Trust-by-Design – Strong Security Arguments for Symmetric Key Cryptography

Projektinformationen

SymTrust

ID Finanzhilfevereinbarung: 101097056

DOI

10.3030/101097056

EK-Unterschriftsdatum 23 Mai 2023

Startdatum 1 September 2023

Enddatum 31 August 2028

Finanziert unter

• European Research Council (ERC)

Gesamtkosten

€ 2 485 000,00

EU-Beitrag

€ 2 485 000,00

Koordiniert durch

RUHR-UNIVERSITAET BOCHUM
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - SymTrust (Trust-by-Design – Strong Security Arguments for Symmetric Key Cryptography)

Berichtszeitraum: 2023-09-01 bis 2026-02-28

Zusammenfassung vom Kontext und den Gesamtzielen des Projekts

Being able to communicate privately and securely is essential in today’s digital world. From online banking and cloud storage to private messaging, our personal and professional lives depend on data being protected from unauthorized access.

Cryptography is the key technology that makes this possible. In particular, symmetric cryptography—the use of shared secret keys to encrypt and decrypt data—protects the vast majority of information that flows through the internet and is stored in digital systems. Its importance will only continue to grow as our reliance on digital infrastructure increases.

While symmetric cryptography has seen remarkable progress in terms of speed and efficiency, the same cannot be said for how we understand and guarantee its security. Many of today’s cryptographic security arguments rely on unproven or unrealistic assumptions, and even the attacks used to test them often rest on shaky ground.

This ERC Advanced Grant aims to change that. By developing cryptographic primitives whose security can be demonstrated from first principles, we aim to build the next generation of cryptographic tools: fast, efficient, and mathematically trustworthy foundations for secure digital communication.

Arbeit, die ab Beginn des Projekts bis zum Ende des durch den Bericht erfassten Berichtszeitraums geleistet wurde, und die wichtigsten bis dahin erzielten Ergebnisse

The project is advancing steadily from foundational research toward practical, trustworthy cryptographic designs. During this period, we focused on understanding how the building blocks of cryptography interact, developing rigorous ways to argue about their security, and creating tools to analyze potential weaknesses.

Our work has led to several publications at top international conferences in cryptography. We clarified when certain cipher components are uniquely defined, resolving ambiguities that have long complicated security analyses. We established design principles that prevent specific structural weaknesses, ensuring that new ciphers can be provably resistant to entire classes of attacks. We also created a framework that connects abstract security proofs with practical attack methods, helping bridge the gap between theory and practice. Finally, we developed efficient tools to test and strengthen modern cipher designs that use modular addition, expanding our understanding of this important technique.

Fortschritte, die über den aktuellen Stand der Technik hinausgehen und voraussichtliche potenzielle Auswirkungen (einschließlich der bis dato erzielten sozioökonomischen Auswirkungen und weiter gefassten gesellschaftlichen Auswirkungen des Projekts)

The advances described above all go beyond the state of the arts and provide a strong theoretical foundation for the next phase of the project, which will focus on developing practical design tools and complete trustworthy cryptographic systems.