Russian Style (Lack of) Randomness

National audienceIt is crucial for a cipher to be trusted that its design be wellexplained. However, some designers do not publish their design methodand instead merely put forward a specification. While this information issufficient for implementers, the lack of explanation hinders third partycryptanalysis.In a recent string of papers, Biryukov, Perrin and Udovenko identifiedincreasingly strong patterns in a subcomponent shared by the last twoRussian standards in symmetric cryptography, namely the hash functionStreebog (GOST R 34.11-2012) and the block cipher Kuznyechik (GOSTR 34.12-2015). In this paper, we summarize the latest result of Perrinon this topic and argue that, in light of them, these algorithms must beavoided

Streebog and Kuznyechik: Inconsistencies in the Claims of their Designers

International audienc

Partitions in the S-Box of Streebog and Kuznyechik

Streebog and Kuznyechik are the latest symmetric cryptographic primitives standardized by the Russian GOST. They share the same S-Box, π, whose design process was not described by its authors. In previous works, Biryukov, Perrin and Udovenko recovered two completely different decompositions of this S-Box. We revisit their results and identify a third decomposition of π. It is an instance of a fairly small family of permutations operating on 2m bits which we call TKlog and which is closely related to finite field logarithms. Its simplicity and the small number of components it uses lead us to claim that it has to be the structure intentionally used by the designers of Streebog and Kuznyechik. The 2m-bit permutations of this type have a very strong algebraic structure: they map multiplicative cosets of the subfield GF(2m)* to additive cosets of GF(2m)*. Furthermore, the function relating each multiplicative coset to the corresponding additive coset is always essentially the same. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to expose this very strong algebraic structure. We also investigate other properties of the TKlog and show in particular that it can always be decomposed in a fashion similar to the first decomposition of Biryukov et al., thus explaining the relation between the two previous decompositions. It also means that it is always possible to implement a TKlog efficiently in hardware and that it always exhibits a visual pattern in its LAT similar to the one present in π. While we could not find attacks based on these new results, we discuss the impact of our work on the security of Streebog and Kuznyechik. To this end, we provide a new simpler representation of the linear layer of Streebog as a matrix multiplication in the exact same field as the one used to define π. We deduce that this matrix interacts in a non-trivial way with the partitions preserved by π

Anomalies and Vector Space Search: Tools for S-Box Analysis (Full Version)

S-boxes are functions with an input so small that the simplest way to specify them is their lookup table (LUT). Unfortunately, some algorithm designers exploit this fact to avoid providing the algorithm used to generate said lookup table. In this paper, we provide tools for finding the hidden structure in an S-box or to identify it as the output of a complex generation process rather than a random sample. We introduce various anomalies . These real numbers are such that a property with an anomaly equal to $a$ should be found roughly once in a set of $2^{a}$ random S-boxes. First, we revisit the literature on S-box reverse-engineering to present statistical anomalies based on the distribution of the coefficients in the difference distribution table, linear approximation table, and for the first time, the boomerang connectivity table. We then count the number of S-boxes that have block-cipher like structures to estimate the anomaly associated to those. In order to recover these structures, we show that the most general tool for decomposing S-boxes is an algorithm efficiently listing all the vector spaces of a given dimension contained in a given set, and we present such an algorithm. Finally, we propose general methods to formally quantify the complexity of any S-box. It relies on the production of the smallest program evaluating it and on combinatorial arguments. Combining these approaches, we show that all permutations that are actually picked uniformly at random always have essentially the same cryptographic properties, and can never be decomposed in a simpler way. These conclusions show that multiple claims made by the designers of the latest Russian standards are factually incorrect

Invariant subspaces in SPN block cipher

Исследуется рассеивание подпространств, инвариантных относительно нелинейного преобразования XSL-шифра, линейным преобразованием. Приведён конструктивный способ поиска подпространств, инвариантных относительно одной итерации XSL-шифра. Показано, что подпространства, инвариантные относительно нелинейных преобразований из некоторых классов, не сохраняются любой матрицей, построенной из ненулевых элементов расширения поля F2. На основании теоретико-графового и группового подходов доказан ряд свойств множеств специального вида, инвариантных относительно раундовой функции XSL-шифра

