the permutation computed by a reversible circuit with $\widetilde{O}(nk\cdot \log(1/\epsilon))$ random $3$-bit gates is $\epsilon$-approximately $k$-wise independent. Our bound improves on currently known bounds in the regime when the approximation error $\epsilon$ is not too small. We obtain our results by analyzing the log-Sobolev constants of appropriate Markov chains rather than their spectral gaps.

Almost perfect nonlinear (in brief, APN) functions are vectorial functions $F:\mathbb F_2^n\rightarrow \mathbb F_2^n$ playing roles in several domains of information protection, at the intersection of computer science and mathematics. Their definition comes from cryptography and is also related to coding theory. When they are used as substitution boxes (S-boxes, which are the only nonlinear components in block ciphers), APN functions contribute optimally to the resistance against...

With the rise of quantum computing, the security of traditional cryptographic systems, especially those vulnerable to quantum attacks, is under threat. While public key cryptography has been widely studied in post-quantum security, symmetric-key cryptography has received less attention. This paper explores using the Ajtai-Micciancio hash function, based on the Short Integer Solution (SIS) problem, as a pseudorandom function in the Luby-Rackoff cipher. Since lattice-based problems like SIS...

In this paper, we study the security of MAC constructions among those classified by Chen et al. in ASIACRYPT '21. Precisely, $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_2}$ (or $\mathsf{EWCDM}$ as named by Cogliati and Seurin in CRYPTO '16), $F^{\text{EDM}}_{B_3}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_2}$, $F^{\text{SoP}}_{B_3}$ (all as named by Chen et al.) are proved to be fully secure up to $2^n$ MAC queries in the nonce-respecting setting, improving the previous bound of $\frac{3n}{4}$-bit security. In particular,...

In FSE'16, Luykx et al. have proposed $\textsf{LightMAC}$ that provably achieves a query length independent PRF security bound. To be precise, the construction achieves security roughly in the order of $O(q^2/2^n)$, when instantiated with two independently keyed $n$-bit block ciphers and $q$ is the total number of queries made by the adversary. Subsequently, in ASIACRYPT'17, Naito proposed a beyond-birthday-bound variant of the $\textsf{LightMAC}$ construction, dubbed as...

Fault Injection (FI) attacks, which involve intentionally introducing faults into a system to cause it to behave in an unintended manner, are widely recognized and pose a significant threat to the security of cryptographic primitives implemented in hardware, making fault tolerance an increasingly critical concern. However, protecting cryptographic hardware primitives securely and efficiently, even with well-established and documented methods such as redundant computation, can be a...

We extend the Linicrypt framework for characterizing hash function security as proposed by McQuoid, Swope, and Rosulek (TCC 2018) to support constructions in the ideal cipher model. In this setting, we give a characterization of collision- and second-preimage-resistance in terms of a linear-algebraic condition on Linicrypt programs, and present an efficient algorithm for determining whether a program satisfies the condition. As an application, we consider the case of the block cipherbased...

Tweakable HCTR is an tweakable enciphering proposed by Dutta and Nandi in Indocrypt 2018. It provides beyond birthday bound security when each tweak value is not used too frequently. More importantly for this note, its security bound degrades linearly with the maximum input length. We show in this note that this is not true by showing a single query distinguisher with advantage $O(l^2/2^n)$ where $l$ is the length of that query. The distinguisher does not break the beyond-birthday-bound...

MRAE security is an important goal for many AEAD applications where the nonce uniqueness cannot be maintained and security risks are significant. However, MRAE schemes can be quite expensive. Two of the SoTA MRAE-secure schemes; Deoxys-II and AES-GCM-SIV rely on internal parallelism and special instructions to achieve competitive performance. However, they both suffer from the same bottleneck, they have at least one call to the underlying primitive that cannot be parallelized to any other...

FUTURE is a recently proposed lightweight block cipher that achieved a remarkable hardware performance due to careful design decisions. FUTURE is an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-like Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) with 10 rounds, whose round function consists of four components, i.e., SubCell, MixColumn, ShiftRow and AddRoundKey. Unlike AES, it is a 64-bit-size block cipher with a 128-bit secret key, and the state can be arranged into 16 cells. Therefore, the operations of...

Cache side-channels are a major threat to cryptographic implementations, particularly block ciphers. Traditional manual hardening methods transform block ciphers into Boolean circuits, a practice refined since the late 90s. The only existing automatic approach based on Boolean circuits achieves security but suffers from performance issues. This paper examines the use of Lookup Tables (LUTs) for automatic hardening of block ciphers against cache side-channel attacks. We present a novel method...

