Cryptanalysis of JAMBU

In this article, we analyse the security of the authenticated encryption mode JAMBU, a submission to the CAESAR competition that remains currently unbroken. We show that the security claims of this candidate regarding its nonce-misuse resistance can be broken. More precisely, we explain a technique to guess in advance a ciphertext block corresponding to a plaintext that has never been queried before (nor its prefix), thus breaking the confidentiality of the scheme when the attacker can make encryption queries with the same nonce. Our attack is very practical as it requires only about 2^{32} encryption queries and computations (instead of the 2^{128} claimed by the designers). Our cryptanalysis has been fully implemented in order to verify our findings. Moreover, due to the small tag length of JAMBU, we show how this attack can be extended in the nonce-respecting scenario to break confidentiality in the adaptative chosen-ciphertext model (IND-CCA2) with 2^{96} computations, with message prefixes not previously queried

Security Proof of JAMBU under Nonce Respecting and Nonce Misuse Cases

JAMBU is an AEAD mode of operation which entered the third round of CAESAR competition. However, it does not have a security proof like other modes of operation do, and there was a cryptanalysis result that has overthrown the security claim under nonce misuse case by the designers. In this paper, we complement the shortage of the scheme by giving security proofs of JAMBU both under nonce respecting case and nonce misuse case. We prove that JAMBU under nonce respecting case has a slightly lower security than the birthday bound of $n$ bits, and JAMBU under nonce misuse case has a tight security bound of $n/2$ bits

Full Round Zero-sum Distinguishers on TinyJAMBU-128 and TinyJAMBU-192 Keyed-permutation in the Known-key setting

TinyJAMBU is one of the finalists in the NIST lightweight standardization competition. This paper presents full round practical zero-sum distinguishers on the keyed permutation used in TinyJAMBU. We propose a full round zero-sum distinguisher on the 128- and 192-bit key variants and a reduced round zero-sum distinguisher for the 256-bit key variant in the known-key settings. Our best known-key distinguisher works with $2^{16}$ data/time complexity on the full 128-bit version and with $2^{23}$ data/time complexity on the full 192-bit version. For the 256-bit ver- sion, we can distinguish 1152 rounds (out of 1280 rounds) in the known- key settings. In addition, we present the best zero-sum distinguishers in the secret-key settings: with complexity $2^{23}$ we can distinguish 544 rounds in the forward direction or 576 rounds in the backward direction. For finding the zero-sum distinguisher, we bound the algebraic degree of the TinyJAMBU permutation using the monomial prediction technique proposed by Hu et al. at ASIACRYPT 2020. We model the monomial prediction rule on TinyJAMBU in MILP and find upper bounds on the degree by computing the parity of the number of solutions

On the Security Margin of TinyJAMBU with Refined Differential and Linear Cryptanalysis

International audienceThis paper presents the first third-party security analysis of TinyJAMBU, which is one of 32 second-round candidates in NIST’s lightweight cryptography standardization process. TinyJAMBU adopts an NLFSR based keyed-permutation that computes only a single NAND gate as a non-linear component per round. The designers evaluated the minimum number of active AND gates, however such a counting method neglects the dependency between multiple AND gates. There also exist previous works considering such dependencies with stricter models, however those are known to be too slow. In this paper, we present a new model that provides a good balance of efficiency and accuracy by only taking into account the first-order correlation of AND gates that frequently occurs in TinyJAMBU. With the refined model, we show a 338-round differential with probability 2^(−62.68) that leads to a forgery attack breaking 64-bit security. This implies that the security margin of TinyJAMBU with respect to the number of unattacked rounds is approximately 12%. We also show a differential on full 384 rounds with probability 2^(−70.64), thus the security margin of full rounds with respect to the data complexity, namely the gap between the claimed security bits and the attack complexity, is less than 8 bits. Our attacks also point out structural weaknesses of the mode that essentially come from the minimal state size to be lightweight

DEEPAND: In-Depth Modeling of Correlated AND Gates for NLFSR-based Lightweight Block Ciphers

