QCB: Efficient Quantum-Secure Authenticated Encryption

Ritam Bhaumik (1) , Xavier Bonnetain (2) , André Chailloux (3) , Gaëtan Leurent (3) , María Naya-Plasencia (3) , André Schrottenloher (4) , Yannick Seurin (5)

1 Indian Statistical Institute [Kolkata]
2 CARAMBA - Cryptology, arithmetic : algebraic methods for better algorithms
3 COSMIQ - Cryptologie symétrique, cryptologie fondée sur les codes et information quantique
4 CWI - Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica
5 LCR - Laboratoire de cryptographie de l'ANSSI

It was long thought that symmetric cryptography was only mildly affected by quantum attacks, and that doubling the key length was sufficient to restore security. However, recent works have shown that Simon's quantum period finding algorithm breaks a large number of MAC and authenticated encryption algorithms when the adversary can query the MAC/encryption oracle with a quantum superposition of messages. In particular, the OCB authenticated encryption mode is broken in this setting, and no quantum-secure mode is known with the same efficiency (rate-one and parallelizable). In this paper we generalize the previous attacks, show that a large class of OCB-like schemes is unsafe against superposition queries, and discuss the quantum security notions for authenticated encryption modes. We propose a new rate-one parallelizable mode named QCB inspired by TAE and OCB and prove its security against quantum superposition queries.

Mots clés: Authenticated encryption; Lightweight cryptography; QCB; Postquantum cryptography; Provable security; Tweakable block ciphers

Domaines: Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Ritam Bhaumik, Xavier Bonnetain, André Chailloux, Gaëtan Leurent, María Naya-Plasencia, et al.. QCB: Efficient Quantum-Secure Authenticated Encryption. ASIACRYPT 2021 - 27th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Application of Cryptology and Information Security, Dec 2021, Singapore / Virtual, Singapore. pp.668-698, ⟨10.1007/978-3-030-92062-3_23⟩. ⟨hal-03516739⟩