Communications in Cryptology IACR CiC


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Kemal Bicakci, Kemal Ulker, Yusuf Uzunay, Halis Taha Şahin, Muhammed Said Gündoğan
Published 2024-07-08 PDFPDF

The adversary model of white-box cryptography includes an extreme case where the adversary, sitting at the endpoint, has full access to a cryptographic scheme. Motivating by the fact that most existing white-box implementations focus on symmetric encryption, we present implementations for hash-based signatures so that the security against white-box attackers (who have read-only access to data with a size bounded by a space-hardness parameter M) depends on the availability of a white-box secure cipher (in addition to a general one-way function). We also introduce parameters and key-generation complexity results for white-box secure instantiation of stateless hash-based signature scheme SPHINCS+, one of the NIST selections for quantum-resistant digital signature algorithms, and its older version SPHINCS. We also present a hash tree-based solution for one-time passwords secure in a white-box attacker context. We implement the proposed solutions and share our performance results.

Keita Xagawa
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

One of the central questions in cryptology is how efficient generic constructions of cryptographic primitives can be. Gennaro, Gertner, Katz, and Trevisan [SIAM J. of Compt., 2005] studied the lower bounds of the number of invocations of a (trapdoor) one-way permutation in order to construct cryptographic schemes, e.g., pseudorandom number generators, digital signatures, and public-key and symmetric-key encryption.

Recently, quantum machines have been explored to _construct_ cryptographic primitives other than quantum key distribution. This paper studies the efficiency of _quantum_ black-box constructions of cryptographic primitives when the communications are _classical_. Following Gennaro et al., we give the lower bounds of the number of invocations of an underlying quantumly-computable quantum-one-way permutation when the _quantum_ construction of pseudorandom number generator and symmetric-key encryption is weakly black-box. Our results show that the quantum black-box constructions of pseudorandom number generator and symmetric-key encryption do not improve the number of invocations of an underlying quantumly-computable quantum-one-way permutation.

Subhadeep Banik, Andrea Caforio, Serge Vaudenay
Published 2024-04-09 PDFPDF

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.