Big-Key Symmetric Encryption: Resisting Key Exfiltration

This paper aims to move research in the bounded retrieval model BRM from theory to practice by considering symmetric rather than public-key encryption, giving efficient schemes, and providing security analyses with sharp, concrete bounds. The threat addressed is malware that aims to exfiltrate a user's key. Our schemes aim to thwart this by using an enormously long key, yet paying for this almost exclusively in storage cost, not speed. Our main result is a general-purpose lemma, the subkey prediction lemma, that gives a very good bound on an adversary's ability to guess a modest length subkey of a big-key, the subkey consisting of the bits of the big-key found at random, specified locations, after the adversary has exfiltrated partial information about the big-key e.g., half as many bits as the big-key is long. We then use this to design a new kind of key encapsulation mechanism, and, finally, a symmetric encryption scheme. Both are in the random-oracle model. We also give a less efficient standard-model scheme that is based on universal computational extractors UCE. Finally, we define and achieve hedged BRM symmetric encryption, which provides authenticity in the absence of leakage.