Minimizing Key Materials: The Even–Mansour Cipher Revisited and Its Application to Lightweight Authenticated Encryption

Abstract EN

The Even–Mansour cipher has been widely used in block ciphers and lightweight symmetric-key ciphers because of its simple structure and strict provable security.

Its research has been a hot topic in cryptography.

This paper focuses on the problem to minimize the key material of the Even–Mansour cipher while its security bound remains essentially the same.

We introduce four structures of the Even–Mansour cipher with a short key and derive their security by Patarin’s H-coefficients technique.

These four structures are proven secure up to O˜2k/μ adversarial queries, where k is the bit length of the key material and μ is the maximal multiplicity.

Then, we apply them to lightweight authenticated encryption modes and prove their security up to about minb/2,c,k−log μ-bit adversarial queries, where b is the size of the permutation and c is the capacity of the permutation.

Finally, we leave it as an open problem to settle the security of the t-round iterated Even–Mansour cipher with short keys.