Key size

Summary

In cryptography, key size, key length, or key space refer to the number of bits in a key used by a cryptographic algorithm (such as a cipher). Key length defines the upper-bound on an algorithm's security (i.e. a logarithmic measure of the fastest known attack against an algorithm), because the security of all algorithms can be violated by brute-force attacks. Ideally, the lower-bound on an algorithm's security is by design equal to the key length (that is, the algorithm's design does not detract from the degree of security inherent in the key length). Most symmetric-key algorithms are designed to have security equal to their key length. However, after design, a new attack might be discovered. For instance, Triple DES was designed to have a 168-bit key, but an attack of complexity 2112 is now known (i.e. Triple DES now only has 112 bits of security, and of the 168 bits in the key the attack has rendered 56 'ineffective' towards security). Nevertheless, as long as the security (under

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The main topic of this thesis is related to the state of the art in designing cryptographic primitives from a hardware point of view. A special emphasis is dedicated to low-power/low-energy CMOS design. A set of solutions is proposed including an LFSR based stream cipher with self-synchronizing capabilities, a new memory-less Rijndael block cipher architecture and a public key scheme in the class of discrete logarithm. The former is based on arithmetic in large finite field, mainly Galois extension field GF(2‴). These solutions are droved using low-energy techniques, in order to decrease both the switching activity and the total delay. The fundamental motivation supporting this work, is to demonstrate that practical solutions can be obtained for implementing such complex primitives in large scaled circuits, that arc at once, high performance architectures (low-power, high-speed) and cryptographicaly strong, using the well known trade-off between area-speed or area-power. Security constraint has been duly considered, mainly by increasing the key-size. In this work, we explore the general aspects of designing the above mentioned cryptographic functions. We give an extensive survey of some cryptographic primitives from the hardware point of view and expose their security properties. The thesis favours stream cipher and public-key schemes, as currently the most promising advance to capture the notion of key generation and establishment and data bulk encryption. One contribution is the convenient notation for expressing cryptographic self-synchronizing stream ciphers SSSC schemes and our SSMG proposal, a scheme based on packet fingerprint identification, that relies on keyed cryptographic hash function to achieve the security requirements. We maintain an important distinction between hardware implementation and algorithm's security, because the security of cryptographic primitives cannot be based on mathematically strong functions only but requires an extensive cryptanalysis at different levels including the application. This causes a concern for a formalization of the security of an implemented cryptographic primitive. Nevertheless, while some schemes arc well known to be secure such as DL based public key schemes and enough cryptanalyzed such as the new standard Rijndael, some security aspects of the SSMG are discussed. A part of this work studies the specific aspects related to hardware implementation of Rijndael block cipher, the new standard designed to be a substitute for DES. An efficient architecture is developed targeting FPGA implementation, by simply avoiding memory blocks dedicated to the implementation of S-boxes and replacing them by on-chip forward computation using composite Galois field. This technique helps to reduce considerably the amount of hardware required at the cost of little increase of the switching activity. The main conclusion is that, while security constraint of cryptographic primitives increases the hardware complexity and reduces the performances, practical solutions exist for reducing such complexities while keeping or increasing the level of security. Nevertheless, major open questions remain both for a firm theoretical foundation and the proper cryptanalysis of certain solutions.

EPFL2002

The Improbable Differential Attack: Cryptanalysis of Reduced Round CLEFIA

Cihangir Tezcan

In this paper we present a new statistical cryptanalytic technique that we call improbable differential cryptanalysis which uses a differential that is less probable when the correct key is used. We provide data complexity estimates for this kind of attacks and we also show a method to expand impossible differentials to improbable differentials. By using this expansion method, we cryptanalyze 13, 14, and 15-round CLEFIA for the key sizes of length 128, 192, and 256 bits, respectively. These are the best cryptanalytic results on CLEFIA up to this date.

Springer2010

Improved Linear Cryptanalysis of Reduced-Round MIBS

Asli Bay, Jialin Huang, Serge Vaudenay

MIBS is a 32-round lightweight block cipher with 64-bit block size and two different key sizes, namely 64-bit and 80-bit keys. Bay et al. provided the first impossible differential, differential and linear cryptanalyses of MIBS. Their best attack was a linear attack on the 18-round MIBS-80. In this paper, we significantly improve their attack by discovering more approximations and mounting Hermelin et al.'s multidimensional linear cryptanalysis. We also use Nguyen et al.'s technique to have less time complexity. We attack on 19 rounds of MIBS-80 with a time complexity of 2^{74.23} 19-round MIBS-80 encryptions by using 2^{57.87} plaintext-ciphertext pairs. To the best of our knowledge, the result proposed in this paper is the best cryptanalytic result for MIBS, so far.

Springer2014

EPFL2002