Authenticated Encryption Scheme Research Articles

Probably Secure Keyed-Function Based Authenticated Encryption Schemes for Big Data

Security, privacy and data integrity are the critical issues in Big Data application of IoT-enable environment and cloud-based services. There are many upcoming challenges to establish secure computations for Big Data applications. Authenticated encryption (AE) plays one of the core roles for Big Data’s confidentiality, integrity, and real-time security. However, many proposals exist in the research area of authenticated encryption. Generally, there are two concepts of nonce respect and nonce reuse under the security notion of the AE. However, recent studies show that nonce reuse needs to sacrifice security bound of the AE. In this paper, we consider nonce respect scheme and probabilistic encryption scheme which are more efficient and suitable for big data applications. Both schemes are based on keyed function. Our first scheme (FS) operates in parallel mode whose security is based on nonce respect and supports associated data. Furthermore, it needs less call of functions/block-cipher. On the contrary, our second scheme is based on probabilistic encryption. It is expected to be a light solution because of weaker security model construction. Moreover, both schemes satisfy reasonable privacy security bound.

POEx: A beyond-birthday-bound-secure on-line cipher

On-line ciphers are convenient building blocks for realizing efficient single- pass encryption. In particular, the trend to limit the consequences of nonce reuses rendered them popular in recent authenticated encryption schemes. While encryption schemes, such as POE, COPE, or the ciphers within ElmE/ElmD concentrated on efficiency, their security guarantees and that of all earlier on-line ciphers is limited by the birthday bound, and so are those of the AE schemes built upon them. This work proposes POEx, a beyond-birthday-bound-secure on-line cipher which employs one call to a tweakable block cipher and one call to a 2n-bit universal hash function per message block. POEx builds upon the recently proposed XTX tweak extender by Iwata and Minematsu. We prove the security of our construction and discuss possible instantiations.

Tweakable Blockciphers for Efficient Authenticated Encryptions with Beyond the Birthday-Bound Security

Modular design via a tweakable blockcipher (TBC) offers efficient authenticated encryption (AE) schemes (with associated data) that call a blockcipher once for each data block (of associated data or a plaintext). However, the existing efficient blockcipher-based TBCs are secure up to the birthday bound, where the underlying keyed blockcipher is a secure strong pseudorandom permutation. Existing blockcipher-based AE schemes with beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security are not efficient, that is, a blockcipher is called twice or more for each data block. In this paper, we present a TBC, XKX, that offers efficient blockcipher-based AE schemes with BBB security, by combining with efficient TBC-based AE schemes such as ΘCB3 and

Tweakable Blockciphers for Efficient Authenticated Encryptions with Beyond the Birthday-Bound Security

Modular design via a tweakable blockcipher (TBC) offers efficient authenticated encryption (AE) schemes (with associated data) that call a blockcipher once for each data block (of associated data or a plaintext). However, the existing efficient blockcipher-based TBCs are secure up to the birthday bound, where the underlying keyed blockcipher is a secure strong pseudorandom permutation. Existing blockcipher-based AE schemes with beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security are not efficient, that is, a blockcipher is called twice or more for each data block. In this paper, we present a TBC, XKX, that offers efficient blockcipher-based AE schemes with BBB security, by combining with efficient TBC-based AE schemes such as ΘCB3 and

Cryptanalysis of PMACx, PMAC2x, and SIVx

At CT-RSA 2017, List and Nandi proposed two variable input length pseudorandom functions (VI-PRFs) called PMACx and PMAC2x, and a deterministic authenticated encryption scheme called SIVx. These schemes use a tweakable block cipher (TBC) as the underlying primitive, and are provably secure up to the query complexity of 2n, where n denotes the block length of the TBC. In this paper, we falsify the provable security claims by presenting concrete attacks. We show that with the query complexity of O(2n/2), i.e., with the birthday complexity, PMACx, PMAC2x, and SIVx are all insecure.

Refined Probability of Differential Characteristics Including Dependency Between Multiple Rounds

The current paper studies the probability of differential characteristics for an unkeyed (or with a fixed key) construction. Most notably, it focuses on the gap between two probabilities of differential characteristics: probability with independent S-box assumption, p_ind, and exact probability, p_exact. It turns out that p_exact is larger than p_ind in Feistel network with some S-box based inner function. The mechanism of this gap is then theoretically analyzed. The gap is derived from interaction of S-boxes in three rounds, and the gap depends on the size and choice of the S-box. In particular the gap can never be zero when the S-box is bigger than six bits. To demonstrate the power of this improvement, a related-key differential characteristic is proposed against a lightweight block cipher RoadRunneR. For the 128-bit key version, p_ind of 2^-48 is improved to p_exact of 2^-43. For the 80-bit key version, p_ind of 2^-68 is improved to p_exact of 2^-62. The analysis is further extended to SPN with an almost-MDS binary matrix in the core primitive of the authenticated encryption scheme Minalpher: p_ind of 2^-128 is improved to p_exact of 2^-96, which allows to extend the attack by two rounds.

