Authenticated Encryption With Associated Data Schemes Research Articles

Depth-Optimized Quantum Circuits for ASCON: AEAD and HASH

Quantum computing advancements pose security challenges for cryptography. Specifically, Grover’s search algorithm affects the reduction in the search complexity of symmetric-key encryption and hash functions. Recent efforts have been made to estimate the complexity of Grover’s search and evaluate post-quantum security. In this paper, we propose a depth-optimized quantum circuit implementation for ASCON, including both symmetric-key encryption and hashing algorithms, as a part of the lightweight cryptography standardization by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology). As far as we know, this is the first implementation of a quantum circuit for the ASCON AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) scheme, which is a symmetric-key algorithm. Also, our quantum circuit implementation of the ASCON-HASH achieves a reduction of more than 88.9% in the Toffoli depth and more than 80.5% in the full depth compared to the previous work. As per our understanding, the most effective strategy against Grover’s search involves minimizing the depth of the quantum circuit for the target cipher. We showcase the optimal Grover’s search cost for ASCON and introduce a proposed quantum circuit optimized for depth. Furthermore, we utilize the estimated cost to evaluate post-quantum security strength of ASCON, employing the relevant evaluation criteria and the latest advancements in research.

Key Committing Attacks against AES-based AEAD Schemes

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the security of authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) within the context of key commitment frameworks. Security within this framework ensures that a ciphertext chosen by an adversary does not decrypt to two different sets of key, nonce, and associated data. Despite this increasing interest, the security of several widely deployed AEAD schemes has not been thoroughly examined within this framework. In this work, we assess the key committing security of several AEAD schemes. First, the AEGIS family, which emerged as a winner in the Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness (CAESAR), and has been proposed to standardization at the IETF. A now outdated version of the draft standard suggested that AEGIS could qualify as a fully committing AEAD scheme; we prove that it is not the case by proposing a novel attack applicable to all variants, which has been experimentally verified. We also exhibit a key committing attack on Rocca-S. Our attacks are executed within the FROB game setting, which is known to be one of the most stringent key committing frameworks. This implies that they remain valid in other, more relaxed frameworks, such as CMT-1, CMT-4, and so forth. Finally, we show that applying the same attack techniques to Rocca and Tiaoxin-346 does not compromise their key-committing security. This observation provides valuable insights into the design of such secure round update functions for AES-based AEAD schemes.

Key Committing Security of AEZ and More

For an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) scheme, the key committing security refers to the security notion of whether the adversary can produce a pair of distinct input tuples, including the key, that result in the same output. While the key committing security of various nonce-based AEAD schemes is known, the security analysis of Robust AE (RAE) is largely unexplored. In particular, we are interested in the key committing security of AEAD schemes built on the Encode-then-Encipher (EtE) approach from a wide block cipher. We first consider AEZ v5, the classical and the first dedicated RAE that employs the EtE approach. We focus our analysis on the core part of AEZ to show our best attacks depending on the length of the ciphertext expansion. In the general case where the Tweakable Block Cipher (TBC) is assumed to be ideal, we show a birthday attack and a matching provable security result. AEZ adopts a simpler key schedule and the prove-then-prune approach in the full specification, and we show a practical attack against it by exploiting the simplicity of the key schedule. The complexity is 227, and we experimentally verify the correctness with a concrete example. We also cover two AEAD schemes based on EtE. One is built on Adiantum, and the other one is built on HCTR2, which are two wide block ciphers that are used in real applications. We present key committing attacks against these schemes when used in EtE and matching proofs for particular cases.

