The Ascon authenticated encryption scheme and hash function of Dobraunig et al (Journal of Cryptology 2021) were recently selected as winner of the NIST lightweight cryptography competition. The mode underlying Ascon authenticated encryption (Ascon-AE) resembles ideas of SpongeWrap, but not quite, and various works have investigated the generic security of Ascon-AE, all covering different attack scenarios and with different bounds. This work systemizes knowledge on the mode security of...

State-of-the-art garbling schemes for boolean circuits roughly consist of two families, i.e., ideal model garbling that combines linear operations and ideal blockciphers (aiming at maximizing performance), and PRF-based garbling that insists on using theoretically sound assumptions. In the linear garbling framework introduced by Zahur, Rosulek, and Evans (Eurocrypt 2015), it was established that garbling an AND gate requires at least $2(\kappa +1)$ bits of ciphertext, with $\kappa$ as the...

This paper partly solves the open problem of tight trade-off of client storage and server time in the client preprocessing setting of private information retrieval (PIR). In the client preprocessing setting of PIR, the client is allowed to store some hints generated from the database in a preprocessing phase and use the hints to assist online queries. We construct a new single-server client preprocessing PIR scheme. For a database with $n$ entries of size $w$, our protocol uses $S=O((n/T)...

The no-cloning principle has played a foundational role in quantum information and cryptography. Following a long-standing tradition of studying quantum mechanical phenomena through the lens of interactive games, Broadbent and Lord (TQC 2020) formalized cloning games in order to quantitatively capture no-cloning in the context of unclonable encryption schemes. The conceptual contribution of this paper is the new, natural, notion of Haar cloning games together with two applications. In the...

For a finite field $\mathbb{F}$ of size $n$, the (patched) inverse permutation $\operatorname{INV}: \mathbb{F} \to \mathbb{F}$ computes the inverse of $x$ over $\mathbb{F}$ when $x\neq 0$ and outputs $0$ when $x=0$, and the $\operatorname{ARK}_K$ (for AddRoundKey) permutation adds a fixed constant $K$ to its input, i.e., $$\operatorname{INV}(x) = x^{n-2} \hspace{.1in} \mbox{and} \hspace{.1in} \operatorname{ARK}_K(x) = x + K \;.$$ We study the process of alternately applying the...

Modern blockchain-based consensus protocols aim for efficiency (i.e., low communication and round complexity) while maintaining security against adaptive adversaries. These goals are usually achieved using a public randomness beacon to select roles for each participant. We examine to what extent this randomness is necessary. Specifically, we provide tight bounds on the amount of entropy a Byzantine Agreement protocol must consume from a beacon in order to enjoy efficiency and adaptive...

The indifferentiability framework has become a standard methodology that enables us to study the security of cryptographic constructions in idealized models of computation. Unfortunately, while indifferentiability provides strong guarantees whenever the security of a construction is captured by a ``single-stage'' security game, it may generally provide no meaningful guarantees when the security is captured by a ``multi-stage'' one. In particular, the indifferentiability framework does not...

A trapdoor Memory-Hard Function is a function that is memory-hard to evaluate for any party who does not have a trapdoor, but is substantially less expensive to evaluate with the trapdoor. Biryukov and Perin (ASIACRYPT 2017) introduced the first candidate trapdoor Memory-Hard Function called Diodon which modifies a Memory-Hard Function called Scrypt by replacing a hash chain with repeated squaring modulo a composite number $N=pq$. The trapdoor, which consists of the prime factors $p$ and...

The Signal Protocol is a two-party secure messaging protocol used in applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages and Facebook Messenger and is used by billions daily. It consists of two core components, one of which is the Double Ratchet protocol that has been the subject of a line of work that aims to understand and formalise exactly what security it provides. Existing models capture strong guarantees including resilience to state exposure in both forward security (protecting...

The $k$-Tree algorithm [Wagner 02] is a non-trivial algorithm for the average-case $k$-SUM problem that has found widespread use in cryptanalysis. Its input consists of $k$ lists, each containing $n$ integers from a range of size $m$. Wagner's original heuristic analysis suggested that this algorithm succeeds with constant probability if $n \approx m^{1/(\log{k}+1)}$, and that in this case it runs in time $O(kn)$. Subsequent rigorous analysis of the algorithm [Lyubashevsky 05, Shallue 08,...

The problem of reliable/secure all-to-all communication over low-degree networks has been essential for communication-local (CL) n-party MPC (i.e., MPC protocols where every party directly communicates only with a few, typically polylogarithmic in n, parties) and more recently for communication over ad hoc networks, which are used in blockchain protocols. However, a limited number of adaptively secure solutions exist, and they all make relatively strong assumptions on the ability of parties...

The Lattice Isomorphism Problem (LIP) was recently introduced as a new hardness assumption for post-quantum cryptography. The strongest known efficiently computable invariant for LIP is the genus of a lattice. To instantiate LIP-based schemes one often requires the existence of a lattice that (1) lies in some fixed genus, and (2) has some good geometric properties such as a high packing density or small smoothness parameter. In this work we show that such lattices exist. In particular,...

