All papers in 2024 (Page 2 of 639 results)

Last updated:  2024-04-07
Supersingular Hashing using Lattès Maps
Daniel Larsson
In this note we propose a variant (with four sub-variants) of the Charles--Goren--Lauter (CGL) hash function using Lattès maps over finite fields. These maps define dynamical systems on the projective line. The underlying idea is that these maps ``hide'' the $j$-invariants in each step in the isogeny chain, similar to the Merkle--Damgård construction. This might circumvent the problem concerning the knowledge of the starting (or ending) curve's endomorphism ring, which is known to create collisions in the CGL hash function. Let us, already in the abstract, preface this note by remarking that we have not done any explicit computer experiments and benchmarks (apart from a small test on the speed of computing the orbits), nor do we make any security claims. Part of the reason for this is the author's lack of competence in complexity theory and evaluation of security claims. Instead this note is only meant as a presentation of the main idea, the hope being that someone more competent will find it interesting enough to pursue further.
Last updated:  2024-04-07
A comment on "Comparing the MOV and FR reductions in elliptic curve cryptography" from EUROCRYPT'99
Qiping Lin and Fengmei Liu
In general the discrete logarithm problem is a hard problem in the elliptic curve cryptography, and the best known solving algorithm have exponential running time. But there exists a class of curves, i.e. supersingular elliptic curves, whose discrete logarithm problem has a subexponential solving algorithm called the MOV attack. In 1999, the cost of the MOV reduction is still computationally expensive due to the power of computers. We analysis the cost of the MOV reduction and the discrete logarithm problem of the curves in \cite{HSSI99} using Magma with an ordinary computer.
Last updated:  2024-04-06
Confidential and Verifiable Machine Learning Delegations on the Cloud
Wenxuan Wu, Soamar Homsi, and Yupeng Zhang
With the growing adoption of cloud computing, the ability to store data and delegate computations to powerful and affordable cloud servers have become advantageous for both companies and individual users. However, the security of cloud computing has emerged as a significant concern. Particularly, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) cannot assure data confidentiality and computations integrity in mission-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a confidential and verifiable delegation scheme that advances and overcomes major performance limitations of existing Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP). Secret-shared Data and delegated computations to multiple cloud servers remain completely confidential as long as there is at least one honest MPC server. Moreover, results are guaranteed to be valid even if all the participating servers are malicious. Specifically, we design an efficient protocol based on interactive proofs, such that most of the computations generating the proof can be done locally on each server. In addition, we propose a special protocol for matrix multiplication where the overhead of generating the proof is asymptotically smaller than the time to evaluate the result in MPC. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our scheme significantly outperforms prior work, with the online prover time being 1-2 orders of magnitude faster. Notably, in the matrix multiplication protocol, only a minimal 2% of the total time is spent on the proof generation. Furthermore, we conducted tests on machine learning inference tasks. We executed the protocol for a fully-connected neural network with 3 layers on the MNIST dataset and it takes 2.6 seconds to compute the inference in MPC and generate the proof, 88× faster than prior work. We also tested the convolutional neural network of Lenet with 2 convolution layers and 3 dense layers and the running time is less than 300 seconds across three servers.
Last updated:  2024-04-18
Highly-Effective Backdoors for Hash Functions and Beyond
Mihir Bellare, Doreen Riepel, and Laura Shea
We study the possibility of schemes whose public parameters have been generated along with a backdoor. We consider the goal of the big-brother adversary to be two-fold: It desires utility (it can break the scheme) but also exclusivity (nobody else can). Starting with hash functions, we give new, strong definitions for these two goals, calling the combination high effectiveness. We then present a construction of a backdoored hash function that is highly effective, meaning provably meets our new definition. As an application, we investigate forgery of X.509 certificates that use this hash function. We then consider signatures, again giving a definition of high effectiveness, and showing that it can be achieved. But we also give some positive results, namely that for the Okamoto and Katz-Wang signature schemes, certain natural backdoor strategies are provably futile. Our backdoored constructions serve to warn that backdoors can be more powerful and damaging than previously conceived, and to help defenders and developers identify potential backdoors by illustrating how they might be built. Our positive results illustrate that some schemes do offer more backdoor resistance than others, which may make them preferable.
