In this paper, we aim to explore the design of low-latency authenticated encryption schemes particularly for memory encryption, with a focus on the temporal uniqueness property. To achieve this, we present the low-latency Pseudo-Random Function (PRF) called Twinkle with an output up to 1152 bits. Leveraging only one block of Twinkle, we developed Twinkle-AE, a specialized authenticated encryption scheme with six variants covering different cache line sizes and security requirements. We also propose Twinkle-PA, a pointer authentication algorithm, which takes a 64-bit pointer and 64-bit context as input and outputs a tag of 1 to 32 bits.

We conducted thorough security evaluations of both the PRFs and these schemes, examining their robustness against various common attacks. The results of our cryptanalysis indicate that these designs successfully achieve their targeted security objectives.

Hardware implementations using the FreePDK45nm library show that Twinkle-AE achieves an encryption and authentication latency of 3.83 ns for a cache line. In comparison, AES-CTR with WC-MAC scheme and Ascon-128a achieve latencies of 9.78 ns and 27.30 ns, respectively. Moreover, Twinkle-AE is also most area-effective for the 1024-bit cache line. For the pointer authentication scheme Twinkle-PA, the latency is 2.04 ns, while QARMA-64-sigma0 has a latency of 5.57 ns.

Biscuit is a recent multivariate signature scheme based on the MPC-in-the-Head paradigm. It has been submitted to the NIST competition for additional signature schemes. Signatures are derived from a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of the solution of a structured polynomial system. This extra structure enables efficient proofs and compact signatures. This short note demonstrates that it also makes these polynomial systems easier to solve than random ones. As a consequence, the original parameters of Biscuit failed to meet the required security levels and had to be upgraded.

At CHES 2017, Banik et al. proposed a lightweight block cipher GIFT consisting of two versions GIFT-64 and GIFT-128. Recently, there are lots of authenticated encryption schemes that adopt GIFT-128 as their underlying primitive, such as GIFT-COFB and HyENA. To promote a comprehensive perception of the soundness of the designs, we evaluate their security against differential-linear cryptanalysis.

For this, automatic tools have been developed to search differential-linear approximation for the ciphers based on S-boxes. With the assistance of the automatic tools, we find 13-round differential-linear approximations for GIFT-COFB and HyENA. Based on the distinguishers, 18-round key-recovery attacks are given for the message processing phase and initialization phase of both ciphers. Moreover, the resistance of GIFT-64/128 against differential-linear cryptanalysis is also evaluated. The 12-round and 17-round differential-linear approximations are found for GIFT-64 and GIFT-128 respectively, which lead to 18-round and 19-round key-recovery attacks respectively. Here, we stress that our attacks do not threaten the security of these ciphers.

The LowMC family of block ciphers was proposed by Albrecht et al. in Eurocrypt 2015, specifically targeting adoption in FHE and MPC applications due to its low multiplicative complexity. The construction operates a 3-bit quadratic S-box as the sole non-linear transformation in the algorithm. In contrast, both the linear layer and round key generation are achieved through multiplications of full rank matrices over GF(2). The cipher is instantiable using a diverse set of default configurations, some of which have partial non-linear layers i.e., in which the S-boxes are not applied over the entire internal state of the cipher.

The significance of cryptanalysing LowMC was elevated by its inclusion into the NIST PQC digital signature scheme PICNIC in which a successful key recovery using a single plaintext/ciphertext pair is akin to retrieving the secret signing key. The current state-of-the-art attack in this setting is due to Dinur at Eurocrypt 2021, in which a novel way of enumerating roots of a Boolean system of equation is morphed into a key-recovery procedure that undercuts an ordinary exhaustive search in terms of time complexity for the variants of the cipher up to five rounds.

In this work, we demonstrate that this technique can efficiently be enriched with a specific linearization strategy that reduces the algebraic degree of the non-linear layer as put forward by Banik et al. at IACR ToSC 2020(4). This amalgamation yields new attacks on certain instances of LowMC up to seven rounds.