Boosting OMD for Almost Free Authentication of Associated Data

We propose pure OMD (p-OMD) as a new variant of the Offset Merkle-Damgård (OMD) authenticated encryption scheme. Our new scheme inherits all desirable security features of OMD while having a more compact structure and providing higher efficiency. The original OMD scheme, as submitted to the CAESAR competition, couples a single pass of a variant of the Merkle-Damgård (MD) iteration with the counter-based XOR MAC algorithm to provide privacy and authenticity. Our improved p-OMD scheme dispenses with the XOR MAC algorithm and is purely based on the MD iteration; hence, the name ``pure'' OMD. To process a message of $\ell$ blocks and associated data of $a$ blocks, OMD needs $\ell+a+2$ calls to the compression function while p-OMD only requires max{$\ell, a$}+$2$ calls. Therefore, for a typical case where $\ell \geq a$, p-OMD makes just $\ell+2$ calls to the compression function; that is, associated data is processed almost freely compared to OMD. We prove the security of p-OMD under the same standard assumption (pseudo-randomness of the compression function) as made in OMD; moreover, the security bound for p-OMD is the same as that of OMD, showing that the modifications made to boost the performance are without any loss of security

Forkcipher: A New Primitive for Authenticated Encryption of Very Short Messages

This is an extended version of the article with the same title accepted at Asiacrypt 2019.International audienceHighly efficient encryption and authentication of short messages is an essential requirement for enabling security in constrained scenarios such as the CAN FD in automotive systems (max. message size 64 bytes), massive IoT, critical communication domains of 5G, and Narrowband IoT, to mention a few. In addition, one of the NIST lightweight cryptography project requirements is that AEAD schemes shall be “optimized to be efficient for short messages (e.g., as short as 8 bytes)”. In this work we introduce and formalize a novel primitive in symmetric cryptography called a forkcipher. A forkcipher is a keyed function expanding a fixed-length input to a fixed-length output. We define its security as indistinguishability under chosen ciphertext attack. We give a generic construction validation via the new iterate-fork-iterate design paradigm. We then propose ForkSkinny as a concrete forkcipher instance with a public tweak and based on SKINNY: a tweakable lightweight block cipher constructed using the TWEAKEY framework. We conduct extensive cryptanalysis of ForkSkinny against classical and structure-specific attacks. We demonstrate the applicability of forkciphers by designing three new provably-secure, nonce-based AEAD modes which offer performance and security tradeoffs and are optimized for efficiency of very short messages. Considering a reference block size of 16 bytes, and ignoring possible hardware optimizations, our new AEAD schemes beat the best SKINNY-based AEAD modes. More generally, we show forkciphers are suited for lightweight applications dealing with predominantly short messages, while at the same time allowing handling arbitrary messages sizes. Furthermore, our hardware implementation results show that when we exploit the inherent parallelism of ForkSkinny we achieve the best performance when directly compared with the most efficient mode instantiated with the SKINNY block cipher

Indifferentiable Authenticated Encryption

We study Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) from the viewpoint of composition in arbitrary (single-stage) environments. We use the indifferentiability framework to formalize the intuition that a “good” AEAD scheme should have random ciphertexts subject to decryptability. Within this framework, we can then apply the indifferentiability composition theorem to show that such schemes offer extra safeguards wherever the relevant security properties are not known, or cannot be predicted in advance, as in general-purpose crypto libraries and standards. We show, on the negative side, that generic composition (in many of its configurations) and well-known classical and recent schemes fail to achieve indifferentiability. On the positive side, we give a provably indifferentiable Feistel-based construction, which reduces the round complexity from at least 6, needed for blockciphers, to only 3 for encryption. This result is not too far off the theoretical optimum as we give a lower bound that rules out the indifferentiability of any construction with less than 2 rounds