Sigma protocols are elegant cryptographic proofs that have become a cornerstone of modern cryptography. A notable example is Schnorr's protocol, a zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge of a discrete logarithm. Despite extensive research, the security of Schnorr's protocol in the standard model is not fully understood. In this paper we study Kilian's protocol, an influential public-coin interactive protocol that, while not a sigma protocol, shares striking similarities with sigma protocols....

This paper studies the provable security of the deterministic random bit generator~(DRBG) utilized in Linux 6.4.8, marking the first analysis of Linux-DRBG from a provable security perspective since its substantial structural changes in Linux 4 and Linux 5.17. Specifically, we prove its security up to $O(\min\{2^{\frac{n}{2}},2^{\frac{\lambda}{2}}\})$ queries in the seedless robustness model, where $n$ is the output size of the internal primitives and $\lambda$ is the min-entropy of the...

The formal verification of architectural strength in terms of computational complexity is achieved through reduction of the Non-Commutative Grothendieck problem in the form of a quadratic lattice. This multivariate form relies on equivalences derived from a k-clique problem within a multigraph. The proposed scheme reduces the k-clique problem as an input function, resulting in the generation of a quadratic used as parameters for the lattice. By Grothendieck’s inequality, the satisfiability...

In the multi-user with corruptions (muc) setting there are $n\geq 1$ users, and the goal is to prove that, even in the face of an adversary that adaptively corrupts users to expose their keys, un-corrupted users retain security. This can be considered for many primitives including signatures and encryption. Proofs of muc security, while possible, generally suffer a factor n loss in tightness, which can be large. This paper gives new proofs where this factor is reduced to the number c of...

At EUROCRYPT'20, Bao et al. have shown that three-round cascading of $\textsf{LRW1}$ construction, which they dubbed as $\textsf{TNT}$, is a strong tweakable pseudorandom permutation that provably achieves $2n/3$-bit security bound. Jha et al. showed a birthday bound distinguishing attack on $\textsf{TNT}$ and invalidated the proven security bound and proved a tight birthday bound security on the $\textsf{TNT}$ construction in EUROCRYPT'24. In a recent work, Datta et al. have...

A security proof for a key exchange protocol requires writing down a security definition. Authors typically have a clear idea of the level of security they aim to achieve, e.g., forward secrecy. Defining the model formally additionally requires making choices on games vs. simulation-based models, partnering, on having one or more Test queries and on adopting a style of avoiding trivial attacks: exclusion, penalizing or filtering. We elucidate the consequences, advantages and disadvantages of...

In the (preprocessing) Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) problem, we are given a cyclic group $G$ with a generator $g$ and a prime order $N$, and we want to prepare some advice of size $S$, such that we can efficiently distinguish $(g^{x},g^{y},g^{xy})$ from $(g^{x},g^{y},g^{z})$ in time $T$ for uniformly and independently chosen $x,y,z$ from $\mathbb{Z}_N$. This is a central cryptographic problem whose computational hardness underpins many widely deployed schemes, such as the Diffie–Hellman...

In this paper, we formulate a special class of systems of linear equations over finite fields that appears naturally in the provable security analysis of several MAC and PRF modes of operation. We derive lower bounds on the number of solutions for such systems adhering to some predefined restrictions, and apply these lower bounds to derive tight PRF security for several constructions. We show security up to $2^{3n/4}$ queries for the single-keyed variant of the Double-block Hash-then-Sum...

(Receiver) Anamorphic encryption, introduced by Persiano $ \textit{et al.}$ at Eurocrypt 2022, considers the question of achieving private communication in a world where secret decryption keys are under the control of a dictator. The challenge here is to be able to establish a secret communication channel to exchange covert (i.e. anamorphic) messages on top of some already deployed public key encryption scheme. Over the last few years several works addressed this challenge by showing...

In this work we prove lower bounds on the (communication) cost of maintaining a shared key among a dynamic group of users. Being "dynamic'' means one can add and remove users from the group. This captures important protocols like multicast encryption (ME) and continuous group-key agreement (CGKA), which is the primitive underlying many group messaging applications. We prove our bounds in a combinatorial setting where the state of the protocol progresses in rounds. The state of the...

In a fully non-interactive multi-signature, resp. aggregate-signature scheme (fNIM, resp. fNIA), signatures issued by many signers on the same message, resp. on different messages, can be succinctly ``combined'', resp. ``aggregated''. fNIMs are used in the Ethereum consensus protocol, to produce the certificates of validity of blocks which are to be verified by billions of clients. fNIAs are used in some PBFT-like consensus protocols, such as the production version of Diem by Aptos, to...

We study network-agnostic secure multiparty computation with perfect security. Traditionally MPC is studied assuming the underlying network is either synchronous or asynchronous. In a network-agnostic setting, the parties are unaware of whether the underlying network is synchronous or asynchronous. The feasibility of perfectly-secure MPC in synchronous and asynchronous networks has been settled a long ago. The landmark work of [Ben-Or, Goldwasser, and Wigderson, STOC'88] shows that $n...

