Universal forgery and key recovery attacks on ELmD authenticated encryption algorithm

Abstract

In this paper, we provide a security analysis of ELmD: a block cipher based Encrypt-Linear-mix-Decrypt authentication mode. As being one of the second-round CAESAR candidate, it is claimed to provide misuse resistant against forgeries and security against blockwise adaptive adversaries as well as 128-bit security against key recovery attacks. We scrutinize ElmD in such a way that we provide universal forgery attacks as well as key recovery attacks. First, based on the collision attacks on similar structures such as Marble, AEZ, and COPA, we present universal forgery attacks. Second, by exploiting the structure of ELmD, we acquire ability to query to the block cipher used in ELmD. Finally, for one of the proposed versions of ELmD, we mount key recovery attacks reducing the effective key strength by more than 60 bits.