A longstanding problem in cryptography is the generation of publicly verifiable randomness. In particular, public verifiability allows to generate parameters for a cryptosystem in a way people can legitimately trust. There are many examples of standards using arbitrary constants which are now challenged and criticized for this reason, some of which even being suspected of containing a trap. Several sources of public entropy have already been proposed such as lotteries, stock market prices, the bitcoin blockchain, board games, or even Twitter and live webcams.

In this article, we propose a way of combining lotteries from several different countries that requires an adversary to manipulate several independent draws in order to introduce a trap in the generated cryptosystem. Each and every time a new source of public entropy is suggested, it receives its share of criticism for being “easy to manipulate”. We do not expect our solution to be an exception on this aspect, and will gladly receive any suggestion allowing to increase the confidence in the cryptosystem parameters we generate.

Our method allows to build what we call a Publicly verifiable RNG, from which we extract a seed that is used to instantiate and initialize a Blum-Blum-Shub random generator. We then use the binary stream produced by this generator as an input to a filtering function which deterministically outputs secure and uniformly distributed parameters from uniform bitstreams.

We apply our methodology to the ECDH cryptosystem, and propose the Million Dollar Curve as an alternative to curves P-256 and Curve25519.

Have a look at the Million Dollar Curve website for details!

In this paper, we study the soundness amplification by repetition of cryptographic protocols. As a tool, we use the Chernoff Information. We specify the number of attempts or samples required to distinguish two distributions efficiently in various protocols. This includes weakly verifiable puzzles such as CAPTCHA-like challenge-response protocols, interactive arguments in sequential composition scenario and cryptanalysis of block ciphers. As our main contribution, we revisit computational soundness amplification by sequential repetition in the threshold case, i.e when completeness is not perfect. Moreover, we outline applications to the Leftover Hash Lemma and iterative attacks on block ciphers. I am part of the program committee of the 2011 edition of the ECRYPT Workshop on Lightweight Cryptography.

Cryptography often meets the problem of distinguishing distributions. In this paper we review techniques from hypothesis testing to express the advantage of the best distinguisher limited to a given number of samples. We link it with the Chernoff information and provide a useful approximation based on the squared Euclidean distance. We use it to extend linear cryptanalysis to groups with order larger than 2.

In this paper we re-visit distinguishing attacks. We show how to generalize the notion of linear distinguisher to arbitrary sets. Our thesis is that our generalization is the most natural one. We compare it with the one by Granboulan et al. from FSE’06 by showing that we can get sharp estimates of the data complexity and cumulate characteristics in linear hulls. As a proof of concept, we propose a better attack on their toy cipher TOY100 than the one that was originally suggested and we propose the best known plaintext attack on SAFER K/SK so far. This provides new directions to block cipher cryptanalysis even in the binary case. On the constructive side, we introduce DEAN18, a toy cipher which encrypts blocks of 18 decimal digits and we study its security.

We introduce KFC, a block cipher based on a three round Feistel scheme. Each of the three round functions has an SPN-like structure for which we can either compute or bound the advantage of the best $d$-limited adaptive distinguisher, for any value of $d$. Using results from the decorrelation theory, we extend these results to the whole KFC construction. To the best of our knowledge, KFC is the first practical (in the sense that it can be implemented) block cipher to propose tight security proofs of resistance against large classes of attacks, including most classical cryptanalysis (such as linear and differential cryptanalysis, taking hull effect in consideration in both cases, higher order differential cryptanalysis, the boomerang attack, differential-linear cryptanalysis, and others).

We introduce C, a practical provably secure block cipher with a slow key schedule. C is based on the same structure as AES but uses independent random substitution boxes instead of a fixed one. Its key schedule is based on the Blum-Blum-Shub pseudo-random generator, which allows us to prove that all obtained security results are still valid when taking into account the dependencies between the round keys. C is provably secure against several general classes of attacks. Strong evidence is given that it resists an even wider variety of attacks. We also propose a variant of C with simpler substitution boxes which is suitable for most applications, and for which security proofs still hold.

In this paper we study the substitution-permutation network (SPN) on which AES is based. We introduce AES*, a SPN identical to AES except that fixed S-boxes are replaced by random and independent permutations. We prove that this construction resists linear and differential cryptanalysis with 4 inner rounds only, despite the huge cumulative effect of multipath characteristics that is induced by the symmetries of AES. We show that the DP and LP terms both tend towards $1/(2^{128}−1)$ very fast when the number of round increases. This proves a conjecture by Keliher, Meijer, and Tavares. We further show that AES* is immune to any iterated attack of order 1 after 10 rounds only, which substantially improves a previous result by Moriai and Vaudenay.

Several generalizations of linear cryptanalysis have been proposed in the past, as well as very similar attacks in a statistical point of view. In this paper, we define a rigorous general statistical framework which allows to interpret most of these attacks in a simple and unified way. Then, we explicitely construct optimal distinguishers, we evaluate their performance, and we prove that a block cipher immune to classical linear cryptanalysis possesses some resistance to a wide class of generalized versions, but not all. Finally, we derive tools which are necessary to set up more elaborate extensions of linear cryptanalysis, and to generalize the notions of bias, characteristic, and piling-up lemma.