52 research outputs found
Review of the NIST Light-weight Cryptography Finalists
Since 2016, NIST has been assessing lightweight encryption methods, and, in
2022, NIST published the final 10: ASCON, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain128-AEAD,
ISAP, Photon-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJambu, and Xoodyak. At the time that
the article was written, NISC announced ASCOn as the chosen method that will be
published as NIST'S lightweight cryptography standard later in 2023. In this
article, we provide a comparison between these methods in terms of energy
efficiency, time for encryption, and time for hashing.Comment: 6 page
Security analysis of NIST-LWC contest finalists
Dissertação de mestrado integrado em Informatics EngineeringTraditional cryptographic standards are designed with a desktop and server environment in mind, so, with the
relatively recent proliferation of small, resource constrained devices in the Internet of Things, sensor networks,
embedded systems, and more, there has been a call for lightweight cryptographic standards with security,
performance and resource requirements tailored for the highly-constrained environments these devices find
themselves in.
In 2015 the National Institute of Standards and Technology began a Standardization Process in order to select
one or more Lightweight Cryptographic algorithms. Out of the original 57 submissions ten finalists remain, with
ASCON and Romulus being among the most scrutinized out of them.
In this dissertation I will introduce some concepts required for easy understanding of the body of work, do
an up-to-date revision on the current situation on the standardization process from a security and performance
standpoint, a description of ASCON and Romulus, and new best known analysis, and a comparison of the two,
with their advantages, drawbacks, and unique traits.Os padrões criptográficos tradicionais foram elaborados com um ambiente de computador e servidor em mente.
Com a proliferação de dispositivos de pequenas dimensões tanto na Internet of Things, redes de sensores e
sistemas embutidos, apareceu uma necessidade para se definir padrões para algoritmos de criptografia leve, com
prioridades de segurança, performance e gasto de recursos equilibrados para os ambientes altamente limitados
em que estes dispositivos operam.
Em 2015 o National Institute of Standards and Technology lançou um processo de estandardização com o
objectivo de escolher um ou mais algoritmos de criptografia leve. Das cinquenta e sete candidaturas originais
sobram apenas dez finalistas, sendo ASCON e Romulus dois desses finalistas mais examinados.
Nesta dissertação irei introduzir alguns conceitos necessários para uma fácil compreensão do corpo deste
trabalho, assim como uma revisão atualizada da situação atual do processo de estandardização de um ponto
de vista tanto de segurança como de performance, uma descrição do ASCON e do Romulus assim como as
suas melhores análises recentes e uma comparação entre os dois, frisando as suas vantagens, desvantagens e
aspectos únicos
Residual Vulnerabilities to Power side channel attacks of lightweight ciphers cryptography competition Finalists
The protection of communications between Internet of Things (IoT) devices is of great concern because the information exchanged contains vital sensitive data. Malicious agents seek to exploit those data to extract secret information about the owners or the system. Power side channel attacks are of great concern on these devices because their power consumption unintentionally leaks information correlatable to the device\u27s secret data. Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of authenticated encryption with advanced data, in protecting communications with these devices. A comprehensive evaluation of the seven (out of 10) algorithm finalists of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) IoT lightweight cipher competition that do not integrate built‐in countermeasures is proposed. The study shows that, nonetheless, they still present some residual vulnerabilities to power side channel attacks (SCA). For five ciphers, an attack methodology as well as the leakage function needed to perform correlation power analysis (CPA) is proposed. The authors assert that Ascon, Sparkle, and PHOTON‐Beetle security vulnerability can generally be assessed with the security assumptions “Chosen ciphertext attack and leakage in encryption only, with nonce‐misuse resilience adversary (CCAmL1)” and “Chosen ciphertext attack and leakage in encryption only with nonce‐respecting adversary (CCAL1)”, respectively. However, the security vulnerability of GIFT‐COFB, Grain, Romulus, and TinyJambu can be evaluated more straightforwardly with publicly available leakage models and solvers. They can also be assessed simply by increasing the number of traces collected to launch the attack
Design and Cryptanalysis of Lightweight Symmetric Key Primitives
The need for lightweight cryptographic primitives to replace the traditional standardized primitives such as AES, SHA-2 and SHA-3, which are unrealistic in constrained environments, has been anticipated by the cryptographic community for over a decade and half. Such an anticipation came to reality by the apparent proliferation of Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFIDs), Internet of Things (IoT), smart devices and sensor networks in our daily lives. All these devices operate in constrained environments and require reasonable efficiency with low implementation costs and sufficient security. Accordingly, designing lightweight symmetric key cryptographic primitives and analyzing the state-of-the-art algorithms is an active area of research for both academia and industry, which is directly followed by the ongoing National Institute of Standards and Technology’s lightweight cryptography (NIST LWC) standardization project. In this thesis, we focus on the design and security analysis of such primitives.
