Towards Secure and Efficient "white-box" Encryption

Gurgen Khachatrian (American University of Armenia, Armenia)

Sergey Abrahamyan (Institute for Informatics and Automation Problems, Armenia)

Abstract: In many applications implemented in mistrusted environments all operations with the secret key during an encryption operation are "obfuscated" in a way that while an attacker has access to all routines of operations, it will nevertheless be hard for him to determine the value of the secret key used during these operations. This kind of execution of encryption operation is called a white-Box implementation. The design of a secure cryptosystem robust in the context of white-box attack is a difficult task which has been addressed by many researchers in the last two decade. The existing implementations of white-box algorithms have been mainly based on AES block cipher, however, all the known systems have been broken. In this paper a design and security analysis of a novel white-box encryption based on SAFER+ block cipher algorithm is presented which is shown to be secure against major attacks successfully applied to AES-based cryptosystems, such as the so-called BGE attack and others.

Keywords: encryption, security analysis, white-box cryptography

Categories: E.3