Tweaks and keys for block ciphers: The TWEAKEY framework

Abstract

We propose the TWEAKEY framework with goal to unify the design of tweakable block ciphers and of block ciphers resistant to relatedkey attacks. Our framework is simple, extends the key-alternating construction, and allows to build a primitive with arbitrary tweak and key sizes, given the public round permutation (for instance, the AES round). Increasing the sizes renders the security analysis very difficult and thus we identify a subclass of TWEAKEY, that we name STK, which solves the size issue by the use of finite field multiplications on low hamming weight constants. Overall, this construction allows a significant increase of security of well-known authenticated encryptions mode like ΘCB3 from birthday-bound security to full security, where a regular block cipher was used as a black box to build a tweakable block cipher. Our work can also be seen as advances on the topic of secure key schedule design.