## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2021/507

The t-wise Independence of Substitution-Permutation Networks

Tianren Liu and Stefano Tessaro and Vinod Vaikuntanathan

Abstract: Block ciphers such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (Rijndael) are used extensively in practice, yet our understanding of their security continues to be highly incomplete. This paper promotes and continues a research program aimed at *proving* the security of block ciphers against important and well-studied classes of attacks. In particular, we initiate the study of (almost) $t$-wise independence of concrete block-cipher construction paradigms such as substitution-permutation networks and key-alternating ciphers. Sufficiently strong (almost) pairwise independence already suffices to resist (truncated) differential attacks and linear cryptanalysis, and hence this is a relevant and meaningful target. Our results are two-fold.

Our first result concerns substitution-permutation networks (SPNs) that model ciphers such as AES. We prove the almost pairwise-independence of an SPN instantiated with concrete S-boxes together with an appropriate linear mixing layer, given sufficiently many rounds and independent sub-keys. Our proof relies on a *characterization* of S-box computation on input differences in terms of sampling output differences from certain subspaces, and a new randomness extraction lemma (which we prove with Fourier-analytic techniques) that establishes when such sampling yields uniformity. We use our techniques in particular to prove almost pairwise-independence for sufficiently many rounds of both the AES block cipher (which uses a variant of the patched inverse function $x \mapsto x^{-1}$ as the $S$-box) and the MiMC block cipher (which uses the cubing function $x \mapsto x^3$ as the $S$-box), assuming independent sub-keys.

Secondly, we show that instantiating a key-alternating cipher (which can be thought of as a degenerate case of SPNs) with most permutations gives us (almost) $t$-wise independence in $t + o(t)$ rounds. In order to do this, we use the probabilistic method to develop two new lemmas, an *independence-amplification lemma* and a *distance amplification lemma*, that allow us to reason about the evolution of key-alternating ciphers.

Category / Keywords: secret-key cryptography / AES, information theory, Substitution-Permutation Network, Key-Alternating Cipher

Original Publication (with minor differences): IACR-CRYPTO-2021
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-030-84259-8_16

Date: received 19 Apr 2021, last revised 22 Jul 2021

Contact author: tianrenl at uw edu,tessaro@cs washington edu,vinodv@mit edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2021/507

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