On hashing with tweakable ciphers

Cryptographic hash functions are often built on block ciphers in order to reduce the security analysis of the hash to that of the cipher, and to minimize the hardware size. Well known hash constructs are used in international standards like MD5 and SHA-1. Recently, researchers proposed new modes of operations for hash functions to protect against generic attacks, and it remains open how to base such functions on block ciphers. An attracting and intuitive choice is to combine previous constructions with tweakable block ciphers. We investigate such constructions, and show the surprising result that combining a provably secure mode of operation with a provably secure tweakable cipher does not guarantee the security of the constructed hash function. In fact, simple attacks can be possible when the interaction between secure components leaves some additional "freedom" to an adversary. Our techniques are derived from the principle of slide attacks, which were introduced for attacking block ciphers

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

Adiantum: length-preserving encryption for entry-level processors

We present HBSH, a simple construction for tweakable length-preserving encryption which supports the fastest options for hashing and stream encryption for processors without AES or other crypto instructions, with a provable quadratic advantage bound. Our composition Adiantum uses NH, Poly1305, XChaCha12, and a single AES invocation. On an ARM Cortex-A7 processor, Adiantum decrypts 4096-byte messages at 10.6 cycles per byte, over five times faster than AES-256-XTS, with a constant-time implementation. We also define HPolyC which is simpler and has excellent key agility at 13.6 cycles per byte

A Simple and Generic Construction of Authenticated Encryption With Associated Data

We revisit the problem of constructing a protocol for performing authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD). A technique is described which combines a collision resistant hash function with a protocol for authenticated encryption (AE). The technique is both simple and generic and does not require any additional key material beyond that of the AE protocol. Concrete instantiations are shown where a 256-bit hash function is combined with some known single-pass AE protocols employing either 128-bit or 256-bit block ciphers. This results in possible efficiency improvement in the processing of the header

XHX - A Framework for Optimally Secure Tweakable Block Ciphers from Classical Block Ciphers and Universal Hashing

Tweakable block ciphers are important primitives for designing cryptographic schemes with high security. In the absence of a standardized tweakable block cipher, constructions built from classical block ciphers remain an interesting research topic in both theory and practice. Motivated by Mennink\u27s F[2] publication from 2015, Wang et al. proposed 32 optimally secure constructions at ASIACRYPT\u2716, all of which employ two calls to a classical block cipher each. Yet, those constructions were still limited to n-bit keys and n-bit tweaks. Thus, applications with more general key or tweak lengths still lack support. This work proposes the XHX family of tweakable block ciphers from a classical block cipher and a family of universal hash functions, which generalizes the constructions by Wang et al. First, we detail the generic XHX construction with three independently keyed calls to the hash function. Second, we show that we can derive the hash keys in efficient manner from the block cipher, where we generalize the constructions by Wang et al.; finally, we propose efficient instantiations for the used hash functions

Deck-Based Wide Block Cipher Modes and an Exposition of the Blinded Keyed Hashing Model

We present two tweakable wide block cipher modes from doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed (deck) functions and a keyed hash function: double-decker and docked-double-decker. Double-decker is a direct generalization of Farfalle-WBC of Bertoni et al. (ToSC 2017(4)), and is a four-round Feistel network on two arbitrarily large branches, where the middle two rounds call deck functions and the first and last rounds call the keyed hash function. Docked-double-decker is a variant of double-decker where the bulk of the input to the deck functions is moved to the keyed hash functions. We prove that the distinguishing advantage of the resulting wide block ciphers is simply two times the sum of the pseudorandom function distinguishing advantage of the deck function and the blinded keyed hashing distinguishing advantage of the keyed hash functions. We demonstrate that blinded keyed hashing is more general than the conventional notion of XOR-universality, and that it allows us to instantiate our constructions with keyed hash functions that have a very strong claim on bkh security but not necessarily on XOR-universality, such as Xoofffie (ePrint 2018/767). The bounds of double-decker and docked-double-decker are moreover reduced tweak-dependent, informally meaning that collisions on the keyed hash function for different tweaks only have a limited impact. We describe two use cases that can exploit this property opportunistically to get stronger security than what would be achieved with prior solutions: SSD encryption, where each sector can only be written to a limited number of times, and incremental tweaks, where one includes the state of the system in the variable-length tweak and appends new data incrementally

