Solid Basis for Symmetric Cryptography

Introduction

Symmetric cryptography, essential for enabling secure communications, has benefited from an explosion of new results in the last two decades, in big part due to several standardization efforts. Many public competitions have been launched since 1997, where the community proposes cryptographic constructions and simultaneously evaluates their security and performance. The security of symmetric cryptography is based on cryptanalysis: we only gain confidence in a symmetric cryptographic function through extensive and continuous scrutiny.

Current Challenges

However, the current context has not allowed the community to digest all the new findings, as can be seen from several recurrent issues. The two main ones are:

1. Primitives proposed at top-tier venues often get broken by slight modifications of already known techniques.
2. Published cryptanalysis at top conferences sometimes include mistakes or are suboptimal. They are also often re-invented and re-named.

Project Goals

The main challenge of SoBaSyC is to establish solid bases for symmetric cryptography. Using cryptanalysis as the starting point, my aim is to unify the knowledge obtained through the years on the different families of attacks, to transform it with an algorithmic approach, and to endow it with optimizations.

Expected Outcomes

The final result will be a toolbox congregating all our newly proposed optimized algorithms that will provide the best known attacks on a given construction, through an easy application. Next, I plan to derive from this algorithmic approach some theoretical bounds, as well as some properties that I will include in the security proofs of symmetric constructions, providing more meaningful and realistic security arguments.

Impact

This would allow, for the first time, to ensure that any newly proposed primitive or construction is already resistant to all known attacks, and will considerably increase the confidence in these functions. It will also save a considerable amount of time and allow the field to advance, at last, on solid ground.