wanliliu / aes-whitebox

WBC AES implementation in C++ using Chow and Muir papers supporting 128, 192, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096-bit keys

AES Whitebox

This code implements Chow et al. scheme, following Muir's tutorial using protected L × MB bijections and XOR tables, extending the logic to AES-192 and AES-256 fully compatible and tested with NIST Special Publication 800-38A test vectors, as well as the experimental AES-512, AES-1024, AES-2048 and AES-4096 obtained from standard expansion ().

The tables generated by this program follow the Chow et al. proposition. Here is a summary with the sizes (values in bytes):

Table	AES-128	AES-192	AES-256	AES-512	AES-1024	AES-2048	AES-4096
XOR tables	221,184	270,336	319,488	516,096	909,312	1,695,744	3,268,608
Tyi-boxes	147,456	180,224	212,992	344,064	606,208	1,130,496	2,179,072
T-boxes (last round)	4,096	4,096	4,096	4,096	4,096	4,096	4,096
inv(MB) × L	147,456	180,224	212,992	344,064	606,208	1,130,496	2,179,072
Total	520,192	634,880	749,568	1,208,320	2,125,824	3,960,832	7,630,848

In order to build a full 'oracle' based in the original paper, this code also implements CFB, OFB and CTR block cipher modes of operation around the inner cipher.

External encodings were not implemented, but these are easy to apply if needed.

How to use

• aes.cc, aes.h and aes_private.h implement the standard AES-{128,192,256} encryption, used only as a reference and can be easily removed from the final build.
• aes_whitebox_compiler.cc contains the AES 'compiler', that generates the aes_whitebox_tables.cc file that contains the cipher tables.
• aes_whitebox.h and aes_whitebox.cc contain the AES implementation that consumes the aes_whitebox_tables.cc.

So for a final build, you must (1) compile the aes_whitebox_compiler tool, (2) generate the aes_whitebox_tables.cc source file using it and (3) add aes_whitebox.h together with aes_whitebox.cc and the generated aes_whitebox_tables.cc to the final build.

The accompanying Makefile performs all steps in a single execution, including an unit test at the end.

The final API is just:

void aes_whitebox_encrypt_cfb(const uint8_t iv[16], const uint8_t* m, size_t len, uint8_t* c);
void aes_whitebox_decrypt_cfb(const uint8_t iv[16], const uint8_t* c, size_t len, uint8_t* m);

void aes_whitebox_encrypt_ofb(const uint8_t iv[16], const uint8_t* m, size_t len, uint8_t* c);
void aes_whitebox_decrypt_ofb(const uint8_t iv[16], const uint8_t* c, size_t len, uint8_t* m);

void aes_whitebox_encrypt_ctr(const uint8_t nonce[16], const uint8_t* m, size_t len, uint8_t* c);
void aes_whitebox_decrypt_ctr(const uint8_t nonce[16], const uint8_t* c, size_t len, uint8_t* m);

Where iv is the initialization vector (CTR adopts a nonce instead of iv), m is the message, c is the ciphertext and len is the number of bytes to encode/decode and can be of any size (does not have to be multiple of 16 bytes as required by other block cipher modes such as EBC and CBC).

Internally the code will manage to use the embedded AES-128, AES-192 or AES-256 key using the obfuscated tables.

The compiler is also capable to generate AES-512 and AES-1024 tables, following Cho, J. et al. The same logic was applied to generate experimental AES-2048 and AES-4096 tables.

BGE Attack

The time complexity of Billet et al.’s key extraction attack for AES-128 is less than 2^30, while some further optimizations suggest 2^22. On the other hand, there is no material produced to analyse the complexity of the other variations.

So, care should be taken before using this implementation in production.