Tweakable Block Ciphers
By Moses D. Liskov, R. Rivest, David A. Wagner. Journal of Cryptology, 2002
597 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A common trend in applications of block ciphers over the past decades has been to employ block ciphers as one piece of a “mode of operation”—possibly, a way to make a secure symmetric-key cryptosystem, but more generally, any cryptographic application. Most of the time, these modes of operation use a wide variety of techniques to achieve a subgoal necessary for their main goal: instantiation of “essentially different” instances of the block cipher.We formalize a cryptographic primitive, the “tweakable block cipher.” Such a cipher has not only the usual inputs—message and cryptographic key—but also a third input, the “tweak.” The tweak serves much the same purpose that an initialization vector does for CBC mode or that a nonce does for OCB mode. Our abstraction brings this feature down to the primitive block-cipher level, instead of incorporating it only at the higher modes-of-operation levels. We suggest that (1) tweakable block ciphers are easy to design, (2) the extra cost of making a block cipher “tweakable” is small, and (3) it is easier to design and prove the security of applications of block ciphers that need this variability using tweakable block ciphers.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0870d19dc1aa8043c1fc1a67d46869764150e5c9
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In Artificial Intelligence
- Brent Waters
- Thomas Ristenpart
- Ted Krovetz
- Dan Boneh
- Mihir Bellare
- Phillip Rogaway
- Scott Yilek
- Stefan Lucks
In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- Ted Krovetz
- Brent Waters
- Thomas Ristenpart
- María Naya-Plasencia
- Ben Morris
- Phillip Rogaway
- Hovav Shacham
- Stefan Lucks
Citations in the corpus
- Lest we remember: cold-boot attacks on encryption keys (2008, methodology): “The same methods can be applied to reconstruct keys for tweakable encryption modes [30], which are commonly used in disk encryption systems.”
- Effective and Efficient Malware Detection at the End Host (2009, unknown): “ifying permissible sequences of system calls [18, 48].”
- Compact Proofs of Retrievability (2008, methodology): “) Third, encrypt each block independently using a tweakable block cipher [24], with the block index as tweak.”
- The Mix-and-Cut Shuffle: Small-Domain Encryption Secure against N Queries (2013, methodology): “In fact, we focus on tweakable separators, which like tweakable block ciphers in the sense of Liskov, Rivest and Wagner [16], are families of permutations indexed by both a key and a tweak.”
- How to Encipher Messages on a Small Domain (2009, methodology): “We sketch other such “engineering” improvements, like making the constructed cipher tweakable [16], and we tabulate the number of blockcipher calls needed for various provable-security guarantees.”
- The Skein Hash Function Family (2009, background): “Threefish is a large, tweakable block cipher [66].”
- Breaking Symmetric Cryptosystems Using Quantum Period Finding (2016, methodology): “The LRW construction, introduced by Liskov, Rivest and Wagner [32], turns a block cipher into a tweakable block cipher, i.e. a family of unrelated block ciphers.”
- The Software Performance of Authenticated-Encryption Modes (2011, methodology): “Also XECB — ✓ OCB1 [35] 2001 I Optimized design similar to IAPM — TAE [28] 2002 I Recasts OCB1 using a tweakable blockcipher — ✓ CCM [39] 2002 C CTR encryption + CBC MAC NIST 800-38C CWC [24] 2004 C CTR encryption + GF(2 127 −1)-based CW MAC — ✓ GCM [31] 2004 C CTR encryption + GF(2 128 )-based CW…”