Maria Eichlseder

Branching Heuristics in Differential Collision Search with Applications to SHA-512

In this work, we present practical semi-free-start collisions for SHA-512 on up to 38 (out of 80) steps with complexity \(2^{40.5}\). The best previously published result was on 24 steps. The attack is based on extending local collisions as proposed by Mendel et al. in their Eurocrypt 2013 attack on SHA-256. However, for SHA-512, the search space is too large for direct application of these techniques. We achieve our result by improving the branching heuristic of the guess-and-determine approach to find differential characteristics and conforming message pairs. Experiments show that for smaller problems like 27 steps of SHA-512, the heuristic can also speed up the collision search by a factor of \(2^{20}\).

Cryptanalysis of Ascon

We present a detailed security analysis of the CAESAR candidate Ascon. Amongst others, cube-like, differential and linear cryptanalysis are used to evaluate the security of Ascon. Our results are practical key-recovery attacks on round-reduced versions of Ascon-128, where the initialization is reduced to 5 out of 12 rounds. Theoretical key-recovery attacks are possible for up to 6 rounds of initialization. Moreover, we present a practical forgery attack for 3 rounds of the finalization, a theoretical forgery attack for 4 rounds finalization and zero-sum distinguishers for the full 12-round Ascon permutation. Besides, we present the first results regarding linear cryptanalysis of Ascon, improve upon the results of the designers regarding differential cryptanalysis, and prove bounds on the minimum number of (linearly and differentially) active S-boxes for the Ascon permutation.

Statistical Fault Attacks on Nonce-Based Authenticated Encryption Schemes

Since the first demonstration of fault attacks by Boneh et al. on RSA, a multitude of fault attack techniques on various cryptosystems have been proposed. Most of these techniques, like Differential Fault Analysis, Safe Error Attacks, and Collision Fault Analysis, have the requirement to process two inputs that are either identical or related, in order to generate pairs of correct/faulty ciphertexts. However, when targeting authenticated encryption schemes, this is in practice usually precluded by the unique nonce required by most of these schemes.

Heuristic Tool for Linear Cryptanalysis with Applications to CAESAR Candidates

Differential and linear cryptanalysis are the general purpose tools to analyze various cryptographic primitives. Both techniques have in common that they rely on the existence of good differential or linear characteristics. The difficulty of finding such characteristics depends on the primitive. For instance, AES is designed to be resistant against differential and linear attacks and therefore, provides upper bounds on the probability of possible linear characteristics. On the other hand, we have primitives like SHA-1, SHA-2, and Keccak, where finding good and useful characteristics is an open problem. This becomes particularly interesting when considering, for example, competitions like CAESAR. In such competitions, many cryptographic primitives are waiting for analysis. Without suitable automatic tools, this is a virtually infeasible job. In recent years, various tools have been introduced to search for characteristics. The majority of these only deal with differential characteristics. In this work, we present a heuristic search tool which is capable of finding linear characteristics even for primitives with a relatively large state, and without a strongly aligned structure. As a proof of concept, we apply the presented tool on the underlying permutations of the first round CAESAR candidates Ascon, ICEPOLE, Keyak, Minalpher and PrOst.

Higher-Order Cryptanalysis of LowMC

LowMC is a family of block ciphers developed particularly for use in multi-party computations and fully homomorphic encryption schemes, where the main performance penalty comes from non-linear operations. Thus, LowMC has been designed to minimize the total quantity of logical “and” operations, as well as the “and” depth. To achieve this, the LowMC designers opted for an incomplete S-box layer that does not cover the complete state, and compensate for it with a very dense, randomly chosen linear layer. In this work, we exploit this design strategy in a cube-like key-recovery attack. We are able to recover the secret key of a round-reduced variant of LowMC with 80-bit security, where the number of rounds is reduced from 11 to 9. Our attacks are independent of the actual instances of the used linear layers and therefore, do not exploit possible weak choices of them. From our results, we conclude that the resulting security margin of 2 rounds is smaller than expected.

