On Some Symmetric Lightweight Cryptographic Designs

This dissertation presents cryptanalysis of several symmetric lightweight primitives, both stream ciphers and block ciphers. Further, some aspects of authentication in combination with a keystream generator is investigated, and a new member of the Grain family of stream ciphers, Grain-128a, with built-in support for authentication is presented. The first contribution is an investigation of how authentication can be provided at a low additional cost, assuming a synchronous stream cipher is already implemented and used for encryption. These findings are then used when presenting the latest addition to the Grain family of stream ciphers, Grain-128a. It uses a 128-bit key and a 96-bit initialization vector to generate keystream, and to possibly also authenticate the plaintext. Next, the stream cipher BEAN, superficially similar to Grain, but notably using a weak output function and two feedback with carry shift registers (FCSRs) rather than linear and (non-FCSR) nonlinear feedback shift registers, is cryptanalyzed. An efficient distinguisher and a state-recovery attack is given. It is shown how knowledge of the state can be used to recover the key in a straightforward way. The remainder of this dissertation then focuses on block ciphers. First, a related-key attack on KTANTAN is presented. The attack notably uses only a few related keys, runs in less than half a minute on a current computer, and directly contradicts the designers' claims. It is discussed why this is, and what can be learned from this. Next, PRINTcipher is subjected to linear cryptanalysis. Several weak key classes are identified and it is shown how several observations of the same statistical property can be made for each plaintext--ciphertext pair. Finally, the invariant subspace property, first observed for certain key classes in PRINTcipher, is investigated. In particular, its connection to large linear biases is studied through an eigenvector which arises inside the cipher and leads to trail clustering in the linear hull which, under reasonable assumptions, causes a significant number of large linear biases. Simulations on several versions of PRINTcipher are compared to the theoretical findings

The Design Space of Lightweight Cryptography

International audienceFor constrained devices, standard cryptographic algorithms can be too big, too slow or too energy-consuming. The area of lightweight cryptography studies new algorithms to overcome these problems. In this paper, we will focus on symmetric-key encryption, authentication and hashing. Instead of providing a full overview of this area of research, we will highlight three interesting topics. Firstly, we will explore the generic security of lightweight constructions. In particular, we will discuss considerations for key, block and tag sizes, and explore the topic of instantiating a pseudorandom permutation (PRP) with a non-ideal block cipher construction. This is inspired by the increasing prevalence of lightweight designs that are not secure against related-key attacks, such as PRINCE, PRIDE or Chaskey. Secondly, we explore the efficiency of cryptographic primitives. In particular, we investigate the impact on efficiency when the input size of a primitive doubles. Lastly, we provide some considerations for cryptographic design. We observe that applications do not always use cryptographic algorithms as they were intended, which negatively impacts the security and/or efficiency of the resulting implementations

Systematization of a 256-bit lightweight block cipher Marvin

In a world heavily loaded by information, there is a great need for keeping specific information secure from adversaries. The rapid growth in the research field of lightweight cryptography can be seen from the list of the number of lightweight stream as well as block ciphers that has been proposed in the recent years. This paper focuses only on the subject of lightweight block ciphers. In this paper, we have proposed a new 256 bit lightweight block cipher named as Marvin, that belongs to the family of Extended LS designs.Comment: 12 pages,6 figure

KALwEN: A New Practical and Interoperable Key Management Scheme for Body Sensor Networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks(BSNs) pose several challenges -- some inherited from wireless sensor networks(WSNs), some unique to themselves -- that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new lightweight scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports global broadcast, local broadcast and neighbor-to-neighbor unicast, while preserving past key secrecry and future key secrecy. The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case

Modern and Lightweight Component-based Symmetric Cipher Algorithms: A Review

Information security, being one of the corner stones of network and communication technology, has been evolving tremendously to cope with the parallel evolution of network security threats. Hence, cipher algorithms in the core of the information security process have more crucial role to play here, with continuous need for new and unorthodox designs to meet the increasing complexity of the applications environment that keep offering challenges to the current existing cipher algorithms. The aim of this review is to present symmetric cipher main components, the modern and lightweight symmetric cipher algorithms design based on the components that utilized in cipher design, highlighting the effect of each component and the essential component among them, how the modern cipher has modified to lightweight cipher by reducing the number and size of these components, clarify how these components give the strength for symmetric cipher versus asymmetric of cipher. Moreover, a new classification of cryptography algorithms to four categories based on four factors is presented. Finally, some modern and lightweight symmetric cipher algorithms are selected, presented with a comparison between them according to their components by taking into considerations the components impact on security, performance, and resource requirements

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

KALwEN: a new practical and interoperable key management scheme for body sensor networks

Key management is the pillar of a security architecture. Body sensor networks (BSNs) pose several challenges–some inherited from wireless sensor networks (WSNs), some unique to themselves–that require a new key management scheme to be tailor-made. The challenge is taken on, and the result is KALwEN, a new parameterized key management scheme that combines the best-suited cryptographic techniques in a seamless framework. KALwEN is user-friendly in the sense that it requires no expert knowledge of a user, and instead only requires a user to follow a simple set of instructions when bootstrapping or extending a network. One of KALwEN's key features is that it allows sensor devices from different manufacturers, which expectedly do not have any pre-shared secret, to establish secure communications with each other. KALwEN is decentralized, such that it does not rely on the availability of a local processing unit (LPU). KALwEN supports secure global broadcast, local broadcast, and local (neighbor-to-neighbor) unicast, while preserving past key secrecy and future key secrecy (FKS). The fact that the cryptographic protocols of KALwEN have been formally verified also makes a convincing case. With both formal verification and experimental evaluation, our results should appeal to theorists and practitioners alike