Provably Robust Sponge-Based PRNGs and KDFs

We study the problem of devising provably secure PRNGs with input based on the sponge paradigm. Such constructions are very appealing, as efficient software/hardware implementations of SHA-3 can easily be translated into a PRNG in a nearly black-box way. The only existing sponge-based construction, proposed by Bertoni et al. (CHES 2010), fails to achieve the security notion of robustness recently considered by Dodis et al. (CCS 2013), for two reasons: (1) The construction is deterministic, and thus there are high-entropy input distributions on which the construction fails to extract random bits, and (2) The construction is not forward secure, and presented solutions aiming at restoring forward security have not been rigorously analyzed. We propose a seeded variant of Bertoni et al.’s PRNG with input which we prove secure in the sense of robustness, delivering in particular concrete security bounds. On the way, we make what we believe to be an important conceptual contribution, develo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: IACR
• Authors: Peter Gazi, Stefano Tessaro
• Keywords: Biometrics, IACR 2016