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The goal of this paper is to investigate linear approximations of random functions and permutations. Our motivation is twofold. First, before the distinguishability of a practical cipher from an ideal one can be analysed, the cryptanalyst must have an accurate understanding of the statistical behaviour of the ideal cipher. Secondly, this issue has been neglected both in old and in more recent studies, particularly when multiple linear approximations are being used simultaneously. Traditional models have been based on the average behaviour and simplified using other assumptions such as independence of the linear approximations. Multidimensional cryptanalysis was introduced to avoid making artificial assumptions about statistical independence of linear approximations. On the other hand, it has the drawback of including many trivial approximations that do not contribute to the attack but just cause a waste of time and memory. We show for the first time in this paper that the trivial approximations reduce the degree of freedom of the related $\chi ^{2}$ distribution. Previously, the affine linear cryptanalysis was proposed to allow removing trivial approximations and, at the same time, admitting a solid statistical model. In this paper, we identify another type of multidimensional linear approximation, called Davies-Meyer approximation, which has similar advantages, and present full statistical models for both the affine and the Davies-Meyer type of multidimensional linear approximations. The new models given in this paper are realistic, accurate and easy to use. They are backed up by standard statistical tools such as Pearson’s $\chi ^{2}$ test and finite population correction and demonstrated to work accurately using practical examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The inverse function x → x−1 on F2n, is one of the most studied functions in cryptography due to its widespread use as an S-box in block ciphers like AES. In this paper, we show that, if n ≥ 5, every function that is CCZ-equivalent to the inverse function is already EA-equivalent to it. This confirms a conjecture by Budaghyan, Calderini and Villa. We also prove that every permutation that is CCZ-equivalent to the inverse function is already affine equivalent to it. The majority of the paper is devoted to proving that there is no permutation polynomial of the form L1(x−1) + L2(x) over F2n if n ≥ 5, where L1,L2 are nonzero linear functions. In the proof, we combine Kloosterman sums, quadratic forms and tools from additive combinatorics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In ICISC-05, and in the ePrint 2010/287, Patarin claimed a lower bound on the number of $2 q$ tuples of $n$ -bit strings $(P_{1}, \ldots, P_{2q}) \in ({\{0,1\}}^{n})^{2q}$ satisfying $P_{2i - 1} \oplus P_{2i} = \lambda _{i}$ for $1 \leq i \leq q$ such that $P_{1}, P_{2}, \ldots $ , $P_{2q}$ are distinct and $\lambda _{i} \in {\{0,1\}} ^{n} \setminus \{0^{n}\}$. This result is known as Mirror theory and widely used in cryptography. It stands as a powerful tool to provide a high-security guarantee for many block cipher-(or even ideal permutation-) based designs. In particular, Mirror theory has a direct application in the security of XOR of block ciphers. Unfortunately, the proof of Mirror theory contains some unverifiable gaps and several mistakes. This paper provides a simple and verifiable proof of Mirror theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Demirci-Selçuk’s meet-in-the-middle attack is one of the most important methods among all the cryptanalytic vectors, which gives the best result against the round-reduced AES with respect to the rounds, and tradeoffs between data, time and memory. While we have already built provable security models against the differential cryptanalysis, linear cryptanalysis cryptanalysis, impossible differential and zero-correlation linear cryptanalysis, the provable security against the meet-in-the-middle attack is missing. In this paper, we propose the subset representation of function based on which we could give an algorithm to compute the exact number of parameters of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher given the input and output, respectively. Experiments show that this algorithm can be more efficient than the automatical tool presented by Shi et al. at Asiacrypt 2018. We further extract a formula based on this algorithm and show an upper bound for the length of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher of an iterative SPN cipher. We prove that for an SPN block cipher whose block size equals the key size, an effective Demirci-Selçuk-type meet-in-the-middle distinguisher covers at most twice the maximum of the primitive indexes of the linear layer and its inverse. As a result, we show that the known length of the Demirci-Selçuk’s distinguisher of the AES-128 cannot be improved unless the details of the S-boxes are exploited, which demonstrates that the AES has a provable security against the Demirci-Selçuk’s meet-in-the-middle attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we define a new (output) multiplicative differential, and the corresponding c-differential uniformity. With this new concept, even for characteristic 2, there are perfect ${c}$ -nonlinear (PcN) functions. We first characterize the ${c}$ -differential uniformity of a function in terms of its Walsh transform. We further look at some of the known perfect nonlinear (PN) functions and show that only one remains a PcN function, under a different condition on the parameters. In fact, the p-ary Gold PN function increases its c-differential uniformity significantly, under some conditions on the parameters. We then precisely characterize the c-differential uniformity of the inverse function (in any dimension and characteristic), relevant for the Rijndael (and Advanced Encryption Standard) block cipher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Eurocrypt’18, Cid et al. proposed a new cryptanalysis tool called Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT), to evaluate S-boxes of block ciphers. Later, Boura and Canteaut further investigated the new parameter Boomerang uniformity for cryptographic S-boxes. It is of great interest to find new S-boxes with low Boomerang uniformity for even dimensions. In this paper, we prove that a class of permutation quadrinomials over $\mathbb {F}_{2^{2m}}$ with $m$ odd has Boomerang uniformity