What a lovely hat

Sparse Learning With Errors (sLWE) is a novel problem introduced at Crypto 2024 by Jain et al., designed to enhance security in lattice-based cryptography against quantum attacks while maintaining computational efficiency. This paper presents the first third-party analysis of the ternary variant of sLWE, where both the secret and error vectors are constrained to ternary values. We introduce a combinatorial attack that employs a subsystem extraction technique followed by a Meet-in-the-Middle...

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in improving the understanding of the practical hardness of the 3-Tensor Isomorphism (3-TI) problem, which, given two 3-tensors, asks for an isometry between the two. The current state-of-the-art for solving this problem is the algebraic algorithm of Ran et al. '23 and the graph-theoretic algorithm of Narayanan et al. '24 that have both slightly reduced the security of the signature schemes MEDS and ALTEQ, based on variants of the 3-TI problem...

It has been shown that the selfish mining attack enables a miner to achieve an unfair relative revenue, posing a threat to the progress of longest-chain blockchains. Although selfish mining is a well-studied attack in the context of Proof-of-Work blockchains, its impact on the longest-chain Proof-of-Stake (LC-PoS) protocols needs yet to be addressed. This paper involves both theoretical and implementation-based approaches to analyze the selfish proposing attack in the LC-PoS protocols. We...

The Alternating Trilinear Form Equivalence (ATFE) problem was recently used by Tang et al. as a hardness assumption in the design of a Fiat-Shamir digital signature scheme ALTEQ. The scheme was submitted to the additional round for digital signatures of the NIST standardization process for post-quantum cryptography. ATFE is a hard equivalence problem known to be in the class of equivalence problems that includes, for instance, the Tensor Isomorphism (TI), Quadratic Maps Linear...

A Bitcoin miner who owns a sufficient amount of mining power can perform selfish mining to increase its relative revenue. Studies have demonstrated that the time-averaged profit of a selfish miner starts to rise once the mining difficulty level gets adjusted in favor of the attacker. Selfish mining profitability lies in the fact that orphan blocks are not incorporated into the current version of Bitcoin's difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM). Therefore, it is believed that considering the...

Maiorana--McFarland type constructions are basically concatenating the truth tables of linear functions on a smaller number of variables to obtain highly nonlinear ones on larger inputs. Such functions and their different variants have significant cryptology and coding theory applications. The straightforward hardware implementation of such functions using decoders (Khairallah et al., WAIFI 2018; Tang et al., SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, 2019) requires exponential resources on the...

The literature gives the impression that (1) existing heuristics accurately predict how effective lattice attacks are, (2) non-ternary lattice systems are not vulnerable to hybrid multi-decoding primal attacks, and (3) the asymptotic exponents of attacks against non-ternary systems have stabilized. This paper shows that 1 contradicts 2 and that 1 contradicts 3: the existing heuristics imply that hybrid primal key-recovery attacks are exponentially faster than standard non-hybrid primal...

This paper presents practicable single trace attacks against the Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) Key Encapsulation Mechanism. These attacks are the first Soft Analytical Side-Channel Attacks (SASCA) against code-based cryptography. We mount SASCA based on Belief Propagation (BP) on several steps of HQC's decapsulation process. Firstly, we target the Reed-Solomon (RS) decoder involved in the HQC publicly known code. We perform simulated attacks under Hamming weight leakage model, and reach...

In this work, we introduce a new attack for the Loidreau scheme [PQCrypto 2017] and its more recent variant LowMS. This attack is based on a constrained linear system for which we provide two solving approaches: - The first one is an enumeration algorithm inspired from combinatorial attacks on the Rank Decoding (RD) Problem. While the attack technique remains very simple, it allows us to obtain the best known structural attack on the parameters of these two schemes. - The second one is...

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,...

Combinatorial attacks on small max norm LWE keys suffer enormous memory requirements, which render them inefficient in realistic attack scenarios. Therefore, more memory-efficient substitutes for these algorithms are needed. In this work, we provide new combinatorial algorithms for recovering small max norm LWE secrets outperforming previous approaches whenever the available memory is limited. We provide analyses of our algorithms for secret key distributions of current NTRU, Kyber and...

