Cryptographic Extraction and Key Derivation: The HKDF Scheme

In spite of the central role of key derivation functions (KDF) in applied cryptography, there has been little formal work addressing the design and analysis of general multi-purpose KDFs. In practice, most KDFs (including those widely standardized) follow ad-hoc approaches that treat cryptographic hash functions as perfectly random functions. In this paper we close some gaps between theory and practice by contributing to the study and engineering of KDFs in several ways. We provide detailed rationale for the design of KDFs based on the extract-then-expand approach; we present the first general and rigorous definition of KDFs and their security which we base on the notion of computational extractors; we specify a concrete fully practical KDF based on the HMAC construction; and we provide an analysis of this construction based on the extraction and pseudorandom properties of HMAC. The resultant KDF design can support a large variety of KDF applications under suitable assumptions on the underlying hash function; particular attention and effort is devoted to minimizing these assumptions as much as possible for each usage scenario. Beyond the theoretical interest in modeling KDFs, this work is intended to address two important and timely needs of cryptographic applications: (i) providing a single hash-based KDF design that can be standardized for use in multiple and diverse applications, and (ii) providing a conservative, yet efficient, design that exercises much care in the way it utilizes a cryptographic hash function. (The HMAC-based scheme presented here, named HKDF, is being standardized by the IETF.

A Unilateral-to-Mutual Authentication Compiler for Key Exchange (with Applications to Client Authentication in TLS 1.3)

We study the question of how to build compilers that transform a unilaterally authenticated (UA) key-exchange protocol into a mutually-authenticated (MA) one. We present a simple and efficient compiler and characterize the UA protocols that the compiler upgrades to the MA model, showing this to include a large and important class of UA protocols. The question, while natural, has not been studied widely. Our work is motivated in part by the ongoing work on the design of TLS 1.3, specifically the design of the client authentication mechanisms including the challenging case of post-handshake authentication. Our approach supports the analysis of these mechanisms in a general and modular way, in particular aided by the notion of functional security that we introduce as a generalization of key exchange models and which may be of independent interest

Revisiting Shared Data Protection Against Key Exposure

This paper puts a new light on secure data storage inside distributed systems. Specifically, it revisits computational secret sharing in a situation where the encryption key is exposed to an attacker. It comes with several contributions: First, it defines a security model for encryption schemes, where we ask for additional resilience against exposure of the encryption key. Precisely we ask for (1) indistinguishability of plaintexts under full ciphertext knowledge, (2) indistinguishability for an adversary who learns: the encryption key, plus all but one share of the ciphertext. (2) relaxes the "all-or-nothing" property to a more realistic setting, where the ciphertext is transformed into a number of shares, such that the adversary can't access one of them. (1) asks that, unless the user's key is disclosed, noone else than the user can retrieve information about the plaintext. Second, it introduces a new computationally secure encryption-then-sharing scheme, that protects the data in the previously defined attacker model. It consists in data encryption followed by a linear transformation of the ciphertext, then its fragmentation into shares, along with secret sharing of the randomness used for encryption. The computational overhead in addition to data encryption is reduced by half with respect to state of the art. Third, it provides for the first time cryptographic proofs in this context of key exposure. It emphasizes that the security of our scheme relies only on a simple cryptanalysis resilience assumption for blockciphers in public key mode: indistinguishability from random, of the sequence of diferentials of a random value. Fourth, it provides an alternative scheme relying on the more theoretical random permutation model. It consists in encrypting with sponge functions in duplex mode then, as before, secret-sharing the randomness

Security under Key-Dependent Inputs

In this work we re-visit the question of building cryptographic primitives that remain secure even when queried on inputs that depend on the secret key. This was investigated by Black, Rogaway, and Shrimpton in the context of randomized encryption schemes and in the random oracle model. We extend the investigation to deterministic symmetric schemes (such as PRFs and block ciphers) and to the standard model. We term this notion security against key-dependent-input attack , or KDI-security for short. Our motivation for studying KDI security is the existence of significant real-world implementations of deterministic encryption (in the context of storage encryption) that actually rely on their building blocks to be KDI secure. We consider many natural constructions for PRFs, ciphers, tweakable ciphers and randomized encryption, and examine them with respect to their KDI security. We exhibit inherent limitations of this notion and show many natural constructions that fail to be KDI secure in the standard model, including some schemes that have been proven in the random oracle model. On the positive side, we demonstrate examples where some measure of KDI security can be provably achieved (in particular, we show such examples in the standard model)