Damaging, simplifying, and salvaging p-OMD

One of the submissions to the CAESAR competition for the design of a new authenticated encryption scheme is Offset Merkle-Damgård (OMD). At FSE 2015, Reyhanitabar et al. introduced p-OMD, an improvement of OMD that processes the associated data almost for free. As an extra benefit, p-OMD was claimed to offer integrity against nonce-misusing adversaries, a property that OMD does not have. In this work we show how a nonce-misusing adversary can forge a message for the original p-OMD using only 3 queries (including the forgery). As a second contribution, we generalize and simplify p-OMD. This is done via the introduction of the authenticated encryption scheme Spoed. The most important difference is the usage of a generalized padding function GPAD, which neatly eliminates the need for a case distinction in the design specification and therewith allows for a significantly shorter description of the scheme and a better security bound. Finally, we introduce the authenticated encryption scheme Spoednic, a variant of Spoed providing authenticity against a nonce-misusing adversary at a modest price

Harvard magazine

In this paper, we propose an ecient method for extracting simple low-degree equations (e.g. quadratic ones) in addi- tion to the linear ones, obtainable from the original cube attack by Dinur and Shamir at EUROCRYPT 2009. This extended cube attack can be successfully applied even to cryptosystems in which the original cube attack may fail due to the attacker's inability in nding suciently many inde- pendent linear equations. As an application of our extended method, we exhibit a side channel cube attack against the PRESENT block cipher using the Hamming weight leakage model. Our side channel attack improves upon the previ- ous work of Yang, Wang and Qiao at CANS 2009 from two aspects. First, we use the Hamming weight leakage mod- el which is a more relaxed leakage assumption, supported by many previously known practical results on side channel attacks, compared to the more challenging leakage assump- tion that the adversary has access to the \exact" value of the internal state bits as used by Yang et al. Thanks to applying the extended cube method, our attack has also a reduced complexity compared to that of Yang et al. Name- ly, for PRESENT-80 (80-bit key variant) as considered by Yang et al., our attack has a time complexity 2^16 and data complexity of about 2^13 chosen plaintexts; whereas, that of Yang et al. has time complexity of 2^32 and needs about 2^15 chosen plaintexts. Furthermore, our method directly applies to PRESENT-128 (i.e. 128-bit key variant) with time com- plexity of 2^64 and the same data complexity of 2^13 chosen plaintexts

Authenticated Encryption with Variable Stretch

In conventional authenticated-encryption (AE) schemes, the ciphertext expansion, a.k.a.stretch or tag length, is a constant or a parameter of the scheme that must be fixed per key. However, using variable-length tags per key can be desirable in practice or may occur as a result of a misuse. The RAE definition by Hoang, Krovetz, and Rogaway (Eurocrypt 2015), aiming at the best-possible AE security, supports variable stretch among other strong features, but achieving the RAE goal incurs a particular inefficiency: neither encryption nor decryption can be online. The problem of enhancing the well-established nonce-based AE (nAE) model and the standard schemes thereof to support variable tag lengths per key, without sacrificing any desirable functional and efficiency properties such as online encryption, has recently regained interest as evidenced by extensive discussion threads on the CFRG forum and the CAESAR competition. Yet there is a lack of formal definition for this goal. First, we show that several recently proposed heuristic measures trying to augment the known schemes by inserting the tag length into the nonce and/or associated data fail to deliver any meaningful security in this setting. Second, we provide a formal definition for the notion of nonce-based variable-stretch AE (nvAE) as a natural extension to the traditional nAE model. Then, we proceed by showing a second modular approach to formalizing the goal by combining the nAE notion and a new property we call key-equivalent separation by stretch (kess). It is proved that (after a mild adjustment to the syntax) any nAE scheme which additionally fulfills the kess property will achieve the nvAE goal. Finally, we show that the nvAE goal is efficiently and provably achievable; for instance, by simple tweaks to off-the-shelf schemes such as OCB

Domain Extension for Enhanced Target Collision-Resistant Hash Functions

Abstract. We answer the question of Reyhanitabar et al. from FSE’09 of constructing a domain extension scheme for enhanced target collisionresistant(eTCR)hashfunctionswithsublinearkeyexpansion.TheeTCR property, introduced by Halevi and Krawczyk [HK06], is a natural fit for hash-and-sign signature schemes, offering an attractive alternative to collision-resistant hash functions. We prove a new composition theorem for eTCR, and demonstrate that eTCR compression functions exist if and only if one-way functions do.