Abstract. In this paper, we point out a new weakness of the AES key schedule by revisiting an old observation exploited by many known attacks. We also discover a major cause for this weakness is that the column-by-column word-wise property in the key schedule matches nicely with the MixColumns operation in the cipher's diffusion layer. Then we propose a new key schedule by minor modification to increase the security level for AES. First, it reduces the number of rounds that some attacks are effective, such as SQUARE attacks and meet-in-the-middle attacks; Second, it is interesting that our new key schedule also protects AES from the most devastating related-key differential type attacks, which work against AES-192 and AES-256 with the full number of rounds. Compared with the original key schedule, ours just does a transposition on the output matrix of the subkeys. Compared with other proposed modifications of AES key schedule, our modification adds no non-linear operations, no need to complicate the diffusion method, or complicate the iteration process of generating subkeys. Finally, our results suggest that the route of diffusion propagation should get more attention in the design of key schedules.

Cryptanalysis of the LowMC block cipher when the attacker has access to a single known plaintext/ciphertext pair is a mathematically challenging problem. This is because the attacker is unable to employ most of the standard techniques in symmetric cryptography like linear and differential cryptanalysis. This scenario is particularly relevant while arguing the security of the PICNIC digital signature scheme in which the plaintext/ciphertext pair generated by the LowMC block cipher serves as the public (verification) key and the corresponding LowMC encryption key also serves as the secret (signing) key of the signature scheme. In the paper by Banik et al. (IACR ToSC 2020:4), the authors used a linearization technique of the LowMC S-box to mount attacks on some instances of the block cipher. In this paper, we first make a more precise complexity analysis of the linearization attack. Then, we show how to perform a 2-stage MITM attack on LowMC. The first stage reduces the key candidates corresponding to a fraction of key bits of the master key. The second MITM stage between this reduced candidate set and the remaining fraction of key bits successfully recovers the master key. We show that the combined computational complexity of both these stages is significantly lower than those reported in the ToSC paper by Banik et al.

Following up mass surveillance and privacy issues, modern secure communication protocols now seek strong security, such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security, in the face of state exposures. To address this problem, ratcheting was thereby introduced, widely used in real-world messaging protocols like Signal. However, ratcheting comes with a high cost. Recently, Caforio et al. proposed pragmatic constructions which compose a weakly secure "light" protocol and a strongly secure "heavy" protocol, in order to achieve the so-called ratcheting on demand. The light protocol they proposed has still a high complexity.In this paper, we prove the security of the lightest possible protocol we could imagine, which essentially encrypts then hashes the secret key. We prove it without any random oracle by introducing a new security notion in the standard model. Our protocol composes well with the generic transformation techniques by Caforio et al. to offer high security and performance at the same time.

No abstract