In the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem we are given a matrix $A \in \mathbb{Z}_q^{N \times N}$ and a target vector $\vec{t} \in \mathbb{Z}_q^N$ such that there exists small-norm $\vec{s}, \vec{e}\in \mathbb{Z}_q^N$ satisfying $A\cdot\vec{s} = \vec{t} + \vec{e} \bmod q$. Modern cryptosystems often sample $\vec{s}, \vec{e}$ from narrow distributions that take integer values in a small range $[-\eta, \eta].$ Kyber and Dilithium both choose $\eta=2$ and $\eta=3$ using either a Centered...

Impossible differential (ID), zero-correlation (ZC), and integral attacks are a family of important attacks on block ciphers. For example, the impossible differential attack was the first cryptanalytic attack on 7 rounds of AES. Evaluating the security of block ciphers against these attacks is very important but also challenging: Finding these attacks usually implies a combinatorial optimization problem involving many parameters and constraints that is very hard to solve using manual...

The Rank Decoding problem (RD) is at the core of rank-based cryptography. Cryptosystems such as ROLLO and RQC, which made it to the second round of the NIST Post-Quantum Standardization Process, as well as the Durandal signature scheme, rely on it or its variants. This problem can also be seen as a structured version of MinRank, which is ubiquitous in multivariate cryptography. Recently, [1,2] proposed attacks based on two new algebraic modelings, namely the MaxMinors modeling which is...

The celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol ushered in several new consensus applications including cryptocurrencies. A few recent works have analyzed important properties of blockchains, including most significantly, consistency, which is a guarantee that all honest parties output the same sequence of blocks throughout the execution of the protocol. To establish consistency, the prior analysis of Pass, Seeman and shelat required a careful counting of certain combinatorial events that was...

We study the power of preprocessing adversaries in finding bounded-length collisions in the widely used Merkle-Damgård (MD) hashing in the random oracle model. Specifically, we consider adversaries with arbitrary $S$-bit advice about the random oracle and can make at most $T$ queries to it. Our goal is to characterize the advantage of such adversaries in finding a $B$-block collision in an MD hash function constructed using the random oracle with range size $N$ as the compression function...

A large proportion of modern symmetric cryptographic building blocks are designed using the Substitution-Permutation Networks (SPNs), or more generally, Shannon's confusion-diffusion paradigm. To justify its theoretical soundness, Dodis et al. (EUROCRYPT 2016) recently introduced the theoretical model of confusion-diffusion networks, which may be viewed as keyless SPNs using random permutations as S-boxes and combinatorial primitives as permutation layers, and established provable security...

Let $As = b + e \bmod q$ be an LWE-instance with ternary keys $s,e \in \{0, \pm 1\}^n$. Let $s$ be taken from a search space of size $\mathcal{S}$. A standard Meet-in-the-Middle attack recovers $s$ in time $\mathcal{S}^{0.5}$. Using the representation technique, a recent improvement of May shows that this can be lowered to approximately $\mathcal{S}^{0.25}$ by guessing a sub-linear number of $\Theta(\frac{n}{\log n})$ coordinates from $e$. While guessing such an amount of $e$ can...

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) enables $n$ parties, of which up to $t$ may be corrupted, to perform joint computations on their private inputs while revealing only the outputs. Optimizing the asymptotic and concrete costs of MPC protocols has become an important line of research. Much of this research focuses on the setting of an honest majority, where $n \ge 2t+1$, which gives rise to concretely efficient protocols that are either information-theoretic or make a black-box use of...

Ternary LWE, i.e., LWE with coefficients of the secret and the error vectors taken from $\{-1, 0, 1\}$, is a popular choice among NTRU-type cryptosystems and some signatures schemes like BLISS and GLP. In this work we consider quantum combinatorial attacks on ternary LWE. Our algorithms are based on the quantum walk framework of Magniez-Nayak-Roland-Santha. At the heart of our algorithms is a combinatorial tool called the representation technique that appears in algorithms for the subset...