Automated cryptanalysis has taken center stage in the arena of cryptanalysis since the pioneering work by Mouha et al. which showcased the power of Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) in solving cryptanalysis problems that otherwise, required significant effort. Since its inception, research in this area has moved in primarily two directions. One is to model more and more classical cryptanalysis tools as optimization problems to leverage the ease provided by state-of-the-art solvers. The other direction is to improve existing models to make them more efficient and/or accurate. The current work is an attempt to contribute to the latter. In this work, a general model referred to as DEEPAND has been devised to capture the correlation between AND gates in NLFSR-based lightweight block ciphers. DEEPAND builds upon and generalizes the idea of joint propagation of differences through AND gates captured using refined MILP modeling of TinyJAMBU by Saha et al. in FSE 2020. The proposed model has been applied to TinyJAMBU and KATAN and can detect correlations that were missed by earlier models. This leads to more accurate differential bounds for both ciphers. In particular, a 384-round (full-round as per earlier specification) Type-IV trail is found for TinyJAMBU with 14 active AND gates using the new model, while the refined model reported this figure to be 19. This also reaffirms the decision of the designers to increase the number of rounds from 384 to 640. Moreover, the model succeeds in searching a full round Type-IV trail of TinyJAMBU keyed permutation $\mathcal{P}_{1024}$ with probability $2^{-108} (\gg 2^{-128})$. This reveals the non-random properties of $\mathcal{P}_{1024}$ thereby showing it to be non-ideal. Hence it cannot be expected to provide the same security levels as robust block ciphers. Further, the provable security of the TinyJAMBU AEAD scheme should be carefully revisited. Similarly, for KATAN 32, DEEPAND modeling improves the 42-round trail with $2^{-11}$ probability to $2^{-7}$. Also, for KATAN 48 and KATAN 64, this model respectively improves the designer\u27s claimed 43-round and 37-round trail probabilities. Moreover, in the related key setting, the DEEPAND model can make a better 140-round boomerang distinguisher (for both the data and time complexity) compared to the previous boomerang attack by Isobe et al. in ACISP 2013. In summary, DEEPAND seems to capture the underlying correlation better when multiple AND gates are at play and can be adapted to other classes of ciphers as well

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

General Classification of the Authenticated Encryption Schemes for the CAESAR Competition

An Authenticated encryption scheme is a scheme which provides privacy and integrity by using a secret key. In 2013, CAESAR (the ``Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness\u27\u27) was co-founded by NIST and Dan Bernstein with the aim of finding authenticated encryption schemes that offer advantages over AES-GCM and are suitable for widespread adoption. The first round started with 57 candidates in March 2014; and nine of these first-round candidates where broken and withdrawn from the competition. The remaining 48 candidates went through an intense process of review, analysis and comparison. While the cryptographic community benefits greatly from the manifold different submission designs, their sheer number implies a challenging amount of study. This paper provides an easy-to-grasp overview over functional aspects, security parameters, and robustness offerings by the CAESAR candidates, clustered by their underlying designs (block-cipher-, stream-cipher-, permutation-/sponge-, compression-function-based, dedicated). After intensive review and analysis of all 48 candidates by the community, the CAESAR committee selected only 30 candidates for the second round. The announcement for the third round candidates was made on 15th August 2016 and 15 candidates were chosen for the third round

Cryptanalysis of the Authenticated Encryption Algorithm COFFE

COFFE is a hash-based authenticated encryption scheme. In the original paper, it was claimed to have IND-CPA security and also ciphertext integrity even in nonce-misuse scenario. In this paper, we analyse the security of COFFE. Our attack shows that even under the assumption that the primitive hash function is ideal, a valid ciphertext can be forged with 2 enquiries with success probability close to 1. The motivation of the attack is to find a collision on the input of each of the hash calls in the COFFE instantiation. It can be done in two ways. The first way is by modifying nonce and last message block size. Chosen appropriately, we can ensure two COFFE instantiations with different nonce and different last message block size can have exactly the same intermediate state value. This hence leads to a valid ciphertext to be generated. Another way is by considering two different COFFE instantiations with different message block size despite same key. In this case, we will use the existence of consecutive zero in the binary representation the initial value to achieve identical intermediate state value on two different COFFE instantiations. Having the state collisions, the forgery attack is then conducted by choosing two different plaintexts with appropriate nonce and tag size to query. Having this fact, without knowing the secret key, we can then validly encrypt another plaintext with probability equal to 1

Practical Related-Key Forgery Attacks on the Full TinyJAMBU-192/256

TinyJambu is one of the finalists in the NIST lightweight cryptography competition. It has undergone extensive analysis in the recent years as both the keyed permutation as well as the mode are new designs. In this paper we present a related-key forgery attackon the updated TinyJambu scheme with 256- and 192-bit keys. We introduce a high probability related-key differential attack were the differences are only introduced into the key state. Therefore, the characteristic is applicable to the TinyJambu mode and can be used to mount a forgery attack. The time and data complexity of the forgery are $2^{32}$ using $2^{10}$ related-keys for the 256-bit key version, and $2^{42}$ using $2^{12}$ related-keys for the 192-bit key version. For the 128-bit key we construct a related-key differential characteristic on the full keyed permutation of TinyJambu with a probability of $2^{-16}$. We extend the related-key differential characteristics on TinyJambu to practical time key recovery attacks that extract the full key from the keyed permutation with a time and data complexity of $2^{23}$, $2^{20}$, and $2^{18}$ for respectively the 128-, 192-, and 256-bit key variants. All characteristics are experimentally verified and we provide key nonce pairs that produce the same tag to show the feasibility of the forgery attack