Title
Rogue Decryption Failures: Reconciling AE Robustness Notions.
Abstract
An authenticated encryption scheme is deemed secure AE if ciphertexts both look like random bitstrings and are unforgeable. AE is a much stronger notion than the traditional IND---CCA. One shortcoming of AE as commonly understood is its idealized, all-or-nothing decryption: if decryption fails, it will always provide the same single error message and nothing more. Reality often turns out differently: encode-then-encipher schemes often output decrypted ciphertext before verification has taken place whereas pad-then-MAC-then-encrypt schemes are prone to distinguishable verification failures due to the subtle interaction between padding and the MAC-then-encrypt concept. Three recent papers provided what appeared independent and radically different definitions to model this type of decryption leakage. We reconcile these three works by providing a reference model of security for authenticated encryption in the face of decryption leakage from invalid queries. Having tracked the development of AE security games, we provide a single expressive framework allowing us to compare and contrast the previous notions. We find that at their core, the notions are essentially equivalent, with their key differences stemming from definitional choices independent of the desire to capture real world behaviour.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1007/978-3-319-27239-9_6
IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive
Field
DocType
Volume
Reference model,Computer security,Computer science,Robustness (computer science),Ciphertext,Padding,Authenticated encryption,Provable security
Journal
2015
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
12
0.51
29
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guy Barwell1151.57
Dan Page230120.67
Martijn Stam3165967.36