Threshold Partially-Oblivious PRFs with Applications to Key Management

An Oblivious PRF (OPRF) is a protocol between a server holding a key to a PRF and a user holding an input. At the end of the interaction, the user learns the output of the OPRF on its input and nothing else. The server learns nothing, including nothing about the user\u27s input or the function\u27s output. OPRFs have found many applications in multiple areas of cryptography. Everspaugh et al. (Usenix 2015) introduced Partially Oblivious PRF (pOPRF) in which the OPRF accepts an additional non-secret input that can be chosen by the server itself, and showed applications in the setting of password hardening protocols. We further investigate pOPRFs showing new constructions, including distributed multi-server schemes, and new applications. We build simple pOPRFs from regular OPRFs, in particular obtaining very efficient DH-based pOPRFs, and provide (n,t)-threshold implementation of such schemes. We apply these schemes to build Oblivious Key Management Systems (KMS) as a much more secure alternative to traditional wrapping-based KMS. The new system hides keys and object identifiers from the KMS, offers unconditional security for key transport, enables forward security, provides key verifiability, reduces storage, and more. Further, we show how to provide all these features in a distributed threshold implementation that additionally protects the service against server compromise. Finally, we extend the scheme to a threshold Oblivious KMS with updatable encryption so that upon the periodic change of OPRF keys by the server, an efficient update procedure allows a client of the KMS service to non-interactively update all its encrypted data to be decryptable only by the new key. Our techniques improve on the efficiency and security of several recent works on updatable encryption from Crypto and Eurocrypt. We report on an implementation of the above schemes and their performance, showing their practicality and readiness for use in real-world systems. In particular, our pOPRF constructions achieve speeds of over an order of magnitude relative to previous pOPRF schemes

Okamoto-Tanaka Revisited: Fully Authenticated Diffie-Hellman with Minimal Overhead

Okamoto-Tanaka Revisited: Fully Authenticated Diffie-Hellman with Minimal Overhead The Diffie-Hellman protocol (DHP) is one of the most studied protocols in cryptography. Much work has been dedicated to armor the original protocol against active attacks while incurring a minimal performance overhead relative to the basic (unauthenticated) DHP. This line of work has resulted in some remarkable protocols, e.g., MQV, where the protocol\u27s communication cost is identical to that of the basic DHP and the computation overhead is small. Unfortunately, MQV and similar 2-message ``implicitly authenticated protocols do not achieve full security against active attacks since they cannot provide forward secrecy (PFS), a major security goal of DHP, against active attackers. In this paper we investigate the question of whether one can push the limits of authenticated DHPs even further, namely, to achieve communication complexity as in the original DHP (two messages with a single group element per message), maintain low computational overhead, and yet achieve full PFS against active attackers in a provable way. We answer this question in the affirmative by resorting to an old and elegant key agreement protocol: the Okamoto-Tanaka protocol \cite{okta}. We present a variant of the protocol (denoted mOT) which achieves the above minimal communication, incurs a computational overhead relative to the basic DHP that is practically negligible, and yet achieves full provable key agreement security, including PFS, against active attackers. Moreover, due to the identity-based properties of mOT, even the sending of certificates (typical for authenticated DHPs) can be avoided in the protocol. As additional contributions, we apply our analysis to prove the security of a recent multi-domain extension of the Okamoto-Tanaka protocol by Schridde et al. and show how to adapt mOT to the (non id-based) certificate-based setting

On the (In)Security of the Diffie-Hellman Oblivious PRF with Multiplicative Blinding

