♦ “Paradigm for designing secure and efficient protocols ” (BR’93). ♦ Assume existence of a publicly accessible ideal random function and prove protocol security. ♦ Replace ideal random function by an actual “secure hash function ” (such as SHA-1) to deploy protocol. ♦ Hope that nothing breaks down! Is SHA-1 Really Random? ♦ Is SHA-1 obscure enough to successfully replace a random oracle? ♦ No. Practical hash functions usually iteratively apply a fixed length compression function to the input (called the Merkle Damgard construction). f f f

Abstract. Liskov, Rivest and Wagner formalized the tweakable blockcipher (TBC) primitive at CRYPTO’02. The typical recipe for instantiating a TBC is to start with a blockcipher, and then build up a construction that admits a tweak. Almost all such constructions enjoy provable security only to the birthday bound, and the one that does achieve security beyond the birthday bound (due to Minematsu) severely restricts the tweak size and requires per-invocation blockcipher rekeying. This paper gives the first TBC construction that simultaneously allows for arbitrarily “wide ” tweaks, does not rekey, and delivers provable security beyond the birthday bound. Our construction is built from a blockcipher and an ɛ-AXU2 hash function. As an application of the TBC primitive, LRW suggest the TBC-MAC construction (similar to CBC-MAC but chaining through the tweak), but leave open the question of its security. We close this question, both for TBC-MAC as a PRF and a MAC. Along the way, we find a nonce-based variant of TBC-MAC that has a tight reduction to the security of the underlying TBC, and also displays graceful security degradation when nonces are misused. This result is interesting on its own, but it also serves as an application of our new TBC construction, ultimately giving a variable input-length PRF with beyond birthday-bound security.