Attack on LAC key exchange in misuse situation

  • Aurélien Greuet
  • , Simon Montoya
  • , Guénaël Renault

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

LAC is a Ring Learning With Error based cryptosystem that has been proposed to the NIST call for post-quantum standardization and passed the first round of the submission process. The particularity of LAC is to use an error-correction code ensuring a high security level with small key sizes and small ciphertext sizes. LAC team proposes a CPA secure cryptosystem, LAC.CPA, and a CCA secure one, LAC.CCA, obtained by applying the Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation on LAC.CPA. In this paper, we study the security of LAC Key Exchange (KE) mechanism, using LAC.CPA, in a misuse context: when the same secret key is reused for several key exchanges and an active adversary has access to a mismatch oracle. This oracle indicates information on the possible mismatch at the end of the KE protocol. In this context, we show that an attacker needs at most 8 queries to the oracle to retrieve one coefficient of a static secret key. This result has been experimentally confirmed using the reference and optimized implementations of LAC. Since our attack can break the CPA version in a misuse context, the Authenticated KE protocol, based on the CCA version, is not impacted. However, this research provides a tight estimation of LAC resilience against this type of attacks.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCryptology and Network Security - 19th International Conference, CANS 2020, Vienna, Austria, December 14–16, 2020, Proceedings
EditorsStephan Krenn, Haya Shulman, Serge Vaudenay
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages549-569
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9783030654108
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2020
Externally publishedYes
Event19th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security, CANS 2020 - Vienna, Austria
Duration: 14 Dec 202016 Dec 2020

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume12579 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference19th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security, CANS 2020
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period14/12/2016/12/20

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