Last updated:  2024-04-05
NodeGuard: A Highly Efficient Two-Party Computation Framework for Training Large-Scale Gradient Boosting Decision Tree
Tianxiang Dai, Yufan Jiang, Yong Li, and Fei Mei
The Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) is a well-known machine learning algorithm, which achieves high performance and outstanding interpretability in real-world scenes such as fraud detection, online marketing and risk management. Meanwhile, two data owners can jointly train a GBDT model without disclosing their private dataset by executing secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols. In this work, we propose NodeGuard, a highly efficient two party computation (2PC) framework for large-scale GBDT training and inference. NodeGuard guarantees that no sensitive intermediate results are leaked in the training and inference. The efficiency advantage of NodeGuard is achieved by applying a novel keyed bucket aggregation protocol, which optimizes the communication and computation complexity globally in the training. Additionally, we introduce a probabilistic approximate division protocol with an optimization for re-scaling, when the divisor is publicly known. Finally, we compare NodeGuard to state-of-the-art frameworks, and we show that NodeGuard is extremely efficient. It can improve the privacy preserving GBDT training performance by a factor of 5.0 to 131 in LAN and 2.7 to 457 in WAN.
Last updated:  2024-04-05
CryptoVampire: Automated Reasoning for the Complete Symbolic Attacker Cryptographic Model
Simon Jeanteur, Laura Kovács, Matteo Maffei, and Michael Rawson
Cryptographic protocols are hard to design and prove correct, as witnessed by the ever-growing list of attacks even on protocol standards. Symbolic models of cryptography enable automated formal security proofs of such protocols against an idealized cryptographic model, which abstracts away from the algebraic properties of cryptographic schemes and thus misses attacks. Computational models of cryptography yield rigorous guarantees but support at present only interactive proofs and/or restricted classes of protocols (e.g., stateless ones). A promising approach is given by the computationally complete symbolic attacker (CCSA) model, formalized in the BC Logic, which aims at bridging and getting the best of the two worlds, obtaining cryptographic guarantees by symbolic protocol analysis. The BC Logic is supported by a recently developed interactive theorem prover, namely Squirrel, which enables machine-checked interactive security proofs, as opposed to automated ones, thus requiring expert knowledge both in the cryptographic space as well as on the reasoning side. In this paper, we introduce the CryptoVampire cryptographic protocol verifier, which for the first time fully automates proofs of trace properties in the BC Logic. The key technical contribution is a first-order formalization of protocol properties with tailored handling of subterm relations. As such, we overcome the burden of interactive proving in higher-order logic and automatically establish soundness of cryptographic protocols using only first-order reasoning. Our first-order encoding of cryptographic protocols is challenging for various reasons. On the theoretical side, we restrict full first-order logic with cryptographic axioms to ensure that, by losing the expressivity of the higher-order BC Logic, we do not lose soundness of cryptographic protocols in our first-order encoding. On the practical side, CryptoVampire integrates dedicated proof techniques using first-order saturation algorithms and heuristics, which all together enable leveraging the state-of-the-art Vampire first-order automated theorem prover as the underlying proving engine of CryptoVampire. Our experimental results showcase the effectiveness of CryptoVampire as a standalone verifier as well as in terms of automation support for Squirrel.
Last updated:  2024-04-05
HyCaMi: High-Level Synthesis for Cache Side-Channel Mitigation
Heiko Mantel, Joachim Schmidt, Thomas Schneider, Maximilian Stillger, Tim Weißmantel, and Hossein Yalame
Cache side-channels are a major threat to cryptographic implementations, particularly block ciphers. Traditional manual hardening methods transform block ciphers into Boolean circuits, a practice refined since the late 90s. The only existing automatic approach based on Boolean circuits achieves security but suffers from performance issues. This paper examines the use of Lookup Tables (LUTs) for automatic hardening of block ciphers against cache side-channel attacks. We present a novel method combining LUT-based synthesis with quantitative static analysis in our HyCaMi framework. Applied to seven block cipher implementations, HyCaMi shows significant improvement in efficiency, being 9.5$\times$ more efficient than previous methods, while effectively protecting against cache side-channel attacks. Additionally, for the first time, we explore balancing speed with security by adjusting LUT sizes, providing faster performance with slightly reduced leakage guarantees, suitable for scenarios where absolute security and speed must be balanced.
Last updated:  2024-04-07
Analysing Cryptography in the Wild - A Retrospective
Martin R. Albrecht and Kenneth G. Paterson
We reflect on our experiences analysing cryptography deployed “in the wild” and give recommendations to fellow researchers about this process.
