## CryptoDB

### Bart Mennink

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2022
TOSC
2022
CRYPTO
The cryptographic sponge is a popular method for hash function design. The construction is in the ideal permutation model proven to be indifferentiable from a random oracle up to the birthday bound in the capacity of the sponge. This result in particular implies that, as long as the attack complexity does not exceed this bound, the sponge construction achieves a comparable level of collision, preimage, and second preimage resistance as a random oracle. We investigate these state-of-the-art bounds in detail, and observe that while the collision and second preimage security bounds are tight, the preimage bounds not tight. We derive an improved and tight preimage security bound for the cryptographic sponge construction. The result has direct implications for various lightweight cryptographic hash functions. For example, the NIST Lightweight Cryptography finalist Ascon-Hash does not generically achieve $2^{128}$ preimage security as claimed, but even $2^{192}$ preimage security. Comparable improvements are obtained for the modes of Spongent, PHOTON, ACE, Subterranean 2.0, and QUARK, among others.
2022
ASIACRYPT
Indifferentiability is a powerful notion in cryptography. If a construction is proven to be indifferentiable from an ideal object, it can under certain assumptions instantiate that ideal object in higher-level constructions. Indifferentiability is a particularly useful model for cryptographic hash functions, and myriad results are known proving that a hash function behaves like a random oracle under the assumption that the underlying primitive (typically a compression function, a block cipher, or a permutation) is random. Recently, advances have been made in proving indifferentiability of one-way functions with fixed input length. One such example is truncation of a permutation. If one evaluates a random permutation on an input value concatenated with a fixed initial value, and truncates the output, one obtains a construction that is indifferentiable from a random function up to a certain bound (Dodis et al., FSE 2009; Choi et al., ASIACRYPT 2019). Security of this construction, however, is in part determined by the length of the initial value; omission of this fixed value yields an insecure construction. In this paper, we reconsider truncation of a permutation, and prove that the construction is indifferentiable from a random oracle, even if this fixed initial value is replaced by a randomized value. This randomized value may be the same for different evaluations of the construction, or freshly generated, up to the discretion of the adversary. The security level is the same as that of truncation with fixed initial value, up to collisions in the randomized value. We show that our construction has immediate implications in the context of parallel variable-length digest generation. In detail, we describe Cascade-MGF, that operates on top of any cryptographic hash function and uses the hash function output as randomized initial value in truncation. We demonstrate that Cascade-MGF compares favorably over earlier parallel variable-length digest generation constructions, namely Counter-MGF and Chained-MGF, in almost all settings.
2021
EUROCRYPT
Side-channel attacks are a threat to secrets stored on a device, especially if an adversary has physical access to the device. As an effect of this, countermeasures against such attacks for cryptographic algorithms are a well-researched topic. In this work, we deviate from the study of cryptographic algorithms and instead focus on the side-channel protection of a much more basic operation, the comparison of a known attacker-controlled value with a secret one. Comparisons sensitive to side-channel leakage occur in tag comparisons during the verification of message authentication codes (MACs) or authenticated encryption, but are typically omitted in security analyses. Besides, also comparisons performed as part of fault countermeasures might be sensitive to side-channel attacks. In this work, we present a formal analysis on comparing values in a leakage resilient manner by utilizing cryptographic building blocks that are typically part of an implementation anyway. Our results indicate that there is no need to invest additional resources into implementing a protected comparison operation itself if a sufficiently protected implementation of a public cryptographic permutation, or a (tweakable) block cipher, is already available. We complement our contribution by applying our findings to the SuKS message authentication code used by lightweight authenticated encryption scheme ISAP, and to the classical Hash-then-PRF construction.