Oblivious Pseudorandom Function (OPRF) is a protocol between a client holding input x and a server holding key k for a PRF F. At the end, the client learns F_k(x) and nothing else while the server learns nothing. OPRF\u27s have found diverse applications as components of larger protocols, and the currently most efficient instantiation, with security proven in the UC model, is F_k(x)=H2(x,(H1(x))^k) computed using so-called exponential blinding, i.e., the client sends a=(H1(x))^r for random r, the server responds b=a^k, which the client ublinds as v=b^{1/r} to compute F_k(x)=H2(x,v). However, this protocol requires two variable-base exponentiations on the client, while a more efficient multiplicative blinding scheme replaces one or both client exponentiations with fixed-base exponentiation, leading to the decrease of the client\u27s computational cost by a factor between two to six, depending on pre-computation. We analyze the security of the above OPRF with multiplicative blinding, showing surprising weaknesses that offer attack avenues which are not present using exponential blinding. We characterize the security of this OPRF implementation as a Revised OPRF functionality, a relaxation of UC OPRF functionality used in prior work. On the positive side, we show that the Revised OPRF suffices for the security of OPAQUE, the asymmetric PAKE protocol, hence allowing OPAQUE the computational advantages of multiplicative blinding. Unfortunately, we also show examples of other OPRF applications which become insecure when using such blinding. The conclusion is that usage of multiplicative blinding for F_k(x) defined as above, in settings where correct value g^k (needed for multiplicative blinding) is not authenticated, and OPRF inputs are of low entropy, must be carefully analyzed, or avoided all together. We complete the picture by showing a simple and safe alternative definition of function F_k(x) which offers (full) UC OPRF security using either form of blinding

KHAPE: Asymmetric PAKE from Key-Hiding Key Exchange

OPAQUE [Jarecki et al., Eurocrypt 2018] is an asymmetric password authenticated key exchange (aPAKE) protocol that is being developed as an Internet standard and for use within TLS 1.3. OPAQUE combines an Oblivious PRF (OPRF) with an authenticated key exchange to provide strong security properties, including security against pre-computation attacks (called saPAKE security). However, the security of OPAQUE relies crucially on the security of the OPRF. If the latter breaks (by cryptanalysis, quantum attacks or security compromise), the user\u27s password is exposed to an offline dictionary attack. To address this weakness, we present KHAPE, a variant of OPAQUE that does not require the use of an OPRF to achieve aPAKE security, resulting in improved resilience and near-optimal computational performance. An OPRF can be optionally added to KHAPE, for enhanced saPAKE security, but without opening the password to an offline dictionary attack upon OPRF compromise. In addition to resilience to OPRF compromise, a DH-based implementation of KHAPE (using HMQV) offers the best performance among aPAKE protocols in terms of exponentiations with less than the cost of an exponentiation on top of an UNauthenticated Diffie-Hellman exchange. KHAPE uses three messages if the server initiates the exchange or four when the client does (one more than OPAQUE in the latter case). All results in the paper are proven within the UC framework in the ideal cipher model. Of independent interest is our treatment of key-hiding AKE which KHAPE uses as a main component as well as our UC proofs of AKE security for protocols 3DH (a basis of Signal), HMQV and SKEME, that we use as efficient instantiations of KHAPE

Secure Hashed Diffie-Hellman over Non-DDH Groups

We show that in applications that use the Diffie-Hellman (DH) transform but take care of hashing the DH output (as required, for example, for secure DH-based encryption and key exchange) the usual requirement to work over a DDH group (i.e., a group in which the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption holds) can be relaxed to only requiring that the DH group contains a large enough DDH subgroup. In particular, this implies the security of (hashed) Diffie-Hellman over non-prime order groups such as $Z_p^*$. Moreover, our results show that one can work directly over $Z_p^*$ without requiring any knowledge of the prime factorization of $p-1$ and without even having to find a generator of $Z_p^*$. These results are obtained via a general characterization of DDH groups in terms of their DDH subgroups, and a relaxation (called $t$-DDH) of the DDH assumption via computational entropy. We also show that, under the short-exponent discrete-log assumption, the security of the hashed Diffie-Hellman transform is preserved when replacing full exponents with short exponents