Paper 2024/260

Kleptographic Attacks against Implicit Rejection

Antoine Joux, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Julian Loss, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
Benedikt Wagner, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Saarland University
Abstract

Given its integral role in modern encryption systems such as CRYSTALS-Kyber, the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform will soon be at the center of our secure communications infrastructure. An enduring debate surrounding the FO transform is whether to use explicit or implicit rejection when decapsulation fails. Presently, implicit rejection, as implemented in CRYSTALS-Kyber, is supported by a strong set of arguments. Therefore, understanding its security implications in different attacker models is essential. In this work, we study implicit rejection through a novel lens, namely, from the perspective of kleptography. Concretely, we consider an attacker model in which the attacker can subvert the user's code to compromise security while remaining undetectable. In this scenario, we present three attacks that significantly reduce the security level of the FO transform with implicit rejection. Notably, our attacks apply to CRYSTALS-Kyber.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint.
Keywords
KleptographyImplicit RejectionChosen-Ciphertext SecurityFujisaki-Okamoto TransformKyber
Contact author(s)
joux @ cispa de
loss @ cispa de
benedikt wagner @ cispa de
History
2024-02-19: approved
2024-02-16: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2024/260
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2024/260,
      author = {Antoine Joux and Julian Loss and Benedikt Wagner},
      title = {Kleptographic Attacks against Implicit Rejection},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2024/260},
      year = {2024},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/260}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/260}
}
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