2021
ASIACRYPT
A growing number of lightweight block ciphers are proposed for environments such as the Internet of Things. An important contribution to the reduced implementation cost is a block length n of 64 or 96 bits rather than 128 bits. As a consequence, encryption modes and message authentication code (MAC) algorithms require security beyond the 2^{n/2} birthday bound. This paper provides an extensive treatment of MAC algorithms that offer beyond birthday bound PRF security for both nonce-respecting and nonce-misusing adversaries. We study constructions that use two block cipher calls, one universal hash function call and an arbitrary number of XOR operations. We start with the separate problem of generically identifying all possible secure n-to-n-bit pseudorandom functions (PRFs) based on two block cipher calls. The analysis shows that the existing constructions EDM, SoP, and EDMD are the only constructions of this kind that achieve beyond birthday bound security. Subsequently we deliver an exhaustive treatment of MAC algorithms, where the outcome of a universal hash function evaluation on the message may be entered at any point in the computation of the PRF. We conclude that there are a total amount of nine schemes that achieve beyond birthday bound security, and a tenth construction that cannot be proven using currently known proof techniques. For these former nine MAC algorithms, three constructions achieve optimal n-bit security in the nonce-respecting setting, but are completely insecure if the nonce is reused. The remaining six constructions have 3n/4-bit security in the nonce-respecting setting, and only four out of these six constructions still achieve beyond the birthday bound security in the case of nonce misuse.
2020
TOSC
In ToSC 2018(4), Daemen et al. performed an in-depth investigation of sound hashing modes based on arbitrary functions, permutations, or block ciphers. However, for the case of invertible primitives, there is a glitch. In this errata, we formally fix this glitch by adding an extra term to the security bound, q/2b−n, where q is query complexity, b the width of the permutation or the block size of the block cipher, and n the size of the hash digest. For permutations that are wider than two times the chaining value this term is negligible. For block cipher based hashing modes where the block size is close to the digest size, the term degrades the security significantly.
2020
TOSC
We present two tweakable wide block cipher modes from doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed (deck) functions and a keyed hash function: double-decker and docked-double-decker. Double-decker is a direct generalization of Farfalle-WBC of Bertoni et al. (ToSC 2017(4)), and is a four-round Feistel network on two arbitrarily large branches, where the middle two rounds call deck functions and the first and last rounds call the keyed hash function. Docked-double-decker is a variant of double-decker where the bulk of the input to the deck functions is moved to the keyed hash functions. We prove that the distinguishing advantage of the resulting wide block ciphers is simply two times the sum of the pseudorandom function distinguishing advantage of the deck function and the blinded keyed hashing distinguishing advantage of the keyed hash functions. We demonstrate that blinded keyed hashing is more general than the conventional notion of XOR-universality, and that it allows us to instantiate our constructions with keyed hash functions that have a very strong claim on bkh security but not necessarily on XOR-universality, such as Xoofffie (ePrint 2018/767). The bounds of double-decker and docked-double-decker are moreover reduced tweak-dependent, informally meaning that collisions on the keyed hash function for different tweaks only have a limited impact. We describe two use cases that can exploit this property opportunistically to get stronger security than what would be achieved with prior solutions: SSD encryption, where each sector can only be written to a limited number of times, and incremental tweaks, where one includes the state of the system in the variable-length tweak and appends new data incrementally.
2020
TOSC
Authenticated encryption schemes are usually expected to offer confidentiality and authenticity. In case of release of unverified plaintext (RUP), an adversary gets separated access to the decryption and verification functionality, and has more power in breaking the scheme. Andreeva et al. (ASIACRYPT 2014) formalized RUP security using plaintext awareness, informally meaning that the decryption functionality gives no extra power in breaking confidentiality, and INT-RUP security, covering authenticity in case of RUP. We describe a single, unified model, called AERUP security, that ties together these notions: we prove that an authenticated encryption scheme is AERUP secure if and only if it is conventionally secure, plaintext aware, and INT-RUP secure. We next present ANYDAE, a generalization of SUNDAE of Banik et al. (ToSC 2018/3). ANYDAE is a lightweight deterministic scheme that is based on a block cipher with block size n and arbitrary mixing functions that all operate on an n-bit state. It is particularly efficient for short messages, it does not rely on a nonce, and it provides maximal robustness to a lack of secure state. Whereas SUNDAE is not secure under release of unverified plaintext (a fairly simple attack can be mounted in constant time), ANYDAE is. We make handy use of the AERUP security model to prove that ANYDAE achieves both conventional security as RUP security, provided that certain modest conditions on the mixing functions are met. We describe two simple instances, called MONDAE and TUESDAE, that conform to these conditions and that are competitive with SUNDAE, in terms of efficiency and optimality.
