Paper 2014/478

Related-Key Secure Pseudorandom Functions: The Case of Additive Attacks

Benny Applebaum and Eyal Widder

Abstract

In a related-key attack (RKA) an adversary attempts to break a cryptographic primitive by invoking the primitive with several secret keys which satisfy some known relation. The task of constructing provably RKA secure PRFs (for non-trivial relations) under a standard assumption has turned to be challenging. Currently, the only known provably-secure construction is due to Bellare and Cash (Crypto 2010). This important feasibility result is restricted, however, to linear relations over relatively complicated groups (e.g., $\Z^*_q$ where $q$ is a large prime) that arise from the algebraic structure of the underlying cryptographic assumption (DDH/DLIN). In contrast, applications typically require RKA-security with respect to simple additive relations such as XOR or addition modulo a power-of-two. In this paper, we partially fill this gap by showing that it is possible to deal with simple additive relations at the expense of relaxing the model of the attack. We introduce several natural relaxations of RKA-security, study the relations between these notions, and describe efficient constructions either under lattice assumptions or under general assumptions. Our results enrich the landscape of RKA security and suggest useful trade-offs between the attack model and the family of possible relations.