First, we present the design of four lightweight cryptographic permutations, namely sLiSCP, sLiSCP-light, ACE and WAGE. At a high level, these permutations adopt a Nonlinear Feedback Shift Register (NLFSR) based design paradigm. sLiSCP, sLiSCP-light and ACE use reduced-round Simeck block cipher, while WAGE employs Welch-Gong (WG) permutation and two 7-bit sboxes over the finite field as their underlying nonlinear components. We discuss their design rationale and analyze the security with respect to differential and linear, integral and symmetry based distinguishers using automated tools such as Mixed Integer
Linear Programming (MILP) and SAT/SMT solvers. Second, we show the applications of these permutations to achieve Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD), Message Authentication Code (MAC), Pseudorandom Bit Generator (PRBG) and Hash functionalities. We introduce the idea of the unified round function, which, when combined in a sponge mode can provide all the aforementioned functionalities with the same circuitry. We give concrete instantiations of several AEAD and hash schemes with varying security levels, e.g., 80, 96, 112 and 128 bits. Next, we present Spoc, a new AEAD mode of operation which offers higher security guarantees compared to traditional sponge-based AEAD schemes with smaller states. We instantiate Spoc with sLiSCP-light permutation and propose another two lightweight AEAD algorithms. Notably, 4 of our proposed schemes, namely ACE, Spix, Spoc and WAGE are round 2 candidates of NIST’s LWC project.
Finally, we present cryptanalytic results on some lightweight ciphers. We first analyze the nonlinear initialization phase of WG-5 stream cipher using the division property based cube attack, and give a key recovery attack on 24 (out of 64) rounds with data and time complexities and , respectively. Next, we propose a novel property of block ciphers called correlated sequences and show its applications to meet-in-the-middle attack. Consequently, we give the best key recovery attacks (up to 27 out of 32 rounds in a single key setting) on Simon and Simeck ciphers with block and key sizes 32 and 64 bits, respectively. The attack requires 3 known plaintext-ciphertext pairs and has a time complexity close to average exhaustive search. It is worth noting that variants of WG-5 and Simeck are the core components of aforementioned AEAD and hash schemes. Lastly, we present practical forgery attacks on Limdolen and HERN which are round 1 candidates of NIST LWC project. We show the existence of structural weaknesses which could be exploited to forge any message with success probability of 1. For Limdolen, we require the output of a single encryption query while for HERN we need at most 4 encryption queries for a valid forgery. Following our attack, both designs are eliminated from second round
A Comprehensive Survey on the Implementations, Attacks, and Countermeasures of the Current NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standard
This survey is the first work on the current standard for lightweight
cryptography, standardized in 2023. Lightweight cryptography plays a vital role
in securing resource-constrained embedded systems such as deeply-embedded
systems (implantable and wearable medical devices, smart fabrics, smart homes,
and the like), radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, sensor networks, and
privacy-constrained usage models. National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) initiated a standardization process for lightweight
cryptography and after a relatively-long multi-year effort, eventually, in Feb.
2023, the competition ended with ASCON as the winner. This lightweight
cryptographic standard will be used in deeply-embedded architectures to provide
security through confidentiality and integrity/authentication (the dual of the
legacy AES-GCM block cipher which is the NIST standard for symmetric key
cryptography). ASCON's lightweight design utilizes a 320-bit permutation which
is bit-sliced into five 64-bit register words, providing 128-bit level
security. This work summarizes the different implementations of ASCON on
field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and ASIC hardware platforms on the basis
of area, power, throughput, energy, and efficiency overheads. The presented
work also reviews various differential and side-channel analysis attacks (SCAs)
performed across variants of ASCON cipher suite in terms of algebraic,
cube/cube-like, forgery, fault injection, and power analysis attacks as well as
the countermeasures for these attacks. We also provide our insights and visions
throughout this survey to provide new future directions in different domains.
