Plaintext Recovery in DES-like Cryptosystems Based on S-boxes with Embedded Parity Check

We describe an approach for recovering the plaintext in block ciphers having a design structure similar to the Data Encryption Standard but with improperly constructed S-boxes. The experiments with a backtracking search algorithm performing this kind of attack against modified DES/Triple-DES in ECB mode show that the unknown plaintext can be recovered with a small amount of uncertainty and this algorithm is highly efficient both in time and memory costs for plaintext sources with relatively low entropy. Our investigations demonstrate once again that modifications resulting to S-boxes which still satisfy some design criteria may lead to very weak ciphers. ACM Computing Classification System (1998): E.3, I.2.7, I.2.8.This work was presented in part at the 1-st International Conference Bulgarian Cryptography Days 2012, Sofia, Bulgaria, 20–21 September 2012

Adaptive Encryption Techniques In Wireless Communication Channels With Tradeoffs Between Communication Reliability And Security

Encryption is a vital process to ensure the confidentiality of the information transmitted over an insecure wireless channel. However, the nature of the wireless channel tends to deteriorate because of noise, interference and fading. Therefore, a symmetrically encrypted transmitted signal will be received with some amount of error. Consequently, due to the strict avalanche criterion (sac), this error propagates during the decryption process, resulting in half the bits (on average) after decryption to be in error. In order to alleviate this amount of error, smart coding techniques and/or new encryption algorithms that take into account the nature of wireless channels are required. The solution for this problem could involve increasing the block and key lengths which might degrade the throughput of the channel. Moreover, these solutions might significantly increase the complexity of the encryption algorithms and hence to increase the cost of its implementation and use. Two main approaches have been folloto solve this problem, the first approach is based on developing an effective coding schemes and mechanisms, in order to minimize and correct the errors introduced by the channel. The second approach is more focused on inventing and implementing new encryption algorithms that encounter less error propagation, by alleviating the sac effect. Most of the research done using these two approaches lacked the comprehensiveness in their designs. Some of these works focused on improving the error performance and/or enhancing the security on the cost of complexity and throughput. In this work, we focus on solving the problem of encryption in wireless channels in a comprehensive way that considers all of the factors in its structure (error performance, security and complexity). New encryption algorithms are proposed, which are modifications to the standardized encryption algorithms and are shown to outperform the use of these algorithms in wireless channels in terms of security and error performance with a slight addition in the complexity. We introduce new modifications that improve the error performance for a certain required security level while achieving the highest possible throughput. We show how our proposed algorithm outperforms the use of other encryption algorithms in terms of the error performance, throughput, complexity, and is secure against all known encryption attacks. In addition, we study the effect of each round and s-box in symmetric encryption algorithms on the overall probability of correct reception at the receiver after encryption and the effect on the security is analyzed as well. Moreover, we perform a complete security, complexity and energy consumption analysis to evaluate the new developed encryption techniques and procedures. We use both analytical computations and computer simulations to evaluate the effectiveness of every modification we introduce in our proposed designs

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

Partition-Based Trapdoor Ciphers

Trapdoors are a two-face key concept in modern cryptography. They are primarily related to the concept of trapdoor function used in asymmetric cryptography. A trapdoor function is a one-to-one mapping that is easy to compute, but for which its inverse function is difficult to compute without special information, called the trapdoor. It is a necessary condition to get reversibility between the sender and the receiver for encryption or between the signer and the verifier for digital signature. The trapdoor mechanism is always fully public and detailed. The second concept of trapdoor relates to the more subtle and perverse concept of mathematical backdoor, which is a key issue in symmetric cryptography. In this case, the aim is to insert hidden mathematical weaknesses, which enable one who knows them to break the cipher. Therefore, the existence of a backdoor is a strongly undesirable property. This book deals with this second concept and is focused on block ciphers or, more specifically, on substitution-permutation networks (SPN). Inserting a backdoor in an encryption algorithm gives an effective cryptanalysis of the cipher to the designer

