Collision Attacks on Round-Reduced Gimli-Hash/Ascon-Xof/Ascon-Hash

The NIST-approved lightweight cryptography competition is an ongoing project to look for some algorithms as lightweight cryp- tographic standards. Recently, NIST chooses 32 algorithms from the 57 submissions as Round 2 candidates. Gimli and Ascon are both the Round 2 candidates. In this paper, we analyze the security of their hash mode against collision attacks. Con- cretely, we mount collision attacks on three hash functions: Gimli-Hash, Ascon-Xof and Ascon-Hash. These three hash functions are all based on sponge constructions. We give two attack strategies for searching collisions in sponge-based hash functions. Following one strategy, we give two non-practical collision attacks: a 6-round collision attack on Gimli-Hash with time complexity 2113and a 2-round collision attack on Ascon-Hash with time complexity 2125. Following the other strategy, we give a practical attack on 2-round Ascon-Xof with a 64-bit output. The time complexity is 215. We search for the differential characteristics using the MILP technique and the target differential algorithm

A Closer Look at the S-box: Deeper Analysis of Round-Reduced ASCON-HASH

ASCON, a lightweight permutation-based primitive, has been selected as NIST’s lightweight cryptography standard. ASCON-HASH is one of the hash functions provided by the cipher suite ASCON. At ToSC 2021, the collision attack on 2-round ASCON-HASH with time complexity 2^{103} was proposed. Due to its small rate, it is always required to utilize at least 2 message blocks to mount a collision attack because each message block is only of size 64 bits. This significantly increases the difficulty of the analysis because one almost needs to analyze equivalently at least $2L$ rounds of ASCON in order to break $L$ rounds. In this paper, we make some critical observations on the round function of ASCON, especially a 2-round property. It is found that such properties can be exploited to reduce the time complexity of the 2-round collision attack to 2^{62.6}. Although the number of attacked rounds is not improved, we believe our techniques shed more insight into the properties of the ASCON permutation and we expect they can be useful for the future research. Following the same analysis method and with SMT technique, we practically find some semi-free-start collision attacks for 4-round ASCON-HASH and ASCON-Xof with STP solver

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

Preimage Attacks on Reduced-Round Ascon-Xof

Ascon, a family of algorithms that supports authenticated encryption and hashing, has been selected as the new standard for lightweight cryptography in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Project. Ascon’s permutation and authenticated encryption have been actively analyzed, but there are relatively few analyses on the hashing. In this paper, we concentrate on preimage attacks on Ascon-Xof. We focus on linearizing the polynomials leaked by the hash value to find its inverse. In an attack on 2-round Ascon-Xof, we carefully construct the set of guess bits using a greedy algorithm in the context of guess-and-determine. This allows us to attack Ascon-Xof more efficiently than the method in Dobraunig et al., and we fully implement our attack to demonstrate its effectiveness. We also provide the number of guess bits required to linearize one output bit after 3- and 4-round Ascon’s permutation, respectively. In particular, for the first time, we connect the result for 3-round Ascon to a preimage attack on Ascon-Xof with a 64-bit output. Our attacks primarily focus on analyzing weakened versions of Ascon-Xof, where the weakening involves setting all the IV values to 0 and omitting the round constants. Although our attacks do not compromise the security of the full Ascon-Xof, they provide new insights into their security

Automatic Verification of Differential Characteristics: Application to Reduced Gimli (Full Version)

Since Keccak was selected as the SHA-3 standard, more and more permutation-based primitives have been proposed. Different from block ciphers, there is no round key in the underlying permutation for permutation-based primitives. Therefore, there is a higher risk for a differential characteristic of the underlying permutation to become incompatible when considering the dependency of difference transitions over different rounds. However, in most of the MILP or SAT based models to search for differential characteristics, only the difference transitions are involved and are treated as independent in different rounds, which may cause that an invalid one is found for the underlying permutation. To overcome this obstacle, we are motivated to design a model which automatically avoids the inconsistency in the search for differential characteristics. Our technique is to involve both the difference transitions and value transitions in the constructed model. Such an idea is inspired by the algorithm to find SHA-2 characteristics as proposed by Mendel et al. in ASIACRYPT 2011, where the differential characteristic and the conforming message pair are simultaneously searched. As a first attempt, our new technique will be applied to the Gimli permutation, which was proposed in CHES 2017. As a result, we reveal that some existing differential characteristics of reduced Gimli are indeed incompatible, one of which is found in the Gimli document. In addition, since only the permutation is analyzed in the Gimli document, we are lead to carry out a comprehensive study, covering the proposed hash scheme and the authenticated encryption (AE) scheme specified for Gimli, which has become a second round candidate of the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization process. For the hash scheme, a semi-free-start (SFS) collision attack can reach up to 8 rounds starting from an intermediate round. For the AE scheme, a state recovery attack is demonstrated to achieve up to 9 rounds. It should be emphasized that our analysis does not threaten the security of Gimli

AlgSAT --- a SAT Method for Search and Verification of Differential Characteristics from Algebraic Perspective