four, which gives the fifth class of such kind of permutation polynomials. Further, the occurrences of 0 and 4 in the BCTs of the investigated permutation polynomials are also completely determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Offset codebook or ${\mathsf {OCB}}$ mode is a popular block cipher mode of operation for authenticated encryption. The latest version of this cipher, called ${\mathsf {OCB3}}$ , is one of the finalists in CAESAR. In this paper, we explore the scope of random read access and out-of-sequence decryption in ${\mathsf {OCB}}$. We observe that the current versions of ${\mathsf {OCB}}$ are inefficient in this respect owing to the ineptness of the underlying mask generating function (MGF). We propose new candidates for MGF based on ${\mathsf {AES}}$ round function, which are efficient in direct computation and provide comparable performance in the usual setting. Our schemes are not the obvious choices for MGF in conventional sense as they do not have optimal almost XOR universal (AXU) bound. In existing ${\mathsf {OCB}}$ designs, the MGFs are required to have $ 2^{-n} $ , i.e. optimal, AXU bound in order to upper bound the distinguishing advantage to $ O(\sigma ^{2}/2^{n}) $ , where $ n $ is the block size of the underlying block cipher and $ \sigma $ is the total number of blocks among all queries. We find this specific requirement too restrictive. We abstract the ${\mathsf {OCB}}$ design, termed as ${\mathsf {GOCB}}$ , to look into the universal notion required from the underlying MGF. We propose a relaxed notion of AXU, called locally imperfect XOR universal (LIXU) hash, which can be of independent interest. Using LIXU as the underlying MGF, we recover reasonable security bounds for our schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An involution over finite fields is a permutation polynomial whose inverse is itself. Owing to this property, involutions over finite fields have been widely used in applications, such as cryptography and coding theory. Following the idea by Wang to characterize the involutory behavior of the generalized cyclotomic mappings, this paper gives a more concise criterion for $x^{r}h(x^{s})\in {\mathbb F} _{q}[x]$ being involutions over the finite field ${\mathbb F}_{q}$ , where $r\geq 1$ and $s\,|\, (q-1)$. By using this criterion, we propose a general method to construct involutions of the form $x^{r}h(x^{s})$ over ${\mathbb F}_{q}$ from given involutions over some subgroups of ${\mathbb F}_{q}^{*}$ by solving congruent and linear equations over finite fields. Then, many classes of explicit involutions of the form $x^{r}h(x^{s})$ over ${\mathbb F}_{q}$ are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of almost perfect nonlinear (APN) permutations operating on an even number of variables was a long-standing open problem, until an example with six variables was exhibited by Dillon et al. in 2009. However it is still unknown whether this example can be generalized to any even number of inputs. In a recent work, Perrin et al. described an infinite family of permutations, named butterflies, operating on $(4k+2)$ variables and with differential uniformity at most 4, which contains the Dillon APN permutation. In this paper, we generalize this family, and we completely solve the two open problems raised by Perrin et al. Indeed we prove that all functions in this larger family have the best known nonlinearity. We also show that this family does not contain any APN permutation besides the Dillon permutation, implying that all other functions have differential uniformity exactly four. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Plateaued functions are very important crypto- graphic functions due to their various desirable cryptographic characteristics. We point out that plateaued functions are more general than bent functions (that is, functions with maximum nonlinearity). Some Boolean plateaued functions have large nonlinearity, which provides protection against fast correlation attacks when they are used as combiners or filters in stream ciphers, and contributes, when they are the component functions of the substitution boxes in block ciphers, to protection against linear cryptanalysis. P-ary plateaued functions have attracted recently some attention in the literature, and many activities on generalized $p$ -ary functions have been carried out. This paper increases our knowledge on plateaued functions in the general context of generalized p$ -ary functions. We first introduce two new versions of plateaued functions, which we shall call generalized plateaued functions and admissible plateaued functions. The generalized plateaued functions extend the standard notion of plateaued p$ -ary functions to those whose outputs are in the ring . Next, we study the generalized plateaued functions and use admissible plateaued functions to characterize the generalized plateaued functions by means of their components. Finally, we provide for the first time two constructions of generalized plateaued functions. In particular, we generalize a known secondary construction of binary generalized bent functions and derive constructions of binary generalized plateaued functions with different amplitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Substitution boxes (S-boxes) play a central role in the modern design of iterative block ciphers. While in substitution-permutation networks the S-boxes are bijective, thus ensuring the invertibility of the encryption algorithm, the property of being bijective is not mandatory for Feistel kind of networks. In this paper, two methods of constructing highly nonlinear balanced S-boxes (whose nonlinearity > 2^n-1-2^n/2 is better than the nonlinearity of the commonly used inverse S-box) with good algebraic and differential properties are given. The first method employs two vectorial Boolean functions from the Maiorana–McFarland class that need to fulfill certain conditions. In particular, these conditions are shown to be satisfied by maximum length sequences. The second method is based on a suitable modification of a certain class of vectorial bent functions. The differential properties of these boxes, measured as a deviation from an optimal uniform distribution, also appear to be better than those of the inverse S-box. Both methods are susceptible to further optimizations of the relevant cryptographic parameters due to the underlying design ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]