Varun Maram

dblp:250/2022 · DBLP profile ↗
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8ranked-venue papers
0as first author
6since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-1607-9062ORCID · verified

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Security and privacy · 6 · 6 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Post-Quantum Cryptographic Analysis of SSH
abstract
The Secure Shell (SSH) protocol is one of the first security protocols on the Internet to upgrade itself to resist attacks against future quantum computers, with the default adoption of the “quantum (otherwise, classically)” secure hybrid key exchange in OpenSSH from April 2022. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive security analysis of this quantum-resistant version of SSH in the literature: related works either focus on the hybrid key exchange in isolation and do not consider security of the overall protocol, or analyze the protocol in security models which are not appropriate for SSH, especially in the “post-quantum” setting. In this paper, we remedy the state of affairs by providing a thorough post-quantum cryptographic analysis of SSH. We follow a “top-down” approach wherein we first prove security of SSH in a more appropriate model, namely, our post-quantum extension of the so-called authenticated and confidential channel establishment (ACCE) protocol security model; our extension which captures “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks could be of independent interest. Then we establish the cryptographic properties of SSH's underlying primitives, as concretely instantiated in practice, based on our protocol-level ACCE security analysis: for example, we prove relevant cryptographic properties of “Streamlined NTRU Prime”, a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) which is used in recent versions of OpenSSH and TinySSH, in the quantum random oracle model, and address open problems related to its analysis in the literature. Notably, our ACCE security analysis of post-quantum SSH relies on the weaker notion of IND-CPA security of the ephemeral KEMs used in the hybrid key exchange. This is in contrast to prior works which rely on the stronger assumption of IND-CCA secure ephemeral KEMs. Hence we conclude the paper with a discussion on potentially replacing IND-CCA secure KEMs in current post-quantum implementations of SSH with simpler and faster IND-CPA secure counterparts, and also provide the corresponding benchmarks.
Benjamin Bencina, Benjamin Dowling, Varun Maram, Keita Xagawa
SP3
2025 Quantum CCA-Secure PKE, Revisited
Navid Alamati, Varun Maram
J. Cryptol.2
2023 Non-Observable Quantum Random Oracle Model
Navid Alamati, Varun Maram, Daniel Masny
PQCrypto2
2023 Quantum Cryptanalysis of OTR and OPP: Attacks on Confidentiality, and Key-Recovery
Melanie Jauch, Varun Maram
SAC2
2022 Anonymous, Robust Post-quantum Public Key Encryption
Paul Grubbs, Varun Maram, Kenneth G. Paterson
EUROCRYPT (3)2
2021 Gladius: LWR Based Efficient Hybrid Public Key Encryption with Distributed Decryption
Kelong Cong, Daniele Cozzo, Varun Maram, Nigel P. Smart
ASIACRYPT (4)3
2020 On Broadcast in Generalized Network and Adversarial Models
Chen-Da Liu-Zhang, Varun Maram, Ueli Maurer
OPODIS2
2019 Brief Announcement: Towards Byzantine Broadcast in Generalized Communication and Adversarial Models
Chen-Da Liu-Zhang, Varun Maram, Ueli Maurer
DISC2