Contributions to Confidentiality and Integrity Algorithms for 5G

The confidentiality and integrity algorithms in cellular networks protect the transmission of user and signaling data over the air between users and the network, e.g., the base stations. There are three standardised cryptographic suites for confidentiality and integrity protection in 4G, which are based on the AES, SNOW 3G, and ZUC primitives, respectively. These primitives are used for providing a 128-bit security level and are usually implemented in hardware, e.g., using IP (intellectual property) cores, thus can be quite efficient. When we come to 5G, the innovative network architecture and high-performance demands pose new challenges to security. For the confidentiality and integrity protection, there are some new requirements on the underlying cryptographic algorithms. Specifically, these algorithms should: 1) provide 256 bits of security to protect against attackers equipped with quantum computing capabilities; and 2) provide at least 20 Gbps (Gigabits per second) speed in pure software environments, which is the downlink peak data rate in 5G. The reason for considering software environments is that the encryption in 5G will likely be moved to the cloud and implemented in software. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate existing algorithms in 4G, checking if they can satisfy the 5G requirements in terms of security and speed, and possibly propose new dedicated algorithms targeting these goals. This is the motivation of this thesis, which focuses on the confidentiality and integrity algorithms for 5G. The results can be summarised as follows.1. We investigate the security of SNOW 3G under 256-bit keys and propose two linear attacks against it with complexities 2172 and 2177, respectively. These cryptanalysis results indicate that SNOW 3G cannot provide the full 256-bit security level. 2. We design some spectral tools for linear cryptanalysis and apply these tools to investigate the security of ZUC-256, the 256-bit version of ZUC. We propose a distinguishing attack against ZUC-256 with complexity 2236, which is 220 faster than exhaustive key search. 3. We design a new stream cipher called SNOW-V in response to the new requirements for 5G confidentiality and integrity protection, in terms of security and speed. SNOW-V can provide a 256-bit security level and achieve a speed as high as 58 Gbps in software based on our extensive evaluation. The cipher is currently under evaluation in ETSI SAGE (Security Algorithms Group of Experts) as a promising candidate for 5G confidentiality and integrity algorithms. 4. We perform deeper cryptanalysis of SNOW-V to ensure that two common cryptanalysis techniques, guess-and-determine attacks and linear cryptanalysis, do not apply to SNOW-V faster than exhaustive key search. 5. We introduce two minor modifications in SNOW-V and propose an extreme performance variant, called SNOW-Vi, in response to the feedback about SNOW-V that some use cases are not fully covered. SNOW-Vi covers more use cases, especially some platforms with less capabilities. The speeds in software are increased by 50% in average over SNOW-V and can be up to 92 Gbps.Besides these works on 5G confidentiality and integrity algorithms, the thesis is also devoted to local pseudorandom generators (PRGs). 6. We investigate the security of local PRGs and propose two attacks against some constructions instantiated on the P5 predicate. The attacks improve existing results with a large gap and narrow down the secure parameter regime. We also extend the attacks to other local PRGs instantiated on general XOR-AND and XOR-MAJ predicates and provide some insight in the choice of safe parameters

Design and evaluation of countermeasures against fault injection attacks and power side-channel leakage exploration for AES block cipher

Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) and Power Analysis (PA) attacks, have become the main methods for exploiting the vulnerabilities of physical implementations of block ciphers, currently used in a multitude of applications, such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). In order to minimize these types of vulnerabilities, several mechanisms have been proposed to detect fault attacks. However, these mechanisms can have a signi cant cost, not fully covering the implementations against fault attacks or not taking into account the leakage of the information exploitable by the power analysis attacks. In this paper, four different approaches are proposed with the aim of protecting the AES block cipher against DFA. The proposed solutions are based on Hamming code and parity bits as signature generators for the internal state of the AES cipher. These allow to detect DFA exploitable faults, from bit to byte level. The proposed solutions have been applied to a T-box based AES block cipher implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Experimental results suggest a fault coverage of 98.5% and 99.99% with an area penalty of 9% and 36% respectively, for the parity bit signature generators and a fault coverage of 100% with an area penalty of 18% and 42% respectively when Hamming code signature generator is used. In addition, none of the proposed countermeasures impose a frequency degradation, in respect to the unprotected cipher. The proposed work goes further in the evaluation of the proposed DFA countermeasures by evaluating the impact of these structures in terms of power side-channel. The obtained results suggest that no extra information leakage is produced that can be exploited by PA. Overall, the proposed DFA countermeasures provide a high fault coverage protection with a low cost in terms of area and power consumption and no PA security degradation

