Tweakable Block Ciphers

Abstract

A common trend in applications of block ciphers over the past decades has been to employ block ciphers as one piece of a “mode of operation”—possibly, a way to make a secure symmetric-key cryptosystem, but more generally, any cryptographic application. Most of the time, these modes of operation use a wide variety of techniques to achieve a subgoal necessary for their main goal: instantiation of “essentially different” instances of the block cipher. We formalize a cryptographic primitive, the “tweakable block cipher.” Such a cipher has not only the usual inputs—message and cryptographic key—but also a third input, the “tweak.” The tweak serves much the same purpose that an initialization vector does for CBC mode or that a nonce does for OCB mode. Our abstraction brings this feature down to the primitive block-cipher level, instead of incorporating it only at the higher modes-of-operation levels. We suggest that (1) tweakable block ciphers are easy to design, (2) the extra cost of making a block cipher “tweakable” is small, and (3) it is easier to design and prove the security of applications of block ciphers that need this variability using tweakable block ciphers.