## Tuesday, June 7, 2016

### From IND-CPA to Robust AEAD: Security Notions for Symmetric Encryption

Edit 09/06/16: When I originally wrote this post, I was under the impression that the Robust AE notion had been widely adopted in the symmetric community. Since this is not yet the case, I have edited the post to emphasise that this is a new notion of Rogaway et al. and not a standard one.

This week I'm at the Summer School on Real-World Crypto and Privacy in a beautiful beach resort near Šibenik, Croatia. Obviously spending time by the hotel pool / Mediterranean sea is terribly dull and exhausting, so I was delighted that today I could instead attend a two-hour lecture by Phil Rogaway on security notions for symmetric encryption.

In all seriousness, Phil gave an excellent tour of the (recent) history of symmetric encryption research and I'll try to sketch some of the key points here.

OK, let's first recall the classical notions for symmetric encryption. We assume that, for any key $k$, encryption is a probabilistic function $E_k$ from the message space $\mathcal{M}$ to the ciphertext space $\mathcal{C}$ and that decryption is a deterministic function $D_k: \mathcal{C} \to \mathcal{M}$. Then the advantage of an adversary is the adversary's ability to distinguish between the oracles $E_k(\cdot)$ and $E_k(\$(\cdot))$, where$\$(\cdot)$ returns a random string of the same length as the input. This is called IND-CPA security.

The above notion captures privacy, but not authenticity. But in practice, people want to use a single encryption scheme to achieve both of these goals. So the security definition evolved to probabilistic Authenticated Encryption (pAE): first we allow the decryption function to return $\bot$, meaning the ciphertext is inauthentic. Then we define the privacy advantage just as in the IND-CPA game, but additionally consider the authenticity advantage, which is the probability that an adversary with access to $E_k(\cdot)$ outputs a forgery: a ciphertext that did not come from the encryption oracle and that is decrypted by $D_k$ to something other than $\bot$.

