SUNDAE: Small Universal Deterministic Authenticated Encryption for the Internet of Things

Lightweight cryptography was developed in response to the increasing need to secure devices for the Internet of Things. After significant research effort, many new block ciphers have been designed targeting lightweight settings, optimizing efficiency metrics which conventional block ciphers did not. However, block ciphers must be used in modes of operation to achieve more advanced security goals such as data confidentiality and authenticity, a research area given relatively little attention in the lightweight setting. We introduce a new authenticated encryption (AE) mode of operation, SUNDAE, specially targeted for constrained environments. SUNDAE is smaller than other known lightweight modes in implementation area, such as CLOC, JAMBU, and COFB, however unlike these modes, SUNDAE is designed as a deterministic authenticated encryption (DAE) scheme, meaning it provides maximal security in settings where proper randomness is hard to generate, or secure storage must be minimized due to expense. Unlike other DAE schemes, such as GCM-SIV, SUNDAE can be implemented efficiently on both constrained devices, as well as the servers communicating with those devices. We prove SUNDAE secure relative to its underlying block cipher, and provide an extensive implementation study, with results in both software and hardware, demonstrating that SUNDAE offers improved compactness and power consumption in hardware compared to other lightweight AE modes, while simultaneously offering comparable performance to GCM-SIV on parallel high-end platforms.

High performance VLSI architectures implementing strong cryptographic primitives

Feth Allah Cherigui

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

Statistical cryptanalysis of block ciphers

Pascal Junod

Since the development of cryptology in the industrial and academic worlds in the seventies, public knowledge and expertise have grown in a tremendous way, notably because of the increasing, nowadays almost ubiquitous, presence of electronic communication means in our lives. Block ciphers are inevitable building blocks of the security of various electronic systems. Recently, many advances have been published in the field of public-key cryptography, being in the understanding of involved security models or in the mathematical security proofs applied to precise cryptosystems. Unfortunately, this is still not the case in the world of symmetric-key cryptography and the current state of knowledge is far from reaching such a goal. However, block and stream ciphers tend to counterbalance this lack of "provable security" by other advantages, like high data throughput and ease of implementation. In the first part of this thesis, we would like to add a (small) stone to the wall of provable security of block ciphers with the (theoretical and experimental) statistical analysis of the mechanisms behind Matsui's linear cryptanalysis as well as more abstract models of attacks. For this purpose, we consider the underlying problem as a statistical hypothesis testing problem and we make a heavy use of the Neyman-Pearson paradigm. Then, we generalize the concept of linear distinguisher and we discuss the power of such a generalization. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of sequential distinguisher, based on sequential sampling, and of aggregate distinguishers, which allows to build sub-optimal but efficient distinguishers. Finally, we propose new attacks against reduced-round version of the block cipher IDEA. In the second part, we propose the design of a new family of block ciphers named FOX. First, we study the efficiency of optimal diffusive components when implemented on low-cost architectures, and we present several new constructions of MDS matrices; then, we precisely describe FOX and we discuss its security regarding linear and differential cryptanalysis, integral attacks, and algebraic attacks. Finally, various implementation issues are considered.

EPFL2005

Cryptosystems and LLL

Thomas Baignères

Since the late 70’s, several public key cryptographic algorithms have been proposed. Diﬃe and Hellman ﬁrst came with this concept in 1976. Since that time, several other public key cryptosystems were invented, such as the well known RSA, ElGamal or Rabin cryptosystems. Roughly, the scope of these algorithms is to allow the secure exchange of a secret key that will later on be used to encrypt a larger amount of data. All these algorithms share one particularity, namely that their security rely on some mathematical problem which is supposed to be hard (computationally speaking) to solve. For example, it is well known that the ability to factorize easily the product of two large primes without any indication about the primes, would lead to break the RSA cryptosystem. Since those early days, most of the assymetric encryption algorithms that have been proposed relied on the same hard mathematical problems. Yet, it is well accepted that we should not put al l the cryptographic eggs in one basket. This is the reason why Goldreich, Goldwasser, and Halevi proposed in 1997 (exactly 10 years after RSA) a new public-key cryptosystem which security was based on lattice reduction problems. This cryptographic schemes is known as the GGH cryptosystem. Unfortunately, only two years later, Nguyen proposed an attack against GGH which proved that in practice, GGH would not provide the security it originally claimed to have. The attack involved a so called lattice reduction algorithm, known as LLL. The aim of this work is to provide the necessary background to understand the GGH cryptosystem and the attack that goes with it. The basis reduction algorithm LLL has many other applications in cryptography. As an example, we will review a very recent attack against the GNU Privacy Guard software, which is a widely used free implementation of Zimmermann’s famous software. The necessary background about lattices, LLL, . . . will be recalled in sections 2 and 3. Section 4 will review the GGH cryptosystem and Nguyen’s attack against it. Finally, Section 5 will show how lattice reduction techniques can break the ElGamal digital signature scheme implementation in GPGv1.2.3.

2006