A good differential is a start for a successful differential attack. However, a differential might be invalid, i.e., there is no right pair following the differential, due to some contradictions in the conditions imposed by the differential. This paper presents a novel and handy method for searching and verifying differential trails from an algebraic perspective. From this algebraic perspective, exact Boolean expressions of differentials over a cryptographic primitive can be conveniently established, which allows for the convenient verification of a given differential trail. This verification process can be naturally formulated as a Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). To demonstrate the power of our new tool, we apply it to Gimli, Ascon, and Xoodoo. For Gimli, we improve the efficiency of searching for a valid 8-round colliding differential trail compared to the previous MILP model (CRYPTO 2020). Based on this differential trail, a practical semi-free-start collision attack on the intermediate 8-round Gimli-Hash is thus successfully mounted. For Ascon, we check several differential trails reported at FSE 2021. Specifically, we find that a 4-round differential used in the forgery attack on Ascon-128’s iteration phase has been proven invalid. As a consequence, the corresponding forgery attack is also invalid. For Xoodoo, as an independent interest, we develop a SAT-based automatic search toolkit called XoodooSat to search for 3- and 4-round differential trail cores of Xoodoo. Our toolkit finds two more 3-round differential trail cores of weight 48 that were missed by the designers which enhance the security analysis of Xoodoo. Then, we verify tens of thousands of 3-round differential trails and two 4-round differential trails extended from the so-called differential trail cores. We find that all these differential trails are valid, which effectively demonstrates that there are no contradictions in the conditions imposed by the round differentials of the DTs in the trail core

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

Preimage and Collision Attacks on Reduced Ascon Using Algebraic Strategies

Ascon, a family of algorithms that supports hashing and authenticated encryption, is the winner of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography Project. In this paper, we propose an improved preimage attack against 2-round Ascon-XOF-64 with a complexity of $2^{32}$ via a better guessing strategy. Furthermore, in order to find a good guessing strategy efficiently, we build a MILP model and successfully extend the attack to 3 rounds. The time complexity is $2^{53}$ when $IV=0$, while for the real $IV$, the attack still works and the time complexity is $2^{51}$. Additionally, we also investigate the resistance of Ascon-HASH against collision attacks. We introduce the linearization of the inverse of S-boxes and then propose a practical free-start collision attack on 3-round Ascon-HASH using a differential trail searched dedicatedly. Furthermore, We construct different 2-round connectors using the linearization of the inverse of S-boxes and successfully extend the collision attack to 4 rounds and 5 rounds of Ascon-HASH with complexities of $2^{21}$ and $2^{41}$ respectively. Although our attacks do not compromise the security of the full 12-round Ascon-XOF and Ascon-HASH, they provide some insights into Ascon\u27s security

Committing Security of Ascon: Cryptanalysis on Primitive and Proof on Mode

Context-committing security of authenticated encryption (AE) that prevents ciphertexts from being decrypted with distinct decryption contexts, (K,N,A) comprising a key K, a nonce N, and associate data A is an active research field motivated by several real-world attacks. In this paper, we study the context-committing security of Ascon, the lightweight permutation-based AE selected by the NIST LWC in 2023, for cryptanalysis on primitive and proof on mode. The attacker’s goal is to find a collision of a ciphertext and a tag with distinct decryption contexts in which an attacker can control all the parameters including the key. First, we propose new attacks with primitives that inject differences in N and A. The new attack on Ascon-128 improves the number of rounds from 2 to 3 and practically generates distinct decryption contexts. The new attack also works in a practical complexity on 3 rounds of Ascon-128a. Second, we prove the context-committing security of Ascon with zero padding, namely Ascon-zp, in the random permutation model. Ascon-zp achieves min {t+z/2 , n+t−k−ν/2 , c/2}-bit security with a t-bit tag, a z-bit padding, an n-bit state, a ν-bit nonce, and a c-bit inner part. This bound corresponds to min {64 + z/2 , 96} with Ascon-128 and Ascon-128a, and min {64 + z/2 , 80} with Ascon-80pq. The original Ascon (z = 0) achieves 64-bit security bounded by a generic birthday attack. By appending zeroes to the plaintext, the security can be enhanced up to 96 bits for Ascon-128 and Ascon-128a and 80 bits for Ascon-80pq

Speeding up Preimage and Key-Recovery Attacks with Highly Biased Differential-Linear Approximations

We present a framework for speeding up the search for preimages of candidate one-way functions based on highly biased differential-linear distinguishers. It is naturally applicable to preimage attacks on hash functions. Further, a variant of this framework applied to keyed functions leads to accelerated key-recovery attacks. Interestingly, our technique is able to exploit related-key differential-linear distinguishers in the single-key model without querying the target encryption oracle with unknown but related keys. This is in essence similar to how we speed up the key search based on the well known complementation property of DES, which calls for caution from the designers in building primitives meant to be secure in the single-key setting without a thorough cryptanalysis in the related-key model. We apply the method to sponge-based hash function Ascon-HASH, XOFs XOEsch/Ascon-XOF and AEAD Schwaemm, etc. Accelerated preimage or key-recovery attacks are obtained. Note that all the differential-linear distinguishers employed in this work are highly biased and thus can be experimentally verified