Algorithm Substitution Attacks from a Steganographic Perspective

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between algorithm substitution attacks (ASAs) and steganography, establishing a formal equivalence that enhances understanding of how cryptographic subversion can be viewed as a form of hidden communication.

Contribution

It provides a rigorous proof linking ASAs to steganographic systems, thereby unifying concepts and rediscovering known results through a new perspective.

Findings

ASAs correspond to secure stegosystems on certain channels

Successful ASAs are equivalent to secure steganographic schemes

The paper reinterprets several ASA results within steganography literature

Abstract

The goal of an algorithm substitution attack (ASA), also called a subversion attack (SA), is to replace an honest implementation of a cryptographic tool by a subverted one which allows to leak private information while generating output indistinguishable from the honest output. Bellare, Paterson, and Rogaway provided at CRYPTO'14 a formal security model to capture this kind of attacks and constructed practically implementable ASAs against a large class of symmetric encryption schemes. At CCS'15, Ateniese, Magri, and Venturi extended this model to allow the attackers to work in a fully-adaptive and continuous fashion and proposed subversion attacks against digital signature schemes. Both papers also showed the impossibility of ASAs in cases where the cryptographic tools are deterministic. Also at CCS'15, Bellare, Jaeger, and Kane strengthened the original model and proposed a universal ASA against sufficiently random encryption schemes. In this paper we analyze ASAs from the perspective of steganography - the well known concept of hiding the presence of secret messages in legal communications. While a close connection between ASAs and steganography is known, this lacks a rigorous treatment. We consider the common computational model for secret-key steganography and prove that successful ASAs correspond to secure stegosystems on certain channels and vice versa. This formal proof allows us to conclude that ASAs are stegosystems and to "rediscover" several results concerning ASAs known in the steganographic literature.