It is well-known that classical Private Information Retrieval (PIR) schemes without preprocessing must suffer from linear server computation per query. Moreover, any such single-server PIR with sublinear bandwidth must rely on public-key cryptography. Several recent works showed that these barriers pertaining to classical PIR can be overcome by introducing a preprocessing phase where each client downloads a small hint that helps it make queries subsequently. Notably, the Piano PIR scheme...

We consider constructions that combine outputs of a single permutation $\pi:\{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^n$ using a public function. These are popular constructions for achieving security beyond the birthday bound when implementing a pseudorandom function using a block cipher (i.e., a pseudorandom permutation). One of the best-known constructions (denoted SXoP$[2,n]$) XORs the outputs of 2 domain-separated calls to $\pi$. Modeling $\pi$ as a uniformly chosen permutation, several previous...

$\mathrm{SPHINCS^{+}}$ is a post-quantum signature scheme that, at the time of writing, is being standardized as $\mathrm{SLH\text{-}DSA}$. It is the most conservative option for post-quantum signatures, but the original tight proofs of security were flawed—as reported by Kudinov, Kiktenko and Fedorov in 2020. In this work, we formally prove a tight security bound for $\mathrm{SPHINCS^{+}}$ using the EasyCrypt proof assistant, establishing greater confidence in the general security of the...

A popular way to build post-quantum signature schemes is by first constructing an identification scheme (IDS) and applying the Fiat-Shamir transform to it. In this work we tackle two open questions related to the general applicability of techniques around this approach that together allow for efficient post-quantum signatures with optimal security bounds in the QROM. First we consider a recent work by Aguilar-Melchor, Hülsing, Joseph, Majenz, Ronen, and Yue (Asiacrypt'23) that showed...

At Eurocrypt $2021$, Li and Micciancio demonstrated that the IND-CPA notion of security is not sufficient to cover the passive security of approximate homomorphic encryption schemes, by outlining a key recovery attack against the CKKS scheme (Cheon, Kim, Kim, Seong, Asiacrypt $2017$). They proposed the notion of $q$-IND-CPA-D security, which allows an adversary to make $q$ calls to a restricted decryption oracle. Li and Micciancio left achieving $q$-IND-CPA-D security as an open problem, but...

The round complexity of interactive proof systems is a key question of practical and theoretical relevance in complexity theory and cryptography. Moreover, results such as QIP = QIP(3) (STOC'00) show that quantum resources significantly help in such a task. In this work, we initiate the study of round compression of protocols in the bounded quantum storage model (BQSM). In this model, the malicious parties have a bounded quantum memory and they cannot store the all the qubits that are...

Cryptography often considers the strongest yet plausible attacks in the real world. Preprocessing (a.k.a. non-uniform attack) plays an important role in both theory and practice: an efficient online attacker can take advantage of advice prepared by a time-consuming preprocessing stage. Salting is a heuristic strategy to counter preprocessing attacks by feeding a small amount of randomness to the cryptographic primitive. We present general and tight characterizations of preprocessing...

We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov...

In this paper, we study the problem of lower bounding any given cost function depending on the false positive and false negative probabilities of adversaries against indistinguishability security notions in symmetric-key cryptography. We take the cost model as an input, so that this becomes a purely information-theoretical question. We propose power bounds as an easy-to-use alternative for advantage bounds in the context of indistinguishability with asymmetric cost functions. We show that...

Hash-and-Sign with Retry is a popular technique to design efficient signature schemes from code-based or multivariate assumptions. Contrary to Hash-and-Sign signatures based on preimage-sampleable functions as defined by Gentry, Peikert and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2008), trapdoor functions in code-based and multivariate schemes are not surjective. Therefore, the standard approach uses random trials. Kosuge and Xagawa (PKC 2024) coined it the Hash-and-Sign with Retry paradigm. As many attacks...

We have investigated both the padding scheme and the applicability of algebraic attacks to both XHash8 and XHash12. The only vulnerability of the padding scheme we can find is plausibly applicable only in the multi-rate setting---for which the authors make no claim---and is safe otherwise. For algebraic attack relying on the computation and exploitation of a Gröbner basis, our survey of the literature suggests to base a security argument on the complexity of the variable elimination step...

In this work, we study the worst-case to average-case hardness of the Learning with Errors problem (LWE) under an alternative measure of hardness $−$ the maximum success probability achievable by a probabilistic polynomial-time (PPT) algorithm. Previous works by Regev (STOC 2005), Peikert (STOC 2009), and Brakerski, Peikert, Langlois, Regev, Stehle (STOC 2013) give worst-case to average-case reductions from lattice problems to LWE, specifically from the approximate decision variant of the...

The Ascon cipher suite has recently become the preferred standard in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography standardization process. Despite its prominence, the initial dedicated security analysis for the Ascon mode was conducted quite recently. This analysis demonstrated that the Ascon AEAD mode offers superior security compared to the generic Duplex mode, but it was limited to a specific scenario: single-user nonce-respecting, with a capacity strictly larger than the key size. In this paper, we...

