arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Roberto Civino.
In this paper we study the relationships between the elementary abelian regular subgroups and the Sylow $2$-subgroups of their normalisers in the symmetric group $\mathrm{Sym}(\mathbb{F}_2^n)$, in view of the interest that they have recently raised for their applications in symmetric cryptography.
Round functions used as building blocks for iterated block ciphers, both in the case of Substitution-Permutation Networks and Feistel Networks, are often obtained as the composition of different layers which provide confusion and diffusion, and key additions. The bijectivity of any encryption function, crucial in order to make the decryption possible, is guaranteed by the use of invertible layers or by the Feistel structure. In this work a new family of ciphers, called wave ciphers, is introduced. In wave ciphers, round functions feature wave functions, which are vectorial Boolean functions obtained as the composition of non-invertible layers, where the confusion layer enlarges the message which returns to its original size after the diffusion layer is applied. This is motivated by the fact that relaxing the requirement that all the layers are invertible allows to consider more functions which are optimal with regard to non-linearity. In particular it allows to consider injective APN S-boxes. In order to guarantee efficient decryption we propose to use wave functions in Feistel Networks. With regard to security, the immunity from some group-theoretical attacks is investigated. In particular, it is shown how to avoid that the group generated by the round functions acts imprimitively, which represent a serious flaw for the cipher.
The access control problem in a hierarchy can be solved by using a hierarchical key assignment scheme, where each class is assigned an encryption key and some private information. A formal security analysis for hierarchical key assignment schemes has been traditionally considered in two different settings, i.e., the unconditionally secure and the computationally secure setting, and with respect to two different notions: security against key recovery (KR-security) and security with respect to key indistinguishability (KI-security), with the latter notion being cryptographically stronger. Recently, Freire, Paterson and Poettering proposed strong key indistinguishability (SKI-security) as a new security notion in the computationally secure setting, arguing that SKI-security is strictly stronger than KI-security in such a setting. In this paper we consider the unconditionally secure setting for hierarchical key assignment schemes. In such a setting the security of the schemes is not based on specific unproven computational assumptions, i.e., it relies on the theoretical impossibility of breaking them, despite the computational power of an adversary coalition. We prove that, in this setting, SKI-security is not stronger than KI-security, i.e., the two notions are fully equivalent from an information-theoretic point of view.