Last updated:  2024-04-06
Avoiding Trusted Setup in Isogeny-based Commitments
Gustave Tchoffo Saah, Tako Boris Fouotsa, Emmanuel Fouotsa, and Célestin Nkuimi-Jugnia
In 2021, Sterner proposed a commitment scheme based on supersingular isogenies. For this scheme to be binding, one relies on a trusted party to generate a starting supersingular elliptic curve of unknown endomorphism ring. In fact, the knowledge of the endomorphism ring allows one to compute an endomorphism of degree a power of a given small prime. Such an endomorphism can then be split into two to obtain two different messages with the same commitment. This is the reason why one needs a curve of unknown endomorphism ring, and the only known way to generate such supersingular curves is to rely on a trusted party or on some expensive multiparty computation. We observe that if the degree of the endomorphism in play is well chosen, then the knowledge of the endomorphism ring is not sufficient to efficiently compute such an endomorphism and in some particular cases, one can even prove that endomorphism of a certain degree do not exist. Leveraging these observations, we adapt Sterner's commitment scheme in such a way that the endomorphism ring of the starting curve can be known and public. This allows us to obtain isogeny-based commitment schemes which can be instantiated without trusted setup requirements.
Last updated:  2024-04-05
An efficient key generation algorithm for GR-NTRU over dihedral group
Vikas Kumar, Ali Raya, and Aditi Kar Gangopadhyay
In this article, we focus on deriving an easily implementable and efficient method of constructing units of the group ring of dihedral group. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition that relates the units in the group ring of dihedral group with the units in the group ring of cyclic group. Using this relation and the methods available for inversion in the group ring of the cyclic group, we introduce an algorithm to construct units efficiently and check its performance experimentally.
Last updated:  2024-04-05
Fully Homomorphic Training and Inference on Binary Decision Tree and Random Forest
Uncategorized
Hojune Shin, Jina Choi, Dain Lee, Kyoungok Kim, and Younho Lee
Show abstract
Uncategorized
This paper introduces a new method for training decision trees and random forests using CKKS homomorphic encryption (HE) in cloud environments, enhancing data privacy from multiple sources. The innovative Homomorphic Binary Decision Tree (HBDT) method utilizes a modified Gini Impurity index (MGI) for node splitting in encrypted data scenarios. Notably, the proposed training approach operates in a single cloud security domain without the need for decryption, addressing key challenges in privacy-preserving machine learning. We also propose an efficient method for inference utilizing only addition for path evaluation even when both models and inputs are encrypted, achieving O(1) multiplicative depth. Experiments demonstrate that this method surpasses the previous study by Akavia et al.'s by at least 3.7 times in the speed of inference. The study also expands to privacy-preserving random forests, with GPU acceleration ensuring feasibly efficient performance in both training and inference.
Last updated:  2024-04-04
The solving degrees for computing Gröbner bases of affine semi-regular polynomial sequences
Momonari Kudo and Kazuhiro Yokoyama
Determining the complexity of computing Gröbner bases is an important problem both in theory and in practice, and for that the solving degree plays a key role. In this paper, we study the solving degrees of affine semi-regular sequences and their homogenized sequences. Some of our results are considered to give mathematically rigorous proofs of the correctness of methods for computing Gröbner bases of the ideal generated by an affine semi-regular sequence. This paper is a sequel of the authors’ previous work and gives additional results on the solving degrees and important behaviors of Gröbner basis computation.
Last updated:  2024-04-04
Slice more? It leaks: Analysis on the paper ``On the Feasibility of Sliced Garbling''
Taechan Kim
Recent improvements to garbled circuits are mainly focused on reducing their size. The state-of-the-art construction of Rosulek and Roy (Crypto 2021) requires $1.5\kappa$ bits for garbling AND gates in the free-XOR setting. This is below the previously proven lower bound $2\kappa$ in the linear garbling model of Zahur, Rosulek, and Evans (Eurocrypt 2015). Recently, Ashur, Hazay, and Satish (eprint 2024/389) proposed a scheme that requires $4/3\kappa + O(1)$ bits for garbling AND gates. Precisely they extended the idea of slicing introduced by Rosulek and Roy to garble 3-input gates of the form $g(u,v,w) := u(v+w)$. By setting $w = 0$, it can be used to garble AND gates with the improved communication costs. However, in this paper, we observe that the scheme proposed by Ashur, Hazy, and Satish leaks information on the permute bits, thereby allowing the evaluator to reveal information on the private inputs. To be precise, we show that in their garbling scheme, the evaluator can compute the bits $\alpha$ and $\beta + \gamma$, where $\alpha$, $\beta$, and $\gamma$ are the private permute bits of the input labels $A$, $B$, and $C$, respectively.