Security Evaluation of Initialization Phases and Round Functions of Rocca and AEGIS

Authenticated-Encryption with Associated-Data (AEAD) plays an important role in guaranteeing confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity in network communications. To meet the requirements of high-performance applications, several AEADs make use of AES New Instructions (AES-NI), which can conduct operations of AES encryption and decryption dramatically fast by hardware accelerations. At SAC 2013, Wu and Preneel proposed an AES-based AEAD scheme called AEGIS-128/128L/256, to achieve high-speed software implementation. At FSE 2016, Jean and Nikolić generalized the construction of AEGIS and proposed more efficient round functions. At ToSC 2021, Sakamoto et al. further improved the constructions of Jean and Nikolić, and proposed an AEAD scheme called Rocca for beyond 5G. In this study, we first evaluate the security of the initialization phases of Rocca and AEGIS family against differential and integral attacks using MILP (Mixed Integer Linear Programming) tools. Specifically, according to the evaluation based on the lower bounds for the number of active S-boxes, the initialization phases of AEGIS-128/128L/256 are secure against differential attacks after 4/3/6 rounds, respectively. Regarding integral attacks, we present the integral distinguisher on 6 rounds and 6/5/7 rounds in the initialization phases of Rocca and AEGIS-128/128L/256, respectively. Besides, we evaluate the round function of Rocca and those of Jean and Nikolić as cryptographic permutations against differential, impossible differential, and integral attacks. Our results indicate that, for differential attacks, the growth rate of increasing the number of active S-boxes in Rocca is faster than those of Jean and Nikolić. For impossible differential and integral attacks, we show that the round function of Rocca achieves the sufficient level of the security against these attacks in smaller number of rounds than those of Jean and Nikolić.

Plaintext recovery and tag guessing attacks on authenticated encryption algorithm COLM

There are three main approaches related to cryptanalysis of Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) algorithms: Simulating the encryption oracle (universal forgery attack), simulating the decryption oracle (plaintext recovery attack) and producing the valid tag of a given ciphertext (tag guessing attack). In this work, we analyze the security of COLM in these approaches. COLM is one of the AEAD algorithms chosen in the final portfolio for defense-in-depth use case of the CAESAR competition. The ciphers in this portfolio are supposed to provide robust security with their multiple layered defense mechanisms. The main motivation of this work is to examine if COLM indeed satisfies defense-in-depth security. We make cryptanalysis of COLM, particularly in the chosen ciphertext attack (CCA) scenario, once its secret whitening parameter L=EK(0) is recovered. To the best of our knowledge, we give the first example of querying an EME/EMD (Encrypt-linearMix-Encrypt/Decrypt) AEAD scheme in its decryption direction for arbitrary ciphertexts, not produced previously by the oracle, namely either a forgery or tag guessing attack. We construct SEBC/SDBC (Simulation models of the Encryption/Decryption oracles of the underlying Block Cipher) of COLM, thereby forming the first examples of these models of an authenticated EME scheme simultaneously. The combination of our SEBC/SDBC is a powerful tool to mount a universal forgery attack, a tag guessing attack and a plaintext recovery attack. All of these attacks have polynomial time complexities once L is recovered in the offline phase, indicating that the security of COLM against plaintext recovery and tag guessing attacks is limited by the birthday bound. Apart from exploiting SEBC/SDBC, we mount a pair of plaintext recovery attacks and another universal forgery attack. Finally, we make some suggestions to prevent our attacks.

Security of COFB against Chosen Ciphertext Attacks

COFB is a lightweight Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) mode based on block ciphers. It was proposed in CHES 2017 and is the basis for GIFT-COFB, a finalist in the NIST lightweight standardization project. It comes with provable security results that guarantee its security up to the birthday bound in the nonce-respecting model. However, the designers offer multiple versions of the analysis with different details and the implications of attacks against the scheme are not discussed deeply. In this article, we look at a group of possible forgery and privacy attacks against COFB. We show that the security for both forgery and privacy is bounded by the number of forgery attempts. We show the existence of forgery and privacy attacks with success probability qd/2n/2, given qd forgery attempts. In particular, we show an attack with 2n/2 attempts using only a single known-plaintext encryption query against COFB. While these attacks do not contradict the claims made by the designers of GIFT-COFB, they show its limitations in terms of the number of forgery attempts. They also show that, while COFB generates a 128-bit tag, it behaves in a very similar manner to an AEAD scheme with 64-bit tag. As a result of independent interest, our analysis provides a contradiction to the main theorem of Journal of Cryptology volume 33, pages 703–741 (2020), which includes an improved security proof of COFB compared to the CHES 2017 version. Finally, we discuss the term nqd/2n/2 that appears in the security proof of GIFT-COFB and CHES 2017, showing why there is a security gap between the provable results and the attacks. We emphasize that the results in this article do not threaten the security of GIFT-COFB in the scope of the NIST lightweight cryptography requirements or the claims made by the designers in the specification document of the design.