Provable Security of (Tweakable) Block Ciphers Based on Substitution-Permutation Networks

Substitution-Permutation Networks (SPNs) refer to a family of constructions which build a wn-bit block cipher from n-bit public permutations (often called S-boxes), which alternate keyless and “local” substitution steps utilizing such S-boxes, with keyed and “global” permu- tation steps which are non-cryptographic. Many widely deployed block ciphers are constructed based on the SPNs, but there are essentially no provable-security results about SPNs. In this work, we initiate a comprehensive study of the provable security of SPNs as (possibly tweakable) wn-bit block ciphers, when the underlying n-bit permutation is modeled as a public random permutation. When the permutation step is linear (which is the case for most existing designs), we show that 3 SPN rounds are necessary and sufficient for security. On the other hand, even 1-round SPNs can be secure when non-linearity is allowed. Moreover, 2-round non-linear SPNs can achieve “beyond- birthday” (up to 2 2n/3 adversarial queries) security, and, as the number of non-linear rounds increases, our bounds are meaningful for the number of queries approaching 2 n . Finally, our non-linear SPNs can be made tweakable by incorporating the tweak into the permutation layer, and provide good multi-user security. As an application, our construction can turn two public n-bit permuta- tions (or fixed-key block ciphers) into a tweakable block cipher working on wn-bit inputs, 6n-bit key and an n-bit tweak (for any w ≥ 2); the tweakable block cipher provides security up to 2 2n/3 adversarial queries in the random permutation model, while only requiring w calls to each permutation, and 3w field multiplications for each wn-bit input

Tweakable HCTR: A BBB Secure Tweakable Enciphering Scheme

\textsf{HCTR}, proposed by Wang et al., is one of the most efficient candidates of tweakable enciphering schemes that turns an $n$-bit block cipher into a variable input length tweakable block cipher. Wang et al. have shown that \textsf{HCTR} offers a cubic security bound against all adaptive chosen plaintext and chosen ciphertext adversaries. Later in FSE 2008, Chakraborty and Nandi have improved its bound to $O(\sigma^2 / 2^n)$, where $\sigma$ is the total number of blocks queried and $n$ is the block size of the block cipher. In this paper, we propose \textbf{tweakable \textsf{HCTR}} that turns an $n$-bit tweakable block cipher to a variable input length tweakable block cipher by replacing all the block cipher calls of \textsf{HCTR} with tweakable block cipher. We show that when there is no repetition of the tweak, tweakable \textsf{HCTR} enjoys the optimal security against all adaptive chosen plaintext and chosen ciphertext adversaries. However, if the repetition of the tweak is limited, then the security of the construction remains close to the security bound in no repetition of the tweak case. Hence, it gives a graceful security degradation with the maximum number of repetition of tweaks

ZCZ - Achieving n-bit SPRP Security with a Minimal Number of Tweakable-block-cipher Calls

Strong Pseudo-random Permutations (SPRPs) are important for various applications. In general, it is desirable to base an SPRP on a single-keyed primitive for minimizing the implementation costs. For constructions built on classical block ciphers, Nandi showed at ASIACRYPT\u2715 that at least two calls to the primitive per processed message block are required for SPRP security, assuming that all further operations are linear. The ongoing trend of using tweakable block ciphers as primitive has already led to MACs or encryption modes with high security and efficiency properties. Thus, three interesting research questions are hovering in the domain of SPRPs: (1) if and to which extent the bound of two calls per block can be reduced with a tweakable block cipher, (2) how concrete constructions could be realized, and (3) whether full $n$-bit security is achievable from primitives with $n$-bit state size. The present work addresses all three questions. Inspired by Iwata et al.\u27s ZHash proposal at CRYPTO\u2717, we propose the ZCZ (ZHash-Counter-ZHash) construction, a single-key variable-input-length SPRP based on a single tweakable block cipher whose tweak length is at least its state size. ZCZ possesses close to optimal properties with regards to both performance and security: not only does it require only asymptotically $3\ell/2$ calls to the primitive for $\ell$-block messages, but we also show that this figure is close to the minimum by an PRP distinguishing attack on any construction with tweak size of $\tau = n$ bits and fewer than $(3\ell-1)/2$ calls to the same primitive. Moreover, it provides optimal $n$-bit security for a primitive with $n$-bit state and tweak size