Last updated:  2024-04-04
Optimizing and Implementing Fischlin's Transform for UC-Secure Zero-Knowledge
Yi-Hsiu Chen and Yehuda Lindell
Fischlin's transform (CRYPTO 2005) is an alternative to the Fiat-Shamir transform that enables straight-line extraction when proving knowledge. In this work we focus on the problem of using the Fischlin transform to construct UC-secure zero-knowledge from Sigma protocols, since UC security -- that guarantees security under general concurrent composition -- requires straight-line (non-rewinding) simulators. We provide a slightly simplified transform that is much easier to understand, and present algorithmic and implementation optimizations that significantly improve the running time. It appears that the main obstacles to the use of Fischlin in practice is its computational cost and implementation complexity (with multiple parameters that need to be chosen). We provide clear guidelines and a simple methodology for choosing parameters, and show that with our optimizations the running-time is far lower than expected. For just one example, on a 2023 MacBook, the cost of proving the knowledge of discrete log with Fischlin is only 0.41ms (on a single core). We also extend the transform so that it can be applied to batch proofs, and show how this can be much more efficient than individually proving each statement. As a contribution of independent interest, we present a new algorithm for polynomial evaluation on any series of sequential points that does not require roots of unity. We hope that this paper will both encourage and help practitioners implement the Fischlin transform where relevant.
Last updated:  2024-04-04
Privacy Preserving Biometric Authentication for Fingerprints and Beyond
Marina Blanton and Dennis Murphy
Biometric authentication eliminates the need for users to remember secrets and serves as a convenient mechanism for user authentication. Traditional implementations of biometric-based authentication store sensitive user biometry on the server and the server becomes an attractive target of attack and a source of large-scale unintended disclosure of biometric data. To mitigate the problem, we can resort to privacy-preserving computation and store only protected biometrics on the server. While a variety of secure computation techniques is available, our analysis of privacy-preserving biometric computation and biometric authentication constructions revealed that available solutions fall short of addressing the challenges of privacy-preserving biometric authentication. Thus, in this work we put forward new constructions to address the challenges. Our solutions employ a helper server and use strong threat models, where a client is always assumed to be malicious, while the helper server can be semi-honest or malicious. We also determined that standard secure multi-party computation security definitions are insufficient to properly demonstrate security in the two-phase (enrollment and authentication) entity authentication application. We thus extend the model and formally show security in the multi-phase setting, where information can flow from one phase to another and the set of participants can change between the phases. We implement our constructions and show that they exhibit practical performance for authentication in real time.
Last updated:  2024-04-03
A Time-Space Tradeoff for the Sumcheck Prover
Alessandro Chiesa, Elisabetta Fedele, Giacomo Fenzi, and Andrew Zitek-Estrada
The sumcheck protocol is an interactive protocol for verifying the sum of a low-degree polynomial over a hypercube. This protocol is widely used in practice, where an efficient implementation of the (honest) prover algorithm is paramount. Prior work contributes highly-efficient prover algorithms for the notable special case of multilinear polynomials (and related settings): [CTY11] uses logarithmic space but runs in superlinear time; in contrast, [VSBW13] runs in linear time but uses linear space. In this short note, we present a family of prover algorithms for the multilinear sumcheck protocol that offer new time-space tradeoffs. In particular, we recover the aforementioned algorithms as special cases. Moreover, we provide an efficient implementation of the new algorithms, and our experiments show that the asymptotics translate into new concrete efficiency tradeoffs.
Last updated:  2024-04-03
Unbindable Kemmy Schmidt: ML-KEM is neither MAL-BIND-K-CT nor MAL-BIND-K-PK
Sophie Schmieg
In "Keeping up with the KEMs" Cremers et al. introduced various binding models for KEMs. The authors show that ML-KEM is LEAK-BIND-K-CT and LEAK-BIND-K-PK, i.e. binding the ciphertext and the public key in the case of an adversary having access, but not being able to manipulate the key material. They further conjecture that ML-KEM also has MAL-BIND-K-PK, but not MAL-BIND-K-CT, the binding of public key or ciphertext to the shared secret in the case of an attacker with the ability to manipulate the key material. This short paper demonstrates that ML-KEM does neither have MALBIND-K-CT nor MAL-BIND-K-PK, due to the attacker being able to produce mal-formed private keys, giving concrete examples for both. We also suggest mitigations, and sketch a proof for binding both ciphertext and public key when the attacker is not able to manipulate the private key as liberally.
Last updated:  2024-04-02
Cryptanalysis of Secure and Lightweight Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication for Securing Traffic Emergency Messages in VANETs
Mahender Kumar
In their paper, Wei et al. proposed a lightweight protocol for conditional privacy-preserving authentication in VANET. The protocol aims to achieve ultra-low transmission delay and efficient system secret key (SSK) updating. Their protocol uses a signature scheme with message recovery to authenticate messages. This scheme provides security against adaptively chosen message attacks. However, our analysis reveals a critical vulnerability in the scheme. It is susceptible to replay attacks, meaning a malicious vehicle can replay a message multiple times at different timestamps. This action undermines the overall effectiveness of conditional privacy. We suggest possible solutions to address these vulnerabilities and enhance the security of VANET communication.
