Volume 194, Issue 4: Central European Conference on Cryptology 2024


1. Ciphertext Malleability in Lattice-Based KEMs as a Countermeasure to Side Channel Analysis

Pierre-Augustin Berthet.
Due to developments in quantum computing, classical asymmetric cryptography is at risk of being breached. Consequently, new Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) primitives using lattices are studied. Another point of scrutiny is the resilience of these new primitives to Side Channel Analysis (SCA), where an attacker can study physical leakages. In this work we discuss a SCA vulnerability due to the ciphertext malleability of some PQC primitives exposed by a work from Ravi et al. We propose a novel countermeasure to this vulnerability exploiting the same ciphertext malleability and discuss its practical application to several PQC primitives. We also extend the seminal work of Ravi et al. by detailing their attack on the different security levels of a post-quantum Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), namely FrodoKEM. We also provide a generalisation of their attack to different parameters which could be used in future similar primitives.

2. Privacy for Quantum Annealing. Attack on Spin Reversal Transformations in the case of cryptanalysis

Mateusz Leśniak ; Michał Wroński.
This paper demonstrates that applying spin reversal transformations (SRT), commonly known as a sufficient method for privacy enhancement in problems solved using quantum annealing, does not guarantee privacy for all possible cases. We show how to recover the original problem from the Ising problem obtained using SRT when the resulting problem in Ising form represents the algebraic attack on the $E_0$ stream cipher. A small example illustrates how to retrieve the original problem from that transformed by SRT. Moreover, we show that our method is efficient also for full-scale problems.

3. MNT Elliptic Curves with Non-Prime Order

Maciej Grześkowiak.
Miyaji, Nakabayashi, and Takano proposed the algorithm for the construction of prime order pairing-friendly elliptic curves with embedding degrees $k=3,4,6$. We present a method for generating generalized MNT curves. The order of such pairing-friendly curves is the product of two prime numbers.

4. Unidirectional Key Update in Updatable Encryption, Revisited

M. Jurkiewicz ; K. Prabucka.
In this paper we construct a new efficient updatable encryption (UE) scheme based on FrodoPKE learning with errors key encapsulation. We analyse the security of the proposed scheme in the backward-leak uni-directional setting within the rand-ind-eu-cpa model. Since the underlying computationally hard problem here is LWE, the scheme is secure against both classical and quantum attacks.