Analysis and Design of Authenticated Encryption Schemes

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While in most people’s minds confidentiality is the primary goal of cryptography, message authentication is arguably as important. Cryptographers have long realized the importance of the privacy and integrity goals. However, the traditional approach to tackle the problem of achieving confidentiality and integrity has been to consider these two goals in isolation; security researchers designed encryption schemes to protect the privacy of digital communication and they independently designed message authentication codes to protect its integrity.  Recently, there have been a series of disastrous attacks resulting from the wrong application of confidentiality and authenticity primitives. Consequently, and following the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) competition, the European Union eStream competition, and the NIST SHA-3 hash function competition, a new Competition for Authenticated Encryption: Security, Applicability, and Robustness (CAESAR) funded by NIST was announced. While being relatively new, this competition has provided a boost to the cryptographic research community to consider the analysis and design of authenticated encryption (AE) primitives. In the first phase of this competition, which started in March 2014, 57 submissions were received. Since this competition has been opened, AE schemes are probably the most frequently visited and challenging topic in the area of symmetric key cryptology. There are mainly two approaches to design an integrated AE algorithm. The first is to use a block cipher in a special mode. The second, and arguably more efficient approach, is to design a dedicated AE algorithm where the message is used to update the state of the underlying cipher and message authentication can be achieved almost for free. In this research project, we plan to focus on schemes constructed using the latter approach. The objective of this project is to investigate the design, analysis and implementation of efficient families of provably secure (against a predefined set of cryptanalytic attacks) dedicated AE schemes. In particular, we plan to (i) Apply state of the art cryptanalytic attacks and automated cryptanalysis tools to the AE schemes submitted to the CAESAR competition, (ii) Investigate different construction methods for AE schemes including new designs whose underlying primitives are based on  AES-like primitives and the recently proposed cryptographic Duplex/Sponge-based constructions (the recently selected hash function standard is a Sponge-based construction) (iii) Establish a criteria for quantifying the AE scheme resistance against different attacks, including side channel attacks, and apply this knowledge to the design of an efficient, secure, nonce misuse resistant, parallelizable and online AE which can be optimized to operate within resource constrained environments.