Project description
Keyless cryptography for enhanced security
In an era where digital security is paramount, traditional cryptographic methods face challenges from emerging technologies, including quantum computing. Keyless cryptographic primitives have gained traction for their flexibility and efficiency, becoming essential in lightweight cryptography and advanced privacy protocols. However, their security assessments often rely on outdated methodologies that overlook significant design differences. In this context, the ERC-funded KEYLESS project aims to develop new methodologies for accurately evaluating keyless primitives. By establishing fine-grained models and integrating novel cryptanalytic techniques, KEYLESS seeks to enhance both security and performance. Additionally, the project will support four PhD students, focusing on creating robust, efficient designs that withstand misuse and side-channel attacks.
Objective
Cryptographic primitives are the foundation of security in any secure information system.
Permutations and similar keyless cryptographic primitives have risen to great popularity in recent years thanks to their flexibility and performance.
They power new lightweight cryptography standards or serve as core building blocks of post-quantum cryptography and advanced privacy-preserving protocols.
However, the security analysis of these designs still follows the traditional cryptanalytic methodology based on decades of research in block ciphers, largely ignoring the substantial differences between the two design paradigms.
In KEYLESS, we propose new methodologies to achieve an accurate, transparent security evaluation of keyless primitives. This has the potential to enable drastic performance improvements as well as prevent security vulnerabilities arising from hidden dependencies.
We will establish new, fine-grained models of keyless primitives to obtain tighter proofs and lightweight designs. This allows to simultaneously improve both security and efficiency.
We will tackle the challenges of keyless settings with novel cryptanalytic techniques and develop formal methods to prove optimality of attacks.
In particular, we will systematically take dependencies between rounds or primitive calls into account and thus achieve complete models of complex attacks.
Finally, we will explore the full potential of keyless primitives to not only provide efficient security, but also practical robustness and resilience under suboptimal conditions, including misuse and side-channel attacks.
Unlike previous work, we will study robustness properties in conjunction to exploit synergies, and obtain new designs that achieve full robustness while maintaining efficiency.
KEYLESS will fund 4 PhD students in the research group of Maria Eichlseder, co-designer of the new NIST standard for lightweight cryptography.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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8010 Graz
Austria
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