Plactic key agreement is a new key agreement scheme that uses Knuth’s multiplication of semistandard tableaus from combinatorial algebra. The security of plactic key agreement relies on the difficulty of some computational problems, such as division of semistandard tableaus. Division by erosion uses backtracking to divide tableaus. Division by erosion is estimated to be infeasible against public keys of 768 or more bytes. If division by erosion is the best attack against plactic key...

The knapsack cryptography is the public-key cryptography whose security depends mainly on the hardness of the subset sum problem. Many of knapsack schemes were broken by low-density attacks, which are attack methods to use the situation that a shortest vector or a closest vector in a lattice corresponds to a solution of the subset sum problem. For the case when the Hamming weight of a solution for a random instance of the subset sum problem is arbitrary, if the density is less than...

The LWE problem with its ring variants is today the most prominent candidate for building efficient public key cryptosystems resistant to quantum computers. NTRU-type cryptosystems use an LWE-type variant with small max-norm secrets, usually with ternary coefficients from the set $\{-1,0,1\}$. The presumably best attack on these schemes is a hybrid attack that combines lattice reduction techniques with Odlyzko's Meet-in-the-Middle approach. Odlyzko's algorithm is a classical combinatorial...

NIST is currently conducting the 3rd round of a survey to find post-quantum class asymmetric protocols (PQC) [1]. We participated in a joint-team with a fellow researcher of the Interamerican Open University (UAI) with a Key-Exchange Protocol (KEP) called HK17 [2]. The proposal was flawed because Bernstein [3] found a weakness, which was later refined by Li [4] using a quadratic reduction of octonions and quaternions, albeit no objection about the published non-commutative protocol and the...

In 2013, Tao et al. introduced the ABC Simple Matrix Encryption Scheme, a multivariate public key encryption scheme. The scheme boasts great efficiency in encryption and decryption, though it suffers from very large public keys. It was quickly noted that the original proposal, utilizing square matrices, suffered from a very bad decryption failure rate. As a consequence, the designers later published updated parameters, replacing the square matrices with rectangular matrices and altering...

In this paper, we show a "direct" equivalence between certain authentication codes and robust secret sharing schemes. It was previously known that authentication codes and robust secret sharing schemes are closely related to similar types of designs, but direct equivalences had not been considered in the literature. Our new equivalences motivate the consideration of a certain "key-substitution attack." We study this attack and analyze it in the setting of "dual authentication codes." We also...

Algorithms for solving the Bounded Distance Decoding problem (BDD) are used for estimating the security of lattice-based cryptographic primitives, since these algorithms can be employed to solve variants of the Learning with Errors problem (LWE). In certain parameter regimes where the target vector is small and/or sparse, batches of BDD instances emerge from a combinatorial approach where several components of the target vector are guessed before decoding. In this work we explore trade-offs...

We prove lower bounds on the round complexity of randomized Byzantine agreement (BA) protocols, bounding the halting probability of such protocols after one and two rounds. In particular, we prove that: (1) BA protocols resilient against $n/3$ [resp., $n/4$] corruptions terminate (under attack) at the end of the first round with probability at most $o(1)$ [resp., $1/2+ o(1)$]. (2) BA protocols resilient against a fraction of corruptions greater than $1/4$ terminate at the end of the second...

The tower field implementation of the $\mathbb{F}_{2^8}$ inverter is not only the key technique for compact implementations of the S-boxes of several internationally standardized block ciphers such as AES, Camellia, and SM4, but also the underlying structure many side-channel attack resistant AES implementations rely on. In this work, we conduct an exhaustive study of the tower field representations of the $\mathbb{F}_{2^8}$ inverter with normal bases by applying several state-of-the-art...

