[Resource Topic] 2016/578: Key-alternating Ciphers and Key-length Extension: Exact Bounds and Multi-user Security

Welcome to the resource topic for 2016/578

Title:
Key-alternating Ciphers and Key-length Extension: Exact Bounds and Multi-user Security

Authors: Viet Tung Hoang, Stefano Tessaro

Abstract:

The best existing bounds on the concrete security of key-alternating ciphers (Chen and Steinberger, EUROCRYPT '14) are only asymptotically tight, and the quantitative gap with the best existing attacks remains numerically substantial for concrete parameters. Here, we prove exact bounds on the security of key-alternating ciphers and extend them to XOR cascades, the most efficient construction for key-length extension. Our bounds essentially match, for any possible query regime, the advantage achieved by the best existing attack. Our treatment also extends to the multi-user regime. We show that the multi-user security of key-alternating ciphers and XOR cascades is very close to the single-user case, i.e., given enough rounds, it does not substantially decrease as the number of users increases. On the way, we also provide the first explicit treatment of multi-user security for key-length extension, which is particularly relevant given the significant security loss of block ciphers (even if ideal) in the multi-user setting. The common denominator behind our results are new techniques for information-theoretic indistinguishability proofs that both extend and refine existing proof techniques like the H-coefficient method.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/578

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwiVRB-iteI

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .