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A white-box AES-like implementation based on key-dependent substitution-linear transformations

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Abstract

It is becoming increasingly common to deploy cryptographic algorithms within software applications which are executed in untrusted environments owned and controlled by a possibly malicious party. White-box cryptography aims to protect the secret key in such an environment. Chow et al. developed a white-box AES implementation in 2002 by hiding secret keys into lookup tables. Afterwards, some improvements were proposed. However, all the published schemes have been shown to be insecure. AES was originally designed without consideration of execution in a white-box attack context. Because of the fixed confusion and diffusion operations, it is easy to break AES’s white-box version. In this paper, we propose an AES-like cipher by replacing AES’s S-boxes and MixColumn matrices with key-dependent components while keeping their good cryptographic properties. We show that the white-box implementation of our AES-like cipher can resist current known attacks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Tao Xu & Feng Liu

  2. School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Tao Xu & Feng Liu

  3. School of Big Data and Computer Science, Guizhou Normal University, Guiyang, Guizhou, China

    Feng Liu

  4. Beijing Kuangen Network Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing, China

    Chuankun Wu

Authors
  1. Tao Xu
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  2. Feng Liu
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  3. Chuankun Wu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Feng Liu.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China with No.2016YFB0800100, in part by the CAS Strategic Priority Research Program with No.XDA06010701, and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China with No.61671448 and No.U1636101.

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Xu, T., Liu, F. & Wu, C. A white-box AES-like implementation based on key-dependent substitution-linear transformations. Multimed Tools Appl 77, 18117–18137 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4562-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4562-8

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