This definition still has practical problems. Firstly, it still requires probabilistic encryption and - as we all know - truly random coins are hard to come by. So we want to swap true randomness with nonces: numbers that should only be used once. Then encryption can be implemented using a deterministic function that takes a nonce as an extra input. Secondly, practitioners often need to transmit some header data along with the ciphertext, and this associated data needs to be authenticated but not encrypted. So here's yet another definition(!): a nonce-based AEAD scheme is a function that takes a key, a nonce, some associated data and a message and returns a ciphertext. The authenticity notion is defined essentially as in pAE, but the privacy notion is strengthened: the adversary is asked to distinguish between $E_k(\cdot,\cdot,\cdot)$ and $\$(E_k(\cdot,\cdot,\cdot)),$i.e. the ciphertexts need to look like random strings, not just encryptions of random strings. These definitions assume that the adversary is nonce-respecting: the adversary never repeats the nonce in their encryption queries. Of course, nonces are not always used just once, as we would like. To move even closer to the messy world of practical security, we introduce Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption (MRAE) where the adversary can repeat nonces, as long as they don't repeat the entire nonce-data-message triple (otherwise they could trivially distinguish the corresponding identical ciphertexts from independent random strings). "Surely that's the last one!", I hear you cry. Not quite. It's easy to show that MRAE requires significant ciphertext expansion: ciphertexts must be significantly longer than the plaintexts. This is a problem in certain lightweight applications like in the Internet of Things. So, accepting that there's a tradeoff between the amount of ciphertext expansion and the level of security, Phil and others have recently introduced robust AE (RAE), where the encryption function now has an additional argument specifying the amount of ciphertext expansion. One then tries to obtain the best possible security with that amount of expansion. I'll omit the details in the interest of space. What was most interesting about Phil's talk was to learn how the evolution of the theoretical notions of security was driven by practical considerations. On the other hand, since the security goalposts seem to be moving all the time, perhaps practitioners will just stop trying to reach them. ### Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Secure Multi-Party Computation 2016: Efficient Constant-Round Multiparty Computation Inspired by Yehuda's talk, I decided to render the history 'flow' which lead today to efficient MPC against malicious parties with a$O(1)$number of rounds and ending with descriptions of some current state of the art techniques. First, let's begin with Yao's protocol [1]:$2$parties - Alice and Bob - hold a function$f$and they want to compute the output of$f$with secret inputs. How is this possible? For this we introduce the notion of garbling a circuit of some$f$,$\mathcal{C}_f$by writing$G(\mathcal{C}_f)$. A nice picture of how this process goes is found in these slides! After you have finished with the nice pictures, you can come back to see an example: Suppose$f$is a simple function which computes the addition of$2$bits, with Alice's input 0, Bob's input 1. Alice computes the garbled circuit of$f$,$G(\mathcal{C}_f)$and sends it to Bob along with the key corresponding to her garbled input:$k_{A_0}$. In order for Bob to compute the output of$f$he needs the key corresponding to his input$k_{B_1}$, but he doesn't want for Alice to see his input. Luckily, there is a tool called OT (oblivious transfer) so the problem is solved. Now, for the general case we can do all of these in$5$rounds of communication: Alice sends to Bob$G(\mathcal{C}_f)$(1), Bob does all the OT's in parallel (3) and at the end sends the output back to Alice (1). Great, let's go home now...well, not so fast: what if Charlie wants to join the party? Or Alice garbles a different circuit? Apparently we need something else for$3,4,\dots$party computation. Another approach appeared in 1990 and it's called the BMR protocol [2]. Assuming we have access to a protocol which generates random shared coins within$O(1)$rounds of communication. BMR uses the coin generation to construct 'super-seeds' for wires and bits to mask parties inputs. Then, for each output wire is applied an one time pad using outputs from a PRG seeded by the input wire coins. Then some equations arise by treating individually each outcome of the gate depending on -$4$possible - input wire labels$A_g, B_g, C_g, D_g$, but for more details we recommend the reader to go through the original article [2]. In 2015 it was published at Crypto the SPDZ-BMR variant [3] which in a nutshell replaces the random coins with calls to the SPDZ random functionality transforming for the first time BMR into a constant round protocol resistant to dishonest majority. Of course, there are many other security subtleties and optimizations presented in [3] such as using PRF's in prime fields instead PRG's in binary fields. SPDZ-BMR is organized in 2 phase offline step: 1. Key wire distribution and input bit mask generation. 2. Compute the wire labels$A_g, B_g, C_g, D_g$of circuit$\mathcal{C}_f$. The first step of the offline phase is very similar to the SPDZ offline phase for generating triples, bits, squares which will be later used in the online phase as well as in the step 2) of the offline phase! The computation of wire labels can be seen as evaluating a circuit in the MPC land with constant depth. In the online phase the labels are revealed to all parties and then each locally computes the outcome of$G(\mathcal{C}_f)$. These all look nice but the scheme's major drawback is that it's cubic in the number of players which means$30$parties is already too much. In these cases, GMW online phase based - like SPDZ - outperform the BMR in low circuit depth setting. The latest experiment using [4] proves that a vickrey auction with$100$parties is practical. In [5] the depth of the circuit shrunk with a slightly more computational overhead using a variant of the Gentry FHE-MPC protocol to only 3! Also the overall time complexity is now quadratic in the number of players. As Yehuda said in his talk these approaches to constant round protocols are like 'low hanging fruits'. As a researcher, are you ready to pick one by combining different things a novel way? Can you find a scheme which is linear complexity in the number of players? [1] Yao, Andrew C. "Protocols for secure computations." Foundations of Computer Science, 1982. SFCS'08. 