Paper 2025/1971

General Key Recovery Attack on Pointwise-Keyed Functions - Application to Alternating Moduli Weak PRFs

Qingju Wang, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris

Abstract

The increasing use of multi-party computation (MPC) has spurred the design of symmetric key primitives specifically suited for MPC environments. Recently, weak pseudorandom functions (wPRFs) based on the alternating moduli paradigm have been proposed as a promising class of MPC-friendly primitives. The wPRF proposed at CRYPTO 2024, in its One-to-One parameter set, has been shown to be vulnerable to a key recovery attack dubbed Zeroed-Out, exploiting collisions in the queries. In this paper, we identify that the aforementioned wPRFs conform to a specific structure, called pointwise-keyed function, and further show a different, general key recovery attack. This method, applied to wPRFs in the One-to-One parameter set attacked by Zeroed-out, improves upon the complexity and achieves an attack with complexity below the birthday bound, and stays effective against the proposed countermeasures. For the first time, it succeeds in attacking one of the two Many-to-One parameter sets and stays effective against one of the proposed countermeasures. We also consider its applicability to the alternative wPRF of similar structure proposed by Boneh et al at TCC 2018.