One-Key Compression Function Based MAC with Security beyond Birthday Bound

Ga{\v z}i et al. [CRYPTO 2014] analyzed the NI-MAC construction proposed by An and Bellare [CRYPTO 1999] and gave a tight birthday-bound of $O(\ell q^{2}/2^{n})$, as an improvement over the previous bound of $O(\ell^{2}q^{2}/2^{n})$. In this paper, we design a simple extension of NI-MAC, called NI$^+$-MAC, and prove that it has security bound beyond birthday (BBB) of order $O(q^2\ell^2 / 2^{2n})$ provided $\ell \leq 2^{n/4}$. Our construction not only lifts the security of NI-MAC beyond birthday, it also reduces the number of keys from 2 (NI uses 2 independent keys) to 1. Before this work, Yasuda had proposed [FSE 2008] a single fixed-keyed compression function based BBB-secure MAC with security bound $O(\ell q^2/2^{2n})$ that uses an extra mask, requires a storage space to store the mask. However, our proposed construction NI$^+$ does not require any extra mask and thereby has reduced the state size compared to Yasuda\u27s proposal [FSE 2008] with providing the same order of security bound for light-weight application

Double-block Hash-then-Sum: A Paradigm for Constructing BBB Secure PRF

SUM-ECBC (Yasuda, CT-RSA 2010) is the first beyond birthday bound (BBB) secure block cipher based deterministic MAC. After this work, some more BBB secure deterministic MACs have been proposed, namely PMAC_Plus (Yasuda, CRYPTO 2011), 3kf9 (Zhang et al., ASIACRYPT 2012) and LightMAC_Plus (Naito, ASIACRYPT 2017). In this paper, we have abstracted out the inherent design principle of all these BBB secure MACs and present a generic design paradigm to construct a BBB secure pseudo random function, namely Double-block Hash-then- Sum or in short (DbHtS). A DbHtS construction, as the name implies, computes a double block hash on the message and then sum the encrypted output of the two hash blocks. Our result renders that if the underlying hash function meets certain security requirements (namely cover-free and block-wise universal advantage is low), DbHtS construction provides 2n/3-bit security. We demonstrate the applicability of our result by instantiating all the existing beyond birthday secure deterministic MACs (e.g., SUM-ECBC, PMAC_Plus, 3kf9, LightMAC_Plus) as well as a simple two-keyed variant for each of them and some algebraic hash based constructions