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Lecture notes in computer science

Dispelling Myths on Superposition Attacks: Formal Security Model and Attack Analyses

Luka Music, Céline Chevalier, Elham Kashefi

Published Jan 1, 2020• 3 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-62576-4_16

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Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) establishes shared ('symmetric') cryptographic keys which are essential for secure online communication. AKE protocols can be constructed from public-key cryptography like Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs). Another approach is to use Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) to establish a symmetric key, which uses quantum communication. Combining post-quantum AKE and QKD appropriately may provide security against quantum attacks even if only one of the two approaches turns out to be secure. We provide an extensive review of existing security analyses for combined AKE and their formal security models, and identify some gaps in their treatment of QKD key IDs. In particular, improper handling of QKD key IDs leads to Dependent-Key attacks on AKE. As our main conceptual contribution, we model QKD as an oracle that closely resembles the standard ETSI 014 QKD interface. We demonstrate the usability of our QKD oracle for cryptographic security analyses by integrating it into a prominent security model for AKE, called CK+ model, thereby obtaining a security model for combined AKE that catches Dependent-Key attacks. In this model, we formally prove security of a new protocol that combines QKD with a triple-KEM handshake. This is the first provably secure hybrid protocol that maintains information-theoretic security of QKD.
In this paper, we continue the line of work initiated by Boneh and Zhandry at CRYPTO 2013 and EUROCRYPT 2013 in which they formally define the notion of unforgeability against quantum adversaries specifically, for classical message authentication codes and classical digital signatures schemes. We develop a general and parameterised quantum game-based security model unifying unforgeability for both classical and quantum constructions allowing us for the first time to present a complete quantum cryptanalysis framework for unforgeability. In particular, we prove how our definitions subsume previous ones while considering more fine-grained adversarial models, capturing the full spectrum of superposition attacks. The subtlety here resides in the characterisation of a forgery. We show that the strongest level of unforgeability, namely existential unforgeability, can only be achieved if only orthogonal to previously queried messages are considered to be forgeries. In particular, we present a non-trivial attack if any overlap between the forged message and previously queried ones is allowed. We further show that deterministic constructions can only achieve the weaker notion of unforgeability, that is selective unforgeability, against such restricted adversaries, but that selective unforgeability breaks if general quantum adversaries (capable of general superposition attacks) are considered. On the other hand, we show that PRF is sufficient for constructing a selective unforgeable classical primitive against full quantum adversaries. Moreover, we show similar positive results relying on Pseudorandom Unitaries (PRU) for quantum primitives. These results demonstrate the generality of our framework that could be applicable to other primitives beyond the cases analysed in this paper.
In this paper, we analyse the security of two mutual authentication protocols that have been recently proposed by Gao et al. (IEEE Access, 7:8376-8384, 2019), a hash-based protocol and a Rabin public key based protocol. Our security analysis clearly shows important security pitfalls in these schemes. More precisely, in each protocol, we introduce efficient approaches to desynchronize the tag and the reader/server. The proposed attacks are almost deterministic and the complexity of each attack is a session for the hash-based and three sessions for Rabin public key based protocol. In addition, in the case of the hash-based protocol, we extend the proposed desynchronization attack to a traceability attack in which the adversary can trace any given tag based on the proposed attack with probability of almost one. In the case of Rabin public key based protocol, we extend the proposed desynchronization attack to a tag impersonation attack with the success probability of one. Besides, we propose an enhanced version of the Rabin public key based protocol to provide a secure authentication between the tag and the reader. We evaluate the security of the proposed protocol formally using the Scyther tool and also in Real-or-Random model.