Best Effort and Practice Activation Codes

Activation Codes are used in many different digital services and known by many different names including voucher, e-coupon and discount code. In this paper we focus on a specific class of ACs that are short, human-readable, fixed-length and represent value. Even though this class of codes is extensively used there are no general guidelines for the design of Activation Code schemes. We discuss different methods that are used in practice and propose BEPAC, a new Activation Code scheme that provides both authenticity and confidentiality. The small message space of activation codes introduces some problems that are illustrated by an adaptive chosen-plaintext attack (CPA-2) on a general 3-round Feis- tel network of size 2^(2n) . This attack recovers the complete permutation from at most 2^(n+2) plaintext-ciphertext pairs. For this reason, BEPAC is designed in such a way that authenticity and confidentiality are in- dependent properties, i.e. loss of confidentiality does not imply loss of authenticity.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, TrustBus 201

Security on Generalized Feistel Scheme with SP Round Function

This paper studies the security against differential/linear cryptanalysis and the pseudorandomness for a class of generalized Feistel scheme with SP round function called $GFSP$. We consider the minimum number of active s-boxes in some consecutive rounds of $GFSP$,i.e., in four, eight and sixteen consecutive rounds, which provide the upper bound of the maximum differential/linear probabilities of 16-round $GFSP$ scheme, in order to evaluate the strength against differential/linear cryptanalysis. Furthermore, We investigate the pseudorandomness of $GFSP$, point out 7-round $GFSP$ is not pseudorandom for non-adaptive adversary, by using some distinguishers, and prove that 8-round $GFSP$ is pseudorandom for any adversaries

Improved quantum attack on Type-1 Generalized Feistel Schemes and Its application to CAST-256

Generalized Feistel Schemes (GFS) are important components of symmetric ciphers, which have been extensively researched in classical setting. However, the security evaluations of GFS in quantum setting are rather scanty. In this paper, we give more improved polynomial-time quantum distinguishers on Type-1 GFS in quantum chosen-plaintext attack (qCPA) setting and quantum chosen-ciphertext attack (qCCA) setting. In qCPA setting, we give new quantum polynomial-time distinguishers on $(3d-3)$-round Type-1 GFS with branches $d\geq3$, which gain $d-2$ more rounds than the previous distinguishers. Hence, we could get better key-recovery attacks, whose time complexities gain a factor of $2^{\frac{(d-2)n}{2}}$. In qCCA setting, we get $(3d-3)$-round quantum distinguishers on Type-1 GFS, which gain $d-1$ more rounds than the previous distinguishers. In addition, we give some quantum attacks on CAST-256 block cipher. We find 12-round and 13-round polynomial-time quantum distinguishers in qCPA and qCCA settings, respectively, while the best previous one is only 7 rounds. Hence, we could derive quantum key-recovery attack on 19-round CAST-256. While the best previous quantum key-recovery attack is on 16 rounds. When comparing our quantum attacks with classical attacks, our result also reaches 16 rounds on CAST-256 with 128-bit key under a competitive complexity

RoadRunneR: A Small And Fast Bitslice Block Cipher For Low Cost 8-bit Processors

Designing block ciphers targeting resource constrained 8-bit CPUs is a challenging problem. There are many recent lightweight ciphers designed for better performance in hardware. On the other hand, most software efficient lightweight ciphers either lack a security proof or have a low security margin. To fill the gap, we present RoadRunneR which is an efficient block cipher in 8-bit software, and its security is provable against differential and linear attacks. RoadRunneR has lowest code size in Atmel’s ATtiny45, except NSA’s design SPECK, which has no security proof. Moreover, we propose a new metric for the fair comparison of block ciphers. This metric, called ST/A, is the first metric to use key length as a parameter to rank ciphers of different key length in a fair way. By using ST/A and other metrics in the literature, we show that RoadRunneR is competitive among existing ciphers on ATtiny45

Manticore and CS mode : parallelizable encryption with joint cipher-state authentication.

We describe a new mode of encryption with inexpensive authentication, which uses information from the internal state of the cipher to provide the authentication. Our algorithms have a number of benefits: (1) the encryption has properties similar to CBC mode, yet the encipherment and authentication can be parallelized and/or pipelined, (2) the authentication overhead is minimal, and (3) the authentication process remains resistant against some IV reuse. We offer a Manticore class of authenticated encryption algorithms based on cryptographic hash functions, which support variable block sizes up to twice the hash output length and variable key lengths. A proof of security is presented for the MTC4 and Pepper algorithms. We then generalize the construction to create the Cipher-State (CS) mode of encryption that uses the internal state of any round-based block cipher as an authenticator. We provide hardware and software performance estimates for all of our constructions and give a concrete example of the CS mode of encryption that uses AES as the encryption primitive and adds a small speed overhead (10-15%) compared to AES alone

Hybrid cryptography key management.

