Improved Masking for Tweakable Blockciphers with Applications to Authenticated Encryption

A popular approach to tweakable blockcipher design is via masking, where a certain primitive (a blockcipher or a permutation) is preceded and followed by an easy-to-compute tweak-dependent mask. In this work, we revisit the principle of masking. We do so alongside the introduction of the tweakable Even-Mansour construction MEM. Its masking function combines the advantages of word-oriented LFSR- and powering-up-based methods. We show in particular how recent advancements in computing discrete logarithms over finite fields of characteristic 2 can be exploited in a constructive way to realize highly efficient, constant-time masking functions. If the masking satisfies a set of simple conditions, then MEM is a secure tweakable blockcipher up to the birthday bound. The strengths of MEM are exhibited by the design of fully parallelizable authenticated encryption schemes OPP (nonce-respecting) and MRO (misuse-resistant). If instantiated with a reduced-round BLAKE2b permutation, OPP and MRO achieve speeds up to 0.55 and 1.06 cycles per byte on the Intel Haswell microarchitecture, and are able to significantly outperform their closest competitors

A new index calculus algorithm with complexity L(1/4 + o(1)) in small characteristic

International audienceIn this paper, we describe a new algorithm for discrete logarithms in small characteristic. This algorithm is based on index calculus and includes two new contributions. The first is a new method for generating multiplicative relations among elements of a small smoothness basis. The second is a new descent strategy that allows us to express the logarithm of an arbitrary finite field element in terms of the logarithm of elements from the smoothness basis. For a small characteristic finite field of size Q = pn, this algorithm achieves heuristic complexity LQ(1/4 + o(1)). For technical reasons, unless is already a composite with factors of the right size, this is done by embedding double-struck FQ in a small extension with double-struck FQe with e ≤ 2⌈logpn⌉. © 2014 Springer-Verlag