Understanding RUP Integrity of COLM

The authenticated encryption scheme COLM is a third-round candidate in the CAESAR competition. Much like its antecedents COPA, ELmE, and ELmD, COLM consists of two parallelizable encryption layers connected by a linear mixing function. While COPA uses plain XOR mixing, ELmE, ELmD, and COLM use a more involved invertible mixing function. In this work, we investigate the integrity of the COLM structure when unverified plaintext is released, and demonstrate that its security highly depends on the choice of mixing function. Our results are threefold. First, we discuss the practical nonce-respecting forgery by Andreeva et al. (ASIACRYPT 2014) against COPA’s XOR mixing. Then we present a noncemisusing forgery against arbitrary mixing functions with practical time complexity. Finally, by using significantly larger queries, we can extend the previous forgery to be nonce-respecting.

Refined Probability of Differential Characteristics Including Dependency Between Multiple Rounds

The current paper studies the probability of differential characteristics for an unkeyed (or with a fixed key) construction. Most notably, it focuses on the gap between two probabilities of differential characteristics: probability with independent S-box assumption, pind, and exact probability, pexact. It turns out that pexact is larger than pind in Feistel network with some S-box based inner function. The mechanism of this gap is then theoretically analyzed. The gap is derived from interaction of S-boxes in three rounds, and the gap depends on the size and choice of the S-box. In particular the gap can never be zero when the S-box is bigger than six bits. To demonstrate the power of this improvement, a related-key differential characteristic is proposed against a lightweight block cipher RoadRunneR. For the 128-bit key version, pind of 2−48 is improved to pexact of 2−43. For the 80-bit key version, pind of 2−68 is improved to pexact of 2−62. The analysis is further extended to SPN with an almost-MDS binary matrix in the core primitive of the authenticated encryption scheme Minalpher: pind of 2−128 is improved to pexact of 2−96, which allows to extend the attack by two rounds.

An Improved E-Payment System and Its Extension to a Payment System for Visually Impaired and Blind People with User Anonymity

Electronic payment systems have become increasingly popular due to the widespread use of the internet-based shopping and banking. Such systems should at least guarantee users' anonymity during the transaction, fair exchange of goods and offer dispute resolutions. As many of the electronic payments are nowadays performed on mobile devices, also efficiency with respect to communication and computation costs at the user's side is another important requirement. In this paper we first show that a previously proposed system does not offer the claimed anonymity and non repudiation features. These issues are based on problems in the underlying authenticated encryption scheme. We propose an alternative system that satisfies all the required security features. In addition, we show how similar techniques can be applied to develop a payment system on a vending machine or in a retail outlet for the user using its smartphone as proxy, allowing besides confidentiality and authentication, also user anonymity throughout the whole process. This payment system is in particular of interest for blind or visually impaired people, who become able to take the whole payment process in own hands, instead of being dependent of the payment device and the possibly untrusted environment. Both payment systems apply the anonymous signcryption scheme ASEC as building block.

ISAP – Towards Side-Channel Secure Authenticated Encryption

Side-channel attacks and in particular differential power analysis (DPA) attacks pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations. One approach to counteract such attacks are cryptographic schemes based on fresh re-keying. In settings of pre-shared secret keys, such schemes render DPA attacks infeasible by deriving session keys and by ensuring that the attacker cannot collect side-channel leakage on the session key during cryptographic operations with different inputs. While these schemes can be applied to secure standard communication settings, current re-keying approaches are unable to provide protection in settings where the same input needs to be processed multiple times. In this work, we therefore adapt the re-keying approach and present a symmetric authenticated encryption scheme that is secure against DPA attacks and that does not have such a usage restriction. This means that our scheme fully complies with the requirements given in the CAESAR call and hence, can be used like other noncebased authenticated encryption schemes without loss of side-channel protection. Its resistance against side-channel analysis is highly relevant for several applications in practice, like bulk storage settings in general and the protection of FPGA bitfiles and firmware images in particular.