23rd Annual Symposium on. IEEE, 1982. [2] Beaver, Donald, Silvio Micali, and Phillip Rogaway. "The round complexity of secure protocols." Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing. ACM, 1990. [3] Lindell, Yehuda, et al. "Efficient Constant Round Multi-Party Computation Combining BMR and SPDZ." Advances in Cryptology--CRYPTO 2015. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2015. 319-338. [4] Keller, Marcel, Emmanuela Orsini, and Peter Scholl. MASCOT: Faster Malicious Arithmetic Secure Computation with Oblivious Transfer. Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2016. http://eprint.iacr.org/2016/505 . [5] Lindell, Yehuda, Nigel P. Smart, and Eduardo Soria-Vazquez. "More Efficient Constant-Round Multi-Party Computation from BMR and SHE." ## Tuesday, May 31, 2016 ### Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Secure Multi-Party Computation 2016: Stable Matching Suppose we have two groups of people,$A$and$B$, and each person in group$A$lists each person in group in order of their preference for being partnered with, and vice versa. Is there a way of ‘optimally’ pairing each person in$A$with a person in$B$? This was the focus of abhi shelat’s talk at the Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Secure Multi-Party Computation 2016 at the University of Aarhus, Denmark. The problem is known as the Stable Marriage Problem and has wide field of application. Perhaps surprisingly, it can be shown that optimal solutions always exist. In fact, David Gale and Lloyd Shapely came up with an algorithm which constructs this matching (the achievement contributing in part to Shapely’s joint win of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012). There are certain cases where it would be useful for the preferences made by each party to be kept secret. The application to the world of secure MPC then becomes clear. We were provided with two motivating examples. • Matching prospective medical residents with hospitals. • Matching women to sorority houses. In these two cases, the data should be kept private. The latter example is based on a real-world instance of the problem in which, to avoid awkward social situations in which sorority houses received women whom they had not preferred, it transpired that one university had exported all of the data comprising lists of preferences to an impartial third-party in Texas, who could sort through it for them and make the assignment obliviously. To perform the Gale-Shapely algorithm, we must have$O(n^2)$arrays holding all of the preferences (where$n$is the number of participants), and also an array holding the current matching. Additionally, loops in the algorithm need$O(n^2)$time. As such, using garbled circuits turns out to be quite inefficient. The use of oblivious RAM (ORAM - you can think of this as something that interfaces between the CPU and physical RAM in a way that hides the precise data access pattern), enables a straightforward implementation, but again, not an efficient one. In an attempt to improve on this, abhi showed how to optimise the algorithm between 40 and 100 times. First, we remove the necessity for ORAM arrays, which are used for: (1) checking the preferences, and (2) finding the next unmatched element. Analysing the algorithm and searching for optimisations allows (2) to be done through the use of a queue, which saves a lot in the implementation. The main optimisation, however, comes from a cheap way of performing (1), which in the original algorithm requires$O(n^2)$space. The contribution of the presented work consists of three particular insights leading to significant reductions in complexity of the algorithms: 1. Operations on the matrix of preferences are only ever ‘read-only’ instructions. The ORAM data structure contains extra space in case of rewriting - this is not needed! Noticing this means we can asymptotically reduce the complexity of searching through these preferences. 2. The preferences are only ever read in a specific order. Noticing this allows us to avoid the recursive lookups into the smaller ORAMs containing the preferences, which is expensive. This observation was made by Craig Gentry (here) for more general data structures. 3. Asymptotically better initialisation of the data can be achieved. This is through the use of what they define as oblivious multi-lists, which, roughly, are (obliviously) sorted lists of preferences of each pair in$A\times B$. This multi-list allows a much faster matching to be made, and the cost is:$\Theta(n^2 \log^2 n)$for$n$sorts on$n$elements, and then$\Theta(n^2 \log n)$for the random permutation on$n^2$elements. These optimisations means it takes less than 2 minutes for 600 participants for the sorority house example given above, which is at least 40 times faster than a straightforward ORAM application. In practice, the sizes of the sets$A$and$B$will not often be the same. This generalised problem was studied by Roth and Peranson and somewhat complicates things, but can still be dealt with. It was suggested that this could be an interesting avenue for further research. ## Sunday, May 29, 2016 ### 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy The 37th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy took place last week in San Jose, California. Although there wasn't an awful lot to see in San Jose itself (direct quote from the Uber driver who took me to the hotel), the conference was full of people from all different backgrounds and interests, which made networking very interesting indeed. This was my first big conference I had attended, so I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I definitely didn't expect six hundred people to turn up, which was quite overwhelming at first. It also meant the biscuits