Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Security Guidelines for Implementing Homomorphic Encryption

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic primitive that allows performing arbitrary operations on encrypted data. Since the conception of the idea in [RAD78], it was considered a holy grail of cryptography. After the first construction in 2009 [Gen09], it has evolved to become a practical primitive with strong security guarantees. Most modern constructions are based on well-known lattice problems such as Learning with Errors (LWE). Besides its academic appeal, in recent years FHE has also attracted significant attention from industry, thanks to its applicability to a considerable number of real-world use-cases. An upcoming standardization effort by ISO/IEC aims to support the wider adoption of these techniques. However, one of the main challenges that standards bodies, developers, and end users usually encounter is establishing parameters. This is particularly hard in the case of FHE because the parameters are not only related to the security level of the system, but also to the type of operations that the system is able to handle. In this paper, we provide examples of parameter sets for LWE targeting particular security levels that can be used in the context of FHE constructions. We also give examples of complete FHE parameter sets, including the parameters relevant for correctness and performance, alongside those relevant for security. As an additional contribution, we survey the parameter selection support offered in open-source FHE libraries

Standard Model Leakage-Resilient Authenticated Key Exchange using Inner-product Extractors

With the development of side-channel attacks, a necessity arises to invent authenticated key exchange protocols in a leakage-resilient manner. Constructing authenticated key exchange protocols using existing cryptographic schemes is an effective method, as such construction can be instantiated with any appropriate scheme in a way that the formal security argument remains valid. In parallel, constructing authenticated key exchange protocols that are proven to be secure in the standard model is more preferred as they rely on real-world assumptions. In this paper, we present a Diffie-Hellman-style construction of a leakage-resilient authenticated key exchange protocol, that can be instantiated with any CCLA2-secure public-key encryption scheme and a function from the pseudo-random function family. Our protocol is proven to be secure in the standard model assuming the hardness of the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem. Furthermore, it is resilient to continuous partial leakage of long-term secret keys, that happens even after the session key is established, while satisfying the security features defined by the eCK security model

New Approach to Practical Leakage-Resilient Public-Key Cryptography

We present a new approach to construct several leakage-resilient cryptographic primitives, including leakage-resilient public-key encryption (PKE) schemes, authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols and low-latency key exchange (LLKE) protocols. To this end, we introduce a new primitive called leakage-resilient non-interactive key exchange (LR-NIKE) protocol. We introduce a generic security model for LR-NIKE protocols, which can be instantiated in both the bounded and continuous-memory leakage ((B/C)-ML) settings. We then show a secure construction of LR-NIKE protocol in the bounded- memory leakage (BML) setting, that achieves an optimal leakage rate, i.e., 1-o(1). Finally, we show how to construct the aforementioned leakage-resilient primitives from such a LR-NIKE protocol as summarized below. All the primitives also achieve the same (optimal) leakage rate as the underlying LR-NIKE protocol. We show how to construct a leakage-resilient IND-CCA-2-secure PKE scheme in the BML model generically from a LR-NIKE protocol. Our construction differs from the state-of-the-art constructions of leakage-resilient IND-CCA-2-secure PKE schemes, which use hash proof techniques to achieve leakage-resilience. Moreover, our transformation preserves the leakage-rate of the underlying LR- NIKE and admits more efficient construction than previous such PKE constructions. We introduce a new leakage model for AKE protocols, in the BML setting. We show how to construct a leakage-resilient AKE protocol starting from LR-NIKE protocol. We introduce the first-ever leakage model for LLKE protocols in the BML setting, and the first construction of such a leakage-resilient LLKE from LR-NIKE protocol

On the Leakage-Resilient Key Exchange

Typically, secure channels are constructed from an authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol, which authenticates the communicating parties based on long-term public keys and establishes secret session keys. In this paper we address the partial leakage of long-term secret keys of key exchange protocol participants due to various side-channel attacks. Security models for two-party authenticated key exchange protocols have developed over time to provide security even when the adversary learns certain secret values. This paper combines and extends the advances of security modelling for AKE protocols addressing more granular partial leakage of long-term secrets of protocol participants