Third-party private set intersection (PSI) enables two parties, each holding a private set to compute their intersection and reveal the result only to an inputless third party. In this paper, we present an efficient third-party PSI protocol requiring only 3 communication rounds, while significantly lowering the computational workload compared to prior work. Our work is motivated by real-world applications such as contact tracing whereby expedition is essential while concurrently preserving...

Sponge hashing is a widely used class of cryptographic hash algorithms which underlies the current international hash function standard SHA-3. In a nutshell, a sponge function takes as input a bit-stream of any length and processes it via a simple iterative procedure: it repeatedly feeds each block of the input into a so-called block function, and then produces a digest by once again iterating the block function on the final output bits. While much is known about the post-quantum security of...

It is known that the sponge construction is tightly indifferentiable from a random oracle up to around $2^{c/2}$ queries, where $c$ is the capacity. In particular, it cannot provide generic security better than half of the underlying permutation size. In this paper, we aim to achieve hash function security beating this barrier. We present a hashing mode based on two $b$-bit permutations named the double sponge. The double sponge can be seen as the sponge embedded within the double block...

One of the most basic problems for studying the "price of privacy over time" is the so called private counter problem, introduced by Dwork et al. (2010) and Chan et al. (2010). In this problem, we aim to track the number of events that occur over time, while hiding the existence of every single event. More specifically, in every time step $t\in[T]$ we learn (in an online fashion) that $\Delta_t\geq 0$ new events have occurred, and must respond with an estimate $n_t\approx\sum_{j=1}^t...

Weak forward secrecy (wFS) of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols is a passive variant of (full) forward secrecy (FS). A natural mechanism to upgrade from wFS to FS is the use of key confirmation messages which compute a message authentication code (MAC) over the transcript. Unfortunately, Gellert, Gjøsteen, Jacobson and Jager (GGJJ, CRYPTO 2023) show that this mechanism inherently incurs a loss proportional to the number of users, leading to an overall non-tight reduction, even if...

Collision-resistant hashing, a fundamental primitive in modern cryptography, ensures that there is no efficient way to find distinct inputs that produce the same hash value. This property underpins the security of various cryptographic applications, making it crucial to understand its complexity. The complexity of this problem is well-understood in the classical setting and $\Theta(N^{1/2})$ queries are needed to find a collision. However, the advent of quantum computing has introduced new...

Nonlocal games are a foundational tool for understanding entanglement and constructing quantum protocols in settings with multiple spatially separated quantum devices. In this work, we continue the study initiated by Kalai et al. (STOC '23) of compiled nonlocal games, played between a classical verifier and a single cryptographically limited quantum device. Our main result is that the compiler proposed by Kalai et al. is sound for any two-player XOR game. A celebrated theorem of Tsirelson...

The XOR of two independent permutations (XoP) is a well-known construction for achieving security beyond the birthday bound when implementing a pseudorandom function using a block cipher (i.e., a pseudorandom permutation). The idealized construction (where the permutations are uniformly chosen and independent) and its variants have been extensively analyzed over nearly 25 years. The best-known asymptotic information-theoretic indistinguishability bound for the XoP construction is...

This paper studies the limitations of the generic approaches to solving cryptographic problems in classical and quantum settings in various models. - In the classical generic group model (GGM), we find simple alternative proofs for the lower bounds of variants of the discrete logarithm (DL) problem: the multiple-instance DL and one-more DL problems (and their mixture). We also re-prove the unknown-order GGM lower bounds, such as the order finding, root extraction, and repeated squaring. -...

Typical results in multi-party computation (in short, MPC) capture faulty parties by assuming a threshold adversary corrupting parties actively and/or fail-corrupting. These corruption types are, however, inadequate for capturing correct parties that might suffer temporary network failures and/or localized faults - these are particularly relevant for MPC over large, global scale networks. Omission faults and general adversary structures have been proposed as more suitable alternatives....

We study the complexity of memory checkers with computational security and prove the first general tight lower bound. Memory checkers, first introduced over 30 years ago by Blum, Evans, Gemmel, Kannan, and Naor (FOCS '91, Algorithmica '94), allow a user to store and maintain a large memory on a remote and unreliable server by using small trusted local storage. The user can issue instructions to the server and after every instruction, obtain either the correct value or a failure (but not...

The size of the authentication tag represents a significant overhead for applications that are limited by bandwidth or memory. Hence, some authenticated encryption designs have a smaller tag than the required privacy level, which was also suggested by the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization project. In the ToSC 2022, two papers have raised questions about the IND-CCA security of AEAD schemes in this situation. These papers show that (a) online AE cannot provide IND-CCA security...

In their seminal work, Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC`07) presented the MPC-in-the-Head paradigm, which shows how to design Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) from secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols. This paradigm has since then revolutionized and modularized the design of efficient ZKP systems, with far-reaching applications beyond ZKPs. However, to the best of our knowledge, all previous instantiations relied on fully-secure MPC protocols, and have not been able to...

We consider the mainstream model in secure computation known as the bare PKI setup, also as the {bulletin-board PKI}. It allows players to broadcast once and non-interactively before they receive their inputs and start the execution. A bulletin-board PKI is essentially the minimum setup known so far to implement the model known as {messages-authentication}, i.e., when $P$ is forwarded a signed message, it considers it to be issued by $R$ if and only if $R$ signed it. It is known since...