2020
TOSC
We formalize and analyze the general suffix keyed sponge construction, a pseudorandom function built on top of a cryptographic permutation. The construction hashes its data using the (keyless) sponge construction, transforms part of the state using the secret key, and generates the tag from the output of a final permutation call. In its simplest form, if the key and tag size are at most the rate of the sponge, one can see the suffix keyed sponge as a simple sponge function evaluation whose input is the plaintext appended with the key. The suffix keyed sponge is, however, much more general: the key and tag size may exceed the rate without any need to make extra permutation calls. We prove that the suffix keyed sponge construction achieves birthday-bound PRF security in the capacity, even if key and tag size exceed the rate. Furthermore, we prove that if the absorption of the key into the state happens in a leakage resilient manner, the suffix keyed sponge itself is leakage resilient as well. Our findings show that the suffix keyed sponge compares favorably with the hash-then-MAC construction. For instance, to reach a security level of k bits, the side-channel protected component in the suffix keyed sponge just needs to process k bits of input besides the key, whereas schemes following the hash-then-MAC construction need a side-channel protected MAC function that processes 2k bits of input besides the key. Moreover, even if we just consider black-box attacks, the MAC function in a hash-then-MAC scheme needs to be cryptographically strong whereas in the suffix keyed sponge the key may be absorbed by a simple XOR. The security proofs are performed using the H-coefficient technique, and make effective use of the multicollision limit function results of Daemen et al. (ASIACRYPT 2017), both for arguing that state manipulation larger than the rate is tolerated after key processing and for upper bounding the amount of leakage an attacker may gain about the secret key.
2020
CRYPTO
A well-established PRP-to-PRF conversion design is truncation: one evaluates an $n$-bit pseudorandom permutation on a certain input, and truncates the result to $a$ bits. The construction is known to achieve tight $2^{n-a/2}$ security. Truncation has gained popularity due to its appearance in the GCM-SIV key derivation function (ACM CCS 2015). This key derivation function makes four evaluations of AES, truncates the outputs to $n/2$ bits, and concatenates these to get a $2n$-bit subkey. In this work, we demonstrate that truncation is wasteful. In more detail, we present the Summation-Truncation Hybrid (STH). At a high level, the construction consists of two parallel evaluations of truncation, where the truncated $(n-a)$-bit chunks are not discarded but rather summed together and appended to the output. We prove that STH achieves a similar security level as truncation, and thus that the $n-a$ bits of extra output is rendered for free. In the application of GCM-SIV, the current key derivation can be used to output $3n$ bits of random material, or it can be reduced to three primitive evaluations. Both changes come with no security loss.
2020
TOSC
With the trend to connect more and more devices to the Internet, authenticated encryption has become a major backbone in securing the communication, not only between these devices and servers, but also the direct communication among these devices. Most authenticated encryption algorithms used in practice are developed to perform well on modern high-end devices, but are not necessarily suited for usage on resource-constrained devices. We present a lightweight authenticated encryption scheme, called Elephant. Elephant retains the advantages of GCM such as parallelism, but is tailored to the needs of resource-constrained devices. The two smallest instances of Elephant, Dumbo and Jumbo, are based on the 160-bit and 176-bit Spongent permutation, respectively, and are particularly suited for hardware; the largest instance of Elephant, Delirium, is based on 200-bit Keccak and is developed towards software use. All three instances are parallelizable, have a small state size while achieving a high level of security, and are constant time by design.
