We study the amplification of security against quantum attacks provided by iteration of block ciphers. In the classical case, the Meet-in-the-middle attack is a generic attack against those constructions. This attack reduces the time required to break double iterations to only twice the time it takes to attack a single block cipher, given that the attacker has access to a large amount of memory. More abstractly, it shows that security by composition does not achieve exact multiplicative amplification. We present a quantized version of this attack based on an optimal quantum algorithm for the Element Distinctness problem. We then use the generalized adversary method to prove the optimality of the attack. An interesting corollary is that the time-space tradeoff for quantum attacks is very different from what classical attacks allow. This first result seems to indicate that composition resists better to quantum attacks than to classical ones because it prevents the quadratic speedup achieved by quantizing an exhaustive search. We investigate security amplification by composition further by examining the case of four iterations. We quantize a recent technique called the dissection attack using the framework of quantum walks. Surprisingly, this leads to better gains over classical attacks than for double iterations, which seems to indicate that when the number of iterations grows, the resistance against quantum attacks decreases.
We study the amplification of security against quantum attacks provided by iteration of block ciphers. In the classical case, the Meet-in-the-middle attack is a generic attack against those constructions. This attack reduces the time required to break double iterations to only twice the time it takes to attack a single block cipher, given that the attacker has access to a large amount of memory. More abstractly, it shows that security by composition does not achieve exact multiplicative amplification. We present a quantized version of this attack based on an optimal quantum algorithm for the Element Distinctness problem. We then use the generalized adversary method to prove the optimality of the attack. An interesting corollary is that the time-space tradeoff for quantum attacks is very different from what classical attacks allow. This first result seems to indicate that composition resists better to quantum attacks than to classical ones because it prevents the quadratic speedup achieved by quantizing an exhaustive search. We investigate security amplification by composition further by examining the case of four iterations. We quantize a recent technique called the dissection attack using the framework of quantum walks. Surprisingly, this leads to better gains over classical attacks than for double iterations, which seems to indicate that when the number of iterations grows, the resistance against quantum attacks decreases.
Quantum computers, that may become available one day, would impact many scientific fields, most notably cryptography since many asymmetric primitives are insecure against an adversary with quantum capabilities. Cryptographers are already anticipating this threat by proposing and studying a number of potentially quantum-safe alternatives for those primitives. On the other hand, symmetric primitives seem less vulnerable against quantum computing: the main known applicable result is Grover's algorithm that gives a quadratic speed-up for exhaustive search. In this work, we examine more closely the security of symmetric ciphers against quantum attacks. Since our trust in symmetric ciphers relies mostly on their ability to resist cryptanalysis techniques, we investigate quantum cryptanalysis techniques. More specifically, we consider quantum versions of differential and linear cryptanalysis. We show that it is usually possible to use quantum computations to obtain a quadratic speed-up for these attack techniques, but the situation must be nuanced: we don't get a quadratic speed-up for all variants of the attacks. This allows us to demonstrate the following non-intuitive result: the best attack in the classical world does not necessarily lead to the best quantum one. We give some examples of application on ciphers LAC and KLEIN. We also discuss the important difference between an adversary that can only perform quantum computations, and an adversary that can also make quantum queries to a keyed primitive.
Quantum computers, that may become available one day, would impact many scientific fields, most notably cryptography since many asymmetric primitives are insecure against an adversary with quantum capabilities. Cryptographers are already anticipating this threat by proposing and studying a number of potentially quantum-safe alternatives for those primitives. On the other hand, symmetric primitives seem less vulnerable against quantum computing: the main known applicable result is Grover’s algorithm that gives a quadratic speed-up for exhaustive search. In this work, we examine more closely the security of symmetric ciphers against quantum attacks. Since our trust in symmetric ciphers relies mostly on their ability to resist cryptanalysis techniques, we investigate quantum cryptanalysis techniques. More specifically, we consider quantum versions of differential and linear cryptanalysis. We show that it is usually possible to use quantum computations to obtain a quadratic speed-up for these attack techniques, but the situation must be nuanced: we don’t get a quadratic speed-up for all variants of the attacks. This allows us to demonstrate the following non-intuitive result: the best attack in the classical world does not necessarily lead to the best quantum one. We give some examples of application on ciphers LAC and KLEIN. We also discuss the important difference between an adversary that can only perform quantum computations, and an adversary that can also make quantum queries to a keyed primitive.