Memory tightness of reductions in cryptography, in addition to the standard tightness related to advantage and running time, is important when the underlying problem can be solved efficiently with large memory, as discussed in Auerbach, Cash, Fersch, and Kiltz (CRYPTO 2017). Diemert, Geller, Jager, and Lyu (ASIACRYPT 2021) and Ghoshal, Ghosal, Jaeger, and Tessaro (EUROCRYPT 2022) gave memory-tight proofs for the multi-challenge security of digital signatures in the random oracle model....

This works introduces Basefold, a new $\textit{field-agnostic}$ Polynomial Commitment Scheme (PCS) for multilinear polynomials that has $O(\log^{2}(n))$ verifier costs and $O(n \log n)$ prover time. An important application of a multilinear PCS is constructing Succinct Non-interactive Arguments (SNARKs) from multilinear polynomial interactive oracle proofs (PIOPs). Furthermore, field-agnosticism is a major boon to SNARK efficiency in applications that require (or benefit from) a certain...

We present new lower and upper bounds on the number of communication rounds required for asynchronous Crusader Agreement (CA) and Binding Crusader Agreement (BCA), two primitives that are used for solving binary consensus. We show results for the information theoretic and authenticated settings. In doing so, we present a generic model for proving round complexity lower bounds in the asynchronous setting. In some settings, our attempts to prove lower bounds on round complexity fail....

We present a construction, called Kirby, for building a variable-input-length pseudorandom function (VIL-PRF) from a $b$-bit permutation. For this construction we prove a tight bound of $b/2$ bits of security on the PRF distinguishing advantage in the random permutation model and in the multi-user setting. Similar to full-state keyed sponge/duplex, it supports full-state absorbing and additionally supports full-state squeezing, while the sponge/duplex can squeeze at most $b-c$ bits per...

In ASIACRYPT'17, Naito proposed a beyond-birthday-bound variant of the LightMAC construction, called LightMAC_Plus, which is built on three independently keyed $n$-bit block ciphers, and showed that the construction achieves $2n/3$-bits PRF security. Later, Kim et al. claimed (without giving any formal proof) its security bound to $2^{3n/4}$. In FSE'18, Datta et al. have proposed a two-keyed variant of the LightMAC_Plus construction, called 2k-LightMAC_Plus, which is built on two...

We propose a new notion of knowledge soundness, denoted rogue-instance security, for interactive and non-interactive batch knowledge proofs. Our notion, inspired by the standard notion of rogue-key security for multi-signature schemes, considers a setting in which a malicious prover is provided with an honestly-generated instance $x_1$, and may then be able to maliciously generate related "rogue" instances $x_2,\ldots,x_k$ for convincing a verifier in a batch knowledge proof of corresponding...

We revisit OCAKE (ACNS 23), a generic recipe that constructs password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) from key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs), to allow instantiations with post-quantums KEM like KYBER. The ACNS23 paper left as an open problem to argue security against quantum attackers, with its security proof being in the universal composability (UC) framework. This is common for PAKE, however, at the time of this submission’s writing, it was not known how to prove (computational)...

This work studies the key-alternating ciphers (KACs) whose round permutations are not necessarily independent. We revisit existing security proofs for key-alternating ciphers with a single permutation (KACSPs), and extend their method to an arbitrary number of rounds. In particular, we propose new techniques that can significantly simplify the proofs, and also remove two unnatural restrictions in the known security bound of 3-round KACSP (Wu et al., Asiacrypt 2020). With these techniques, we...

Broadcast protocols enable a set of $n$ parties to agree on the input of a designated sender, even facing attacks by malicious parties. In the honest-majority setting, a fruitful line of work harnessed randomization and cryptography to achieve low-communication broadcast protocols with sub-quadratic total communication and with "balanced" sub-linear communication cost per party. However, comparatively little is known in the dishonest-majority setting. Here, the most...

Various message authentication codes (MACs), including HMAC-Streebog and Streebog-K, are based on the keyless hash function Streebog. Under the assumption that the compression function of Streebog is resistant to the related key attacks, the security proofs of these algorithms were recently presented at CTCrypt 2022. We carefully detail the resources of the adversary in the related key settings, revisit the proof, and obtain tight security bounds. Let $n$ be the bit length of the hash...

Many classical secure structures are broken by quantum attacks. Evaluating the quantum security of a structure and providing a tight security bound is a challenging research area. As a tweakable block cipher structure based on block ciphers, $\mathsf{TNT}$ was proven to have $O(2^{3n/4})$ CPA and $O(2^{n/2})$ CCA security in the classical setting. We prove that $\mathsf{TNT}$ is a quantum-secure tweakable block cipher with a bound of $O(2^{n/6})$. In addition, we show the tight quantum PRF...

Liskov, Rivest and Wagner laid the theoretical foundations for tweakable block ciphers (TBC). In a seminal paper, they proposed two (up to) birthday-bound secure design strategies --- LRW1 and LRW2 --- to convert any block cipher into a TBC. Several of the follow-up works consider cascading of LRW-type TBCs to construct beyond-the-birthday bound (BBB) secure TBCs. Landecker et al. demonstrated that just two-round cascading of LRW2 can already give a BBB security. Bao et al. undertook a...