Dynamic block encryption with self-authenticating key exchange

One of the greatest challenges facing cryptographers is the mechanism used for key exchange. When secret data is transmitted, the chances are that there may be an attacker who will try to intercept and decrypt the message. Having done so, he/she might just gain advantage over the information obtained, or attempt to tamper with the message, and thus, misguiding the recipient. Both cases are equally fatal and may cause great harm as a consequence. In cryptography, there are two commonly used methods of exchanging secret keys between parties. In the first method, symmetric cryptography, the key is sent in advance, over some secure channel, which only the intended recipient can read. The second method of key sharing is by using a public key exchange method, where each party has a private and public key, a public key is shared and a private key is kept locally. In both cases, keys are exchanged between two parties. In this thesis, we propose a method whereby the risk of exchanging keys is minimised. The key is embedded in the encrypted text using a process that we call `chirp coding', and recovered by the recipient using a process that is based on correlation. The `chirp coding parameters' are exchanged between users by employing a USB flash memory retained by each user. If the keys are compromised they are still not usable because an attacker can only have access to part of the key. Alternatively, the software can be configured to operate in a one time parameter mode, in this mode, the parameters are agreed upon in advance. There is no parameter exchange during file transmission, except, of course, the key embedded in ciphertext. The thesis also introduces a method of encryption which utilises dynamic blocks, where the block size is different for each block. Prime numbers are used to drive two random number generators: a Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) which takes in the seed and initialises the system and a Blum-Blum Shum (BBS) generator which is used to generate random streams to encrypt messages, images or video clips for example. In each case, the key created is text dependent and therefore will change as each message is sent. The scheme presented in this research is composed of five basic modules. The first module is the key generation module, where the key to be generated is message dependent. The second module, encryption module, performs data encryption. The third module, key exchange module, embeds the key into the encrypted text. Once this is done, the message is transmitted and the recipient uses the key extraction module to retrieve the key and finally the decryption module is executed to decrypt the message and authenticate it. In addition, the message may be compressed before encryption and decompressed by the recipient after decryption using standard compression tools

Some Words on Cryptanalysis of Stream Ciphers

In the world of cryptography, stream ciphers are known as primitives used to ensure privacy over a communication channel. One common way to build a stream cipher is to use a keystream generator to produce a pseudo-random sequence of symbols. In such algorithms, the ciphertext is the sum of the keystream and the plaintext, resembling the one-time pad principal. Although the idea behind stream ciphers is simple, serious investigation of these primitives has started only in the late 20th century. Therefore, cryptanalysis and design of stream ciphers are important. In recent years, many designs of stream ciphers have been proposed in an effort to find a proper candidate to be chosen as a world standard for data encryption. That potential candidate should be proven good by time and by the results of cryptanalysis. Different methods of analysis, in fact, explain how a stream cipher should be constructed. Thus, techniques for cryptanalysis are also important. This thesis starts with an overview of cryptography in general, and introduces the reader to modern cryptography. Later, we focus on basic principles of design and analysis of stream ciphers. Since statistical methods are the most important cryptanalysis techniques, they will be described in detail. The practice of statistical methods reveals several bottlenecks when implementing various analysis algorithms. For example, a common property of a cipher to produce n-bit words instead of just bits makes it more natural to perform a multidimensional analysis of such a design. However, in practice, one often has to truncate the words simply because the tools needed for analysis are missing. We propose a set of algorithms and data structures for multidimensional cryptanalysis when distributions over a large probability space have to be constructed. This thesis also includes results of cryptanalysis for various cryptographic primitives, such as A5/1, Grain, SNOW 2.0, Scream, Dragon, VMPC, RC4, and RC4A. Most of these results were achieved with the help of intensive use of the proposed tools for cryptanalysis

New Family of Stream Ciphers as Physically Clone-Resistant VLSI-Structures

A new large class of $2^{100}$ possible stream ciphers as keystream generators KSGs, is presented. The sample cipher-structure-concept is based on randomly selecting a set of 16 maximum-period Nonlinear Feedback Shift Registers (NLFSRs). A non-linear combining function is merging the 16 selected sequences. All resulting stream ciphers with a total state-size of 223 bits are designed to result with the same security level and have a linear complexity exceeding $2^{81}$ and a period exceeding $2^{161}$. A Secret Unknown Cipher (SUC) is created randomly by selecting one cipher from that class of $2^{100}$ ciphers. SUC concept was presented recently as a physical security anchor to overcome the drawbacks of the traditional analog Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs). Such unknown ciphers may be permanently self-created within System-on-Chip SoC non-volatile FPGA devices to serve as a digital clone-resistant structure. Moreover, a lightweight identification protocol is presented in open networks for physically identifying such SUC structures in FPGA-devices. The proposed new family may serve for lightweight realization of clone-resistant identities in future self-reconfiguring SoC non-volatile FPGAs. Such self-reconfiguring FPGAs are expected to be emerging in the near future smart VLSI systems. The security analysis and hardware complexities of the resulting clone-resistant structures are evaluated and shown to exhibit scalable security levels even for post-quantum cryptography.Comment: 24 pages, 7 Figures, 3 Table