Analysis of property-preservation capabilities of the ROX and ESh hash domain extenders

Two of the most recent and powerful multi-property preserving (MPP) hash domain extension transforms are the Ramdom-Oracle-XOR (ROX) transform and the Enveloped Shoup (ESh) transform. The former was proposed by Andreeva et al. at ASIACRYPT 2007 and the latter was proposed by Bellare and Ristenpart at ICALP 2007. In the existing literature, ten notions of security for hash functions have been considered in analysis of MPP capabilities of domain extension transforms, namely CR, Sec, aSec, eSec (TCR), Pre, aPre, ePre, MAC, PRF, PRO. Andreeva et al. showed that ROX is able to preserve seven properties; namely collision resistance (CR), three flavors of second preimage resistance (Sec, aSec, eSec) and three variants of preimage resistance (Pre, aPre, ePre). Bellare and Ristenpart showed that ESh is capable of preserving five important security notions; namely CR, message authentication code (MAC), pseudorandom function (PRF), pseudorandom oracle (PRO), and target collision resistance (TCR). Nonetheless, there is no further study on these two MPP hash domain extension transforms with regard to the other properties. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. Firstly, we show that ROX does not preserve two other widely-used and important security notions, namely MAC and PRO. We also show a positive result about ROX, namely that it also preserves PRF. Secondly, we show that ESh does not preserve other four properties, namely Sec, aSec, Pre, and aPre. On the positive side we show that ESh can preserve ePre property. Our results in this paper provide a full picture of the MPP capabilities of both ROX and ESh transforms by completing the property-preservation analysis of these transforms in regard to all ten security notions of interest, namely CR, Sec, aSec, eSec (TCR), Pre, aPre, ePre, MAC, PRF, PRO

Forkcipher: A New Primitive for Authenticated Encryption of Very Short Messages

This is an extended version of the article with the same title accepted at Asiacrypt 2019.International audienceHighly efficient encryption and authentication of short messages is an essential requirement for enabling security in constrained scenarios such as the CAN FD in automotive systems (max. message size 64 bytes), massive IoT, critical communication domains of 5G, and Narrowband IoT, to mention a few. In addition, one of the NIST lightweight cryptography project requirements is that AEAD schemes shall be “optimized to be efficient for short messages (e.g., as short as 8 bytes)”. In this work we introduce and formalize a novel primitive in symmetric cryptography called a forkcipher. A forkcipher is a keyed function expanding a fixed-length input to a fixed-length output. We define its security as indistinguishability under chosen ciphertext attack. We give a generic construction validation via the new iterate-fork-iterate design paradigm. We then propose ForkSkinny as a concrete forkcipher instance with a public tweak and based on SKINNY: a tweakable lightweight block cipher constructed using the TWEAKEY framework. We conduct extensive cryptanalysis of ForkSkinny against classical and structure-specific attacks. We demonstrate the applicability of forkciphers by designing three new provably-secure, nonce-based AEAD modes which offer performance and security tradeoffs and are optimized for efficiency of very short messages. Considering a reference block size of 16 bytes, and ignoring possible hardware optimizations, our new AEAD schemes beat the best SKINNY-based AEAD modes. More generally, we show forkciphers are suited for lightweight applications dealing with predominantly short messages, while at the same time allowing handling arbitrary messages sizes. Furthermore, our hardware implementation results show that when we exploit the inherent parallelism of ForkSkinny we achieve the best performance when directly compared with the most efficient mode instantiated with the SKINNY block cipher