2020
TOSC
We specify Isap v2.0, a lightweight permutation-based authenticated encryption algorithm that is designed to ease protection against side-channel and fault attacks. This design is an improved version of the previously published Isap v1.0, and offers increased protection against implementation attacks as well as more efficient implementations. Isap v2.0 is a candidate in NIST’s LightWeight Cryptography (LWC) project, which aims to identify and standardize authenticated ciphers that are well-suited for applications in constrained environments. We provide a self-contained specification of the new Isap v2.0 mode and discuss its design rationale. We formally prove the security of the Isap v2.0 mode in the leakage-resilient setting. Finally, in an extensive implementation overview, we show that Isap v2.0 can be implemented securely with very low area requirements. https://isap.iaik.tugraz.at
2020
ASIACRYPT
Fresh rekeying is a well-established method to protect a primitive or mode against side-channel attacks: an easy to protect but cryptographically not so involved function generates a subkey from the master key, and this subkey is then used for the block encryption of a single or a few messages. It is an efficient way to achieve side-channel protection, but current solutions only achieve birthday bound security in the block size of the cipher and thus halve its security (except if more involved primitives are employed). We present generalized solutions to parallel block cipher rekeying that, for the first time, achieve security beyond the birthday bound in the block size $n$. The first solution involves, next to the subkey generation, one multiplication and the core block cipher call and achieves $2^{2n/3}$ security. The second solution makes two block cipher calls, and achieves optimal $2^n$ security. Our third solution uses a slightly larger subkey generation function but requires no adaptations to the core encryption and also achieves optimal security. The construction seamlessly generalizes to permutation based fresh rekeying. Central to our schemes is the observation that fresh rekeying and generic tweakable block cipher design are two very related topics, and we can take lessons from the advanced results in the latter to improve our understanding and development of the former. We subsequently use these rekeying schemes in a constructive manner to deliver three authenticated encryption modes that achieve beyond birthday bound security and are easy to protect against side-channel attacks.
2020
TOSC
Generic attacks are a vital ingredient in the evaluation of the tightness of security proofs. In this paper, we evaluate the tightness of the suffix keyed sponge (SuKS) bound. As its name suggests, SuKS is a sponge-based construction that absorbs the key after absorbing the data, but before producing an output. This absorption of the key can be done via an easy to invert operation, like an XOR, or a hard to invert operation, like a PRF. Using SuKS with a hard to invert absorption provides benefits with respect to its resistance against side-channel attacks, and such a construction is used as part of the authenticated encryption scheme Isap. We derive two key recovery attacks against SuKS with easy to invert key absorption, and a forgery in case of hard to invert key absorption. The attacks closely match the terms in the PRF security bound of SuKS by Dobraunig and Mennink, ToSC 2019(4), and therewith show that these terms are justified, even if the function used to absorb the key is a PRF, and regardless of whether SuKS is used as a PRF or a MAC.
2019
CRYPTO
Pseudorandom functions are traditionally built upon block ciphers, but with the trend of permutation based cryptography, it is a natural question to investigate the design of pseudorandom functions from random permutations. We present a generic study of how to build beyond birthday bound secure pseudorandom functions from public random permutations. We first show that a pseudorandom function based on a single permutation call cannot be secure beyond the $2^{n/2}$ birthday bound, where n is the state size of the function. We next consider the Sum of Even-Mansour (SoEM) construction, that instantiates the sum of permutations with the Even-Mansour construction. We prove that SoEM achieves tight $2n{/}3$-bit security if it is constructed from two independent permutations and two randomly drawn keys. We also demonstrate a birthday bound attack if either the permutations or the keys are identical. Finally, we present the Sum of Key Alternating Ciphers (SoKAC) construction, a translation of Encrypted Davies-Meyer Dual to a public permutation based setting, and show that SoKAC achieves tight $2n{/}3$-bit security even when a single key is used.
2019
ASIACRYPT
Side-channel attacks, especially differential power analysis (DPA), pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations deployed in a malicious environment. One way to counter side-channel attacks is to design cryptographic schemes to withstand them, an area that is covered amongst others by leakage resilient cryptography. So far, however, leakage resilient cryptography has predominantly focused on block cipher based designs, and insights in permutation based leakage resilient cryptography are scarce. In this work, we consider leakage resilience of the keyed duplex construction: we present a model for leakage resilient duplexing, derive a fine-grained bound on the security of the keyed duplex in said model, and map it to ideas of Taha and Schaumont (HOST 2014) and Dobraunig et al. (ToSC 2017) in order to use the duplex in a leakage resilient manner.