In 1989, A. Shamir introduced an interesting public-key scheme of a new nature, a Zero-Knowledge (ZK) Identification scheme, based on PKP: the Permuted Kernel Problem. PKP is an NP-hard algebraic problem which has been extensively studied. Among all the attacks, the problem PKP is in spite of the research effort, still exponential. This problem was used to develop an Identification Scheme (IDS) which has a very efficient implementation on low-cost smart cards. There has been recently a...

Ever since the first candidate white-box implementations by Chow et al. in 2002, producing a secure white-box implementation of AES has remained an enduring challenge. Following the footsteps of the original proposal by Chow et al., other constructions were later built around the same framework. In this framework, the round function of the cipher is "encoded" by composing it with non-linear and affine layers known as encodings. However, all such attempts were broken by a series of...

By injecting faults, active physical attacks pose serious threats to cryptographic hardware where Concurrent Error Detection (CED) schemes are promising countermeasures. They are usually based on an Error-Detecting Code (EDC) which enables detecting certain injected faults depending on the specification of the underlying code. Here, we propose a methodology to enable correct, practical, and robust implementation of code-based CEDs. We show that straightforward hardware implementations of...

A memory-hard function (MHF) $f_n$ with parameter $n$ can be computed in sequential time and space $n$. Simultaneously, a high amortized parallel area-time complexity (aAT) is incurred per evaluation. In practice, MHFs are used to limit the rate at which an adversary (using a custom computational device) can evaluate a security sensitive function that still occasionally needs to be evaluated by honest users (using an off-the-shelf general purpose device). The most prevalent examples of such...

In this paper we investigate weak keys of universal hash functions (UHFs) from their combinatorial properties. We find that any UHF has a general class of keys, which makes the combinatorial properties totally disappear, and even compromises the security of the UHF-based schemes, such as the Wegman-Carter scheme, the UHF-then-PRF scheme, etc. By this class of keys, we actually get a general method to search weak-key classes of UHFs, which is able to derive all previous weak-key classes of...

A memory-hard function (MHF) $f$ is equipped with a {\em space cost} $\sigma$ and {\em time cost} $\tau$ parameter such that repeatedly computing $f_{\sigma,\tau}$ on an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is not economically advantageous relative to a general purpose computer. Technically we would like that any (generalized) circuit for evaluating an iMHF $f_{\sigma,\tau}$ has area $\times$ time (AT) complexity at $\Theta(\sigma^2 * \tau)$. A data-independent MHF (iMHF) has the...

We discuss a higher dimensional generalization of the Hidden Number Problem and generalize the Boneh-Venkatesan method for solving it in polynomial time. We then use this to analyze a key recovery (decoding) attack on LWE which runs in polynomial time using the LLL lattice basis reduction algorithm and Babai's nearest planes method. We prove that success can be guaranteed with overwhelming probability when the error distribution is narrow enough and $q\geq 2^{O(n)}$, where $n$ is the...

Slide attacks use pairs of encryption operations which are slid against each other. Slide with a twist attacks are more sophisticated variants of slide attacks which slide an encryption operation against a decryption operation. Designed by Biryukov and Wagner in 2000, these attacks were used against several cryptosystems, including DESX, the Even-Mansour construction, and Feistel structures with four-round self-similarity. They were further extended in 2012 to the mirror slidex framework,...

NMAC is a mode of operation which turns a fixed input-length keyed hash function f into a variable input-length function. A~practical single-key variant of NMAC called HMAC is a very popular and widely deployed message authentication code (MAC). Security proofs and attacks for NMAC can typically be lifted to HMAC. NMAC was introduced by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk [Crypto'96], who proved it to be a secure pseudorandom function (PRF), and thus also a MAC, assuming that (1) f is a PRF...

In CRYPTO 2008, one year earlier than Gentry's pioneering \lq\lq bootstrapping'' technique on constructing the first fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme, Ostrovsky and Skeith III had suggested a completely different approach towards achieving FHE. Namely, they showed that the $\mathsf{NAND}$ operator can be realized in some \emph{non-commutative} groups; consequently, in combination with the $\mathsf{NAND}$ operator realized in such a group, homomorphically encrypting the elements of...

