On Constructing Secure and Hardware-Efficient Invertible Mappings

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to efficiently verify the invertibility of cryptographic mappings, enabling the design of secure, hardware-efficient primitives suitable for resource-constrained IoT devices.

Contribution

It introduces a sufficient condition for invertibility of mappings that can be checked in polynomial time, facilitating the construction of secure cryptographic primitives for IoT security.

Findings

Invertibility check can be performed in O(n^2 N) time.

Provides a criterion for constructing secure invertible mappings.

Supports hardware-efficient cryptographic primitive design.

Abstract

Our society becomes increasingly dependent on wireless communications. The tremendous growth in the number and type of wirelessly connected devices in a combination with the dropping cost for performing cyberattacks create new challenges for assuring security of services and applications provided by the next generation of wireless communication networks. The situation is complicated even further by the fact that many end-point Internet of Things (IoT) devices have very limited resources for implementing security functionality. This paper addresses one of the aspects of this important, many-faceted problem - the design of hardware-efficient cryptographic primitives suitable for the protection of resource-constrained IoT devices. We focus on cryptographic primitives based on the invertible mappings of type $\{0,1,\ldots,2^n-1\} \rightarrow \{0,1,\ldots,2^n-1\}$. In order to check if a given mapping is invertible or not, we generally need an exponential in $n$ number of steps. In this paper, we derive a sufficient condition for invertibility which can be checked in $O(n^2 N)$ time, where $N$ is the size of representation of the largest function in the mapping. Our results can be used for constructing cryptographically secure invertible mappings which can be efficiently implemented in hardware.