Anomalies and Vector Space Search: Tools for S-Box Analysis

International audienceS-boxes are functions with an input so small that the simplest way to specify them is their lookup table (LUT). How can we quantify the distance between the behavior of a given S-box and that of an S-box picked uniformly at random? To answer this question, we introduce various "anomalies". These real numbers are such that a property with an anomaly equal to should be found roughly once in a set of $2^a$ random S-boxes. First, we present statistical anomalies based on the distribution of the coefficients in the difference distribution table, linear approximation table, and for the first time, the boomerang connectivity table. We then count the number of S-boxes that have block-cipher like structures to estimate the anomaly associated to those. In order to recover these structures, we show that the most general tool for decomposing S-boxes is an algorithm efficiently listing all the vector spaces of a given dimension contained in a given set, and we present such an algorithm. Combining these approaches, we conclude that all permutations that are actually picked uniformly at random always have essentially the same cryptographic properties and the same lack of structure

Fast Skinny-128 SIMD Implementations for Sequential Modes of Operation

This paper reports new software implementation results for the Skinny-128 tweakable block ciphers on various SIMD architectures. More precisely, we introduce a decomposition of the 8-bit S-box into four 4-bit S-boxes in order to take advantage of vector permute instructions, leading to significant performance improvements over previous constant-time implementations. Since our approach is of particular interest when Skinny-128 is used in sequential modes of operation, we also report how it benefits to the Romulus authenticated encryption scheme, a finalist of the NIST LWC standardization process

The MALICIOUS Framework: Embedding Backdoors into Tweakable Block Ciphers

Inserting backdoors in encryption algorithms has long seemed like a very interesting, yet difficult problem. Most attempts have been unsuccessful for symmetric-key primitives so far and it remains an open problem how to build such ciphers. In this work, we propose the MALICIOUS framework, a new method to build tweakable block ciphers that have backdoors hidden which allows to retrieve the secret key. Our backdoor is differential in nature: a specific related-tweak differential path with high probability is hidden during the design phase of the cipher. We explain how any entity knowing the backdoor can practically recover the secret key of a user and we also argue why even knowing the presence of the backdoor and the workings of the cipher will not permit to retrieve the backdoor for an external user. We analyze the security of our construction in the classical black-box model and we show that retrieving the backdoor (the hidden high-probability differential path) is very difficult. We instantiate our framework by proposing the LowMC-M construction, a new family of tweakable block ciphers based on instances of the LowMC cipher, which allow such backdoor embedding. Generating LowMC-M instances is trivial and the LowMC-M family has basically the same efficiency as the LowMC instances it is based on

Design and Cryptanalysis of Symmetric-Key Algorithms in Black and White-box Models

Cryptography studies secure communications. In symmetric-key cryptography, the communicating parties have a shared secret key which allows both to encrypt and decrypt messages. The encryption schemes used are very efficient but have no rigorous security proof. In order to design a symmetric-key primitive, one has to ensure that the primitive is secure at least against known attacks. During 4 years of my doctoral studies at the University of Luxembourg under the supervision of Prof. Alex Biryukov, I studied symmetric-key cryptography and contributed to several of its topics. Part I is about the structural and decomposition cryptanalysis. This type of cryptanalysis aims to exploit properties of the algorithmic structure of a cryptographic function. The first goal is to distinguish a function with a particular structure from random, structure-less functions. The second goal is to recover components of the structure in order to obtain a decomposition of the function. Decomposition attacks are also used to uncover secret structures of S-Boxes, cryptographic functions over small domains. In this part, I describe structural and decomposition cryptanalysis of the Feistel Network structure, decompositions of the S-Box used in the recent Russian cryptographic standard, and a decomposition of the only known APN permutation in even dimension. Part II is about the invariant-based cryptanalysis. This method became recently an active research topic. It happened mainly due to recent extreme cryptographic designs, which turned out to be vulnerable to this cryptanalysis method. In this part, I describe an invariant-based analysis of NORX, an authenticated cipher. Further, I show a theoretical study of linear layers that preserve low-degree invariants of a particular form used in the recent attacks on block ciphers. Part III is about the white-box cryptography. In the white-box model, an adversary has full access to the cryptographic implementation, which in particular may contain a secret key. The possibility of creating implementations of symmetric-key primitives secure in this model is a long-standing open question. Such implementations have many applications in industry; in particular, in mobile payment systems. In this part, I study the possibility of applying masking, a side-channel countermeasure, to protect white-box implementations. I describe several attacks on direct application of masking and provide a provably-secure countermeasure against a strong class of the attacks. Part IV is about the design of symmetric-key primitives. I contributed to design of the block cipher family SPARX and to the design of a suite of cryptographic algorithms, which includes the cryptographic permutation family SPARKLE, the cryptographic hash function family ESCH, and the authenticated encryption family SCHWAEMM. In this part, I describe the security analysis that I made for these designs