at break time went very quickly. However, the atmosphere was very enjoyable and I had a fantastic time listening to all the presentations and speeches from various members of the IEEE community. The papers covered all different aspects of Security and Privacy, from a paper on the Formal Treatment and Implications for TLS 1.3 [1], to a Survey of Techniques against Telephone Spam [2]. After the three days of the conference, it split into six 'workshops'. I mostly attended MoST - the Mobile Security Technologies Workshop - but went to a couple of talks on the BioStar stream - the Workshop on Bio-inspired Security, Trust, Assurance and Resilience. One of the most enjoyable talks of the conference was on a paper titled "Users Really Do Plug In USB Drives They Find" [3], which follows academics from the University of Illinois littering USB drives round the University campus, containing labels like 'Top Secret Information', or even 'All Exam Answers' (this experiment took place just before finals). Inside each drive were a variety of 'inconspicuous' documents, all html files in disguise linking to a survey that logged the time and filename to a server when users clicked on one of the files. They dropped 297 USB drives around, and 290 of these were picked up (or rather, no longer in their original position). From these 290 that were picked up, 135 people opened a file on them. This is a big security risk, as these USB drives could have malicious files on them, that could infect the host machine if plugged in and run. The most interesting talk for me was "Dedup Est Machina: Memory Deduplication as an Advanced Exploitation Vector" [4]. Memory deduplication is a technique (default in Windows 8.1 and 10) that 'maps multiple identical copies of a physical page onto a single shared copy with copy-on-write semantics'. However, as writing to a shared page takes longer than writing to a normal page, this is a target for timing side channel attacks. The paper not only exploits this, but goes on to develop a JavaScript-based attack against the Microsoft Edge browser, that allows arbitrary memory read and write access in the browser using a reliable Rowhammer exploit. Overall, the conference was rewarding and worthwhile experience, and I recommend the conference to anyone interested in the fields of Security and Privacy, or who want some free t-shirts from the various sponsors. [1] http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a470.pdf [2] http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a320.pdf [3] http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a306.pdf [4] http://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2016/papers/0824a987.pdf ## Monday, May 16, 2016 ### Securing Cryptography Implementations in Embedded Systems In the afternoon of the second day of EUROCRYPT 2016, Emmanuel Prouff gave a tutorial on how to securely implement cryptographic schemes on embedded devices. The main focus of the tutorial was on the security definitions of side-channel countermeasures, their construction and analyses. A side-channel observation tends to leak information on the operation being performed at a given point in time and also on the data under manipulation. To secure an implementation against side-channel leakage, we need effective and efficient countermeasures that can be formally analysed in reasonably realistic models of leakage. The need for formal security analysis need not be emphasised given the fact that the side-channel analysis research community has witnessed several ad hoc analyses being invalidated. Practical security evaluation of countermeasures that come with sound theoretical analysis is also necessary for various reasons, the most important of which is to validate the practical relevance of the formal model of leakage adopted. Side-channel observations are inherently noisy and the efficiency of a side-channel attack depends on the amount of noise in an observation. So a natural way to secure implementations against such attacks is to increase the noise in the observations. One method to achieve this is to secret share sensitive intermediate variables in such a way that probing a few intermediate values would not reveal any information about the secret parameters. For example, a secret key$x$could be shared as$x = x_0 \oplus \ldots \oplus x_d$. This method belongs to a popular class of countermeasures known as masking, and these type of countermeasures are of algorithmic nature, which is in contrast to physical countermeasures such as hiding. One of the reasons for the popularity of the masking countermeasure is its amenability to a formal security analysis. Though the "crypto theory" community has shown considerable interest to provide effective defenses against side-channel attacks, for instance, the research on leakage-resilient cryptography [MR04,DP08], a practical solution currently seems to be out of reach due to its lack of efficiency. A possible reason for this is that the formal model of leakage often used is too strong compared to that observed in practice. The first use of the idea of secret sharing as a side-channel countermeasure dates back to the works [GP99] and [CJRR99]. The practical effectiveness of the masking countermeasure can be deduced from a result in [CJRR99] that the number of side-channel traces necessary to distinguish the underlying unmasked bit increases exponentially w.r.t. to the number of shares of the corresponding bit. To formally analyse the security of masking schemes the most popular model of leakage used is the probing model of [ISW03]. In this model, an adversary is allowed to obtain leakage corresponding to a fixed number of wires of a boolean circuit. A more realistic leakage model, called as information bounded model, was proposed in [RP13]. These two models were unified in [DDF14]. Two main issues that need to be addressed while designing a masking scheme are: (1) how to share the sensitive data, and (2) how to securely process the shared data. For the former problem, most often one adopts a linear secret sharing scheme, in particular, the boolean masking. This method is closely related to the problem of constructing error correcting codes with large dual distance. Other alternatives to