In this paper we analyze for the first time the post-quantum security of AES. AES is the most popular and widely used block cipher, established as the encryption standard by the NIST in 2001. We consider the secret key setting and, in particular, AES-256, the recommended primitive and one of the few existing ones that aims at providing a post-quantum security of 128 bits. In order to determine the new security margin, i.e., the lowest number of non-attacked rounds in time less than 2128 encryptions, we first provide generalized and quantized versions of the best known cryptanalysis on reduced-round AES, as well as a discussion on attacks that don’t seem to benefit from a significant quantum speed-up. We propose a new framework for structured search that encompasses both the classical and quantum attacks we present, and allows to efficiently compute their complexity. We believe this framework will be useful for future analysis.Our best attack is a quantum Demirci-Selçuk meet-in-the-middle attack. Unexpectedly, using the ideas underlying its design principle also enables us to obtain new, counter-intuitive classical TMD trade-offs. In particular, we can reduce the memory in some attacks against AES-256 and AES-128.One of the building blocks of our attacks is solving efficiently the AES S-Box differential equation, with respect to the quantum cost of a reversible S-Box. We believe that this generic quantum tool will be useful for future quantum differential attacks. Judging by the results obtained so far, AES seems a resistant primitive in the post-quantum world as well as in the classical one, with a bigger security margin with respect to quantum generic attacks.
It has been said that security of symmetric key schemes is not so much affected by quantum computers, compared to public key schemes. However, recent works revealed that, in some specific situations, symmetric key schemes are also broken in polynomial time by adversaries with quantum computers. These works contain a quantum distinguishing attack on 3-round Feistel ciphers and a quantum key recovery attack on the Even-Mansour cipher by Kuwakado and Morii, in addition to the quantum forgery attack on CBC-MAC which is proposed independently by Kaplan et al., and by Santoli and Schaffner. Iterated Even-Mansour cipher is a simple but important block cipher, which can be regarded as an idealization of AES. Whether there exists an efficient quantum algorithm that can break iterated Even-Mansour cipher with independent subkeys is an important problem from the viewpoint of analyzing post-quantum security of block ciphers. Actually there is an efficient quantum attack on iterated Even-Mansour cipher by Kaplan et al., but their attack can only be applied in the case that all subkeys are the same. This paper shows that there is a polynomial time quantum algorithm that recovers partial keys of the iterated Even-Mansour cipher with independent subkeys, in a related-key setting. The related-key condition is somewhat strong, but our algorithm can recover subkeys with two related oracles. In addition, we also show that our algorithm can recover all keys of the i-round iterated Even-Mansour cipher, if we are allowed to access i related quantum oracles. To realize quantum related-key attacks, we extend Simon's quantum algorithm so that we can recover the hidden period of a function that is periodic only up to constant. Our technique is to take differential of the target function to make a double periodic function, and then apply Simon's algorithm.
Key-length extension (KLE) techniques provide a general approach to enhancing the security of block ciphers by using longer keys. There are mainly two classes of KLE techniques, cascade encryption and XOR-cascade encryption. This paper presents several quantum meet-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks against two specific KLE constructions.
For the two-key triple encryption (2kTE), we propose two quantum MITM attacks under the Q2 model. The first attack, leveraging the quantum claw-finding (QCF) algorithm, achieves a time complexity of O(22κ/3) with O(22κ/3) quantum random access memory (QRAM). The second attack, based on Grover's algorithm, achieves a time complexity of O(2κ/2) with O(2κ) QRAM. The latter complexity is nearly identical to Grover-based brute-force attack on the underlying block cipher, indicating that 2kTE does not enhance security under the Q2 model when sufficient QRAM resources are available.
For the 3XOR-cascade encryption (3XCE), we propose a quantum MITM attack applicable to the Q1 model. This attack requires no QRAM and has a time complexity of O(2(κ+n)/2) (κ and n are the key length and block length of the underlying block cipher, respectively.), achieving a quadratic speedup over classical MITM attack.
Furthermore, we extend the quantum MITM attack to quantum sieve-in-the-middle (SITM) attack, which is applicable for more constructions. We present a general quantum SITM framework for the construction ELE=E2∘L∘E1 and provide specific attack schemes for three different forms of the middle layer L. The quantum SITM attack technique can be further applied to a broader range of quantum cryptanalysis scenarios.
In this thesis, we study the security of cryptographic systems against an adversary who has access to a quantum computer. In quantum computing, we studied the hidden period and hidden shift problems, which are among the few known problems that have some applications in cryptogaphy and for which the best known quantum algorithm is more than polynomially faster than the best known classical algorithm. We proposed some improvements, new tradeoffs between classical and quantum time and memory, and extended their scope of applications to cases where only a classical oracle is available. In cryptanalysis, in symmetric cryptography, we proposed some attacks against symmetric constructions based on hidden shifts, and generalized many attacks using hidden periods to cases where the construction is only accessible classically. We proposed a quantum cryptanalysis of the different versions of the authenticated cipher AEZ and some quantum versions of multiple slide attacks, which are a classical family of cryptanalyses. This rewriting of attacks in the formalism of hidden periods has allowed us to propose a new classical attack against multiple variants of the cipher MiMC. In asymmetric cryptography, we proposed a concrete and asymptotic quantum security analysis of some isogeny-based key exchanges. Finally, we studied quantum security in some cases where these hidden structure problems do not apply, with in particular the first quantum security analysis of AES, the most used symmetric cipher to date.