Oblivious sorting is arguably the most important building block in the design of efficient oblivious algorithms. We propose new oblivious sorting algorithms for hardware enclaves. Our algorithms achieve asymptotic optimality in terms of both computational overhead and the number of page swaps the enclave has to make to fetch data from insecure memory or disk. We also aim to minimize the concrete constants inside the big-O. One of our algorithms achieve bounds tight to the constant in terms...

Interactive oracle proofs (IOPs) (Ben-Sasson et al., TCC 2016; Reingold et al., SICOMP 2021) have emerged as a powerful model for proof systems combining IP and PCP. While IOPs are not any more powerful than PCPs from a complexity theory perspective, their potential to create succinct proofs and arguments has been demonstrated by many recent constructions achieving better parameters such as total proof length, alphabet size, and query complexity. In this work, we establish new results on the...

In a recent paper, Khairallah demonstrated a birthday-bound attack on TNT, thereby invalidating its (beyond-the-birthday-bound) CCA security claims. In this short note, we reestablish a birthday-bound CCA security bound for TNT. Furthermore, using a minor variant of Khairallah's attack, we show that our security bound is tight. We provide a rigorous and complete attack advantage calculations to further enhance the confidence in Khairallah's proposed attack strategy.

The most crucial but time-consuming task for differential cryptanalysis is to find a differential with a high probability. To tackle this task, we propose a new SAT-based automatic search framework to efficiently figure out a differential with the highest probability under a specified condition. As the previous SAT methods (e.g., the Sun et al’s method proposed at ToSC 2021(1)) focused on accelerating the search for an optimal single differential characteristic, these are not optimized for...

Research about the theoretical properties of side channel distinguishers revealed the rules by which to maximise the probability of first order success (``optimal distinguishers'') under different assumptions about the leakage model and noise distribution. Simultaneously, research into bounding first order success (as a function of the number of observations) has revealed universal bounds, which suggest that (even optimal) distinguishers are not able to reach theoretically possible success...

Suppose two parties have hash functions $h_1$ and $h_2$ respectively, but each only trusts the security of their own. We wish to build a hash combiner $C^{h_1, h_2}$ which is secure so long as either one of the underlying hash functions is. This question has been well-studied in the regime of collision resistance. In this case, concatenating the two hash outputs clearly works. Unfortunately, a long series of works (Boneh and Boyen, CRYPTO'06; Pietrzak, Eurocrypt'07; Pietrzak, CRYPTO'08)...

Masking is a counter-measure that can be incorporated to software and hardware implementations of block ciphers to provably se- cure them against side-channel attacks. The security of masking can be proven in different types of threat models. In this paper, we are interested in directly proving the security in the most realistic threat model, the so-called noisy leakage adversary, that captures well how real-world side- channel adversaries operate. Direct proofs in this leakage model...

A classic result in the theory of interactive proofs shows that a special-sound $\Sigma$-protocol is automatically a proof of knowledge. This result is very useful to have, since the latter property is typically tricky to prove from scratch, while the former is often easy to argue -- if it is satisfied. While classic $\Sigma$-protocols often are special-sound, this is unfortunately not the case for many recently proposed, highly efficient interactive proofs, at least not in this strict...

Historically, most cryptosystems chose their keys uniformly at random. This is in contrast to modern (lattice-based) schemes, which typically sample their keys from more complex distributions $\mathcal{D}$, such as the discrete Gaussian or centered binomial distribution. It is well-known that any key drawn from the uniform distribution $\mathcal{U}$ can be guessed using at most $2^{\operatorname{H}(\mathcal{U})}$ key guesses, where $\operatorname{H}(\mathcal{U})$ denotes the entropy of...

The Ascon cipher suite, offering both authenticated encryption with associated data (AEAD) and hashing functionality, has recently emerged as the winner of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LwC) standardization process. The AEAD schemes within Ascon, namely Ascon-128 and Ascon-128a, have also been previously selected as the preferred lightweight authenticated encryption solutions in the CAESAR competition. In this paper, we present a tight and comprehensive security analysis of the Ascon...

In this short note we give another direct proof for the variant of the FO transform used by Kyber in the QROM. At PKC'23 Maram & Xagawa gave the first direct proof which does not require the indirection via FO with explicit rejection, thereby avoiding either a non-tight bound, or the necessity to analyze the failure probability in a new setting. However, on the downside their proof produces a bound that incurs an additive collision bound term. We explore a different approach for a direct...

The key generation of the lattice-based key-encapsulation mechanism CRYSTALS-Kyber (or short, just Kyber) involves a rejection-sampling routine to produce coefficients modulo $q=3329$ that look uniformly random. The input to this rejection sampling is output of the SHAKE-128 extendable output function (XOF). If this XOF is modelled as a random oracle with infinite output length, it is easy to see that Kyber terminates with probability 1; also, in this model, for any upper bound on the...