The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most commonly used and analyzed encryption algorithms. In this work, we present new combinations of some prominent attacks on AES, achieving new records in data requirements among attacks, utilizing only $2^4$ and $2^{16}$ chosen plaintexts (CP) for 6-round and 7-round AES-192/256 respectively. One of our attacks is a combination of a meet-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack with a square attack mounted on 6-round AES-192/256 while ...

In this paper, we describe new quantum generic attacks on 6 rounds balanced Feistel networks with internal functions or internal permutations. In order to obtain our new quantum attacks, we revisit a result of Childs and Eisenberg that extends Ambainis' collision finding algorithm to the subset finding problem. In more details, we continue their work by carefully analyzing the time complexity of their algorithm. We also use four points structures attacks instead of two points structures...

In this study, we investigate the newly developed low energy lightweight block cipher (LELBC), specifically designed for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart agriculture. The designers conducted a preliminary differential cryptanalysis of LELBC through mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). This paper further delves into LELBC’s differential characteristics in both single and related-key frameworks using MILP, identifying a nine-round differential characteristic...

A recent work from Eurocrypt 2023 suggests that prime-field masking has excellent potential to improve the efficiency vs. security tradeoff of masked implementations against side-channel attacks, especially in contexts where physical leakages show low noise. We pick up on the main open challenge that this seed result leads to, namely the design of an optimized prime cipher able to take advantage of this potential. Given the interest of tweakable block ciphers with cheap inverses in many...

In recent years quantum computing has developed rapidly. The security threat posed by quantum computing to cryptography makes it necessary to better evaluate the resource cost of attacking algorithms, some of which require quantum implementations of the attacked cryptographic building blocks. In this paper we manage to optimize quantum circuits of AES in several aspects. Firstly, based on de Brugière \textit{et al.}'s greedy algorithm, we propose an improved depth-oriented algorithm for...

Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) is a trend in applied cryptography because it combine confidentiality, integrity, and authentication into one algorithm and is more efficient than using block ciphers and hash functions separately. The Ascon algorithm, as the winner in both the CAESAR competition and the NIST LwC competition, will soon become the AEAD standard for protecting the Internet of Things and micro devices with limited computing resources. We propose a partial...

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

A Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocol allows two parties to agree upon a cryptographic key, in the setting where the only secret shared in advance is a low-entropy password. The standard security notion for PAKE is in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. In recent years there have been a large number of works analyzing the UC-security of Encrypted Key Exchange (EKE), the very first PAKE protocol, and its One-encryption variant (OEKE), both of which compile an...

The AES block cipher is today the most important and analyzed symmetric algorithm. While all versions of the AES are known to be secure in the single-key setting, this is not the case in the related-key scenario. In this article we try to answer the question whether the AES would resist better differential-like related-key attacks if the key schedule was different. For this, we search for alternative permutation-based key schedules by extending the work of Khoo et al. at ToSC 2017 and Derbez...

LoPher brings, for the first time, cryptographic security promises to the field of logic locking in a bid to break the game of cat-and-mouse seen in logic locking. Toward this end, LoPher embeds the circuitry to lock within multiple rounds of a block cipher, by carefully configuring all the S-Boxes. To realize general Boolean functionalities and to support varying interconnect topologies, LoPher also introduces additional layers of MUXes between S-Boxes and the permutation operations. The...

Authenticated Encryption (AE) modes of operation based on Tweakable Block Ciphers (TBC) usually measure efficiency in the number of calls to the underlying primitive per message block. On the one hand, many existing solutions reach a primitive-rate of 1, meaning that each n-bit block of message asymptotically needs a single call to the TBC with output length n. On the other hand, while these modes look optimal in a blackbox setting, they become less attractive when leakage comes into play,...

Differential cryptanalysis is an old and powerful attack against block ciphers. While different techniques have been introduced throughout the years to improve the complexity of this attack, the key recovery phase remains a tedious and error-prone procedure. In this work, we propose a new algorithm and its associated tool that permits, given a distinguisher, to output an efficient key guessing strategy. Our tool can be applied to SPN ciphers whose linear layer consists of a bit-permutation...

At Eurocrypt 2023, a differential attack on the block cipher Speedy-7-192 was presented. This note shows that the main differential characteristic that this attack is based on has probability zero.

In 1994, Langford and Hellman introduced differential-linear (DL) cryptanalysis, with the idea of decomposing the block cipher E into two parts, EU and EL, such that EU exhibits a high-probability differential trail, while EL has a high-correlation linear trail.Combining these trails forms a distinguisher for E, assuming independence between EU and EL. The dependency between the two parts of DL distinguishers remained unaddressed until EUROCRYPT 2019, where Bar-On et al. introduced the DLCT...

