Paper 2025/1183 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2025/1183 ↗

PA1 Security on Release of Unverified Plaintext in Encrypt-then-MAC AE Schemes

Abstract

At ASIACRYPT 2014, Andreeva et al. put forward a definition for security of authenticated encryption under release of unverified plaintext. They introduced two notions of plaintext awareness (PA1 and its stronger sibling PA2), suggested to be used in conjunction with confidentiality in case of release of unverified plaintext, as well as the notion of integrity under release of unverified plaintext (INT-RUP). Various efforts have been made to develop a unified model (e.g., Ashur et al., CRYPTO 2017, Chang et al., ToSC 2019(4)). With respect to the analysis of existing and new modes under release of unverified plaintext, most research however has focused on INT-RUP security only. Plaintext awareness is less studied and understood. In this work, we take a detailed look at the original definitions of PA1 and PA2 security. We observe that the definitions leave too much room for interpretation, and claimed results such as PA1 security of Encrypt-then-MAC are unjustified. The core of the issue lies in the fact that PA1 security is necessarily tied to the implementation of the scheme. To resolve this, we present refined definitions of PA1 and PA2 security. We argue that even for these refined definitions, there is no implementation of Encrypt-and-MAC that is PA1 (nor PA2) secure. For MAC-then-Encrypt, results depend on the actual scheme, as we demonstrate using a negative result and a positive result (from literature, on Romulus-M). Furthermore, we formally prove for Encrypt-then-MAC that (i) there exist implementations that are PA1 insecure and (ii) there exist implementations that are PA1 secure. In other words, Encrypt-then-MAC is insecure under the old definition but secure under the new definition, provided a proper implementation is used. We apply this observation to Isap v2, finalist in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition, where we additionally deal with the complication that the same key is used for encryption and authentication.