In this paper we model a class of stream and block ciphers as systems of (ordinary) explicit difference equations over a finite field. We call this class "difference ciphers" and we show that ciphers of application interest, as for example systems of LFSRs with a combiner, Trivium and Keeloq, belong to the class. By using Difference Algebra, that is, the formal theory of difference equations, we can properly define and study important properties of these ciphers, such as their invertibility and periodicity. We describe then general cryptanalytic methods for difference ciphers that follow from these properties and are useful to assess the security. We illustrate such algebraic attacks in practice by means of the ciphers Bivium and Keeloq.
In this paper we show that a recently published finite automaton stream cipher can be considered as a quasigroup based stream cipher. Some additional properties of the discussed cipher are also given.
In this paper we study the security of the Bluetooth stream cipher E0 from the viewpoint it is a "difference stream cipher", that is, it is defined by a system of explicit difference equations over the finite field GF(2). This approach highlights some issues of the Bluetooth encryption such as the invertibility of its state transition map, a special set of 14 bits of its 132-bit state which when guessed implies linear equations among the other bits and finally a small number of spurious keys, with 83 guessed bits, which are compatible with a keystream of about 60 bits. Exploiting these issues,…
This paper deals with the merger of the two lightweight stream ciphers: A5by1 and Trivium. The idea is to make the key stream generation more secure and to remove the attacks of the individual algorithms. The bits generated by the Trivium cipher will act as the input of the A5by1 cipher. The registers used in the A5by1 cipher will be filled by the output bits of the Trivium cipher. The three registers will then be connected to generate an output which will be our required key stream.
The rotation operator is frequently used in several stream ciphers, including HC-128, Rabbit, and Salsa20, the final candidates for eSTREAM. This is because the rotation operator (ROT) is simple but has very good dispersibility. In this paper, we propose a disperse rotation operator (DRT), which has the same structure as ROT but has better dispersibility. In addition, the use of DRT instead of ROT has shown that the quality of the output stream of all three stream ciphers was significantly improved. However, the use of DRT instead of ROT in the HC-128 stream cipher prevents the expansion of di…
We follow two main objectives in this article. On the one hand, we introduce a security model called LORBACPA$^+$ for self-synchronized stream ciphers which is stronger than the blockwise LOR-IND-CPA, where we show that standard constructions as delayed CBC or similar existing self-synchronized modes of operation are not secure in this stronger model. Then, on the other hand, following contributions of G.~Millérioux et.al., we introduce a new self-synchronized stream cipher and prove its security in LORBACPA$^+$ model.
A stream cipher was implemented on a FPGA. The keystream, for some authors the most important element, was developed using an algorithm based on Bernoullis chaotic map. When dynamic systems are digitally implemented, a normal degradation appears and disturbs their behavior; for such reason, a mechanism was needed. The proposed mechanism gives a solution for degradation issue and its implementation is not complicated. Finally, the implemented cipher includes 8 stages and 2 pseudo-random number generators (PRNG), such cipher was tested using NIST testes. Once its designing stage, it was implemen…
We propose two parity-based concurrent error detection schemes for the Quarterround of the ChaCha stream cipher to protect from transient and permanent faults. They offer a trade-off between implementation overhead and error coverage. The second approach can detect any odd-weight error on the in-/output and intermediate signals of a Quarterround, while the first one requires less logic.
Lightweight stream ciphers are highly demanded in IoT applications. In order to optimize the hardware performance, a new class of stream cipher has been proposed. The basic idea is to employ a single Galois NLFSR with maximum period to construct the cipher. As a representative design of this kind of stream ciphers, Espresso is based on a 256-bit Galois NLFSR initialized by a 128-bit key. The $2^{256}-1$ maximum period is assured because the Galois NLFSR is transformed from a maximum length LFSR. However, we propose a Galois-to-Fibonacci transformation algorithm and successfully transform the G…
Weak pseudorandom functions (wPRFs) found an important application as main building blocks for leakage-resilient ciphers (EUROCRYPT'09). Several security bounds, based on different techniques, were given to these stream ciphers. The security loss in these reduction-based proofs is always polynomial, but has not been studied in detail. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present a clear comparison of quantitatively different security bounds in the literature. Second, we revisit the current proof techniques and answer the natural question of how far we are from meaningful and provable se…
In order to improve the efficiency of using ZUC primitives, we give two AEAD (Authenticated Encryption with Associated Data) modes for them, ZUC-GXM and ZUC-MUR. They are suitable for ZUC (ZUC-128) and two cases of ZUC-256. The former is a nonce-based AEAD, which is following the GCM framework. The latter is a nonce misuse-resistant one which is based on the framework of SIV variance, providing more robust applications for ZUC family stream ciphers.
A new large class of $2^{100}$ possible stream ciphers as keystream generators KSGs, is presented. The sample cipher-structure-concept is based on randomly selecting a set of 16 maximum-period Nonlinear Feedback Shift Registers (NLFSRs). A non-linear combining function is merging the 16 selected sequences. All resulting stream ciphers with a total state-size of 223 bits are designed to result with the same security level and have a linear complexity exceeding $2^{81}$ and a period exceeding $2^{161}$. A Secret Unknown Cipher (SUC) is created randomly by selecting one cipher from that class of …
We provide sufficient conditions to guarantee that a translation based cipher is not vulnerable with respect to the partition-based trapdoor. This trapdoor has been introduced, recently, by Bannier et al. (2016) and it generalizes that introduced by Paterson in 1999. Moreover, we discuss the fact that studying the group generated by the round functions of a block cipher may not be sufficient to guarantee security against these trapdoors for the cipher.