the linear secret sharing schemes are multiplicative masking, affine masking, modular additive masking, homographic masking, inner product masking, etc. The latter problem of securely processing on shared data is closely related to the problem of secure multi-party computation. In the context of boolean masking, a well known method to compute in the presence of shares is from [ISW03]. Note that for circuits over the finite field of two elements$\mathbb{F}_2$(i.e., boolean circuits), processing an$\mathbb{F}_2$-addtion gate (i.e., an xor gate) is straightforward as we just need to add up the corresponding shares of the input to produce the shares of the output of the addition gate. The main difficulty is to process an$\mathbb{F}_2$--multiplication gate (i.e., an and gate). The method proposed in [ISW03] to securely perform multiplication in the presence of shares requires quadratic amount (in the number of shares) of time and randomness, and hence is more expensive compared to performing an addition. The [ISW03] method was generalised to$\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$-arithmetic circuits in [CGPQR12] for improved efficiency in software implementations. In [CGPQR12], the function represented by a given (non-randomised) arithmetic circuit over$\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$is represented by an univariate polynomial over$\mathbb{F}_{2^n}$, which is then evaluated by a sequence of the following operations: polynomial addition, scalar multiplication, polynomial squaring and multiplication of two distinct polynomials. While the first three are$\mathbb{F}_{2}$-linear operations, and hence relatively cheap to process, only the multiplication operation is non-linear and relatively more expensive. Currently, the heuristic method of [CRV14] is the most efficient polynomial evaluation method over binary finite fields that seeks to minimise the total count of non-linear multiplications. Recently, [CPRR15] proposed an algebraic decomposition method where the target function to be securely evaluated is represented as a composition of quadratic or higher algebraic-degree functions, which in turn are securely implemented more efficiently than by using previously known techniques. While the probing model is effective against differential power analysis-like attacks, however, they are vulnerable to attacks that exploit the presence of glitches. The security requirements of glitch-resistant side-channel countermeasures are more demanding than that of masking schemes and, as a consequence, are less efficient in practice than masking schemes. Threshold implementations are a well-known class of glitch-resistant countermeasures. The speaker concluded the tutorial by emphasising the need for algorithmic side-channel countermeasures enabled with formal security analysis, the need for formal models of leakage that suit the physical reality of devices and that enables relatively simple security proofs, and the need for efficient countermeasures. References: [CGPQR12] Claude Carlet, Louis Goubin, Emmanuel Prouff, Michaël Quisquater, Matthieu Rivain: Higher-Order Masking Schemes for S-Boxes. FSE 2012. [CJRR99] Suresh Chari, Charanjit S. Jutla, Josyula R. Rao, Pankaj Rohatgi: Towards Sound Approaches to Counteract Power-Analysis Attacks. CRYPTO 1999. [CPRR15] Claude Carlet, Emmanuel Prouff, Matthieu Rivain, Thomas Roche: Algebraic Decomposition for Probing Security. CRYPTO 2015. [CRV14] Jean-Sébastien Coron, Arnab Roy, Srinivas Vivek: Fast Evaluation of Polynomials over Binary Finite Fields and Application to Side-Channel Countermeasures. CHES 2014. [DDF14] Alexandre Duc, Stefan Dziembowski, Sebastian Faust: Unifying Leakage Models: From Probing Attacks to Noisy Leakage. EUROCRYPT 2014. [DP08] Stefan Dziembowski, Krzysztof Pietrzak: Leakage-Resilient Cryptography. FOCS 2008. [GP99] Louis Goubin, Jacques Patarin: DES and Differential Power Analysis (The "Duplication" Method). CHES 1999. [ISW03] Yuval Ishai, Amit Sahai, David Wagner: Private Circuits: Securing Hardware against Probing Attacks. CRYPTO 2003. [MR04] Silvio Micali, Leonid Reyzin: Physically Observable Cryptography (Extended Abstract). TCC 2004. [RP13] Emmanuel Prouff, Matthieu Rivain: Masking against Side-Channel Attacks: Masking against Side-Channel Attacks: A Formal Security Proof. EUROCRYPT 2013. ### Eurocrypt 2016: All Complete Functionalities are Reversible In the multi-party computation (MPC) track at Eurocrypt 2016 in Vienna, Austria, Dakshita Khurana rather heroically gave two consecutive, very well-presented talks, the second of which explaining that All Complete Functionalities are Reversible. This second talk is the focus of this blog post. In the context of MPC, a functionality is an algorithm which performs some operation using two or more parties' inputs while guaranteeing certain requisite security properties. The functionalities covered by this paper are secure function computations (SFEs), in which the parties want to compute some function on their combined inputs in a secure manner. In the case of functionalities with two parties,$P_A$and$P_B$, we usually consider one party as the sender and the other as the receiver. For decades, an open question in the field of MPC was, Given a two-party functionality$\mathcal{F}$in which$P_A$acts as the sender and$P_B$as the receiver, is it possible to turn this into a secure scheme in which instead$P_A$acts as the receiver and$P_B$as the sender? This reverse functionality is denoted by$\textsf{reverse}(\mathcal{F})$. Intuitively, we think of a functionality allowing this reversal as containing 'enough symmetry' to perform the functionality of$\mathcal{F}$regardless of which party performs which role. It was shown by Wolf and Wullschleger that oblivious transfer (OT) can be reversed. OT is a process by which$P_A$receives one of (at least) two values private to$P_B$without$P_B$finding out which$P_A$chose. A functionality$\mathcal{F}$is called complete if both$\mathcal{F}$and$\textsf{reverse}(\mathcal{F})\$ are able to realise OT functionality. In light of Wolf and Wullschleger's result, a natural question to ask is then, Exactly which complete 2PC functionalities can be reversed? This new result shows that they all can be.

