Formally Verifying Kyber Episode V: Machine-checked IND-CCA Security and Correctness of ML-KEM in EasyCrypt

Date:

August 18, 2024

2024

Type:

Conference

Publication:

CRYPTO 2024

Author(s):

José Bacelar Almeida, Santiago Arranz Olmos, Manuel Barbosa, Gilles Barthe, François Dupressoir, Benjamin Grégoire, Vincent Laporte, Jean-Christophe Léchenet, Cameron Low, Tiago Oliveira, Hugo Pacheco, Miguel Quaresma, Peter Schwabe, Pierre-Yves Strub

Abstract

We present a formally verified proof of the correctness and IND-CCA security of ML-KEM, the Kyber-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) undergoing standardization by NIST.The proof is machine-checked in EasyCrypt and it includes:

1) A formalization of the correctness (decryption failure probability) and IND-CPA security  of the Kyber base public-key encryption scheme, following Bos et al. at Euro S&P 2018;

2) A formalization of the relevant variant of the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform in the Random Oracle Model (ROM), which follows closely (but not exactly) Hofheinz, Hovelmanns and Kiltz at TCC 2017;

3) A proof that the IND-CCA security of the ML-KEM specification and its correctness as a KEM follows from the previous results;

4) Two formally verified implementations of ML-KEM written in Jasmin that are provably constant-time, functionally equivalent to the ML-KEM specification and, for this reason, inherit the provable security guarantees established in the previous points.

The top-level theorems give self-contained concrete bounds for the correctness and security of MLKEM down to (a variant of) Module-LWE. We discuss how they are built modularly by leveraging various EasyCrypt features.

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