Cryptanalysis of Some Block Cipher Constructions

When the public-key cryptography was introduced in the 1970s, symmetric-key cryptography was believed to soon become outdated. Nevertheless, we still heavily rely on symmetric-key primitives as they give high-speed performance. They are used to secure mobile communication, e-commerce transactions, communication through virtual private networks and sending electronic tax returns, among many other everyday activities. However, the security of symmetric-key primitives does not depend on a well-known hard mathematical problem such as the factoring problem, which is the basis of the RSA public-key cryptosystem. Instead, the security of symmetric-key primitives is evaluated against known cryptanalytic techniques. Accordingly, the topic of furthering the state-of-the-art of cryptanalysis of symmetric-key primitives is an ever-evolving topic. Therefore, this thesis is dedicated to the cryptanalysis of symmetric-key cryptographic primitives. Our focus is on block ciphers as well as hash functions that are built using block ciphers. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: First, we tackle the limitation of the current Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) approaches to represent the differential propagation through large S-boxes. Indeed, we present a novel approach that can efficiently model the Difference Distribution Table (DDT) of large S-boxes, i.e., 8-bit S-boxes. As a proof of the validity and efficiency of our approach, we apply it on two out of the seven AES-round based constructions that were recently proposed in FSE 2016. Using our approach, we improve the lower bound on the number of active S-boxes of one construction and the upper bound on the best differential characteristic of the other. Then, we propose meet-in-the-middle attacks using the idea of efficient differential enumeration against two Japanese block ciphers, i.e., Hierocrypt-L1 and Hierocrypt-3. Both block ciphers were submitted to the New European Schemes for Signatures, Integrity, and Encryption (NESSIE) project, selected as one of the Japanese e-Government recommended ciphers in 2003 and reselected in the candidate recommended ciphers list in 2013. We construct five S-box layer distinguishers that we use to recover the master keys of reduced 8 S-box layer versions of both block ciphers. In addition, we present another meet-in-the-middle attack on Hierocrypt-3 with slightly higher time and memory complexities but with much less data complexity. Afterwards, we shift focus to another equally important cryptanalytic attack, i.e., impossible differential attack. SPARX-64/128 is selected among the SPARX family that was recently proposed to provide ARX based block cipher whose security against differential and linear cryptanalysis can be proven. We assess the security of SPARX-64/128 against impossible differential attack and show that it can reach the same number of rounds the division-based integral attack, proposed by the designers, can reach. Then, we pick Kiasu-BC as an example of a tweakable block cipher and prove that, on contrary to its designers’ claim, the freedom in choosing the publicly known tweak decreases its security margin. Lastly, we study the impossible differential properties of the underlying block cipher of the Russian hash standard Streebog and point out the potential risk in using it as a MAC scheme in the secret-IV mode

LPN in Cryptography:an Algorithmic Study

The security of public-key cryptography relies on well-studied hard problems, problems for which we do not have efficient algorithms. Factorization and discrete logarithm are the two most known and used hard problems. Unfortunately, they can be easily solved on a quantum computer by Shor's algorithm. Also, the research area of cryptography demands for crypto-diversity which says that we should offer a range of hard problems for public-key cryptography. If one hard problem proves to be easy, we should be able to provide alternative solutions. Some of the candidates for post-quantum hard problems, i.e. problems which are believed to be hard even on a quantum computer, are the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN), the Learning with Errors (LWE) and the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP). A thorough study of these problems is needed in order to assess their hardness. In this thesis we focus on the algorithmic study of LPN. LPN is a hard problem that is attractive, as it is believed to be post-quantum resistant and suitable for lightweight devices. In practice, it has been employed in several encryption schemes and authentication protocols. At the beginning of this thesis, we take a look at the existing LPN solving algorithms. We provide the theoretical analysis that assesses their complexity. We compare the theoretical results with practice by implementing these algorithms. We study the efficiency of all LPN solving algorithms which allow us to provide secure parameters that can be used in practice. We push further the state of the art by improving the existing algorithms with the help of two new frameworks. In the first framework, we split an LPN solving algorithm into atomic steps. We study their complexity, how they impact the other steps and we construct an algorithm that optimises their use. Given an LPN instance that is characterized by the noise level and the secret size, our algorithm provides the steps to follow in order to solve the instance with optimal complexity. In this way, we can assess if an LPN instance provides the security we require and we show what are the secure instances for the applications that rely on LPN. The second framework handles problems that can be decomposed into steps of equal complexity. Here, we assume that we have an adversary that has access to a finite or infinite number of instances of the same problem. The goal of the adversary is to succeed in just one instance as soon as possible. Our framework provides the strategy that achieves this. We characterize an LPN solving algorithm in this framework and show that we can improve its complexity in the scenario where the adversary is restricted. We show that other problems, like password guessing, can be modeled in the same framework