Last updated:  2024-04-02
LIT-SiGamal: An efficient isogeny-based PKE based on a LIT diagram
Tomoki Moriya
In this paper, we propose a novel isogeny-based public key encryption (PKE) scheme named LIT-SiGamal. This is based on a LIT diagram and SiGamal. SiGamal is an isogeny-based PKE scheme that uses a commutative diagram with an auxiliary point. LIT-SiGamal uses a LIT diagram which is a commutative diagram consisting of large-degree horizontal isogenies and relatively small-degree vertical isogenies, while the original SiGamal uses a CSIDH diagram. A strength of LIT-SiGamal is efficient encryption and decryption. QFESTA is an isogeny-based PKE scheme proposed by Nakagawa and Onuki, which is a relatively efficient scheme in isogeny-based PKE schemes. In our experimentation with our proof-of-concept implementation, the computational time of the encryption of LIT-SiGamal is as efficient as that of QFESTA, and that of the decryption of LIT-SiGamal is about $5$x faster than that of QFESTA.
Last updated:  2024-04-02
A note on securing insertion-only Cuckoo filters
Fernando Virdia and Mia Filić
We describe a small tweak to Cuckoo filters that allows securing them under insertions using the techniques from Filić et al. (ACM CCS 2022), without the need for an outer PRF call.
Last updated:  2024-04-02
On implementation of Stickel's key exchange protocol over max-min and max-$T$ semirings
Sulaiman Alhussaini and Serge˘ı Sergeev
Given that the tropical Stickel protocol and its variants are all vulnerable to the generalized Kotov-Ushakov attack, we suggest employing the max-min semiring and, more generally, max-$T$ semiring where the multiplication is based on a $T-$norm, as a framework to implement the Stickel protocol. While the Stickel protocol over max-min semiring or max-$T$ semiring remains susceptible to a form of Kotov-Ushakov attack, we demonstrate that it exhibits significantly increased resistance against this attack when compared to the tropical (max-plus) implementation.
Last updated:  2024-04-02
Software-Defined Cryptography: A Design Feature of Cryptographic Agility
Jihoon Cho, Changhoon Lee, Eunkyung Kim, Jieun Lee, and Beumjin Cho
Cryptographic agility, or crypto-agility, is a design feature that enables agile updates to new cryptographic algorithms and standards without the need to modify or replace the surrounding infrastructure. This paper examines the prerequisites for crypto-agility and proposes its desired design feature. More specifically, we investigate the design characteristics of widely deployed cybersecurity paradigms, i.e., zero trust, and apply its design feature to crypto-agility, achieving greater visibility and automation in cryptographic management.
Last updated:  2024-04-16
Fast pairings via biextensions and cubical arithmetic
Damien Robert
Biextensions associated to line bundles on abelian varieties allows to reinterpret the usual Weil, Tate, Ate, optimal Ate, \ldots, pairings as monodromy pairings. We introduce a cubical arithmetic, derived from the canonical cubical torsor structure of these line bundles, to obtain an efficient arithmetic of these biextensions. This unifies and extends Miller's standard algorithm to compute pairings along with other algorithms like elliptic nets and theta functions, and allows to adapt these algorithms to pairings on any model of abelian varieties with a polarisation $\Phi_D$, as long as we have an explicit theorem of the square for $D$. In particular, we give explicit formulas for the arithmetic of the biextension (and cubical torsor structure) associated to the divisor $D=2(0_E)$ on an elliptic curve. We derive very efficient pairing formulas on elliptic curves and Kummer lines. Notably for generic pairings on Montgomery curves, our cubical biextension ladder algorithm to compute pairings costs only $15M$ by bits, which as far as I know is faster than any pairing doubling formula in the literature.
Last updated:  2024-04-15
Similar Data is Powerful: Enhancing Inference Attacks on SSE with Volume Leakages
Björn Ho, Huanhuan Chen, Zeshun Shi, and Kaitai Liang
Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) schemes provide users with the ability to perform keyword searches on encrypted databases without the need for decryption. While this functionality is advantageous, it introduces the potential for inadvertent information disclosure, thereby exposing SSE systems to various types of attacks. In this work, we introduce a new inference attack aimed at enhancing the query recovery accuracy of RefScore (presented at USENIX 2021). The proposed approach capitalizes on both similar data knowledge and an additional volume leakage as auxiliary information, facilitating the extraction of keyword matches from leaked data. Empirical evaluations conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate a notable enhancement in query recovery accuracy, up to 19.5%. We also analyze the performance of the proposed attack in the presence of diverse countermeasures.
