A Survey of ARX-based Symmetric-key Primitives

Addition Rotation XOR is suitable for fast implementation symmetric –key primitives, such as stream and block ciphers. This paper presents a review of several block and stream ciphers based on ARX construction followed by the discussion on the security analysis of symmetric key primitives where the best attack for every cipher was carried out. We benchmark the implementation on software and hardware according to the evaluation metrics. Therefore, this paper aims at providing a reference for a better selection of ARX design strategy

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

Efficient Error detection Architectures for Low-Energy Block Ciphers with the Case Study of Midori Benchmarked on FPGA

Achieving secure, high performance implementations for constrained applications such as implantable and wearable medical devices is a priority in efficient block ciphers. However, security of these algorithms is not guaranteed in presence of malicious and natural faults. Recently, a new lightweight block cipher, Midori, has been proposed which optimizes the energy consumption besides having low latency and hardware complexity. This algorithm is proposed in two energy-efficient varients, i.e., Midori64 and Midori128, with block sizes equal to 64 and 128 bits. In this thesis, fault diagnosis schemes for variants of Midori are proposed. To the best of the our knowledge, there has been no fault diagnosis scheme presented in the literature for Midori to date. The fault diagnosis schemes are provided for the nonlinear S-box layer and for the round structures with both 64-bit and 128-bit Midori symmetric key ciphers. The proposed schemes are benchmarked on field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and their error coverage is assessed with fault-injection simulations. These proposed error detection architectures make the implementations of this new low-energy lightweight block cipher more reliable

EFFICIENT HARDWARE PRIMITIVES FOR SECURING LIGHTWEIGHT SYSTEMS

In the era of IoT and ubiquitous computing, the collection and communication of sensitive data is increasingly being handled by lightweight Integrated Circuits. Efficient hardware implementations of crytographic primitives for resource constrained applications have become critical, especially block ciphers which perform fundamental operations such as encryption, decryption, and even hashing. We study the efficiency of block ciphers under different implementation styles. For low latency applications that use unrolled block cipher implementations, we design a glitch filter to reduce energy consumption. For lightweight applications, we design a novel architecture for the widely used AES cipher. The design eliminates inefficiencies in data movement and clock activity, thereby significantly improving energy efficiency over state-of-the-art architectures. Apart from efficiency, vulnerability to implementation attacks are a concern, which we mitigate by our randomization capable lightweight AES architecture. We fabricate our designs in a commercial 16nm FinFET technology and present measured testchip data on energy consumption and side channel resistance. Finally, we address the problem of supply chain security by using image processing techniques to extract fingerprints from surface texture of plastic IC packages for IC authentication and counterfeit prevention. Collectively these works present efficient and cost effective solutions to secure lightweight systems

SoK: Assisted Fault Simulation - Existing Challenges and Opportunities Offered by AI

Fault injection attacks have caused implementations to behave unexpectedly, resulting in a spectacular bypass of security features and even the extraction of cryptographic keys. Clearly, developers want to ensure the robustness of the software against faults and eliminate production weaknesses that could lead to exploitation. Several fault simulators have been released that promise cost-effective evaluations against fault attacks. In this paper, we set out to discover how suitable such tools are, for a developer who wishes to create robust software against fault attacks. We found four open-source fault simulators that employ different techniques to navigate faults, which we objectively compare and discuss their benefits and drawbacks. Unfortunately, none of the four open-source fault simulators employ artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. However, AI was successfully applied to improve the fault simulation of cryptographic algorithms, though none of these tools is open source. We suggest improvements to open-source fault simulators inspired by the AI techniques used by cryptographic fault simulators

Using quantum key distribution for cryptographic purposes: a survey

The appealing feature of quantum key distribution (QKD), from a cryptographic viewpoint, is the ability to prove the information-theoretic security (ITS) of the established keys. As a key establishment primitive, QKD however does not provide a standalone security service in its own: the secret keys established by QKD are in general then used by a subsequent cryptographic applications for which the requirements, the context of use and the security properties can vary. It is therefore important, in the perspective of integrating QKD in security infrastructures, to analyze how QKD can be combined with other cryptographic primitives. The purpose of this survey article, which is mostly centered on European research results, is to contribute to such an analysis. We first review and compare the properties of the existing key establishment techniques, QKD being one of them. We then study more specifically two generic scenarios related to the practical use of QKD in cryptographic infrastructures: 1) using QKD as a key renewal technique for a symmetric cipher over a point-to-point link; 2) using QKD in a network containing many users with the objective of offering any-to-any key establishment service. We discuss the constraints as well as the potential interest of using QKD in these contexts. We finally give an overview of challenges relative to the development of QKD technology that also constitute potential avenues for cryptographic research.Comment: Revised version of the SECOQC White Paper. Published in the special issue on QKD of TCS, Theoretical Computer Science (2014), pp. 62-8

Security Assessment of White-Box Design Submissions of the CHES 2017 CTF Challenge

In 2017, the first CHES Capture the Flag Challenge was organized in an effort to promote good design candidates for white-box cryptography. In particular, the challenge assessed the security of the designs with regard to key extraction attacks. A total of 94 candidate programs were submitted, and all of them were broken eventually. Even though most candidates were broken within a few hours, some candidates remained robust against key extraction attacks for several days, and even weeks. In this paper, we perform a qualitative analysis on all candidates submitted to the CHES 2017 Capture the Flag Challenge. We test the robustness of each challenge against different types of attacks, such as automated attacks, extensions thereof and reverse engineering attacks. We are able to classify each challenge depending on their robustness against these attacks, highlighting how challenges vulnerable to automated attacks can be broken in a very short amount of time, while more robust challenges demand for big reverse engineering efforts and therefore for more time from the adversaries. Besides classifying the robustness of each challenge, we also give data regarding their size and efficiency and explain how some of the more robust challenges could actually provide acceptable levels of security for some real-life applications

SoK : On DFA Vulnerabilities of Substitution-Permutation Networks

Recently, the NIST launched a competition for lightweight cryptography and a large number of ciphers are expected to be studied and analyzed under this competition. Apart from the classical security, the candidates are desired to be analyzed against physical attacks. Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) is an invasive physical attack method for recovering key information from cipher implementations. Up to date, almost all the block ciphers have been shown to be vulnerable against DFA, while following similar attack patterns. However, so far researchers mostly focused on particular ciphers rather than cipher families, resulting in works that reuse the same idea for different ciphers. In this article, we aim at bridging this gap, by providing a generic DFA attack method targeting Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) based families of symmetric block ciphers. We provide an overview of the state-of-the-art of the fault attacks on SPNs, followed by generalized conditions that hold on all the ciphers of this design family. We show that for any SPN, as long as the fault mask injected before a non-linear layer in the last round follows a non-uniform distribution, the key search space can always be reduced. This shows that it is not possible to design an SPN-based cipher that is completely secure against DFA, without randomization. Furthermore, we propose a novel approach to find good fault masks that can leak the key with a small number of instances. We then developed a tool, called Joint Difference Distribution Table (JDDT) for pre-computing the solutions for the fault equations, which allows us to recover the last round key with a very small number of pairs of faulty and non-faulty ciphertexts. We evaluate our methodology on various block ciphers, including PRESENT-80, PRESENT-128, GIFT-64, GIFT-128, AES-128, LED-64, LED-128, Skinny-64-64, Skinny-128-128, PRIDE and PRINCE. The developed technique would allow automated DFA analysis of several candidates in the NIST competition