What a lovely hat

In this paper, we analyze the security of authenticated encryption modes OTR (Minematsu, Eurocrypt 2014) and OPP (Granger, Jovanovic, Mennink, and Neves, Eurocrypt 2016) in a setting where an adversary is allowed to make encryption queries in quantum superposition. Starting with OTR -- or more technically, AES-OTR, a third-round CAESAR candidate -- we extend prior quantum attacks on the mode's unforgeability in the literature to provide the first attacks breaking confidentiality, i.e.,...

Post-Compromise Security (PCS) is a property of secure-channel establishment schemes, which limits the security breach of an adversary that has compromised one of the endpoint to a certain number of messages, after which the channel heals. An attractive property, especially in view of Snowden's revelation of mass-surveillance, PCS was pioneered by the Signal messaging protocol, and is present in OTR. In this paper, we introduce a framework for quantifying and comparing PCS security, with...

Authenticated encryption (AE) is a symmetric-key encryption function that provides confidentiality and authenticity of a message. One of the evaluation criteria for AE is state size, which is memory size needed for encryption. State size is especially important when cryptosystem is implemented in constrained devices, while trivial reduction by using a small primitive is not generally acceptable as it leads to a degraded security. In these days, the state size of AE has been very actively...

A deniable authenticated key exchange can establish a secure communication channel while leaving no cryptographic evidence of communication. Some well-designed protocol today, even in the case of betrayal by some participants and disclosure of long-term key materials, cannot leave any cryptographic evidence. However, this is no longer enough: If “Big data” technology is used to analyse data fetched from pivotal nodes, it’s not difficult to register your identity through your long-term public...

Off-the-Record (OTR) messaging is a two-party message authentication protocol that also provides plausible deniability: there is no record that can later convince a third party what messages were actually sent. To extend OTR to group messaging we need to consider issues that are not present in the 2-party case. In group OTR (as in two-party OTR), the sender should be able to authenticate (or sign) his messages so that group members can verify who sent a message (that is, signatures should be...

We define ZOCB and ZOTR for nonce-based authenticated encryption with associated data, and analyze their provable security. These schemes use a tweakable blockcipher (TBC) as the underlying primitive, and fully utilize its input to process a plaintext and associated data (AD). This property is commonly referred to as full absorption, and this has been explored for schemes based on a permutation or a pseudorandom function (PRF). Our schemes improve the efficiency of TBC-based counterparts of...

Deniable messaging protocols allow two parties to have 'off-the-record' conversations without leaving any record that can convince external verifiers about what either of them said during the conversation. Recent events like the Podesta email dump underscore the importance of deniable messaging to politicians, whistleblowers, dissidents and many others. Consequently, messaging protocols like Signal and OTR are designed with cryptographic mechanisms to ensure deniable communication,...

This paper considers the security of the Offset Two-Round (OTR) authenticated encryption mode \cite{cryptoeprint:2013:628} with respect to forgery attacks. The current version of OTR gives a security proof for specific choices of the block size $(n)$ and the primitive polynomial used to construct the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$. Although the OTR construction is generic, the security proof is not. For every choice of finite field the distinctness of masking coefficients must be verified...

In this paper, we investigate the efficiency of FPGA implementations of AES and AES-like ciphers, specially in the context of authenticated encryption. We consider the encryption/decryption and the authentication/verification structures of OCB-like modes (like OTR or SCT modes). Their main advantage is that they are fully parallelisable. While this feature has already been used to increase the throughput/performance of hardware implementations, it is usually overlooked while comparing...

The XOR-Encrypt-XOR (XEX) block cipher mode was introduced by Rogaway in 2004. XEX mode uses nonce-based secret masks $(L)$ that are distinct for each message. The existence of secret masks in XEX mode prevents the application of conventional fault attack techniques, such as differential fault analysis. This work investigates other types of fault attacks against XEX mode that either eliminate the effect of the secret masks or retrieve their values. Either of these outcomes enables existing...

We examine how two parallel modes of operation for Authenticated Encryption (namely CTR+PMAC and OTR mode) work when evaluated in a multi-party computation engine. These two modes are selected because they suit the PRFs examined in previous works. In particular the modes are highly parallel, and do not require evaluation of the inverse of the underlying PRF. In order to use these modes one needs to convert them from their original instantiation of being defined on binary blocks of data, to...

Modular design via a tweakable blockcipher (TBC) offers efficient authenticated encryption (AE) schemes (with associated data) that call a blockcipher once for each data block (of associated data or a plaintext). However, the existing efficient blockcipher-based TBCs are secure up to the birthday bound, where the underlying keyed blockcipher is a secure strong pseudorandom permutation. Existing blockcipher-based AE schemes with beyond-birthday-bound (BBB) security are not efficient, that is,...

Tweakable blockcipher (TBC) is a powerful tool to design authenticated encryption schemes as illustrated by Minematsu's Offset Two Rounds (OTR) construction. It considers an additional input, called tweak, to a standard blockcipher which adds some variability to this primitive. More specifically, each tweak is expected to define a different, independent pseudo-random permutation. In this work we focus on OTR's way to instantiate a TBC and show that it does not achieve such a property for a...

AES-NI, or Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions, is an extension of the x86 architecture proposed by Intel in 2008. With a pipelined implementation utilizing AES-NI, parallelizable modes such as AES-CTR become extremely efficient. However, out of the four non-trivial NIST-recommended encryption modes, three are inherently sequential: CBC, CFB, and OFB. This inhibits the advantage of using AES-NI significantly. Similar observations apply to CMAC, CCM and a great deal of other modes....

We show that a distinguishing attack in the related key model on an Even-Mansour block cipher can readily be converted into an extremely efficient key recovery attack. Concerned ciphers include in particular all iterated Even-Mansour schemes with independent keys. We apply this observation to the Caesar candidate Prøst-OTR and are able to recover the whole key with a number of requests linear in its size. This improves on recent forgery attacks in a similar setting.

We present a forgery attack on Prøst-OTR in a related-key setting. Prøst is a family of authenticated encryption algorithms proposed as candidates in the currently ongoing CAESAR competition, and Prøst-OTR is one of the three variants of the Prøst design. The attack exploits how the Prøst permutation is used in an Even-Mansour construction in the Feistel-based OTR mode of operation. Given the ciphertext and tag for any two messages under two related keys K and K + Delta with related nonces,...

Authenticated encryption (AE) has recently gained renewed interest due to the ongoing CAESAR competition. This paper deals with the performance of block cipher modes of operation for AE in parallel software. We consider the example of the AES on Intel's new Haswell microarchitecture that has improved instructions for AES and finite field multiplication. As opposed to most previous high-performance software implementations of operation modes -- that have considered the encryption of single...

This paper proposes a new scheme for authenticated encryption (AE) which is typically realized as a blockcipher mode of operation. The proposed scheme has attractive features for fast and compact operation. When it is realized with a blockcipher, it requires one blockcipher call to process one input block (i.e. rate-1), and uses the encryption function of the blockcipher for both encryption and decryption. Moreover, the scheme enables one-pass, parallel operation under two-block...