There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

National Institute of Standards and Technology における超伝導研究及び生活

We present a new block cipher LED. While dedicated to compact hardware implementation, and offering the smallest silicon footprint among comparable block ciphers, the cipher has been designed to simultaneously tackle three additional goals. First, we explore the role of an ultra-light (in fact non-existent) key schedule. Second, we consider the resistance of ciphers, and LED in particular, to related-key attacks: we are able to derive simple yet interesting AES-like security proofs for LED regarding related- or single-key attacks. And third, while we provide a block cipher that is very compact in hardware, we aim to maintain a reasonable performance profile for software implementation.

The LED block cipher

Smart grids equipped with bi-directional communication flow are expected to provide more sophisticated consumption monitoring and energy trading. However, the issues related to the security and privacy of consumption and trading data present serious challenges. In this paper we address the problem of providing transaction security in decentralized smart grid energy trading without reliance on trusted third parties. We have implemented a proof-of-concept for decentralized energy trading system using blockchain technology, multi-signatures, and anonymous encrypted messaging streams, enabling peers to anonymously negotiate energy prices and securely perform trading transactions. We conducted case studies to perform security analysis and performance evaluation within the context of the elicited security and privacy requirements.

Security and Privacy in Decentralized Energy Trading Through Multi-Signatures, Blockchain and Anonymous Messaging Streams

Since Rijndael was chosen as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), improving upon 7-round attacks on the 128-bit key variant (out of 10 rounds) or upon 8-round attacks on the 192/256-bit key variants (out of 12/14 rounds) has been one of the most difficult challenges in the cryptanalysis of block ciphers for more than a decade. In this paper, we present the novel technique of block cipher cryptanalysis with bicliques, which leads to the following results:

 

The first key recovery method for the full AES-128 with computational complexity 2126.1.

The first key recovery method for the full AES-192 with computational complexity 2189.7.

The first key recovery method for the full AES-256 with computational complexity 2254.4.

Key recovery methods with lower complexity for the reduced-round versions of AES not considered before, including cryptanalysis of 8-round AES-128 with complexity 2124.9.

Preimage search for compression functions based on the full AES versions faster than brute force.

In contrast to most shortcut attacks on AES variants, we do not need to assume related-keys. Most of our techniques only need a very small part of the codebook and have low memory requirements, and are practically verified to a large extent. As our cryptanalysis is of high computational complexity, it does not threaten the practical use of AES in any way.

/pdf/biclique-cryptanalysis-of-the-full-aes-pi8uwf8n7d.pdf

Biclique cryptanalysis of the full AES

Whirlpool is a hash function based on a block cipher that can be seen as a scaled up variant of the AES. The main difference is the (compared to AES) extremely conservative key schedule. In this work, we present a distinguishing attack on the full compression function of Whirlpool. We obtain this result by improving the rebound attack on reduced Whirlpool with two new techniques. First, the inbound phase of the rebound attack is extended by up to two rounds using the available degrees of freedom of the key schedule. This results in a near-collision attack on 9.5 rounds of the compression function of Whirlpool with a complexity of 2176 and negligible memory requirements. Second, we show how to turn this near-collision attack into a distinguishing attack for the full 10 round compression function of Whirlpool. This is the first result on the full Whirlpool compression function.

https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/258382/2/article-1374.pdf

Rebound Distinguishers: Results on the Full Whirlpool Compression Function

Fresh re-keying is a type of protocol which aims at splitting the task of protecting an encryption/authentication scheme against side-channel attacks in two parts. One part, a re-keying function, has to satisfy a minimum set of properties such as good diffusion, and is based on an algebraic structure that is easy to protect against side-channel attacks with countermeasures such as masking. The other part, a block cipher, brings resistance against mathematical cryptanalysis, and only has to be secure against single-measurement attacks. Since fresh re-keying schemes are cheap and stateless, they are convenient to use in practice and do not require any synchronization between communication parties. However, it has been shown that their first instantiation from Africacrypt 2010 only provides birthday security because of a mathematical only collision-based key recovery attack recently put forward by Dobraunigi¾?eti¾?al. CARDIS 2014. In this paper, we provide two provably secure in the ideal cipher model solutions to avoid such collision attacks. The first one is based on classical block ciphers, but does not achieve beyond-birthday CPA security i.e. it only provably prevents the CARDIS 2014 key recovery attack and requires an additional block cipher execution in the protocol. The second one is based on tweakable block ciphers and provides tight CPA security while also being more efficient. As a complement, we also show that our reasoning extends to hybrid schemes, where the communication party to protect against side-channel attacks is stateful. We illustrate this claim by describing a collision attack against an example of a hybrid scheme patented by Kocher, and presenting a tweak leading to beyond birthday security. We conclude the paper by discussing the use of fresh/hybrid re-keying for encryption and authentication, together with a cautionary note on their side-channel resistance.

/pdf/towards-fresh-and-hybrid-re-keying-schemes-with-beyond-rp7s23oqrs.pdf

Towards Fresh and Hybrid Re-Keying Schemes with Beyond Birthday Security

In this work, we study the application of higher-order differential attacks on hash functions. We show a second-order differential attack on the SHA-256 compression function reduced to 46 out of 64 steps. We implemented the attack and give the result in Table 1. The best attack so far (in a different attack model) with practical complexity was for 33 steps of the compression function.

/pdf/higher-order-differential-attack-on-reduced-sha-256-bwujjjd2qo.pdf

Higher-Order Differential Attack on Reduced SHA-256.

We present a detailed security analysis of the CAESAR candidate Ascon. Amongst others, cube-like, differential and linear cryptanalysis are used to evaluate the security of Ascon. Our results are practical key-recovery attacks on round-reduced versions of Ascon-128, where the initialization is reduced to 5 out of 12 rounds. Theoretical key-recovery attacks are possible for up to 6 rounds of initialization. Moreover, we present a practical forgery attack for 3 rounds of the finalization, a theoretical forgery attack for 4 rounds finalization and zero-sum distinguishers for the full 12-round Ascon permutation. Besides, we present the first results regarding linear cryptanalysis of Ascon, improve upon the results of the designers regarding differential cryptanalysis, and prove bounds on the minimum number of (linearly and differentially) active S-boxes for the Ascon permutation.

Cryptanalysis of Ascon

In this article we present a detailed analysis of the impact of carries on the estimation of the attack complexity for SHA-1. We build up on existing estimates and refine them. We show that the attack complexity is slightly lower than estimated in all published work to date. We point out that it is more accurate to consider probabilities instead of conditions.

/pdf/the-impact-of-carries-on-the-complexity-of-collision-attacks-o6lsaog5ry.pdf

Florian Mendel

Papers

Rebound Distinguishers: Results on the Full Whirlpool Compression Function

Towards Fresh and Hybrid Re-Keying Schemes with Beyond Birthday Security

Higher-Order Differential Attack on Reduced SHA-256.

Cryptanalysis of Ascon

The impact of carries on the complexity of collision attacks on SHA-1