2019
JOFC
The Sponge function is known to achieve $2^{c/2}$ 2 c / 2 security, where c is its capacity. This bound was carried over to its keyed variants, such as SpongeWrap, to achieve a $\min \{2^{c/2},2^\kappa \}$ min { 2 c / 2 , 2 κ } security bound, with $\kappa$ κ the key length. Similarly, many CAESAR competition submissions were designed to comply with the classical $2^{c/2}$ 2 c / 2 security bound. We show that Sponge-based constructions for authenticated encryption can achieve the significantly higher bound of $\min \{2^{b/2},2^c,2^\kappa \}$ min { 2 b / 2 , 2 c , 2 κ } , with $b>c$ b > c the permutation size, by proving that the CAESAR submission NORX achieves this bound. The proof relies on rigorous computation of multi-collision probabilities, which may be of independent interest. We additionally derive a generic attack based on multi-collisions that matches the bound. We show how to apply the proof to five other Sponge-based CAESAR submissions: Ascon, CBEAM/STRIBOB, ICEPOLE, Keyak, and two out of the three PRIMATEs. A direct application of the result shows that the parameter choices of some of these submissions are overly conservative. Simple tweaks render the schemes considerably more efficient without sacrificing security. We finally consider the remaining one of the three PRIMATEs, APE, and derive a blockwise adaptive attack in the nonce-respecting setting with complexity $2^{c/2}$ 2 c / 2 , therewith demonstrating that the techniques cannot be applied to APE.
2018
TOSC
A non-malleable code is an unkeyed randomized encoding scheme that offers the strong guarantee that decoding a tampered codeword either results in the original message, or in an unrelated message. We consider the simplest possible construction in the computational split-state model, which simply encodes a message m as k||Ek(m) for a uniformly random key k, where E is a block cipher. This construction is comparable to, but greatly simplifies over, the one of Kiayias et al. (ACM CCS 2016), who eschewed this simple scheme in fear of related-key attacks on E. In this work, we prove this construction to be a strong non-malleable code as long as E is (i) a pseudorandom permutation under leakage and (ii) related-key secure with respect to an arbitrary but fixed key relation. Both properties are believed to hold for “good” block ciphers, such as AES-128, making this non-malleable code very efficient with short codewords of length |m|+2τ (where τ is the security parameter, e.g., 128 bits), without significant security penalty.
2018
TCC
The Cascaded LRW2 tweakable block cipher was introduced by Landecker et al. at CRYPTO 2012, and proven secure up to $2^{2n/3}$ queries. There has not been any attack on the construction faster than the generic attack in $2^n$ queries. In this work we initiate the quest towards a tight bound. We first present a distinguishing attack in $2n^{1/2}2^{3n/4}$ queries against a generalized version of the scheme. The attack is supported with an experimental verification and a formal success probability analysis. We subsequently discuss non-trivial bottlenecks in proving tight security, most importantly the distinguisher’s freedom in choosing the tweak values. Finally, we prove that if every tweak value occurs at most $2^{n/4}$ times, Cascaded LRW2 is secure up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries.
2018
ASIACRYPT
Length doublers are cryptographic functions that transform an n-bit cryptographic primitive into an efficient and secure cipher that length-preservingly encrypts strings of length in $[n,2n-1]$. All currently known constructions are only proven secure up to the birthday bound, and for all but one construction this bound is known to be tight. We consider the remaining candidate, $\mathrm {LDT}$ by Chen et al. (ToSC 2017(3)), and prove that it achieves beyond the birthday bound security for the domain [n, 3n / 2). We generalize the construction to multiple rounds and demonstrate that by adding one more encryption layer to $\mathrm {LDT}$, beyond the birthday bound security can be achieved for all strings of length in $[n,2n-1]$: security up to around $2^{2n/3}$ for the encryption of strings close to n and security up to around $2^{n}$ for strings of length close to 2n. The security analysis of both schemes is performed in a modular manner through the introduction and analysis of a new concept called “harmonic permutation primitives.”