Cryptanalysis of NORX v2.0

NORX is an authenticated encryption scheme with associated data being publicly scrutinized as part of the ongoing CAESAR competition, where 14 other primitives are also competing. It is based on the sponge construction and relies on a simple permutation that allows efficient and versatile implementations. Thanks to research on the security of the sponge construction, the design of NORX, whose permutation is inspired from the permutations used in BLAKE and ChaCha, has evolved throughout three main versions (v1.0, v2.0 and v3.0). In this paper, we investigate the security of the full NORX v2.0 primitive that has been accepted as third-round candidate in the CAESAR competition. We show that some non-conservative design decisions probably motivated by implementation efficiency considerations result in at least one strong structural distinguisher of the underlying sponge permutation that can be turned into an attack on the full primitive. This attack yields a ciphertext-only forgery with time and data complexity 266 (resp. 2130) for the variant of NORX v2.0 using 128-bit (resp. 256-bit) keys and breaks the designers’ claim of a 128-bit, resp. 256-bit security. Furthermore, we show that this forgery attack can be extended to a key-recovery attack on the full NORX v2.0 with the same time and data complexities. We have implemented and experimentally verified the correctness of the attacks on a toy version of NORX. We emphasize that the scheme has recently been tweaked to NORX v3.0 at the beginning of the third round of the CAESAR competition: the main change introduces some key-dependent internal operations, which make NORX v3.0 immune to our attacks. However, the structural distinguisher of the permutation persists.

Cube-like Attack on Round-Reduced Initialization of Ketje Sr

This paper studies the Keccak-based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme Ketje Sr against cube-like attacks. Ketje is one of the remaining 16 candidates of third round CAESAR competition, whose primary recommendation is Ketje Sr. Although the cube-like method has been successfully applied to Ketje’s sister ciphers, including Keccak-MAC and Keyak – another Keccak-based AE scheme, similar attacks are missing for Ketje. For Ketje Sr, the state (400-bit) is much smaller than Keccak-MAC and Keyak (1600-bit), thus the 128-bit key and cubes with the same dimension would occupy more lanes in Ketje Sr. Hence, the number of key bits independent of the cube sum is very small, which makes the divide-and-conquer method (it has been applied to 7-round attack on Keccak-MAC by Dinur et al.) can not be translated to Ketje Sr trivially. This property seems to be the barrier for the translation of the previous cube-like attacks to Ketje Sr. In this paper, we evaluate Ketje Sr against the divide-and-conquer method. Firstly, by applying the linear structure technique, we find some 32/64-dimension cubes of Ketje Sr that do not multiply with each other as well as some bits of the key in the first round. In addition, we introduce the new dynamic variable instead of the auxiliary variable (it was used in Dinur et al.’s divide-and-conquer attack to reduce the diffusion of the key) to reduce the diffusion of the key as well as the cube variables. Finally, we successfully launch a 6/7-round 1 key recovery attack on Ketje Sr v1 and v2 (v2 is presented for the 3rd round CAESAR competition.). In 7-round attack, the complexity of online phase for Ketje Sr v1 is 2 113 , while for Ketje Sr v2, it is 2 97 (the preprocessing complexity is the same). We claim 7-round reduced Ketje Sr v2 is weaker than v1 against our attacks. In addition, some results on other Ketje instances and Ketje Sr with smaller nonce are given. Those are the first results on Ketje and bridge the gaps of cryptanalysis between its sister ciphers – Keyak and the Keccak keyed modes.

Cube-like Attack on Round-Reduced Initialization of Ketje Sr

This paper studies the Keccak-based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme Ketje Sr against cube-like attacks. Ketje is one of the remaining 16 candidates of third round CAESAR competition, whose primary recommendation is Ketje Sr. Although the cube-like method has been successfully applied to Ketje’s sister ciphers, including Keccak-MAC and Keyak – another Keccak-based AE scheme, similar attacks are missing for Ketje. For Ketje Sr, the state (400-bit) is much smaller than Keccak-MAC and Keyak (1600-bit), thus the 128-bit key and cubes with the same dimension would occupy more lanes in Ketje Sr. Hence, the number of key bits independent of the cube sum is very small, which makes the divide-and-conquer method (it has been applied to 7-round attack on Keccak-MAC by Dinur et al.) can not be translated to Ketje Sr trivially. This property seems to be the barrier for the translation of the previous cube-like attacks to Ketje Sr. In this paper, we evaluate Ketje Sr against the divide-and-conquer method. Firstly, by applying the linear structure technique, we find some 32/64-dimension cubes of Ketje Sr that do not multiply with each other as well as some bits of the key in the first round. In addition, we introduce the new dynamic variable instead of the auxiliary variable (it was used in Dinur et al.’s divide-and-conquer attack to reduce the diffusion of the key) to reduce the diffusion of the key as well as the cube variables. Finally, we successfully launch a 6/7-round1 key recovery attack on Ketje Sr v1 and v2 (v2 is presented for the 3rd round CAESAR competition.). In 7-round attack, the complexity of online phase for Ketje Sr v1 is 2113, while for Ketje Sr v2, it is 297 (the preprocessing complexity is the same). We claim 7-round reduced Ketje Sr v2 is weaker than v1 against our attacks. In addition, some results on other Ketje instances and Ketje Sr with smaller nonce are given. Those are the first results on Ketje and bridge the gaps of cryptanalysis between its sister ciphers – Keyak and the Keccak keyed modes.

