Simple and Efficient Single Round Almost Perfectly Secure Message Transmission Tolerating Generalized Adversary

Patra et al. gave a necessary and sufficient condition for the possibility of almost perfectly secure message transmission protocols tolerating general, non-threshold Q^2 adversary structure. However, their protocol requires at least three rounds and performs exponential (exponential in the size of the adversary structure) computation and communication. Moreover, they have left it as an open problem to design efficient protocol for almost perfectly secure message transmission, tolerating Q^2 adversary structure. In this paper, we show the first single round almost perfectly secure message transmission protocol tolerating Q^2 adversary structure. The computation and communication complexities of the protocol are both polynomial} in the size of underlying linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS) and adversary structure. This solves the open problem raised by Patra et al.. When we restrict our general protocol to threshold adversary with n=2t+1, we obtain a single round, communication optimal almost secure message transmission protocol tolerating threshold adversary, which is much more computationally efficient and relatively simpler than the previous communication optimal protocol of Srinathan et al

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

More Rounds, Less Security?

This paper focuses on a surprising class of cryptanalysis results for symmetric-key primitives: when the number of rounds of the primitive is increased, the complexity of the cryptanalysis result decreases. Our primary target will be primitives that consist of identical round functions, such as PBKDF1, the Unix password hashing algorithm, and the Chaskey MAC function. However, some of our results also apply to constructions with non-identical rounds, such as the PRIDE block cipher. First, we construct distinguishers for which the data complexity decreases when the number of rounds is increased. They are based on two well-known observations: iterating a random permutation increases the expected number of fixed points, and iterating a random function decreases the expected number of image points. We explain that these effects also apply to components of cryptographic primitives, such as a round of a block cipher. Second, we introduce a class of key-recovery and preimage-finding techniques that correspond to exhaustive search, however on a smaller part (e.g. one round) of the primitive. As the time complexity of a cryptanalysis result is usually measured by the number of full-round evaluations of the primitive, increasing the number of rounds will lower the time complexity. None of the observations in this paper result in more than a small speed-up over exhaustive search. Therefore, for lightweight applications, implementation advantages may outweigh the presence of these observations

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

Exclusion-intersection encryption

Identity-based encryption (IBE) has shown to be a useful cryptographic scheme enabling secure yet flexible role-based access control. We propose a new variant of IBE named as exclusion-intersection encryption: during encryption, the sender can specify the targeted groups that are legitimate and interested in reading the documents; there exists a trusted key generation centre generating the intersection private decryption keys on request. This special private key can only be used to decrypt the ciphertext which is of all the specified groups' interests, its holders are excluded from decrypting when the documents are not targeted to all these groups (e.g., the ciphertext of only a single group's interest). While recent advances in cryptographic techniques (e.g., attribute-based encryption or wicked IBE) can support a more general access control policy, the private key size may be as long as the number of attributes or identifiers that can be specified in a ciphertext, which is undesirable, especially when each user may receive a number of such keys for different decryption power. One of the applications of our notion is to support an ad-hoc joint project of two or more groups which needs extra helpers that are not from any particular group. © 2011 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 1st IEEE International Workshop on Security in Computers, Networking and Communications (SCNC 2011) in conjuntion with IEEE INFOCOM 2011, Shanghai, China, 10-15 April 2011. In Conference Proceedings of INFOCOM WKSHPS, 2011, p. 1048-1053The 1st IEEE International Workshop on Security in Computers, Networking and Communications (SCNC 2011) in conjuntion with IEEE INFOCOM 2011, Shanghai, China, 10-15 April 2011. In Conference Proceedings of INFOCOM WKSHPS, 2011, p. 1048-105

Smooth Number Message Authentication Code in the IoT Landscape

This paper presents the Smooth Number Message Authentication Code (SNMAC) for the context of lightweight IoT devices. The proposal is based on the use of smooth numbers in the field of cryptography, and investigates how one can use them to improve the security and performance of various algorithms or security constructs. The literature findings suggest that current IoT solutions are viable and promising, yet they should explore the potential usage of smooth numbers. The methodology involves several processes, including the design, implementation, and results evaluation. After introducing the algorithm, provides a detailed account of the experimental performance analysis of the SNMAC solution, showcasing its efficiency in real-world scenarios. Furthermore, the paper also explores the security aspects of the proposed SNMAC algorithm, offering valuable insights into its robustness and applicability for ensuring secure communication within IoT environments.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figure

Differential Cryptanalysis of Salsa and ChaCha -- An Evaluation with a Hybrid Model

While \textsf{Salsa} and \textsf{ChaCha} are well known software oriented stream ciphers, since the work of Aumasson et al in FSE 2008 there aren\u27t many significant results against them. The basic model of their attack was to introduce differences in the IV bits, obtain biases after a few forward rounds, as well as to look at the Probabilistic Neutral Bits (PNBs) while reverting back. In this paper we first consider the biases in the forward rounds, and estimate an upper bound on the number of rounds till such biases can be observed. For this, we propose a hybrid model (under certain assumptions), where initially the nonlinear rounds as proposed by the designer are considered, and then we employ their linearized counterpart. The effect of reverting the rounds with the idea of PNBs is also considered. Based on the assumptions and analysis, we conclude that 12 rounds of \textsf{Salsa} and \textsf{ChaCha} should be considered sufficient for 256-bit keys under the current best known attack models