Tight Security of TNT and Beyond
Document Type
Conference Article
Publication Title
Lecture Notes in Computer Science Including Subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics
Abstract
Liskov, Rivest and Wagner laid the theoretical foundations for tweakable block ciphers (TBC). In a seminal paper, they proposed two (up to) birthday-bound secure design strategies — LRW1 and LRW2 — to convert any block cipher into a TBC. Several of the follow-up works consider cascading of LRW-type TBCs to construct beyond-the-birthday bound (BBB) secure TBCs. Landecker et al. demonstrated that just two-round cascading of LRW2 can already give a BBB security. Bao et al. undertook a similar exercise in context of LRW1 with TNT — a three-round cascading of LRW1 — that has been shown to achieve BBB security as well. In this paper, we present a CCA distinguisher on TNT that achieves a non-negligible advantage with O(2n/2) queries, directly contradicting the security claims made by the designers. We provide a rigorous and complete advantage calculation coupled with experimental verification that further support our claim. Next, we provide new and simple proofs of birthday-bound CCA security for both TNT and its single-key variant, which confirm the tightness of our attack. Furthering on to a more positive note, we show that adding just one more block cipher call, referred as 4-LRW1, does not just re-establish the BBB security, but also amplifies it up to 23n/4 queries. As a side-effect of this endeavour, we propose a new abstraction of the cascaded LRW-design philosophy, referred to as the LRW+ paradigm, comprising two block cipher calls sandwiched between a pair of tweakable universal hashes. This helps us to provide a modular proof covering all cascaded LRW constructions with at least 2 rounds, including 4-LRW1, and its more established relative, the well-known CLRW2, or more aptly, 2-LRW2.
First Page
249
Last Page
279
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-58716-0_9
Publication Date
1-1-2024
Recommended Citation
Jha, Ashwin; Khairallah, Mustafa; Nandi, Mridul; and Saha, Abishanka, "Tight Security of TNT and Beyond" (2024). Conference Articles. 906.
https://digitalcommons.isical.ac.in/conf-articles/906