Nonces are a fact of life for achieving semantic security. Generating a uniformly random nonce can be costly and may not always be feasible. Using anything other than uniformly random bits can result in information leakage; e.g., a timestamp can deanonymize a communication and a counter can leak the quantity of transmitted messages. Ideally, we would like to be able to efficiently encrypt the nonce to 1) avoid needing uniformly random bits and 2) avoid information leakage. This paper presents new modes built on top of Farfalle that achieve nonce and redundancy encryption in the AEAD and onion AE settings.

Currently, a vast majority of symmetric-key cryptographic schemes are built as block cipher modes. The block cipher is designed to be hard to distinguish from a random permutation and this is supported by cryptanalysis, while (good) modes can be proven secure if a random permutation takes the place of the block cipher. As such, block ciphers form an abstraction level that marks the border between cryptanalysis and security proofs. In this paper, we investigate a re-factored version of symmetric-key cryptography built not around the block ciphers but rather the deck function: a keyed function with arbitrary input and output length and incrementality properties. This allows for modes of use that are simpler to analyze and still very efficient thanks to the excellent performance of currently proposed deck functions. We focus on authenticated encryption modes with varying levels of robustness. Our modes have built-in support for sessions, but are also efficient without them. As a byproduct, we define a new ideal model for authenticated encryption dubbed the jammin cipher. Unlike the OAE2 security models, the jammin cipher is both a operational ideal scheme and a security reference, and addresses real-world use cases such as bi-directional communication and multi-key security.

In this paper, we present Xoodyak, a cryptographic primitive that can be used for hashing, encryption, MAC computation and authenticated encryption. Essentially, it is a duplex object extended with an interface that allows absorbing strings of arbitrary length, their encryption and squeezing output of arbitrary length. It inherently hashes the history of all operations in its state, allowing to derive its resistance against generic attacks from that of the full-state keyed duplex. Internally, it uses the Xoodoo[12] permutation that, with its width of 48 bytes, allows for very compact implementations. The choice of 12 rounds justifies a security claim in the hermetic philosophy: It implies that there are no shortcut attacks with higher success probability than generic attacks. The claimed security strength is 128 bits. We illustrate the versatility of Xoodyak by describing a number of use cases, including the ones requested by NIST in the lightweight competition. For those use cases, we translate the relatively detailed security claim that we make for Xoodyak into simple ones.

This paper presents Xoodoo, a 48-byte cryptographic permutation with excellent propagation properties. Its design approach is inspired by Keccak-p, while it is dimensioned like Gimli for efficiency on low-end processors. The structure consists of three planes of 128 bits each, which interact per 3-bit columns through mixing and nonlinear operations, and which otherwise move as three independent rigid objects. We analyze its differential and linear propagation properties and, in particular, prove lower bounds on the weight of trails using the tree search-based technique of Mella et al. (ToSC 2017). Xoodoo’s primary target application is in the Farfalle construction that we instantiate for the doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed (or deck) function Xoofff. Combining a relatively narrow permutation with the parallelism of Farfalle results in very efficient schemes on a wide range of platforms, from low-end devices to high-end processors with vector instructions.

This note defines Kravatte-SANE and Kravatte-SANSE. Both are session authenticated encryption schemes and differ in their robustness with respect to nonce misuse. They are defined as instances of modes on top of the deck function Kravatte, where a deck function is a keyed function with variable-length input strings, an arbitrary-length output and certain incrementality properties.

This document presents Xoodoo, a 48-byte cryptographic permutation that allows very efficient symmetric crypto on a wide range of platforms and a suite of cryptographic functions built on top of it. The central function in this suite is Xoofff, obtained by instantiating Farfalle with Xoodoo. Xoofff is what we call a deck function and can readily be used for MAC computation, stream encryption and key derivation. The suite includes two session authenticated encryption (SAE) modes: Xoofff-SANE and Xoofff-SANSE. Both are built on top of Xoofff and differ in their robustness with respect to nonce misuse. The final members of the suite are a tweakable wide block cipher Xoofff-WBC and authenticated encryption mode Xoofff-WBC-AE, obtained by instantiating the Farfalle-WBC and Farfalle-WBC-AE constructions with Xoofff. This paper is a specification and security claim reference for the Xoodoo suite. It is a standing document: over time, we may extend the Xoodoo suite, e.g., with a hash function or a dedicated lightweight MAC function and we will update it accordingly.

In this paper, we introduce Farfalle, a new permutation-based construction for building a pseudorandom function (PRF). The PRF takes as input a key and a sequence of arbitrary-length data strings, and returns an arbitrary-length output. It has a compression layer and an expansion layer, each involving the parallel application of a permutation. The construction also makes use of LFSR-like rolling functions for generating input and output masks and for updating the inner state during expansion. On top of the inherent parallelism, Farfalle instances can be very efficient because the construction imposes less requirements on the underlying primitive than, e.g., the duplex construction or typical block cipher modes. Farfalle has an incremental property: compression of common prefixes of inputs can be factored out. Thanks to its input-output characteristics, Farfalle is really versatile. We specify simple modes on top of it for authentication, encryption and authenticated encryption, as well as a wide block cipher mode. As a showcase, we present Kravatte, a very efficient instance of Farfalle based on Keccak-p[1600, n_r] permutations and formulate concrete security claims against classical and quantum adversaries. The permutations in the compression and expansion layers of Kravatte have only 6 rounds apiece and the rolling functions are lightweight. We provide a rationale for our choices and report on software performance.