Authenticated Encryption Based on Chaotic Neural Networks and Duplex Construction

In this paper, we propose, implement and analyze an Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data Scheme (AEADS) based on the Modified Duplex Construction (MDC) that contains a chaotic compression function (CCF) based on our chaotic neural network revised (CNNR). Unlike the standard duplex construction (SDC), in the MDC there are two phases: the initialization phase and the duplexing phase, each contain a CNNR formed by a neural network with single layer, and followed by a set of non-linear functions. The MDC is implemented with two variants of width, i.e., 512 and 1024 bits. We tested our proposed scheme against the different cryptanalytic attacks. In fact, we evaluated the key and the message sensitivity, the collision resistance analysis and the diffusion effect. Additionally, we tested our proposed AEADS using the different statistical tests such as NIST, Histogram, chi-square, entropy, and correlation analysis. The experimental results obtained on the security performance of the proposed AEADS system are notable and the proposed system can then be used to protect data and authenticate their sources.

Retrofitting Leakage Resilient Authenticated Encryption to Microcontrollers

The security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices relies on fundamental concepts such as cryptographically protected firmware updates. In this context attackers usually have physical access to a device and therefore side-channel attacks have to be considered. This makes the protection of required cryptographic keys and implementations challenging, especially for commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) microcontrollers that typically have no hardware countermeasures. In this work, we demonstrate how unprotected hardware AES engines of COTS microcontrollers can be efficiently protected against side-channel attacks by constructing a leakage resilient pseudo random function (LR-PRF). Using this side-channel protected building block, we implement a leakage resilient authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) scheme that enables secured firmware updates. We use concepts from leakage resilience to retrofit side-channel protection on unprotected hardware AES engines by means of software-only modifications. The LR-PRF construction leverages frequent key changes and low data complexity together with key dependent noise from parallel hardware to protect against side-channel attacks. Contrary to most other protection mechanisms such as time-based hiding, no additional true randomness is required. Our concept relies on parallel S-boxes in the AES hardware implementation, a feature that is fortunately present in many microcontrollers as a measure to increase performance. In a case study, we implement the protected AEAD scheme for two popular ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers with differing parallelism. We evaluate the protection capabilities in realistic IoT attack scenarios, where non-invasive EM probes or power consumption measurements are employed by the attacker. We show that the concept provides the side-channel hardening that is required for the long-term security of IoT devices.

Combiners for AEAD

The Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) primitive, which integrates confidentiality and integrity services under a single roof, found wide-spread adoption in industry and became indispensable in practical protocol design. Recognizing this, academic research put forward a large number of candidate constructions, many of which come with provable security guarantees. Nevertheless, the recent past has shaken up with the discovery of vulnerabilities, some of them fatal, in well-regarded schemes, stemming from weak underlying primitives, flawed security arguments, implementation-level vulnerabilities, and so on. Simply reacting to such findings by replacing broken candidates by better(?) ones is in many cases unduly, costly, and sometimes just impossible. On the other hand, as attack techniques and opportunities change over time, it seems venturous to propose any specific scheme if the intended lifetime of its application is, say, twenty years.In this work we study a workable approach towards increasing the resilience against unforeseen breaks of AEAD primitives. Precisely, we consider the ability to combine two AEAD schemes into one such that the resulting AEAD scheme is secure as long as at least one of its components is (or: as long as at most one component is broken). We propose a series of such combiners, some of which work with fully generic AEAD components while others assume specific internal structures of the latter (like an encrypt-then-MAC design). We complement our results by proving the optimality of our constructions by showing the impossibility of combiners that get along with less invocations of the component algorithms.

