Sloth: Key Stretching and Deniable Encryption using Secure Elements on Smartphones

Traditional key stretching lacks a strict time guarantee due to the ease of parallelized password guessing by attackers. This paper introduces Sloth, a key stretching method leveraging the Secure Element (SE) commonly found in modern smartphones to provide a strict rate limit on password guessing. While this would be straightforward with full access to the SE, Android and iOS only provide a very limited API. Sloth utilizes the existing developer SE API and novel cryptographic constructions to build an effective rate-limit for password guessing on recent Android and iOS devices. Our approach ensures robust security even for short, randomly-generated, six-character alpha-numeric passwords against adversaries with virtually unlimited computing resources. Our solution is compatible with approximately 96% of iPhones and 45% of Android phones and Sloth seamlessly integrates without device or OS modifications, making it immediately usable by app developers today. We formally define the security of Sloth and evaluate its performance on various devices. Finally, we present HiddenSloth, a deniable encryption scheme, leveraging Sloth and the SE to withstand multi-snapshot adversaries