Tweaking Even-Mansour Ciphers

We study how to construct efficient tweakable block ciphers in the Random Permutation model, where all parties have access to public random permutation oracles. We propose a construction that combines, more efficiently than by mere black-box composition, the CLRW construction (which turns a traditional block cipher into a tweakable block cipher) of Landecker et al. (CRYPTO 2012) and the iterated Even-Mansour construction (which turns a tuple of public permutations into a traditional block cipher) that has received considerable attention since the work of Bogdanov et al. (EUROCRYPT 2012). More concretely, we introduce the (one-round) tweakable Even-Mansour (TEM) cipher, constructed from a single n-bit permutation P and a uniform and almost XOR-universal family of hash functions \((H_k)\) from some tweak space to \(\{0,1\}^n\), and defined as \((k,t,x)\mapsto H_k(t)\oplus P(H_k(t)\oplus x)\), where k is the key, t is the tweak, and x is the n-bit message, as well as its generalization obtained by cascading r independently keyed rounds of this construction. Our main result is a security bound up to approximately \(2^{2n/3}\) adversarial queries against adaptive chosen-plaintext and ciphertext distinguishers for the two-round TEM construction, using Patarin’s H-coefficients technique. We also provide an analysis based on the coupling technique showing that asymptotically, as the number of rounds r grows, the security provided by the r-round TEM construction approaches the information-theoretic bound of \(2^n\) adversarial queries.