We revisit the construction of signature schemes using the MPC-in-the-head paradigm. 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 that is provably secure in the multi-instance setting. The security analysis of our PPRF, in the ideal cipher model, is quite involved and forms a...

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...

In this paper, we propose a leakage-resilient pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) design that leverages the rekeying techniques of the PSV-Enc encryption scheme and the superposition property of the Superposition-Tweak-Key (STK) framework. The random seed of the PRNG is divided into two parts; one part is used as an ephemeral key that changes every two calls to a tweakable block cipher (TBC), and the other part is used as a static long-term key. Using the superposition property, we show...

In this work, we introduce a family of asymmetric cryptographic functions based on dynamic number theoretic transformations with multiple rounds of modular arithmetic to enhance diffusion and difficulty of inversion. This function acts as a basic cryptographic building block for a novel communication-efficient zero-knowledge crypto-system. The system as defined exhibits partial homomorphism and behaves as an additive positive accumulator. By using a novel technique to constructively embed...

The search for differential characteristics on block ciphers is a difficult combinatorial problem. In this paper, we investigate the performances of an AI-originated technique, Single Player Monte-Carlo Tree Search (SP-MCTS), in finding good differential characteristics on ARX ciphers, with an application to the block cipher SPECK. In order to make this approach competitive, we include several heuristics, such as the combination of forward and backward searches, and achieve significantly...

PRESENT is an ultra-lightweight block cipher designed by Bogdanov et al., and has been widely studied since its proposal. It supports 80-bit and 128-bit keys, which are referred as PRESENT-80 and PRESENT-128, respectively. Up to now, linear cryptanalysis is the most effective method on attacking this cipher, especially when accelerated with the pruned Walsh transform. Combing pruned Walsh transform with multiple linear attacks, one can recover the right key for 28-round PRESENT-80 and -128....

We continue the study of $t$-wise independence of substitution-permutation networks (SPNs) initiated by the recent work of Liu, Tessaro, and Vaikuntanathan (CRYPTO 2021). Our key technical result shows that when the S-boxes are randomly and independently chosen and kept secret, an $r$-round SPN with input length $n = b \cdot k$ is $2^{-\Theta(n)}$-close to $t$-wise independent within $r = O(\min\{k, \log t\})$ rounds for any $t$ almost as large as $2^{b/2}$. Here, $b$ is the input length of...

ZK-SNARKs, a fundamental component of privacy-oriented payment systems, identity protocols, or anonymous voting systems, are advanced cryptographic protocols for verifiable computation: modern SNARKs allow to encode the invariants of a program, expressed as an arithmetic circuit, in an appropriate constraint language from which short, zero-knowledge proofs for correct computations can be constructed. One of the most important computations that is run through SNARK systems is the...

At EUROCRYPT 2017, Grassi et al. proposed the multiple-of-8 property for 5-round AES, where the number $n$ of right pairs is a multiple of 8. At ToSC 2019, Boura et al. generalized the multiple-of property for a general SPN block cipher and applied it to block cipher SKINNY. In this paper, we present that $n$ is not only a multiple but also a fixed value for SKINNY. Unlike the previous proof of generalization of multiple-of property using equivalence class, we investigate the...

HALFLOOP-96 is a 96-bit tweakable block cipher used in high frequency radio to secure automatic link establishment messages. In this paper, we concentrate on its differential properties in the contexts of conventional, related-tweak, and related-key differential attacks. Using automatic techniques, we determine the minimum number of active S-boxes and the maximum differential probability in each of the three configurations. The resistance of HALFLOOP-96 to differential attacks in the...

In recent years, symmetric primitives that focus on arithmetic metrics over large finite fields, characterized as arithmetization-oriented (\texttt{AO}) ciphers, are widely used in advanced protocols such as secure multi-party computations (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and zero-knowledge proof systems (ZK). To ensure good performance in protocols, these \texttt{AO} ciphers are commonly designed with a small number of multiplications over finite fields and low multiplicative...

Given a fixed-size block, cryptographic block functions gen- erate outputs by a sequence of bitwise operations. Block functions are widely used in the design of hash functions and stream ciphers. Their correct implementations hence are crucial to computer security. We pro- pose a method that leverages logic equivalence checking to verify assem- bly implementations of cryptographic block functions. Logic equivalence checking is a well-established technique from hardware verification....

Nonlinear feedback shift registers (NFSRs) are used in many stream ciphers as their main building blocks. One security criterion for the design of a stream cipher is to assure its keystream has a long period. To meet this criterion, the NFSR used in a stream cipher must have a long state cycle. Further, to simultaneously avoid equivalent keys, the keystream's period is not compressed compared to the NFSR's state cycle length, which can be guaranteed if the NFSR is observable in the sense...