This survey is the first one in its kind and a step forward towards
scrutinizing the advantages and future directions of the NIST lightweight
cryptography standard introduced in 2023
Security of lightweight cryptographic algorithms
Η διπλωματική εργασία μελετά τους lightweight κρυπτογραφικούς αλγορίθμους, εστιάζοντας σε συγκεκριμένα χαρακτηριστικά ασφάλειας. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, θα αναλυθούν, θα αξιολογηθούν και θα ταξινομηθούν σε διάφορες κατηγορίες, όπως αν είναι block ή stream ciphers και αν είναι authenticated ή όχι, κάποιοι lightweight αλγόριθμοι. Αυτή η ταξινόμηση αφορά αλγόριθμους που βρίσκονται σε διαδικασία προτυποποίησης και συμμετέχουν στο διαγωνισμό του NIST (National Institution of Standards and Technology), Lightweight Crypto. Στη συνέχεια, θα δοθεί έμφαση στις Boolean Functions που χρησιμοποιούν αυτοί οι lightweight κρυπτογραφικοί αλγόριθμοι, με σκοπό να υπολογιστούν οι κρυπτογραφικές ιδιότητες των συναρτήσεων αυτών και να αξιολογηθεί η ανθεκτικότητα αυτών των αλγορίθμων ενάντια σε κρυπταναλυτικές επιθέσεις. Η ανάλυσή μας δείχνει πως δεν υπάρχει καμία Boolean function που να ικανοποιεί όλες τις κρυπτογραφικές ιδιότητες και έτσι απαιτείται περαιτέρω έρευνα για να διευκρινιστεί αν οι ευπάθειες αυτές των Boolean functions μπορούν να χρησιμοποιηθούν για την διεξαγωγή κρυπταναλυτικής επίθεσης.This thesis studies the lightweight cryptographic algorithms, focusing on specific security features. In particular, many lightweight algorithms are being analyzed, evaluated and classified into several categories including but not limited to block/stream ciphers, either being authenticated or not. This categorization consists of algorithms that are in the progress of standardization, competing in the NIST (National Institution of Standards and Technology) Lightweight Crypto Standardization process. Next, emphasis will be given on the Boolean functions that these Lightweight cryptographic algorithms utilize, with the aim to calculate the cryptographic properties of such functions towards evaluating the resistance of these algorithms against several cryptanalytic attacks. Our analysis illustrates that there is no cryptographic Boolean function satisfying all the cryptographic properties and, thus, further research is needed in order to evaluate whether such vulnerabilities of underlying Boolean functions can actually be exploited in order to mount a cryptanalytic attac
LOL: A Highly Flexible Framework for Designing Stream Ciphers
In this paper, we propose LOL, a general framework for designing blockwise stream ciphers, to achieve ultrafast software implementations for the ubiquitous virtual networks in 5G/6G environments and high-security level for post-quantum cryptography. The LOL framework is structurally strong, and all its components as well as the LOL framework itself enjoy high flexibility with various extensions. Following the LOL framework, we propose new stream cipher designs named LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE with the support of the AES-NI and SIMD instructions: the former applies the basic LOL single mode while the latter uses the extended parallel-dual mode. Both LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE support 256-bit key length and, according to our thorough evaluations, have 256-bit security margins against all existing cryptanalysis methods including differential, linear, integral, etc. The software performances of LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE can reach 89 Gbps and 135 Gbps. In addition to pure encryptions, the LOL-MINI and LOL-DOUBLE stream ciphers can also be applied in a stream-cipher-then-MAC strategy to make an AEAD scheme
RISC-V Instruction Set Extensions for Lightweight Symmetric Cryptography
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 important example. Aiming to provide evidence allowing richer evaluation with respect to such metrics, this paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of one separate Instruction Set Extension (ISE) for each of the 10 LWC final round submissions, namely Ascon, Elephant, GIFT-COFB, Grain-128AEADv2, ISAP, PHOTON-Beetle, Romulus, Sparkle, TinyJAMBU, and Xoodyak; although we base the work on use of RISC-V, we argue that it provides more general insight
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