Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998, Volume 1403/1998, 266-280, DOI: 10.1007/BFb0054132

Luby-Rackoff backwards: Increasing security by making block ciphers non-invertible

Mihir Bellare, Ted Krovetz and Phillip Rogaway

View Related Documents

Abstract

We argue that the invertibility of a block cipher can reduce the security of schemes that use it, and a better starting point for scheme design is the non-invertible analog of a block cipher, that is, a pseudorandom function (PRF). Since a block cipher may be viewed as a pseudorandom permutation, we are led to investigate the reverse of the problem studied by Luby and Rackoff, and ask: “how can one transform a PRP into a PRF in as security-preserving a way as possible?” The solution we propose is data- dependent re- keying. As an illustrative special case, let E: {0, 1}n x {0, 1}n → {0, 1}n be the block cipher. Then we can construct the PRF F from the PRP E by setting F(k, x) = E(E(k, x), x). We generalize this to allow for arbitrary block and key lengths, and to improve efficiency. We prove strong quantitative bounds on the value of data-dependent re-keying in the Shannon model of an ideal cipher, and take some initial steps towards an analysis in the standard model.

Fulltext Preview

Image of the first page of the fulltext document