White-Box Tweakable Block Cipher and Hardware-Binding Scheme Under Tweak-Unique Mode
White-box cryptography protects secret keys in untrusted execution environments but remains vulnerable to code lifting attacks. Hardware-binding offers a practical countermeasure by coupling cryptographic implementations with specific devices, yet a unified theoretical foundation is lacking. This paper establishes such a foundation by formalizing the white-box tweakable block cipher and introducing the tweak-binding property, which guarantees decryption failure upon tweak mismatch and underpins hardware-binding security. We prove that strong tweakable pseudo-random permutation security implies tweak-binding. A concrete construction is realized by embedding the WARX white-box block cipher into the CLRW14 framework, with provable security against key extraction. We further propose the tweak-unique mode as a mandatory operational paradigm, requiring a unique non-repeating tweak per encryption. Leveraging this mode with physical unclonable functions (PUFs), we design a hardware-binding scheme that stores only a single challenge-response pair per device, enabling deployment with commodity static random-access memory (SRAM) PUFs. Security proofs demonstrate provable resilience against code lifting. Performance evaluations on Intel server, Raspberry Pi 5, and Xilinx Zynq-7010 platforms show linear scaling with message size and minimal overhead, confirming suitability for both server-grade and resource-constrained internet of things (IoT) or mobile environments.
Authors
- Bo Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0419-1209)
- Yanwei Zhou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7254-3579)
- Jie Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4152-8923)
- Jun Liu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-1969-8347)
- Xiaoli Dong
- Feng Zhu
Institutions
- Xidian University (CN)
- DHC Software (China) (CN)
- Xi’an University of Posts and Telecommunications (CN)
- Shaanxi Normal University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Information
- Published
- 2026-09-15
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3390/info17090902
- Primary Topic
- Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Hardware Security
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00