Wireless communication networks are highly resource-constrained; thus many security protocols which work in other settings may not be efficient enough for use in wireless environments. This report considers a variety of cryptographic techniques which enable secure, authenticated communication when resources such as processor speed, battery power, memory, and bandwidth are tightly limited

Structural Evaluation by Generalized Integral Property

In this paper, we show structural cryptanalyses against two popular networks, i.e., the Feistel Network and the Substitute-Permutation Network (SPN). Our cryptanalyses are distinguishing attacks by an improved integral distinguisher. The integral distinguisher is one of the most powerful attacks against block ciphers, and it is usually constructed by evaluating the propagation characteristic of integral properties, e.g., the ALL or BALANCE property. However, the integral property does not derive useful distinguishers against block ciphers with non-bijective functions and bit-oriented structures. Moreover, since the integral property does not clearly exploit the algebraic degree of block ciphers, it tends not to construct useful distinguishers against block ciphers with low-degree functions. In this paper, we propose a new property called {\it the division property}, which is the generalization of the integral property. It can effectively construct the integral distinguisher even if the block cipher has non-bijective functions, bit-oriented structures, and low-degree functions. From viewpoints of the attackable number of rounds or chosen plaintexts, the division property can construct better distinguishers than previous methods. Although our attack is a generic attack, it can improve several integral distinguishers against specific cryptographic primitives. For instance, it can reduce the required number of chosen plaintexts for the 10-round distinguisher on Keccak-f from $2^{1025}$ to $2^{515}$. For the Feistel cipher, it theoretically proves that Simon 32, 48, 64, 96, and 128 have 9-, 11-, 11-, 13-, and 13-round integral distinguishers, respectively

Practical-Time Attacks Against Reduced Variants of MISTY1

MISTY1 is a block cipher designed by Matsui in 1997. It is widely deployed in Japan where it is an e-government standard, and is recognized internationally as a NESSIE-recommended cipher as well as an ISO standard and an RFC. Moreover, MISTY1 was selected to be the blueprint on top of which KASUMI, the GSM/3G block cipher, was based. Since its introduction, and especially in recent years, MISTY1 was subjected to extensive cryptanalytic efforts, which resulted in numerous attacks on its reduced variants. Most of these attacks aimed at maximizing the number of attacked rounds, and as a result, their complexities are highly impractical. In this paper we pursue another direction, by focusing on attacks with a practical time complexity. The best previously-known attacks with practical complexity against MISTY1 could break either 4 rounds (out of 8), or 5 rounds in a modified variant in which some of the FL functions are removed. We present an attack on 5-round MISTY1 with all the FL functions present whose time complexity is 2^38 encryptions. When the FL functions are removed, we present a devastating (and experimentally verified) related-key attack on the full 8-round variant, requiring only 2^18 data and time. While our attacks clearly do not compromise the security of the full MISTY1, they expose several weaknesses in MISTY1’s components, and improve our understanding of its security. Moreover, future designs which rely on MISTY1 as their base, should take these issues into close consideration

Quantum Demiric-Selçuk Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks: Applications to 6-Round Generic Feistel Constructions

This paper shows that quantum computers can significantly speed-up a type of meet-in-the-middle attacks initiated by Demiric and Selçuk (DS-MITM attacks), which is currently one of the most powerful cryptanalytic approaches in the classical setting against symmetric-key schemes. The quantum DS-MITM attacks are demonstrated against 6 rounds of the generic Feistel construction supporting an $n$-bit key and an $n$-bit block, which was attacked by Guo et al. in the classical setting with data, time, and memory complexities of $O(2^{3n/4})$. The complexities of our quantum attacks depend on the adversary\u27s model and the number of qubits available. When the adversary has an access to quantum computers for offline computations but online queries are made in a classical manner (so called Q1 model), the attack complexities are $O(2^{n/2})$ classical queries, $O(2^n/q)$ quantum computations by using about $q$ qubits. Those are balanced at $\tilde{O}(2^{n/2})$, which significantly improves the classical attack. Technically, we convert the quantum claw finding algorithm to be suitable in the Q1 model. The attack is then extended to the case that the adversary can make superposition queries (so called Q2 model). The attack approach is drastically changed from the one in the Q1 model; the attack is based on 3-round distinguishers with Simon\u27s algorithm and then appends 3 rounds for key recovery. This can be solved by applying the combination of Simon\u27s and Grover\u27s algorithms recently proposed by Leander and May