The main technical challenge that the authors overcome is that of creating commitments in both directions. This accomplishment is essentially what allows this symmetry property to go through and achieve the result.

As one would hope for in papers on cryptography, this result has practical as well as theoretical appeal: if one party possesses some physical property requiring that it perform a particular role in the functionality (e.g. a computationally 'weak' device), it is essential that this property suffice to compute securely even if roles are reversed. In this way, this paper serves as a good example of how cryptography theory and practice can and should go hand in hand. Like a couple dancing a Viennese waltz?

## Thursday, May 12, 2016

### Eurocrypt 2016: Message Authentication Codes

Of the many sessions of EuroCrypt 2016, one of the most interesting was on Message Authentication  Codes (MACs). Chaired by Peter Gazi, the session was somewhat different from many provable security sessions in that it focused on better understanding the security of two schemes already in existence (and use).  In each case, the MAC in question is constructed through a mode-of-operation on top of an ideal primitive. This seems to be part of a trend at the moment: a number of recent papers on modes-of-operation papers have been written to tighten the security bounds of known schemes[1].

First up, Stefano Tessaro presented joint work with Mihir Bellare and Dan Bernstein [2] on the security of the MAC function used in the Ed25519 deterministic signature scheme, which they term AMAC (for Augmented MAC). AMAC can be thought of as a simplified version of using HMAC with an MD-based hash function, in which we replace the outer keying with a public output transformation.
The work first generalises AMAC to describe an "Augmented Cascade" by allowing any output transformation. This surfaces a new characterisation for the compression function: a PRF-under-Out-Leakage, where Out is the output transformation in question. That is, the primitive should be secure even when the adversary is given the evaluation of Out on it's inputs (this basically corresponds to length-extension attacks).  Directly targeting multi-user security of the overall scheme (rather than relying on a hybrid argument), they provide a reduction from the from the multi-user augmented cascade to the multi-user PRF-under-Out-leakage security of the compression function.
The work then demonstrates that (in the ideal model) this bound is small, and in doing so deduces the security of the cascade, which directly implies security of AMAC.  It was observed that bound was better than one would have by simply calculating single-user security and applying a hybrid argument.

The second talk of the session was by Atul Luykx, who spoke about PMAC (Parallelizable MAC) and its security bounds [3], based on work with Bart Preneel, Alan Szepieniec and Kan Yasuda. Atul focussed on what a security bound actually means, and why in the concrete world (where we expect in instantiate our schemes by setting real-world parameters) we should be careful about needlessly loose security proofs.  For example, he showed how, if one wishes to have reasonable level of confidence that an adversary cannot create a forgery yet use a small block cipher, birthday bound security can end up as low as a single-digit number of queries.
With this in mind, we looked at the security landscape for first EMAC (encrypted CBC MAC) and then PMAC through a graph of number of queries against maximum query length, with the various security bounds drawn in.  With generic attacks taking out large sectors of each graph, it was still clear that the attacks and bounds did not meet, and the paper focusses on whether these proofs can be modified to be independent of query length. The paper explains how this length-dependence is heavily dependent on the type of masking used internally, and this leads to the main conclusions. The most relevant of these for the real world is that using a Gray code to generate the masks leads to a length-dependent attack.

[1] See for example these papers from FSE.
[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/142.pdf
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/185.pdf