Pseudorandom correlation functions (PCF), introduced in the work of (Boyle et al., FOCS 2020), allow two parties to locally gen- erate, from short correlated keys, a near-unbounded amount of pseu- dorandom samples from a target correlation. PCF is an extremely ap- pealing primitive in secure computation, where they allow to confine all preprocessing phases of all future computations two parties could want to execute to a single short interaction with low communication and computation,...

Let $C$ be an error-correcting code over a large alphabet $q$ of block length $n$, and assume that, a possibly corrupted, codeword $c$ is distributively stored among $n$ servers where the $i$th entry is being held by the $i$th server. Suppose that every pair of servers publicly announce whether the corresponding coordinates are ``consistent'' with some legal codeword or ``conflicted''. What type of information about $c$ can be inferred from this consistency graph? Can we check whether errors...

In this paper we formally introduce a novel mode of operation based on the cipher block chaining mode. The main idea of this mode is to use a stateful block cipher instead of a stateless one. Afterwards, we show how to implement our proposal and present a performance analysis of our mode. Next, we provide a concrete security analysis by computing a tight bound on the success of adversaries based on their resources. The results of our performance and security analyses are that this novel mode...

We provide identity-based signature (IBS) schemes with tight security against adaptive adversaries, in the (classical or quantum) random oracle model (ROM or QROM), in both unstructured and structured lattices, based on the SIS or RSIS assumption. These signatures are short (of size independent of the message length). Our schemes build upon a work from Pan and Wagner (PQCrypto’21) and improve on it in several ways. First, we prove their transformation from non-adaptive to adaptive IBS in...

In this paper, we study both the implications and potential impact of backdoored parameters for two RSA-based pseudorandom number generators: the ISO-standardized Micali-Schnorr generator and a closely related design, the RSA PRG. We observe, contrary to common understanding, that the security of the Micali-Schnorr PRG is not tightly bound to the difficulty of inverting RSA. We show that the Micali-Schnorr construction remains secure even if one replaces RSA with a publicly evaluatable PRG,...

This work presents a novel machine-checked tight security proof for $\mathrm{XMSS}$ — a stateful hash-based signature scheme that is (1) standardized in RFC 8391 and NIST SP 800-208, and (2) employed as a primary building block of $\mathrm{SPHINCS}^{+}$, one of the signature schemes recently selected for standardization as a result of NIST’s post-quantum competition. In 2020, Kudinov, Kiktenko, and Fedoro pointed out a flaw affecting the tight security proofs of $\mathrm{SPHINCS}^{+}$ and...

We present Fusion, a post-quantum one-time digital signature scheme with non-interactive aggregation with security resting on the short integer solution problem over ideal lattices. Fusion is structurally similar to CRYSTALS-Dilithium, but Fusion is based upon the aggregatable one-time lattice-based scheme by Boneh and Kim. Fusion parameters conservatively target at least $128$ bits of security against forgery, taking tightness gaps into account, and with tighter bounds than the BK scheme....

Duplex-based authenticated encryption modes with a sufficiently large key length are proven to be secure up to the birthday bound 2^(c/2), where c is the capacity. However this bound is not known to be tight and the complexity of the best known generic attack, which is based on multicollisions, is much larger: it reaches (2^c)/α where α represents a small security loss factor. There is thus an uncertainty on the true extent of security beyond the bound 2^(c/2) provided by such constructions....

The sponge construction is a popular method for hashing. Quickly after its introduction, the sponge was proven to be tightly indifferentiable from a random oracle up to $ \approx 2^{c/2}$ queries, where $c$ is the capacity. However, this bound is not tight when the number of message blocks absorbed is restricted to $\ell <\lceil \frac{c}{2(b-c)}\rceil + 1$ (but still an arbitrary number of blocks can be squeezed). In this work, we show that this restriction leads to indifferentiability from...

Deniable Authentication is a highly desirable property for secure messaging protocols: it allows a sender Alice to authentically transmit messages to a designated receiver Bob in such a way that only Bob gets convinced that Alice indeed sent these messages. In particular, it guarantees that even if Bob tries to convince a (non-designated) party Judy that Alice sent some message, and even if Bob gives Judy his own secret key, Judy will not be convinced: as far as Judy knows, Bob could be...

In this paper, we consider tight multi-user security under adaptive corruptions, where the adversary can adaptively corrupt some users and obtain their secret keys. We propose generic constructions for a bunch of primitives, and the instantiations from the matrix decision Diffie-Hellman (MDDH) assumptions yield the following schemes: (1) the first digital signature (SIG) scheme achieving almost tight strong EUF-CMA security in the multi-user setting with adaptive corruptions in the...

Secret sharing schemes allow sharing a secret between a set of parties in a way that ensures that only authorized subsets of the parties learn the secret. Evolving secret sharing schemes (Komargodski, Naor, and Yogev [TCC ’16]) allow achieving this end in a scenario where the parties arrive in an online fashion, and there is no a-priory bound on the number of parties. An important complexity measure of a secret sharing scheme is the share size, which is the maximum number of bits that a...