Linking Online Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption and Blockwise Attack Models

Real-world applications of authenticated encryption often require the encryption to be computable online, e.g. to compute the ith block of ciphertext after having processed the first i blocks of plaintext. A significant line of research was dedicated to identifying security notions for online authenticated encryption schemes, that capture various security goals related to real-life scenarios. Fouque, Joux, Martinet and Valette proposed definitions of privacy and integrity against adversaries that can query their oracles in a blockwise-adaptive manner, to model memory-constrained applications. A decade later, Fleischmann, Forler and Lucks proposed the notion of online nonce misuse-resistant authenticated encryption (OAE) to capture the security of online authenticated encryption under nonce-reuse. In this work we investigate the relation between these notions. We first recast the blockwise notions of Fouque et al. to make them compatible with online authenticated encryption schemes that support headers. We then show that OAE and the conjunction of the blockwise notions are “almost” equivalent. We identify the missing property on the side of blockwise notions, and formalize it under the name PR-TAG. With PR-TAG being just an auxiliary definition, the equivalence we finally show suggests that OAE and the blockwise model for online authenticated encryption capture essentially the same notion of security.

Linking Online Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption and Blockwise Attack Models

Real-world applications of authenticated encryption often require the encryption to be computable online, e.g. to compute the i th block of ciphertext after having processed the first i blocks of plaintext. A significant line of research was dedicated to identifying security notions for online authenticated encryption schemes, that capture various security goals related to real-life scenarios. Fouque, Joux, Martinet and Valette proposed definitions of privacy and integrity against adversaries that can query their oracles in a blockwise-adaptive manner, to model memory-constrained applications. A decade later, Fleischmann, Forler and Lucks proposed the notion of online nonce misuse-resistant authenticated encryption (OAE) to capture the security of online authenticated encryption under nonce-reuse. In this work we investigate the relation between these notions. We first recast the blockwise notions of Fouque et al. to make them compatible with online authenticated encryption schemes that support headers. We then show that OAE and the conjunction of the blockwise notions are “almost” equivalent. We identify the missing property on the side of blockwise notions, and formalize it under the name PR-TAG. With PR-TAG being just an auxiliary definition, the equivalence we finally show suggests that OAE and the blockwise model for online authenticated encryption capture essentially the same notion of security.

A simple authentication encryption scheme

SummaryAn authentication encryption (AE) scheme satisfies to transfer an authenticated data between 2 parties or more. There are vast applications of the AE such as access control, encryption, enhancing trust between multiple parties, and assure the originality of a message. However, the main challenge of the AE is to maintain low‐cost features for its construction. Furthermore, there is another emerging issue of Internet of Things (IoT) in the field of data and network communication. The numbers of application of the IoT are increasing expeditiously, where various kinds of device have been used such as IoT‐end device, constrained device, and RfID. Moreover, the main challenge of the IoT‐end devices and resource constrained devices is to keep a certain level of security bound including minimum cost. However, the IoT‐end devices, resource constrained devices, and RfID have lack of resources such as memory, power, and processors. Interestingly, the AE can play a vital role between data acquisition (sensors, actuators) and data aggregation of usual platform of the IoT. Thus, the construction of the AE should satisfy the properties of low‐cost, least resources, and less operating‐time. Though, there are many familiar constructions of AE such as OTR, McOE, POE, OAE, APE, COPE, CLOC, and SILK but most of the schemes depend on the features of nonce and associate data. In the aspect of security, the usage of nonce and associated data are adequate. However, these 2 features increase the overhead cost. Therefore, we propose a simple construction of IV‐based AE where blockcipher compression function is used as encryption function. Our proposed scheme's efficiency‐rate is 1 with reasonable privacy‐security bound. In addition, it can encrypt arbitrary length of message in each iteration without padding.

Disk encryption: do we need to preserve length?

