
doi: 10.62056/ayfhp2fgx
Forkcipher-based AEADs have emerged as lightweight and efficient cryptographic modes, making them suitable for resource-constrained environments such as IoT devices and distributed decryption through MPC. These schemes, including prominent examples like Eevee (Jolteon, Espeon, and Umbreon), PAEF, RPAEF, and SAEF, leverage the properties of forkciphers to achieve enhanced performance. However, their security in terms of key commitment, a critical property for certain applications such as secure cloud services, as highlighted by Albertini et al. (USENIX 2022), has not been comprehensively analyzed until now. In this work, we analyze the key-commitment properties of forkcipher-based AEADs. We found that some of the forkcipher-based AEAD schemes lack key-commitment properties, primarily due to the distinctive manner in which they process associated data and plaintext. For two different keys and the same nonce, an adversary can identify associated data and plaintext blocks that produce identical ciphertext-tags with a complexity of O ( 1 ) . Our findings apply to various forkcipher-based AEADs, including Eevee, PAEF, and SAEF, and naturally extend to less strict frameworks, such as CMT-1 and CMT-4. These findings highlight a significant limitation in the robustness of forkcipher-based AEADs. While these modes are attractive for their lightweight design and efficiency, their deployment should be restricted in scenarios where explicit robustness or key-commitment security is required.
| selected citations These citations are derived from selected sources. This is an alternative to the "Influence" indicator, which also reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | 1 | |
| popularity This indicator reflects the "current" impact/attention (the "hype") of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network. | Average | |
| influence This indicator reflects the overall/total impact of an article in the research community at large, based on the underlying citation network (diachronically). | Average | |
| impulse This indicator reflects the initial momentum of an article directly after its publication, based on the underlying citation network. | Average |
