Abstract
COMETv1, by Gueron, Jha and Nandi, is a mode of operation for nonce-based authenticated encryption with associated data functionality. It was one of the second round candidates in the ongoing NIST Lightweight Cryptography Standardization Process. In this paper, we study a generalized version of COMETv1, that we call \(\mathsf {gCOMET}\), from provable security perspective. First, we present a comprehensive and complete security proof for \(\mathsf {gCOMET}\) in the ideal cipher model. Second, we view COMET, the underlying mode of operation in COMETv1, as an instantiation of \(\mathsf {gCOMET}\), and derive its concrete security bounds. Finally, we propose another instantiation of \(\mathsf {gCOMET}\), dubbed COMETv2, and show that this version achieves better security guarantees as well as memory-efficient implementations as compared to COMETv1.
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Notes
- 1.
A forgery attack that does not involve exhaustive guessing of internal state or key.
- 2.
Each block of \(\mathsf {fatCOMETv1}\) is built of 16 bytes.
- 3.
Each block of \(\mathsf {tinyCOMETv1}\) is built of 8 bytes.
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Acknowledgments
Shay Gueron is supported by The Israel Science Foundation (grants No. 1018/16 and 3380/19); NSF-BSF Grant 2018640; The BIU Center for Research in Applied Cryptography and Cyber Security and the Center for Cyber Law and Policy at the University of Haifa, both in conjunction with the Israel National Cyber Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office. Ashwin Jha’s work was carried out in the framework of the French-German-Center for Cybersecurity, a collaboration of CISPA and LORIA. Mridul Nandi is supported by the project “Study and Analysis of IoT Security” under Government of India at R. C. Bose Centre for Cryptology and Security, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata.
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Gueron, S., Jha, A., Nandi, M. (2021). Revisiting the Security of COMET Authenticated Encryption Scheme. In: Adhikari, A., Küsters, R., Preneel, B. (eds) Progress in Cryptology – INDOCRYPT 2021. INDOCRYPT 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13143. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92518-5_1
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