Abstract

We argue that the invertibility of a block cipher can reduce the security of schemes that use it, and a better starting point for scheme design is the non-invertible analog of a block cipher, that is, a pseudorandom function (PRF). Since a block cipher may be viewed as a pseudorandom permutation, we are led to investigate the reverse of the problem studied by Luby and Rackoff, and ask: "how can one transform a PRP into a PRF in as security-preserving a way as possible?" The solution we propose is data-dependent re-keying. As an illustrative special case, let E:f0; 1g nf0;1g n!f0;1g n be the block cipher. Then we can construct the PRF F from the PRP E by setting F (k; x) =E(E(k; x);x). We generalize this to allow for arbitrary block and key lengths, and to improve e ciency. We prove strong quantitative bounds on the value of data-dependent re-keying in the Shannon model of an ideal cipher, and take some initial steps towards an analysis in the standard model.

Citations