Common block ciphers like AES specified by the NIST or KASUMI (A5/3) of GSM are extensively utilized by billions of individuals globally to protect their privacy and maintain confidentiality in daily communications. However, these ciphers lack comprehensive security proofs against the vast majority of known attacks. Currently, security proofs are limited to differential and linear attacks for both AES and KASUMI. For instance, the consensus on the security of AES is not based on formal...

In spite of being a popular technique for designing block ciphers, Lai-Massey networks have received considerably less attention from a security analysis point-of-view than Feistel networks and Substitution-Permutation networks. In this paper we study the beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security of Lai-Massey networks with independent random round functions against chosen-plaintext adversaries. Concretely, we show that five rounds are necessary and sufficient to achieve BBB security.

QARMAv2 is a general-purpose and hardware-oriented family of lightweight tweakable block ciphers (TBCs) introduced in ToSC 2023. QARMAv2, as a redesign of QARMAv1 with a longer tweak and tighter security margins, is also designed to be suitable for cryptographic memory protection and control flow integrity. The designers of QARMAv2 provided a relatively comprehensive security analysis in the design specification, e.g., some bounds for the number of attacked rounds in differential and...

The linear layer of block ciphers plays an important role in their security. In particular, ciphers designed following the wide-trail strategy use the branch number of the linear layer to derive bounds on the probability of linear and differential trails. At FSE 2014, the LS-design construction was introduced as a simple and regular structure to design bitsliced block ciphers. It considers the internal state as a bit matrix, and applies alternatively an identical S-Box on all the columns,...

In the attacker models of Side-Channel Attacks (SCA) and Fault Injection Attacks (FIA), the opponent has access to a noisy version of the internal behavior of the hardware. Since the end of the nineties, many works have shown that this type of attacks constitutes a serious threat to cryptosystems implemented in embedded devices. In the state-of-the-art, there exist several countermeasures to protect symmetric encryption (especially AES-128). Most of them protect only against one of these two...

The LowMC family of SPN block cipher proposed by Albrecht et al. was designed specifically for MPC-/FHE-/ZKP-friendly use cases. It is especially used as the underlying block cipher of PICNIC, one of the alternate third-round candidate digital signature algorithms for NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization. The security of PICNIC is highly related to the difficulty of recovering the secret key of LowMC from a given plaintext/ciphertext pair, which raises new challenges for security...

Integral, impossible-differential (ID), and zero-correlation (ZC) attacks are three of the most important attacks on block ciphers. However, manually finding these attacks can be a daunting task, which is why automated methods are becoming increasingly important. Most automatic tools regarding integral, ZC, and ID attacks have focused only on finding distinguishers rather than complete attacks. At EUROCRYPT 2023, Hadipour et al. proposed a generic and efficient constraint programming (CP)...

This paper presents full round distinguishing and key recovery attacks on lightweight block cipher SAND-2 with 64-bit block size and 128-bit key size, which appears to be a mixture of the AND-Rotation-XOR (AND-RX) based ciphers SAND and ANT. However, the security arguments against linear and some other attacks are not fully provided. In this paper, we find that the combination of a SAND-like nibble-based round function and ANT-like bit-based permutations will cause dependencies and lead to...

In this paper, inspired by the work of Beyne and Rijmen at CRYPTO 2022, we explore the accurate probability of $d$-differential in the fixed-key model. The theoretical foundations of our method are based on a special matrix $-$ quasi-$d$-differential transition matrix, which is a natural extension of the quasidifferential transition matrix. The role of quasi-$d$-differential transition matrices in polytopic cryptananlysis is analogous to that of correlation matrices in linear cryptanalysis....

QARMAv2 represents a family of lightweight block ciphers introduced in ToSC 2023. This new iteration, QARMAv2, is an evolution of the original QARMA design, specifically constructed to accommodate more extended tweak values while simultaneously enhancing security measures. This family of ciphers is available in two distinct versions, referred to as QARMAv2-$b$-$s$, where ‘$b$’ signifies the block length, with options for both 64-bit and 128-bit blocks, and ‘$c$’ signifies the...

In TCHES’22, Shen et al. proposed Triplex, a single-pass leakage-resistant authenticated encryption scheme based on Tweakable Block Ciphers (TBCs) with 2n-bit tweaks. Triplex enjoys beyond-birthday-bound ciphertext integrity in the CIML2 setting and birthday-bound confidentiality in the CCAmL1 notion. Despite its strengths, Triplex’s operational efficiency was hindered by its sequential nature, coupled with a rate limit of 2/3. In an endeavor to surmount these efficiency challenges, Peters...