Construction of Lightweight S-Boxes using Feistel and MISTY structures (Full Version)

The aim of this work is to find large S-Boxes, typically operating on 8 bits, having both good cryptographic properties and a low implementation cost. Such S-Boxes are suitable building-blocks in many lightweight block ciphers since they may achieve a better security level than designs based directly on smaller S-Boxes. We focus on S-Boxes corresponding to three rounds of a balanced Feistel and of a balanced MISTY structure, and generalize the recent results by Li and Wang on the best differential uniformity and linearity offered by such a construction. Most notably, we prove that Feistel networks supersede MISTY networks for the construction of 8-bit permutations. Based on these results, we also provide a particular instantiation of an 8-bit permutation with better properties than the S-Boxes used in several ciphers, including Robin, Fantomas or CRYPTON

Partitions in the S-Box of Streebog and Kuznyechik

Streebog and Kuznyechik are the latest symmetric cryptographic primitives standardized by the Russian GOST. They share the same S-Box, π, whose design process was not described by its authors. In previous works, Biryukov, Perrin and Udovenko recovered two completely different decompositions of this S-Box. We revisit their results and identify a third decomposition of π. It is an instance of a fairly small family of permutations operating on 2m bits which we call TKlog and which is closely related to finite field logarithms. Its simplicity and the small number of components it uses lead us to claim that it has to be the structure intentionally used by the designers of Streebog and Kuznyechik. The 2m-bit permutations of this type have a very strong algebraic structure: they map multiplicative cosets of the subfield GF(2m)* to additive cosets of GF(2m)*. Furthermore, the function relating each multiplicative coset to the corresponding additive coset is always essentially the same. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to expose this very strong algebraic structure. We also investigate other properties of the TKlog and show in particular that it can always be decomposed in a fashion similar to the first decomposition of Biryukov et al., thus explaining the relation between the two previous decompositions. It also means that it is always possible to implement a TKlog efficiently in hardware and that it always exhibits a visual pattern in its LAT similar to the one present in π. While we could not find attacks based on these new results, we discuss the impact of our work on the security of Streebog and Kuznyechik. To this end, we provide a new simpler representation of the linear layer of Streebog as a matrix multiplication in the exact same field as the one used to define π. We deduce that this matrix interacts in a non-trivial way with the partitions preserved by π

Cryptanalysis, Reverse-Engineering and Design of Symmetric Cryptographic Algorithms

In this thesis, I present the research I did with my co-authors on several aspects of symmetric cryptography from May 2013 to December 2016, that is, when I was a PhD student at the university of Luxembourg under the supervision of Alex Biryukov. My research has spanned three different areas of symmetric cryptography. In Part I of this thesis, I present my work on lightweight cryptography. This field of study investigates the cryptographic algorithms that are suitable for very constrained devices with little computing power such as RFID tags and small embedded processors such as those used in sensor networks. Many such algorithms have been proposed recently, as evidenced by the survey I co-authored on this topic. I present this survey along with attacks against three of those algorithms, namely GLUON, PRINCE and TWINE. I also introduce a new lightweight block cipher called SPARX which was designed using a new method to justify its security: the Long Trail Strategy. Part II is devoted to S-Box reverse-engineering, a field of study investigating the methods recovering the hidden structure or the design criteria used to build an S-Box. I co-invented several such methods: a statistical analysis of the differential and linear properties which was applied successfully to the S-Box of the NSA block cipher Skipjack, a structural attack against Feistel networks called the yoyo game and the TU-decomposition. This last technique allowed us to decompose the S-Box of the last Russian standard block cipher and hash function as well as the only known solution to the APN problem, a long-standing open question in mathematics. Finally, Part III presents a unifying view of several fields of symmetric cryptography by interpreting them as purposefully hard. Indeed, several cryptographic algorithms are designed so as to maximize the code size, RAM consumption or time taken by their implementations. By providing a unique framework describing all such design goals, we could design modes of operations for building any symmetric primitive with any form of hardness by combining secure cryptographic building blocks with simple functions with the desired form of hardness called plugs. Alex Biryukov and I also showed that it is possible to build plugs with an asymmetric hardness whereby the knowledge of a secret key allows the privileged user to bypass the hardness of the primitive