Paper 2013/416

Computational Fuzzy Extractors

Benjamin Fuller and Xianrui Meng and Leonid Reyzin

Abstract

Fuzzy extractors derive strong keys from noisy sources. Their security is defined information- theoretically, which limits the length of the derived key, sometimes making it too short to be useful. We ask whether it is possible to obtain longer keys by considering computational security, and show the following. -Negative Result: Noise tolerance in fuzzy extractors is usually achieved using an information reconciliation component called a "secure sketch." The security of this component, which directly affects the length of the resulting key, is subject to lower bounds from coding theory. We show that, even when defined computationally, secure sketches are still subject to lower bounds from coding theory. Specifically, we consider two computational relaxations of the information-theoretic security requirement of secure sketches, using conditional HILL entropy and unpredictability entropy. For both cases we show that computational secure sketches cannot outperform the best information-theoretic secure sketches in the case of high-entropy Hamming metric sources. -Positive Result: We show that the negative result can be overcome by analyzing computational fuzzy extractors directly. Namely, we show how to build a computational fuzzy extractor whose output key length equals the entropy of the source (this is impossible in the information-theoretic setting). Our construction is based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem, and is secure when the noisy source is uniform or symbol-fixing (that is, each dimension is either uniform or fixed). As part of the security proof, we show a result of independent interest, namely that the decision version of LWE is secure even when a small number of dimensions has no error.

Note: Expanded version of paper that appeared at Asiacrypt 2013. Contains additional proofs and discussion.