Paper 2021/1232

Gröbner Basis Attack on STARK-Friendly Symmetric-Key Primitives: JARVIS, MiMC and GMiMCerf

Gizem Kara and Oğuz Yayla

Abstract

A number of arithmetization-oriented ciphers emerge for use in advanced cryptographic protocols such as secure multi-party computation (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZK) in recent years. The standard block ciphers like AES and the hash functions SHA2/SHA3 are proved to be efficient in software and hardware but not optimal to use in this field, for this reason, new kind of cryptographic primitives were proposed recently. However, unlike traditional ones, there is no standard approach to design and analyze such block ciphers and the hash functions, therefore their security analysis needs to be done carefully. In 2018, StarkWare launched a public STARK-Friendly Hash (SFH) Challenge to select an efficient and secure hash function to be used within ZK-STARKs, transparent and post-quantum secure proof systems. The block cipher JARVIS is one of the first ciphers designed for STARK applications but, shortly after its publication, the cipher has been shown vulnerable to Gröbner basis attack. This paper aims to describe a Gröbner basis attack on new block ciphers, MiMC, GMiMCerf (SFH candidates) and the variants of JARVIS. We present the complexity of Gröbner basis attack on JARVIS-like ciphers. Then we give results from our experiments for the attack on reduced-round MiMC and a structure we found in the Gröbner basis attack for GMiMCerf.