SAFE: Sponge API for Field Elements

From hashing and commitment schemes to Fiat-Shamir and encryption, hash functions are everywhere in zero-knowledge proofsystems (ZKPs), and minor performance changes in ``vanilla\u27\u27 implementations can translate in major discrepancies when the hash is processed as a circuit within the proofsystem. Protocol designers have resorted to a number of techniques and custom modes to optimize hash functions for ZKPs settings, but so far without a single established, well-studied construction. To address this need, we define the Sponge API for Field Elements (SAFE), a unified framework for permutation-based schemes (including AEAD, Sigma, PRNGs, and so on). SAFE eliminates the performance overhead, is pluggable in any field-oriented protocol, and is suitable for any permutation algorithm. SAFE is implemented in Filecoin\u27s Neptune hash framework, {which is} our reference implementation (in Rust). SAFE is also being integrated in other prominent ZKP projects. This report specifies SAFE and describes some use cases. Among other improvements, our construction is among the first to store the protocol metadata in the sponge inner part in a provably secure way, which may be of independent interest to the sponge use cases outside of ZKP

APE: Authenticated Permutation-Based Encryption for Lightweight Cryptography

The domain of lightweight cryptography focuses on cryptographic algorithms for extremely constrained devices. It is very costly to avoid nonce reuse in such environments, because this requires either a hardware source of randomness, or non-volatile memory to store a counter. At the same time, a lot of cryptographic schemes actually require the nonce assumption for their security. In this paper, we propose APE as the first permutation-based authenticated encryption scheme that is resistant against nonce misuse. We formally prove that APE is secure, based on the security of the underlying permutation. To decrypt, APE processes the ciphertext blocks in reverse order, and uses inverse permutation calls. APE therefore requires a permutation that is both efficient for forward and inverse calls. We instantiate APE with the permutations of three recent lightweight hash function designs: Quark, Photon, and Spongent. For any of these permutations, an implementation that sup- ports both encryption and decryption requires less than 1.9 kGE and 2.8 kGE for 80-bit and 128-bit security levels, respectively

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

SipHash : a fast short-input PRF

SipHash is a family of pseudorandom functions optimized for short inputs. Target applications include network traffic authentication and hash-table lookups protected against hash-flooding denial-of-service attacks. SipHash is simpler than MACs based on universal hashing, and faster on short inputs. Compared to dedicated designs for hash-table lookup, SipHash has well-defined security goals and competitive performance. For example, SipHash processes a 16-byte input with a fresh key in 140 cycles on an AMD FX-8150 processor, which is much faster than state-of-the-art MACs. We propose that hash tables switch to SipHash as a hash function