Advancing the Meet-in-the-Filter Technique: Applications to CHAM and KATAN

in Smith, Benjamin; Wu, Huapeng (Eds.) Selected Areas in Cryptography (in press)

Recently, Biryukov et al. presented a new technique for key recovery in differential cryptanalysis, called meet-in-the-filter (MiF). In this work, we develop theoretical and practical aspects of the ... [more ▼]

Recently, Biryukov et al. presented a new technique for key recovery in differential cryptanalysis, called meet-in-the-filter (MiF). In this work, we develop theoretical and practical aspects of the technique, which helps understanding and simplifies application. In particular, we show bounds on MiF complexity and conditions when the MiF-enhanced attack may reach them. We present a method based on trail counting which allows to estimate filtering strength of involved rounds and perform consequent complexity analysis with pen and paper, compared to the computer-aided approach of the original work. Furthermore, we show how MiF can be combined with plaintext structures for linear key schedules, allowing to increase the number of attacked rounds or to reduce the data complexity. We illustrate our methods on block cipher families CHAM and KATAN and show best-to-date single-key differential attacks for these ciphers. [less ▲]

Meet-in-the-Filter and Dynamic Counting with Applications to Speck

in Tibouchi, Mehdi; Wang, Xiaofeng (Eds.) Applied Cryptography and Network Security, 21st International Conference, ACNS 2023, Kyoto, Japan, June 19–22, 2023, Proceedings, Part I (2023)

We propose a new cryptanalytic tool for differential cryptanalysis, called meet-in-the-filter (MiF). It is suitable for ciphers with a slow or incomplete diffusion layer such as the ones based on Addition ... [more ▼]

We propose a new cryptanalytic tool for differential cryptanalysis, called meet-in-the-filter (MiF). It is suitable for ciphers with a slow or incomplete diffusion layer such as the ones based on Addition-Rotation-XOR (ARX). The main idea of the MiF technique is to stop the difference propagation earlier in the cipher, allowing to use differentials with higher probability. This comes at the expense of a deeper analysis phase in the bottom rounds possible due to the slow diffusion of the target cipher. The MiF technique uses a meet-in-the-middle matching to construct differential trails connecting the differential’s output and the ciphertext difference. The proposed trails are used in the key recovery procedure, reducing time complexity and allowing flexible time-data trade-offs. In addition, we show how to combine MiF with a dynamic counting technique for key recovery. We illustrate MiF in practice by reporting improved attacks on the ARXbased family of block ciphers Speck. We improve the time complexities of the best known attacks up to 15 rounds of Speck32 and 20 rounds of Speck64/128. Notably, our new attack on 11 rounds of Speck32 has practical analysis and data complexities of 224.66 and 226.70 respectively, and was experimentally verified, recovering the master key in a matter of seconds. It significantly improves the previous deep learning-based attack by Gohr from CRYPTO 2019, which has time complexity 238. As an important milestone, our conventional cryptanalysis method sets a new high benchmark to beat for cryptanalysis relying on machine learning. [less ▲]

Dummy Shuffling Against Algebraic Attacks in White-Box Implementations

in Canteaut, Anne; Standaert, Francois-Xavier (Eds.) Advances in Cryptology -- EUROCRYPT 2021 (2021)

Cryptanalysis of a Dynamic Universal Accumulator over Bilinear Groups

in Topics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 2021 (2021)

In this paper we cryptanalyse the two accumulator variants proposed by Au et al., which we call the alpha-based construction and the common reference string-based (CRS-based) construction. We show that if ... [more ▼]

In this paper we cryptanalyse the two accumulator variants proposed by Au et al., which we call the alpha-based construction and the common reference string-based (CRS-based) construction. We show that if non-membership witnesses are issued according to the alpha-based construction, an attacker that has access to multiple witnesses is able to efficiently recover the secret accumulator parameter alpha and completely break its security. More precisely, if p is the order of the underlying bilinear group, the knowledge of O(log p log log p) non-membership witnesses permits to successfully recover alpha. Further optimizations and different attack scenarios allow to reduce the number of required witnesses to O(log p), together with practical attack complexity. Moreover, we show that accumulator's collision resistance can be broken if just one of these non-membership witnesses is known to the attacker. We then show how all these attacks for the alpha-based construction can be easily prevented by using instead a corrected expression for witnesses. Although outside the original security model assumed by Au \etal but motivated by some possible concrete application of the scheme where the Manager must have exclusive rights for issuing witnesses (e.g. white/black list based authentication mechanisms), we show that if non-membership witnesses are issued using the CRS-based construction and the CRS is kept secret by the Manager, an attacker accessing multiple witnesses can reconstruct the CRS and compute witnesses for arbitrary new elements. In particular, if the accumulator is initialized by adding m secret elements, the knowledge of m non-membership witnesses allows to succeed in such attack. [less ▲]