IACR News item: 14 September 2015
Kazuhiko Minematsu, Tetsu Iwata
ePrint ReportIn this paper we study the problem of extending tweak of a given TBC of fixed-length tweak,
which is a variant of popular problem of converting a blockcipher into a TBC, i.e., blockcipher mode of operation.
The problem is particularly important for known dedicated TBCs since they have relatively short tweak.
We propose a simple and efficient solution, called XTX, for this problem.
XTX converts a TBC of fixed-length tweak into another TBC of arbitrarily long tweak, by extending the scheme of Liskov, Rivest and Wagner that converts a blockcipher into a TBC.
Given a TBC of $n$-bit block and $m$-bit tweak, XTX provides $(n+m)/2$-bit security while conventional methods provide $n/2$ or $m/2$-bit security.
We also show that XTX is even useful when combined with some blockcipher modes for building TBC having security beyond the birthday bound.
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