We introduce CorrGapCDH, the Gap Computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the multi-user setting with Corruptions. In the random oracle model, our assumption tightly implies the security of the authenticated key exchange protocols NAXOS in the eCK model and (a simplified version of) X3DH without ephemeral key reveal. We prove hardness of CorrGapCDH in the generic group model, with optimal bounds matching the one of the discrete logarithm problem. We also introduce CorrCRGapCDH, a stronger...

The ChaCha20-Poly1305 AEAD scheme is being increasingly widely deployed in practice. Practitioners need proven security bounds in order to set data limits and rekeying intervals for the scheme. But the formal security analysis of ChaCha20-Poly1305 currently lags behind that of AES-GCM. The only extant analysis (Procter, 2014) contains a flaw and is only for the single-user setting. We rectify this situation. We prove a multi-user security bound on the AEAD security of ChaCha20-Poly1305 and...

The One-Way to Hiding (O2H) Lemma is a central component of proofs of chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) security of practical public-key encryption schemes using variants of the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform in the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM). Recently, Kuchta et al. (EUROCRYPT ’20) introduced a new QROM proof technique, called Measure-Rewind-Measure (MRM), giving an improved variant of the O2H lemma, with a new security reduction that does not suffer from a square-root advantage...

At Eurocrypt 2015, Duc et al. conjectured that the success rate of a side-channel attack targeting an intermediate computation encoded in a linear secret-sharing, a.k.a masking with \(d+1\) shares, could be inferred by measuring the mutual information between the leakage and each share separately. This way, security bounds can be derived without having to mount the complete attack. So far, the best proven bounds for masked encodings were nearly tight with the conjecture, up to a constant...

Kyber is a key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM) that was recently selected by NIST in its PQC standardization process; it is also the only scheme to be selected in the context of public-key encryption (PKE) and key establishment. The main security target for KEMs, and their associated PKE schemes, in the NIST PQC context has been IND-CCA security. However, some important modern applications also require their underlying KEMs/PKE schemes to provide anonymity (Bellare et al., ASIACRYPT 2001)....

In p-noisy coin-tossing, Alice and Bob obtain fair coins which are of opposite values with probability p. Its Oblivious-Transfer (OT) complexity refers to the least number of OTs required by a semi-honest perfectly secure 2-party protocol for this task. We show a tight bound of Θ(log 1/p) for the OT complexity of p-noisy coin-tossing. This is the first instance of a lower bound for OT complexity that is independent of the input/output length of the function. We obtain our result by...

Goh and Jarecki (Eurocrypt 2003) showed how to get a signature scheme from the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption, and they introduced the name EDL for signatures of this type. The corresponding EDL family of signature schemes is remarkable for several reasons: elegance, simplicity and tight security. However, EDL security proofs stand in the random oracle model, and, to the best of our knowledge, extending this family without using an idealization of hash functions has never been...

Cuckoo hashing is a powerful primitive that enables storing items using small space with efficient querying. At a high level, cuckoo hashing maps $n$ items into $b$ entries storing at most $\ell$ items such that each item is placed into one of $k$ randomly chosen entries. Additionally, there is an overflow stash that can store at most $s$ items. Many cryptographic primitives rely upon cuckoo hashing to privately embed and query data where it is integral to ensure small failure probability...

ASCON is a family of cryptographic primitives for authenticated encryption and hashing introduced in 2015. It is selected as one of the ten finalists in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition. Since its introduction, ASCON has been extensively cryptanalyzed, and the results of these analyses can indicate the good resistance of this family of cryptographic primitives against known attacks, like differential and linear cryptanalysis. Proving upper bounds for the differential...

Distributed key generation (DKG) protocols are an essential building block for threshold cryptosystems. Many DKG protocols tolerate up to $t_s<n/2$ corruptions assuming a well-behaved synchronous network, but become insecure as soon as the network delay becomes unstable. On the other hand, solutions in the asynchronous model operate under arbitrary network conditions, but only tolerate $t_a<n/3$ corruptions, even when the network is well-behaved. In this work, we ask whether one can...

Registration-based encryption (Garg, Hajiabadi, Mahmoody, Rahimi, TCC'18) aims to offer what identity-based encryption offers without the key-escrow problem, which refers to the ability of the private-key generator to obtain parties' decryption keys at wish. In RBE, parties generate their own secret and public keys and register their public keys to the key curator (KC) who updates a compact public parameter after each registration. The updated public parameter can then be used to securely...

Differential privacy (DP) is a key tool in privacy-preserving data analysis. Yet it remains challenging for non-privacy-experts to prove the DP of their algorithms. We propose a methodology for domain experts with limited data privacy background to empirically estimate the privacy of an arbitrary mechanism. Our Eureka moment is a new link---which we prove---between the problems of DP parameter-estimation and Bayes optimal classifiers in ML, which we believe can be of independent interest....

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) is the basis of modern Secure Group Messaging (SGM) protocols. At a high level, a CGKA protocol enables a group of users to continuously compute a shared (evolving) secret while members of the group add new members, remove other existing members, and perform state updates. The state updates allow CGKA to offer desirable security features such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security. CGKA is regarded as a practical primitive in the...