Breaking the Shin-Shin-Rhee remotely keyed encryption schemes

Remotely keyed encryption (RKE) schemes provide fast symmetric encryption and decryption using a small-bandwidth security module and a powerful host. Such schemes keep the key inside the security module to prevent key compromise. Shin, Shin, and Rhee proposed a length-preserving as well as a length-increasing RKE scheme that both use only a single round of interaction between host and security module. With the length-preserving scheme they claim to answer an open problem of Blaze, Feigenbaum, and Naor. However, in the present paper we show that both their schemes are completely insecure. Further, we present heuristic arguments on why a one-round length-preserving RKE scheme might be impossible. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.