Last updated:  2024-04-01
Inject Less, Recover More: Unlocking the Potential of Document Recovery in Injection Attacks Against SSE
Manning Zhang, Zeshun Shi, Huanhuan Chen, and Kaitai Liang
Searchable symmetric encryption has been vulnerable to inference attacks that rely on uniqueness in leakage patterns. However, many keywords in datasets lack distinctive leakage patterns, limiting the effectiveness of such attacks. The file injection attacks, initially proposed by Cash et al. (CCS 2015), have shown impressive performance with 100% accuracy and no prior knowledge requirement. Nevertheless, this attack fails to recover queries with underlying keywords not present in the injected files. To address these limitations, our research introduces a novel attack strategy called LEAP-Hierarchical Fusion Attack (LHFA) that combines the strengths of both file injection attacks and inference attacks. Before initiating keyword injection, we introduce a new approach for inert/active keyword selection. In the phase of selecting injected keywords, we focus on keywords without unique leakage patterns and recover them, leveraging their presence for document recovery. Our goal is to achieve an amplified effect in query recovery. We demonstrate a minimum query recovery rate of 1.3 queries per injected keyword with a 10% data leakage of a real-life dataset, and initiate further research to overcome challenges associated with non-distinctive keywords.
Last updated:  2024-04-22
Zero-Knowledge Proof Vulnerability Analysis and Security Auditing
Xueyan Tang, Lingzhi Shi, Xun Wang, Kyle Charbonnet, Shixiang Tang, and Shixiao Sun
Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology marks a revolutionary advancement in the field of cryptography, enabling the verification of certain information ownership without revealing any specific details. This technology, with its paradoxical yet powerful characteristics, provides a solid foundation for a wide range of applications, especially in enhancing the privacy and security of blockchain technology and other cryptographic systems. As ZKP technology increasingly becomes a part of the blockchain infrastructure, its importance for security and completeness becomes more pronounced. However, the complexity of ZKP implementation and the rapid iteration of the technology introduce various vulnerabilities, challenging the privacy and security it aims to offer. This study focuses on the completeness, soundness, and zero-knowledge properties of ZKP to meticulously classify existing vulnerabilities and deeply explores multiple categories of vulnerabilities, including completeness issues, soundness problems, information leakage, and non-standardized cryptographic implementations. Furthermore, we propose a set of defense strategies that include a rigorous security audit process and a robust distributed network security ecosystem. This audit strategy employs a divide-and-conquer approach, segmenting the project into different levels, from the application layer to the platform-nature infrastructure layer, using threat modelling, line-by-line audit, and internal cross-review, among other means, aimed at comprehensively identifying vulnerabilities in ZKP circuits, revealing design flaws in ZKP applications, and accurately identifying inaccuracies in the integration process of ZKP primitives.
Last updated:  2024-04-23
Quantum Implementation and Analysis of SHA-2 and SHA-3
Kyungbae Jang, Sejin Lim, Yujin Oh, Hyunjun Kim, Anubhab Baksi, Sumanta Chakraborty, and Hwajeong Seo
Quantum computers have the potential to solve hard problems that are nearly impossible to solve by classical computers, this has sparked a surge of research to apply quantum technology and algorithm against the cryptographic systems to evaluate for its quantum resistance. In the process of selecting post-quantum standards, NIST categorizes security levels based on the complexity that quantum computers would require to crack AES encryption (levels 1, 3 and 5) and SHA-2 or SHA-3 (levels 2 and 4). In assessing the security strength of cryptographic algorithms against quantum threats, accurate predictions of quantum resources are crucial. Following the work of Jaques et al. in Eurocrypt 2020, NIST estimated security levels 1, 3, and 5, corresponding to quantum circuit size for finding the key for AES-128, AES-192, and AES-256, respectively. This work has been recently followed-up by Huang et al. (Asiacrypt'22) and Liu et al. (Asiacrypt'23) among others; though the most up-to-date results are available in the work by Jang et al. (ePrint'22). However, for levels 2 and 4, which relate to the collision finding for the SHA-2 and SHA-3 hash functions, quantum attack complexities are probably not well-studied. In this paper, we present novel techniques for optimizing the quantum circuit implementations for SHA-2 and SHA-3 algorithms in all the categories specified by NIST. After that, we evaluate the quantum circuits of target cryptographic hash functions for quantum collision search. Finally, we define the quantum attack complexity for levels 2 and 4, and comment on the security strength of the extended level. We present new concepts to optimize the quantum circuits at the component level and the architecture level.
