Aleksei Udovenko

Design Strategies for ARX with Provable Bounds: Sparx and LAX

We present, for the first time, a general strategy for designing ARX symmetric-key primitives with provable resistance against single-trail differential and linear cryptanalysis. The latter has been a long standing open problem in the area of ARX design. The wide-trail design strategy (WTS), that is at the basis of many S-box based ciphers, including the AES, is not suitable for ARX designs due to the lack of S-boxes in the latter. In this paper we address the mentioned limitation by proposing the long trail design strategy (LTS) – a dual of the WTS that is applicable (but not limited) to ARX constructions. In contrast to the WTS, that prescribes the use of small and efficient S-boxes at the expense of heavy linear layers with strong mixing properties, the LTS advocates the use of large (ARX-based) S-Boxes together with sparse linear layers. With the help of the so-called long-trail argument, a designer can bound the maximum differential and linear probabilities for any number of rounds of a cipher built according to the LTS.

Reverse-Engineering the S-Box of Streebog, Kuznyechik and STRIBOBr1

The Russian Federations standardization agency has recently published a hash function called Streebog and a 128-bit block cipher called Kuznyechik. Both of these algorithms use the same 8-bit S-Box but its design rationale was never made public. In this paper, we reverse-engineer this S-Box and reveal its hidden structure. It is based on a sort of 2-round Feistel Network where exclusive-or is replaced by a finite field multiplication. This structure is hidden by two different linear layers applied before and after. In total, five different 4-bit S-Boxes, a multiplexer, two 8-bit linear permutations and two finite field multiplications in a field of size

Algebraic Insights into the Secret Feistel Network

2^{4}

Optimal First-Order Boolean Masking for Embedded IoT Devices

are needed to compute the S-Box. The knowledge of this decomposition allows a much more efficient hardware implementation by dividing the area and the delay by 2.5 and 8 respectively. However, the small 4-bit S-Boxes do not have very good cryptographic properties. In fact, one of them has a probability 1 differential. We then generalize the method we used to partially recover the linear layers used to whiten the core of this S-Box and illustrate it with a generic decomposition attack against 4-round Feistel Networks whitened with unknown linear layers. Our attack exploits a particular pattern arising in the Linear Approximations Table of such functions.

The Secret Structure of the S-Box of Streebog, Kuznechik and Stribob.

The existence of Almost Perfect Non-linear APN permutations operating on an even number of bits has been a long standing open question until Dillon et al., who work for the NSA, provided an example on 6 bits in 2009. In this paper, we apply methods intended to reverse-engineer S-Boxes with unknown structure to this permutation and find a simple decomposition relying on the cube function over

Analysis of the NORX Core Permutation.

GF2^3