Paper 2026/254

Key Committing Security of HCTR2, Revisited

Abstract

This paper presents improved attacks and proofs for the key committing security of EtE-HCTR2, a robust authenticated encryption scheme constructed from HCTR2 and the Encode-then-Encipher (EtE) framework, in light of the ongoing standardization effort of cryptographic accordions by NIST. We improve attacks on the instantiations with two common encodings, where zeros are either appended or prepended to the message, namely EtE_A-HCTR2 and EtE_P-HCTR2. Compared with the state-of-the-art attack by Chen et al. in ToSC 2023(4), our EtE_A-HCTR2 attack reduces the complexity from $O(2^{\tau/2})$ to $O(2^{\max\{\tau/3, \tau-n\}})$ for an $n$-bit block cipher and $\tau$-bit zero padding, which degrades EtE_A-HCTR2's security below the birthday bound. Meanwhile, our EtE_P-HCTR2 attack reduces the complexity from $O(2^{\min \{n/2, \tau\}})$ to $O(2^{\tau/2})$, which is tight with our new security proof. We verify these computationally-bounded attacks by experimentally generating concrete vectors for both EtE_A-HCTR2 with $\tau=96$ and EtE_P-HCTR2 with $\tau=64$, each instantiated with $n=128$, in less than 15 minutes. We consider yet another padding scheme that appends zeros to the first message block, namely EtE_S-HCTR2, and prove that it has a tight committing security bound of $O(2^{\tau/2})$ by avoiding the issue in EtE_A-HCTR2.