TEDT, a Leakage-Resist AEAD Mode for High Physical Security Applications

We propose TEDT, a new Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data (AEAD) mode leveraging Tweakable Block Ciphers (TBCs). TEDT provides the following features: (i) It offers full leakage-resistance, that is, it limits the exploitability of physical leakages via side-channel attacks, even if these leakages happen during every message encryption and decryption operation. Moreover, the leakage integrity bound is asymptotically optimal in the multi-user setting. (ii) It offers nonce misuse-resilience, that is, the repetition of nonces does not impact the security of ciphertexts produced with fresh nonces. (iii) It can be implemented with a remarkably low energy cost when strong resistance to side-channel attacks is needed, supports online encryption and handles static and incremental associated data efficiently. Concretely, TEDT encourages so-called leveled implementations, in which two TBCs are implemented: the first one needs strong and energy demanding protections against side-channel attacks but is used in a limited way, while the other only requires weak and energy-efficient protections and performs the bulk of the computation. As a result, TEDT leads to more energy-efficient implementations compared to traditional AEAD schemes, whose side-channel security requires to uniformly protect every (T)BC execution.

Integrity analysis of authenticated encryption based on stream ciphers

We study the security of authenticated encryption based on a stream cipher and a universal hash function. We consider ChaCha20-Poly1305 and generic constructions proposed by Sarkar, where the generic constructions include 14 AEAD (authenticated encryption with associated data) schemes and 3 DAEAD (deterministic AEAD) schemes. In this paper, we analyze the integrity of these schemes both in the standard INT-CTXT (integrity of ciphertext) notion and in the RUP (releasing unverified plaintext) setting called INT-RUP notion. We present INT-CTXT attacks against 3 out of the 14 AEAD schemes and 1 out of the 3 DAEAD schemes. We then show INT-RUP attacks against 1 out of the 14 AEAD schemes and the 2 remaining DAEAD schemes. Next, we consider ChaCha20-Poly1305 and show that it is provably secure in the INT-RUP notion. Finally, we show that the remaining 10 AEAD schemes are provably secure in the INT-RUP notion.

A Chaos-Based Authenticated Cipher with Associated Data

In recent years, there has been a rising interest in authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) which combines encryption and authentication into a unified scheme. AEAD schemes provide authentication for a message that is divided into two parts: associated data which is not encrypted and the plaintext which is encrypted. However, there is a lack of chaos-based AEAD schemes in recent literature. This paper introduces a new 128-bit chaos-based AEAD scheme based on the single-key Even-Mansour and Type-II generalized Feistel structure. The proposed scheme provides both privacy and authentication in a single-pass using only one 128-bit secret key. The chaotic tent map is used to generate whitening keys for the Even-Mansour construction, round keys, and random s-boxes for the Feistel round function. In addition, the proposed AEAD scheme can be implemented with true random number generators to map a message to multiple possible ciphertexts in a nondeterministic manner. Security and statistical evaluation indicate that the proposed scheme is highly secure for both the ciphertext and the authentication tag. Furthermore, it has multiple advantages over AES-GCM which is the current standard for authenticated encryption.

Modes of operations for encryption and authentication using stream ciphers supporting an initialisation vector

We describe a systematic framework for using a stream cipher supporting an initialisation vector (IV) to perform various tasks of authentication and authenticated encryption. These include message authentication code (MAC), authenticated encryption (AE), authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) and deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE) with associated data. Several schemes are presented and rigourously analysed. A major component of the constructions is a keyed hash function having provably low collision and differential probabilities. Methods are described to efficiently extend such hash functions to take multiple inputs. In particular, double-input hash functions are required for the construction of AEAD schemes. An important practical aspect of our work is that a designer can combine off-the-shelf stream ciphers with off-the-shelf hash functions to obtain secure primitives for MAC, AE, AEAD and DAE(AD).