Malicious Hashing: Eve’s Variant of SHA-1

We present collisions for a version of SHA-1 with modified constants, where the colliding payloads are valid binary files. Examples are given of colliding executables, archives, and images. Our malicious SHA-1 instances have round constants that differ from the original ones in only 40 bits (on average). Modified versions of cryptographic standards are typically used on closed systems (e.g., in pay-TV, media and gaming platforms) and aim to differentiate cryptographic components across customers or services. Our proof-of-concept thus demonstrates the exploitability of custom SHA-1 versions for malicious purposes, such as the injection of user surveillance features. To encourage further research on such malicious hash functions, we propose definitions of malicious hash functions and of associated security notions.

ISAP – Towards Side-Channel Secure Authenticated Encryption

Side-channel attacks and in particular differential power analysis (DPA) attacks pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations. One approach to counteract such attacks are cryptographic schemes based on fresh re-keying. In settings of pre-shared secret keys, such schemes render DPA attacks infeasible by deriving session keys and by ensuring that the attacker cannot collect side-channel leakage on the session key during cryptographic operations with different inputs. While these schemes can be applied to secure standard communication settings, current re-keying approaches are unable to provide protection in settings where the same input needs to be processed multiple times. In this work, we therefore adapt the re-keying approach and present a symmetric authenticated encryption scheme that is secure against DPA attacks and that does not have such a usage restriction. This means that our scheme fully complies with the requirements given in the CAESAR call and hence, can be used like other noncebased authenticated encryption schemes without loss of side-channel protection. Its resistance against side-channel analysis is highly relevant for several applications in practice, like bulk storage settings in general and the protection of FPGA bitfiles and firmware images in particular.

Analysis of SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256

In 2012, NIST standardized SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256, two truncated variants of SHA-512, in FIPS 180-4. These two hash functions are faster than SHA-224 and SHA-256 on 64-bit platforms, while maintaining the same hash size and claimed security level. So far, no third-party analysis of SHA-512/224 or SHA-512/256 has been published. In this work, we examine the collision resistance of step-reduced versions of SHA-512/224 and SHA-512/256 by using differential cryptanalysis in combination with sophisticated search tools. We are able to generate practical examples of free-start collisions for 44-step SHA-512/224 and 43-step SHA-512/256. Thus, the truncation performed by these variants on their larger state allows us to attack several more rounds compared to the untruncated family members. In addition, we improve upon the best published collisions for 24-step SHA-512 and present practical collisions for 27 steps of SHA-512/224, SHA-512/256, and SHA-512.

Square Attack on 7-Round Kiasu-BC

Kiasu-BC is a tweakable block cipher presented within the TWEAKEY framework at AsiaCrypt 2014. Kiasu-BC is almost identical to AES-128, the only difference to AES-128 is the tweak addition, where the 64-bit tweak is xored to the first two rows of every round-key. The security analysis of the designers focuses primarily on related-key related-tweak differential characteristics and meet-in-the-middle attacks. For other attacks, they conclude that the security level of Kiasu-BC is similar to AES-128. In this work, we provide the first third-party analysis of Kiasu-BC. We show that we can mount Square attacks on up to 7-round Kiasu-BC with a complexity of about \(2^{48.5}\) encryptions, which improves upon the best published 7-round attacks for AES-128. Furthermore, we show that such attacks are applicable to the round-reduced \(\Theta \)CB3-like mode of the CAESAR candidate Kiasu. To be specific, we show a key-recovery attack on 7-round Kiasu\(\ne \) with a complexity of about \(2^{82}\) encryptions.

Related-Key Forgeries for Prøst-OTR

We present a forgery attack on Prost-OTR in a related-key setting. Prost is a family of authenticated encryption algorithms proposed as candidates in the currently ongoing CAESAR competition, and Prost-OTR is one of the three variants of the Prost design. The attack exploits how the Prost permutation is used in an Even-Mansour construction in the Feistel-based OTR mode of operation. Given the ciphertext and tag for any two messages under two related keys K and \(K \oplus \varDelta \) with related nonces, we can forge the ciphertext and tag for a modified message under K. If we can query ciphertexts for chosen messages under \(K \oplus \varDelta \), we can achieve almost universal forgery for K. The computational complexity is negligible.