In this paper we show that a large class of diverse problems have a bicomposite structure which makes it possible to solve them with a new type of algorithm called {\it dissection}, which has much better time/memory tradeoffs than previously known algorithms. A typical example is the problem of finding the key of multiple encryption schemes with $r$ independent $n$-bit keys. All the previous error-free attacks required time $T$ and memory $M$ satisfying $TM = 2^{rn}$, and even if ``false...

We consider user-private information retrieval (UPIR), an interesting alternative to private information retrieval (PIR) introduced by Domingo-Ferrer et al. In UPIR, the database knows which records have been retrieved, but does not know the identity of the person making the query. The goal of UPIR, then, is to disguise user profiles from the point of view of the database. Domingo-Ferrer et al.\ focus on using a peer-to-peer community to construct a UPIR scheme, which we term P2P UPIR. In...

In this paper, we present a new combinatorial conjecture about binary strings. Based on the new conjecture, two classes of Boolean functions of $2k$ variables with optimal algebraic immunity are proposed, where $k\ge 2$. The first class contains unbalanced functions having high algebraic degree and nonlinearity. The functions in the second one are balanced and have maximal algebraic degree and high nonlinearity. It is checked that, at least for small numbers of variables, both classes of...

This paper presents a practical cryptanalysis of the Identification Scheme proposed by Patarin at Crypto 1996. This scheme relies on the hardness of the Isomorphism of Polynomial with One Secret (IP1S), and enjoys shorter key than many other schemes based on the hardness of a combinatorial problem (as opposed to number-theoretic problems). Patarin proposed concrete parameters that have not been broken faster than exhaustive search so far. On the theoretical side, IP1S has been shown to be...

We show that the knowledge of any one of the two internal state arrays of HC-128 along with the knowledge of 2048 keystream words is sufficient to construct the other state array completely in $2^{42}$ time complexity. Though our analysis does not lead to any attack on HC-128, it reveals a structural insight into the cipher. In the process, we theoretically establish certain combinatorial properties of HC-128 keystream generation algorithm. We also suggest a modification to HC-128 that takes...

There are several public key establishment protocols as well as complete public key cryptosystems based on allegedly hard problems from combinatorial (semi)group theory known by now. Most of these problems are search problems, i.e., they are of the following nature: given a property P and the information that there are objects with the property P, find at least one particular object with the property P. So far, no cryptographic protocol based on a search problem in a non-commutative...

In this paper we compute the collision probability of CBC-MAC for suitably chosen messages. We show that the probability is $\Omega(\ell q^2/N)$ where $\ell$ is the number of message block, $N$ is the size of the domain and $q$ is the total number of queries. For random oracle the probability is $O(q^2/N)$. This improved collision probability will help us to have an efficient distinguishing attack and MAC-forgery attack. We also show collision probability for PMAC with collision...

We address the issue of encrypting data in local storage using a key that is derived from the user's password. The typical solution in use today is to derive the key from the password using a cryptographic hash function. This solution provides relatively weak protection, since an attacker that gets hold of the encrypted data can mount an off-line dictionary attack on the user's password, thereby recovering the key and decrypting the stored data. We propose an approach for limiting off-line...

Construction methods of Boolean functions with cryptographically significant properties is an important and difficult problem. In this work we investigate the class of rotation symmetric Boolean functions (RSBFs). These functions are invariant under circular translation of indices and were mainly introduced for efficient implementation purposes. First, we derive general results on these functions. Afterwards, we concentrate on plateaued RSBFs on odd number of variables, which have three...

This paper presents a new attack on keyboards. \smallskip The attack consists in depositing on each keyboard key a small ionic salt quantity ({\sl e.g.} some NaCl on key 0, some KCl on key 1, LiCl on key 2, SrCl$_2$ on key 3, BaCl$_2$ on key 4, CaCl$_2$ on key 5...). As the user enters his PIN, salts get mixed and leave the keyboard in a state that leaks secret information. Nicely enough, evaluating the entropy loss due to the chemical trace turns out to be a very interesting combinatorial...