Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, Volume 2025
Zeroed Out: Cryptanalysis of Weak PRFs in Alternating Moduli
Irati Manterola Ayala
Simula UiB, Bergen, Norway
Håvard Raddum
Simula UiB, Bergen, Norway
Keywords: Multi-Party Computation, Weak pseudorandom functions, Alternating moduli paradigm, Symmetric cryptanalysis, Key recovery attack
Abstract
The growing adoption of secure multi-party computation (MPC) has driven the development of efficient symmetric key primitives tailored for MPC. Recent advances, such as the alternating moduli paradigm, have shown promise but leave room for cryptographic and practical improvements. In this paper, we analyze a family of weak pseudorandom functions (wPRF) proposed at Crypto 2024, focusing on their One-to-One parameter sets. We demonstrate that these configurations fail to achieve their intended one-to-one mappings and exploit this observation to develop an efficient key recovery attack. Our analysis reveals critical vulnerabilities, reducing the complexity of key recovery to O(2^(λ/2) log₂ λ) for the Standard One-to-One wPRF and O(2^(0.84λ)) for the Reversed Moduli variant, both substantially below their claimed λ-bit security. We validate our findings through experimental evaluation, confirming alignment between predicted and observed attack complexities.
Publication
Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, Volume 2025, Issue 2
PaperArtifact
Artifact number
fse/2026/a1
Artifact published
June 22, 2026
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IACR FSE Results Reproduced
License
This work is licensed under the MIT License.
Note that license information is supplied by the authors and has not been confirmed by the IACR.
BibTeX How to cite
Irati Manterola Ayala and Håvard Raddum. (2025). Zeroed Out: Cryptanalysis of Weak PRFs in Alternating Moduli. Transactions on Symmetric Cryptology, 2025(2), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.46586/tosc.v2025.i2.1-15. Artifact available at https://artifacts.iacr.org/fse/2026/a1