Cycle slicer: An algorithm for building permutations on special domains

Abstract

We introduce an algorithm called Cycle Slicer that gives new solutions to two important problems in format-preserving encryption: domain targeting and domain completion. In domain targeting, where we wish to use a cipher on domain χ to construct a cipher on a smaller domain S ⊆ χ, using Cycle Slicer leads to a significantly more efficient solution than Miracle and Yilek’s Reverse Cycle Walking (ASIACRYPT 2016) in the common setting where the size of S is large relative to the size of χ. In domain completion, a problem recently studied by Grubbs, Ristenpart, and Yarom (EUROCRYPT 2017) in which we wish to construct a cipher on domain χ while staying consistent with existing mappings in a lazily-sampled table, Cycle Slicer provides an alternative construction with better worst-case running time than the Zig-Zag construction of Grubbs et al. Our analysis of Cycle Slicer uses a refinement of the Markov chain techniques for analyzing matching exchange processes, which were originally developed by Czumaj and Kutylowski (Rand. Struct. & Alg. 2000).