In this paper, we propose and evaluate a method for generating key-dependent feedback configurations (KDFC) for $σ$-LFSRs. $σ$-LFSRs with such configurations can be applied to any stream cipher that uses a word-based LFSR. Here, a configuration generation algorithm uses the secret key(K) and the initialization vector (IV) to generate a feedback configuration. We have mathematically analysed the feedback configurations generated by this method. As a test case, we have applied this method on SNOW 2.0 and have studied its impact on resistance to various attacks. Further, we have also tested the g…
Recent years have shown that more than ever governments and intelligence agencies try to control and bypass the cryptographic means used for the protection of data. Backdooring encryption algorithms is considered as the best way to enforce cryptographic control. Implementation backdoors (at the protocol/implementation/ma\-nagement level) are generally considered. In this paper we propose to address the most critical issue of backdoors: mathematical backdoors or by-design backdoors, which are put directly at the mathematical design of the encryption algorithm. Considering a particular family (a…
In this paper, a new stream cipher is designed as a clock-controlled one, but with a new mechanism of altering steps based on system theory in such a way that the structures used in it are resistant to conventional attacks. Our proposed algorithm (PALS) uses the main key with the length of 256 bits and a 32-bit message key. The most important criteria considered in designing the PALS are resistance to known attacks, maximum period, high linear complexity, and good statistical properties. As a result, the output keystream is very similar to the perfectly random sequences and resistant to conven…
There can be performance and vulnerability concerns with block ciphers, thus stream ciphers can used as an alternative. Although many symmetric key stream ciphers are fairly resistant to side-channel attacks, cryptographic artefacts may exist in memory. This paper identifies a significant vulnerability within OpenSSH and OpenSSL and which involves the discovery of cryptographic artefacts used within the ChaCha20 cipher. This can allow for the cracking of tunneled data using a single targeted memory extraction. With this, law enforcement agencies and/or malicious agents could use the vulnerabil…
The previous work showed that the Y00 protocol could stay secure with the eavesdropper's guessing probability on the secret keys being strictly less than one under an unlimitedly long known-plaintext attack with quantum memory. However, an assumption that at least a fast correlation attack is completely disabled by irregular mapping. The present study shows that the Y00 protocol can be information-theoretic secure under any quantum-computational crypto-analyses if the Y00 system is well designed. The Y00 protocol directly encrypts messages with short secret keys expanded into pseudo-random run…
The Solitaire cipher was designed by Bruce Schneier as a plot point in the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. The cipher is intended to fit the archetype of a modern stream cipher whilst being implementable by hand using a standard deck of cards with two jokers. We find a model for repetitions in the keystream in the stream cipher Solitaire that accounts for the large majority of the repetition bias. Other phenomena merit further investigation. We have proposed modifications to the cipher that would reduce the repetition bias, but at the cost of increasing the complexity of the cipher (pr…
The control of the cryptography is more than ever a recurrent issue. As the current international regulation does not apply in the signatory countries, the concept of enforcing backdoors in encryption system is reborn with more strength. This paper deals with a particular class of stream cipher backdoors. This class, under a different form, has been widely used by the industry in the 80s and 90s in the context of the export control rules imposed by the US to the Western countries. We propose here a new system -- called BSEA-2, with a 128-bit secret key -- which is a seemingly minor modificatio…
The growing potential of modern communications needs the use of secure means to protect information from unauthorized access and use during transmission. In general, encryption a message using cryptography techniques and then hidden a message with a steganography methods provides an additional layer of protection. Furthermore, using these combination reduces the chance of finding the hidden message. This paper proposed a system which combines schemes of cryptography with steganography for hiding secret messages and to add more complexity for steganography. The proposed system secret message en…
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University（纽约大学库朗数学科学研究所）
This work provides a survey of several networking cipher algorithms and proposes a method for integrating natural language processing (NLP) as a protective agent for them. Two main proposals are covered for the use of NLP in networking. First, NLP is considered as the weakest link in a networking encryption model; and, second, as a hefty deterrent when combined as an extra layer over what could be considered a strong type of encryption -- the stream cipher. This paper summarizes how languages can be integrated into symmetric encryption as a way to assist in the encryption of vulnerable streams…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；Institute of Electronic and Information Engineering of UESTC in Guangdong（电子科技大学广东电子信息工程研究院）；University of Texas at San Antonio（德克萨斯大学圣安东尼奥分校）
The need for medical image encryption is increasingly pronounced, for example to safeguard the privacy of the patients' medical imaging data. In this paper, a novel deep learning-based key generation network (DeepKeyGen) is proposed as a stream cipher generator to generate the private key, which can then be used for encrypting and decrypting of medical images. In DeepKeyGen, the generative adversarial network (GAN) is adopted as the learning network to generate the private key. Furthermore, the transformation domain (that represents the "style" of the private key to be generated) is designed t…
In a world heavily loaded by information, there is a great need for keeping specific information secure from adversaries. The rapid growth in the research field of lightweight cryptography can be seen from the list of the number of lightweight stream as well as block ciphers that has been proposed in the recent years. This paper focuses only on the subject of lightweight block ciphers. In this paper, we have proposed a new 256 bit lightweight block cipher named as Marvin, that belongs to the family of Extended LS designs.