Last updated:  2024-04-09
Single Trace is All It Takes: Efficient Side-channel Attack on Dilithium
Zehua Qiao, Yuejun Liu, Yongbin Zhou, Yuhan Zhao, and Shuyi Chen
As the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) concludes its post-quantum cryptography (PQC) competition, the winning algorithm, Dilithium, enters the deployment phase in 2024. This phase underscores the importance of conducting thorough practical security evaluations. Our study offers an in-depth side-channel analysis of Dilithium, showcasing the ability to recover the complete private key, ${s}_1$, within ten minutes using just two signatures and achieving a 60% success rate with a single signature. We focus on analyzing the polynomial addition in Dilithium, $z=y+{cs}_1$, by breaking down the attack into two main phases: the recovery of $y$ and ${cs}_1$ through side-channel attacks, followed by the resolution of a system of error-prone equations related to ${cs}_1$. Employing Linear Regression-based profiled attacks enables the successful recovery of the full $y$ value with a 40% success rate without the necessity for initial filtering. The extraction of ${cs}_1$ is further improved using a CNN model, which boasts an average success rate of 75%. A significant innovation of our research is the development of a constrained optimization-based residual analysis technique. This method efficiently recovers ${s}_1$ from a large set of error-containing equations concerning ${cs}_1$, proving effective even when only 10% of the equations are accurate. We conduct a practical attack on the Dilithium2 implementation on an STM32F4 platform, demonstrating that typically two signatures are sufficient for complete private key recovery, with a single signature sufficing in optimal conditions. Using a general-purpose PC, the full private key can be reconstructed in ten minutes.
Last updated:  2024-03-31
A Black-box Attack on Fixed-Unitary Quantum Encryption Schemes
Cezary Pilaszewicz, Lea R. Muth, and Marian Margraf
We show how fixed-unitary quantum encryption schemes can be attacked in a black-box setting. We use an efficient technique to invert a unitary transformation on a quantum computer to retrieve an encrypted secret quantum state $\ket{\psi}$. This attack has a success rate of 100% and can be executed in constant time. We name a vulnerable scheme and suggest how to improve it to invalidate this attack. The proposed attack highlights the importance of carefully designing quantum encryption schemes to ensure their security against quantum adversaries, even in a black-box setting.
Last updated:  2024-03-31
DoS-resistant Oblivious Message Retrieval from Snake-eye Resistant PKE
Uncategorized
Zeyu Liu, Katerina Sotiraki, Eran Tromer, and Yunhao Wang
Show abstract
Uncategorized
Oblivious message retrieval (OMR) allows messages resource-limited recipients to outsource the message retrieval process without revealing which messages are pertinent to which recipient. Its realizations in recent works leave an open problem: can an OMR scheme be both practical and provably secure against spamming attacks from malicious senders (i.e., DoS-resistant) under standard assumptions? In this paper, we first prove that a prior construction OMRp2 is DoS-resistant under a standard LWE assumption, resolving an open conjecture of prior works. Then, we present DoS-PerfOMR: a provably DoS-resistant OMR construction that is 12x faster than OMRp2, and (almost) matches the performance of the state-of-the-art OMR scheme that is not DoS-resistant. As a building block, we analyze the snake-eye resistance property for general PKE schemes. We construct a new lattice-based PKE scheme, LWEmongrass that is provably snake-eye resistant and has better efficiency than the PVW scheme underlying OMRp2. We also show that the natural candidates (e.g., RingLWE PKE) are not snake-eye resistant. Of independent interest, we introduce two variants of LWE with side information, as components towards proving the properties of LWEmongrass, and reduce standard LWE to them for the parameters of interest.
Last updated:  2024-03-31
Distribution of cycles in supersingular $\ell$-isogeny graphs
Eli Orvis
Recent work by Arpin, Chen, Lauter, Scheidler, Stange, and Tran counted the number of cycles of length $r$ in supersingular $\ell$-isogeny graphs. In this paper, we extend this work to count the number of cycles that occur along the spine. We provide formulas for both the number of such cycles, and the average number as $p \to \infty$, with $\ell$ and $r$ fixed. In particular, we show that when $r$ is not a power of $2$, cycles of length $r$ are disproportionately likely to occur along the spine. We provide experimental evidence that this result holds in the case that $r$ is a power of $2$ as well.
Last updated:  2024-03-30
Secure Multi-Party Linear Algebra with Perfect Correctness
Jules Maire and Damien Vergnaud
We present new secure multi-party computation protocols for linear algebra over a finite field, which improve the state-of-the-art in terms of security. We look at the case of \emph{unconditional security with perfect correctness}, i.e., information-theoretic security without errors. We notably propose an expected constant-round protocol for solving systems of $m$ linear equations in $n$ variables over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with expected complexity $O(k(n^{2.5} + m^{2.5}+n^2m^{0.5}))$ where $k > m(m+n)+1$ (complexity is measured in terms of the number of secure multiplications required). The previous proposals were not error-free: known protocols can indeed fail and thus reveal information with probability $\Omega(\textsf{poly}(m)/q)$. Our protocols are simple and rely on existing computer-algebra techniques, notably the Preparata-Sarwate algorithm, a simple but poorly known ``baby-step giant-step'' method for computing the characteristic polynomial of a matrix, and techniques due to Mulmuley for error-free linear algebra in positive characteristic.