2018
TOSC
The keyed sponge is a well-accepted method for message authentication. It processes data at a certain rate by sequential evaluation of an underlying permutation. If the key size k is smaller than the rate, currently known bounds are tight, but if it exceeds the rate, state of the art only dictates security up to 2k/2. We take closer inspection at the key prediction security of the sponge and close the remaining gap in the existing security analysis: we confirm key security up to close to 2k, regardless of the rate. The result impacts all applications of the keyed sponge and duplex that process at a rate smaller than the key size, including the STROBE protocol framework, as well as the related constructions such as HMAC-SHA-3 and the sandwich sponge.
2018
TOSC
Cryptographic hashing modes come in many flavors, including Merkle-Damgård with various types of strengthening, Merkle trees, and sponge functions. As underlying primitives, these functions use arbitrary functions, permutations, or block ciphers. In this work we provide three simple proofs, one per primitive type, that cover all modes where the input to the primitive consists of message bits, chaining value bits, and bits that only depend on the mode and message length. Our approach generalizes and simplifies over earlier attempts of Dodis et al. (FSE 2009) and Bertoni et al. (Int. J. Inf. Sec. 2014). We prove tight indifferentiability bounds for modes using each of these three primitive types provided that the mode satisfies some easy to verify conditions.
2017
CRYPTO
2017
CRYPTO
2017
ASIACRYPT
2017
ASIACRYPT
2017
TOSC
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.
2017
TOSC
We present a length doubler, LDT, that turns an n-bit tweakable block cipher into an efficient and secure cipher that can encrypt any bit string of length [n..2n − 1]. The LDT mode is simple, uses only two cryptographic primitive calls (while prior work needs at least four), and is a strong length-preserving pseudorandom permutation if the underlying tweakable block ciphers are strong tweakable pseudorandom permutations. We demonstrate that LDT can be used to neatly turn an authenticated encryption scheme for integral data into a mode for arbitrary-length data.
2017
TOSC
Cryptographic modes built on top of a blockcipher usually rely on the assumption that this primitive behaves like a pseudorandom permutation (PRP). For many of these modes, including counter mode and GCM, stronger security guarantees could be derived if they were based on a PRF design. We propose a heuristic method of transforming a dedicated blockcipher design into a dedicated PRF design. Intuitively, the method consists of evaluating the blockcipher once, with one or more intermediate state values fed-forward. It shows strong resemblance with the optimally secure EDMD construction by Mennink and Neves (CRYPTO 2017), but the use of internal state values make their security analysis formally inapplicable. In support of its security, we give the rationale of relying on the EDMD function (as opposed to alternatives), and present analysis of simplified versions of our conversion method applied to the AES. We conjecture that our main proposal AES-PRF, AES with a feed-forward of the middle state, achieves close to optimal security. We apply the design to GCM and GCM-SIV, and demonstrate how it entails significant security improvements. We furthermore demonstrate how the technique extends to tweakable blockciphers and allows for security improvements in, for instance, PMAC1.
2016
EUROCRYPT
2016
CRYPTO
2016
TOSC
BLAKE2 is a hash function introduced at ACNS 2013, which has been adopted in many constructions and applications. It is a successor to the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE, which received a significant amount of security analysis. Nevertheless, BLAKE2 introduces sufficient changes so that not all results from BLAKE carry over, meaning new analysis is necessary. To date, all known cryptanalysis done on BLAKE2 has focused on its underlying building blocks, with little focus placed on understanding BLAKE2’s generic security. We prove that BLAKE2’s compression function is indifferentiable from a random function in a weakly ideal cipher model, which was not the case for BLAKE. This implies that there are no generic attacks against any of the modes that BLAKE2 uses.
2015
FSE
2015
FSE
2015
ASIACRYPT
2015
ASIACRYPT
2014
CRYPTO
2014
ASIACRYPT
2014
ASIACRYPT
2014
FSE
2014
FSE
2013
CRYPTO
2013
ASIACRYPT
2013
FSE
2012
CRYPTO
2012
ASIACRYPT

Crypto 2022
Eurocrypt 2021
FSE 2020
Eurocrypt 2020
FSE 2019
Eurocrypt 2019
FSE 2018
Asiacrypt 2018
Eurocrypt 2018
Eurocrypt 2017
Asiacrypt 2017
FSE 2017
FSE 2016
Asiacrypt 2015