In the last one and a half decade there has been a lot of activity toward development of cryptographic techniques for disk encryption. It has been almost canonized that an encryption scheme suitable for the application of disk encryption must be length preserving, i.e., it rules out the use of schemes such as authenticated encryption where an authentication tag is also produced as a part of the ciphertext resulting in ciphertexts being longer than the corresponding plaintexts. The notion of a tweakable enciphering scheme (TES) has been formalized as the appropriate primitive for disk encryption, and it has been argued that they provide the maximum security possible for a tagless scheme. On the other hand, TESs are less efficient than some existing authenticated encryption schemes. Also TES cannot provide true authentication as they do not have authentication tags. In this paper, we analyze the possibility of the use of encryption schemes where length expansion is produced for the purpose of disk encryption. On the negative side, we argue that nonce-based authenticated encryption schemes are not appropriate for this application. On the positive side, we demonstrate that deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE) schemes may have more advantages than disadvantages compared to a TES when used for disk encryption. Finally, we propose a new deterministic authenticated encryption scheme called BCTR which is suitable for this purpose. We provide the full specification of BCTR, prove its security and also report an efficient implementation in reconfigurable hardware. Our experiments suggests that BCTR performs significantly better than existing TESs and existing DAE schemes.

A new authenticated encryption technique for handling long ciphertexts in memory constrained devices

In authenticated encryption schemes, there are two techniques for handling long ciphertexts while working within the constraints of a low buffer size: Releasing unverified plaintext (RUP) or Producing intermediate tags (PIT). In this paper, in addition to the two techniques, we propose another way to handle a long ciphertext with a low buffer size by storing and releasing only one (generally, or only few) intermediate state without releasing or storing any part of an unverified plaintext and without need of generating any intermediate tag. In this paper we explain this generalized technique using our new construction sp-AELM. sp-AELM is a sponge based authenticated encryption scheme that provides support for limited memory devices. We also provide its security proof for privacy and authenticity in an ideal permutation model, using a code based game playing framework. Furthermore, we also present two more variants of sp-AELM that serve the same purpose and are more efficient than sp-AELM. The ongoing CAESAR competition has 9 submissions which are based on the Sponge construction. We apply our generalized technique of storing single intermediate state to all these submissions, to determine their suitability with a Crypto module having limited memory. Our findings show that only ASCON and one of the PRIMATE’s mode(namely GIBBON) satisify the limited memory constraint using this technique, while the remaining schemes (namely, Artemia, ICEPOLE, Ketje, Keyak, NORX, Π-cipher, STRIBOB and two of the PRIMATEs mode: APE & HANUMAN) are not suitable for this scenario directly.

A new authenticated encryption technique for handling long ciphertexts in memory constrained devices

In authenticated encryption schemes, there are two techniques for handling long ciphertexts while working within the constraints of a low buffer size: releasing unverified plaintext (RUP) or producing intermediate tags (PIT). In this paper, in addition to the two techniques, we propose another way to handle a long ciphertext with a low buffer size by storing and releasing only one (generally, or only few) intermediate state without releasing or storing any part of an unverified plaintext and without need of generating any intermediate tag. In this paper we explain this generalised technique using our new construction sp-AELM. sp-AELM is a sponge-based authenticated encryption scheme that provides support for limited memory devices. We also provide its security proof for privacy and authenticity in an ideal permutation model, using a code-based game playing framework. Furthermore, we also present two more variants of sp-AELM that serve the same purpose and are more efficient than sp-AELM. The ongoing CAESAR competition has nine submissions which are based on the sponge construction. We apply our generalised technique of storing single intermediate state to all these submissions, to determine their suitability with a crypto module having limited memory. Our findings show that only ASCON and one of the PRIMATE's modes (namely GIBBON) satisfy the limited memory constraint using this technique, while the remaining schemes (namely, Artemia, ICEPOLE, Ketje, Keyak, NORX, Π-cipher, STRIBOB and two of the PRIMATEs modes: APE and HANUMAN) are not suitable for this scenario directly.

A Non-interactive Deniable Authentication Scheme in the Standard Model

Deniable authentication protocols enable a sender to authenticate a message to a receiver such that the receiver is unable to prove the identity of the sender to a third party. In contrast to interactive schemes, non-interactive deniable authentication schemes improve communication efficiency. Currently, several non-interactive deniable authentication schemes have been proposed with provable security in the random oracle model. In this paper, we study the problem of constructing non-interactive deniable authentication scheme secure in the standard model without bilinear groups. An efficient non-interactive deniable authentication scheme is presented by combining the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol with authenticated encryption schemes. We prove the security of our scheme by sequences of games and show that the computational cost of our construction can be dramatically reduced by applying pre-computation technique.