FPL: White-box secure block cipher using parallel table look-ups

Abstract

In this work, we propose a new table-based block cipher structure, dubbed FPL, that can be used to build white-box secure block ciphers. Our construction is a balanced Feistel cipher, where the input to each round function determines multiple indices for the underlying table via a probe function, and the sum of the values from the table becomes the output of the round function. We identify the properties of the probe function that make the resulting block cipher white-box secure in terms of weak and strong space hardness against known-space and non-adaptive chosen-space attacks. Our construction, enjoying rigorous provable security without relying on any ideal primitive, provides flexibility to the block size and the table size, and permits parallel table look-ups. We also propose a concrete instantiation of FPL, dubbed FPLAES, using (round-reduced) AES for the underlying table and probe functions. Our implementation shows that FPLAES provides stronger security without significant loss of efficiency, compared to existing schemes including SPACE, WhiteBlock and WEM.