Joan Daemen (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Gilles Van Assche (STMicroelectronics)
December 14 at 12:30
Campus Plaine, Forum F
Abstract : In this talk we will discuss the role and benefits deck functions can have in symmetric cryptography. We will illustrate this with concrete modes for (authenticated) encryption on top of these, as well as with examples of efficient designs of such functions. Modern symmetric encryption and/or authentication schemes consist of modes of block ciphers. Often these schemes have a proof of security on the condition that the underlying block cipher behave as (strong) pseudo-random permutations ((S)PRP), that is, when keyed with a fixed and unknown key it shall be hard to distinguish from a random permutation. The PRP and SPRP security notions have become so accepted that they are referred to as the standard model. (S)PRP security cannot be proven but thanks to this nice split in primitives and modes, the assurance of block-cipher based cryptographic schemes relies on public scrutiny of the block cipher in the simple standard scenario. During the last decade, however, permutation-based cryptography has gained a lot of traction. Modes on top of these primitives have appeared and many new permutations have been proposed. At their core, these modes often have a duplex-like construction and its parallel nephew, farfalle. However, while it is reasonable to assume one can build a block cipher that is (S)PRP secure, it is impossible to formalize what it means for a permutation to behave like an ideal permutation. We show that permutation-based cryptography can have its own standard model with (keyed) duplex functions or farfalle-based functions at their center: Both are instances of what we call deck functions, and the standard model is the pseudorandom function (PRF) security. Modes can be defined in terms of deck functions and can be proven secure in the setting where the keyed deck function is hard to distinguish from a random oracle. Similarly to the (S)PRP security of a block cipher, the PRF security of a deck function is the subject of public scrutiny and cryptanalysis.
Bio :
Since March 2015, Joan Daemen is full professor symmetric cryptography at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Digital Security (DiS) Group. He is currently at the head of the DiS group. Until 2018, he worked also as a security architect and cryptographer for STMicroelectronics, previously Proton World (1998-2003), previously Banksys (1996-1998), all that time in the security engineering group. He did a PhD on the design of symmetric cryptography at COSIC in Leuven from 1988 until 1995.
Gilles Van Assche currently works in the Secure Microcontrollers Division of STMicroelectronics and teach cryptography at the ULB and at the École Supérieure d’Informatique in Brussels. He got a Physics Engineer degree and a PhD degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). After working for several years in quantum cryptography and information theory, his current research is in (classical) symmetric cryptography, mainly in collaboration with Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and, since 2006, Guido Bertoni. This collaboration spans several nice projects, such as the introduction of the concept of cryptographic sponge functions and the design of the Keccak sponge function, which was selected as the new SHA-3 standard in 2012, after an intense five-year contest. He is also interested in side-channel attacks, which were explicitly taken into account from the start of the design of Keccak.