Sponge function

About: Sponge function is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 159 publications have been published within this topic receiving 3919 citations.

Cube Attacks and Cube-attack-like Cryptanalysis on the Round-reduced Keccak Sponge Function.

Abstract: In this paper, we comprehensively study the resistance of keyed variants of SHA-3 (Keccak) against algebraic attacks. This analysis covers a wide range of key recovery, MAC forgery and other types of attacks, breaking up to 9 rounds (out of the full 24) of the Keccak internal permutation much faster than exhaustive search. Moreover, some of our attacks on the 6-round Keccak are completely practical and were verified on a desktop PC. Our methods combine cube attacks (an algebraic key recovery attack) and related algebraic techniques with structural analysis of the Keccak permutation. These techniques should be useful in future cryptanalysis of Keccak and similar designs. Although our attacks break more rounds than previously published techniques, the security margin of Keccak remains large. For Keyak – a Keccak-based authenticated encryption scheme – the nominal number of rounds is 12 and therefore its security margin is smaller (although still sufficient).

On the security of two improved authenticated encryption schemes

Abstract: Authenticated encryption schemes are cryptographic primitives that are used to simultaneously protect the confidentiality and authenticity of communications. In 2003, Tseng et al. proposed two efficient authenticated encryption schemes with message linkages for message flows. Two years later, Zhang et al. pointed out that these two schemes lack the non-repudiation property and presented a new authenticated encryption scheme to surmount these weaknesses. Besides, in 2006, Hwang et al. presented another forgery attack against the original schemes and proposed some modified schemes to repair these flaws. In this paper, we show that the new authenticated encryption scheme proposed by Zhang et al. does not satisfy its claimed non-repudiation and authentication properties. We also present an attack against Hwang et al.'s scheme that allows a dishonest referee to decrypt all the future and past authenticated ciphertext between the contending parties. Furthermore, we present a simple fix to prevent these attacks.

sp-AELM: Sponge Based Authenticated Encryption Scheme for Memory Constrained Devices

Abstract: 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 these 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.

Analysis of stream cipher based authenticated encryption schemes

Abstract: Authenticated Encryption (AE) is the cryptographic process of providing simultaneous confidentiality and integrity protection to messages. This approach is more efficient than applying a two-step process of providing confidentiality for a message by encrypting the message, and in a separate pass providing integrity protection by generating a Message Authentication Code (MAC). AE using symmetric ciphers can be provided by either stream ciphers with built in authentication mechanisms or block ciphers using appropriate modes of operation. However, stream ciphers have the potential for higher performance and smaller footprint in hardware and/or software than block ciphers. This property makes stream ciphers suitable for resource constrained environments, where storage and computational power are limited. There have been several recent stream cipher proposals that claim to provide AE. These ciphers can be analysed using existing techniques that consider confidentiality or integrity separately; however currently there is no existing framework for the analysis of AE stream ciphers that analyses these two properties simultaneously. This thesis introduces a novel framework for the analysis of AE using stream cipher algorithms. This thesis analyzes the mechanisms for providing confidentiality and for providing integrity in AE algorithms using stream ciphers. There is a greater emphasis on the analysis of the integrity mechanisms, as there is little in the public literature on this, in the context of authenticated encryption. The thesis has four main contributions as follows. The first contribution is the design of a framework that can be used to classify AE stream ciphers based on three characteristics. The first classification applies Bellare and Namprempre's work on the the order in which encryption and authentication processes take place. The second classification is based on the method used for accumulating the input message (either directly or indirectly) into the into the internal states of the cipher to generate a MAC. The third classification is based on whether the sequence that is used to provide encryption and authentication is generated using a single key and initial vector, or two keys and two initial vectors. The second contribution is the application of an existing algebraic method to analyse the confidentiality algorithms of two AE stream ciphers; namely SSS and ZUC. The algebraic method is based on considering the nonlinear filter (NLF) of these ciphers as a combiner with memory. This method enables us to construct equations for the NLF that relate the (inputs, outputs and memory of the combiner) to the output keystream. We show that both of these ciphers are secure from this type of algebraic attack. We conclude that using a keydependent SBox in the NLF twice, and using two different SBoxes in the NLF of ZUC, prevents this type of algebraic attack. The third contribution is a new general matrix based model for MAC generation where the input message is injected directly into the internal state. This model describes the accumulation process when the input message is injected directly into the internal state of a nonlinear filter generator. We show that three recently proposed AE stream ciphers can be considered as instances of this model; namely SSS, NLSv2 and SOBER-128. Our model is more general than a previous investigations into direct injection. Possible forgery attacks against this model are investigated. It is shown that using a nonlinear filter in the accumulation process of the input message when either the input message or the initial states of the register is unknown prevents forgery attacks based on collisions. The last contribution is a new general matrix based model for MAC generation where the input message is injected indirectly into the internal state. This model uses the input message as a controller to accumulate a keystream sequence into an accumulation register. We show that three current AE stream ciphers can be considered as instances of this model; namely ZUC, Grain-128a and Sfinks. We establish the conditions under which the model is susceptible to forgery and side-channel attacks.