Last updated:  2024-04-01
An Efficient SNARK for Field-Programmable and RAM Circuits
Jehyuk Jang and Jamie Judd
The advancement of succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (SNARK) with constant proof size has significantly enhanced the efficiency and privacy of verifiable computation. Verifiable computation finds applications in distributed computing networks, particularly in scenarios where nodes cannot be generally trusted, such as blockchains. However, fully harnessing the efficiency of SNARK becomes challenging when the computing targets in the network change frequently, as the SNARK verification can involve some untrusted preprocess of the target, which is expected to be reproduced by other nodes. This problem can be addressed with two approaches: One relieves the reproduction overhead by reducing the dimensionality of preprocessing data; The other utilizes verifiable machine computation, which eliminates the dependency on preprocess at the cost of increased overhead to SNARK proving and verification. In this paper, we propose a new SNARK with constant proof size applicable to both approaches. The proposed SNARK combines the efficiency of Groth16 protocol, albeit lacking universality for new problems, and the universality of PlonK protocol, albeit with significantly larger preprocessing data dimensions. Consequently, we demonstrate that our proposed SNARK maintains the efficiency and the universality while significantly reducing the dimensionality of preprocessing data. Furthermore, our SNARK can be seamlessly applied to the verifiable machine computation, requiring a proof size smaller about four to ten times than other related works.
Last updated:  2024-03-29
A Decentralized Federated Learning using Reputation
Olive Chakraborty and Aymen Boudguiga
Nowadays Federated learning (FL) is established as one of the best techniques for collaborative machine learning. It allows a set of clients to train a common model without disclosing their sensitive and private dataset to a coordination server. The latter is in charge of the model aggregation. However, FL faces some problems, regarding the security of updates, integrity of computation and the availability of a server. In this paper, we combine some new ideas like clients’ reputation with techniques like secure aggregation using Homomorphic Encryption and verifiable secret sharing using Multi-Party Computation techniques to design a decentralized FL system that addresses the issues of incentives, security and availability amongst others. One of the original contributions of this work is the new leader election protocol which uses a secure shuffling and is based on a proof of reputation. Indeed, we propose to select an aggregator among the clients participating to the FL training using their reputations. That is, we estimate the reputation of each client at every FL iteration and then we select the next round aggregator from the set of clients with the best reputations. As such, we remove misbehaving clients (e.g., byzantines) from the list of clients eligible for the role of aggregation server.
Last updated:  2024-04-15
RSA-Based Dynamic Accumulator without Hashing into Primes
Victor Youdom Kemmoe and Anna Lysyanskaya
A cryptographic accumulator is a compact data structure for representing a set of elements coming from some domain. It allows for a compact proof of membership and, in the case of a universal accumulator, non-membership of an element x in the data structure. A dynamic accumulator, furthermore, allows elements to be added to and deleted from the accumulator. Previously known RSA-based dynamic accumulators were too slow in practice because they required that an element in the domain be represented as a prime number. Accumulators based on settings other than RSA had other drawbacks such as requiring a prohibitively large common reference string or a trapdoor, or not permitting deletions. In this paper, we construct RSA-based dynamic universal accumulators that do not require that the accumulated elements be represented as primes. We also show how to aggregate membership and non-membership witnesses and batch additions and deletions. We demonstrate that the efficiency gains compared to previously known RSA-based accumulators are substantial, and, for the first time, make cryptographic accumulators a viable candidate for a certificate revocation mechanism as part of a WebPKI-type system.
Last updated:  2024-03-29
Polylogarithmic Proofs for Multilinears over Binary Towers
Benjamin E. Diamond and Jim Posen
We introduce a polylogarithmic-verifier polynomial commitment scheme for multilinears over towers of binary fields. To achieve this, we adapt an idea of Zeilberger, Chen and Fisch's BaseFold ('23) to the setting of binary towers, using FRI (ICALP '18)'s binary-field variant. In the process, we reinterpret Lin, Chung and Han (FOCS '14)'s novel polynomial basis so as to make apparent its compatibility with FRI. We moreover introduce a "packed" version of our protocol, which supports—with no embedding overhead during its commitment phase—multilinears over tiny fields (including that with just two elements). Our protocol leverages a new multilinear FRI-folding technique, and exploits the recent tensor proximity gap of Diamond and Posen (Commun. Cryptol. '24). We achieve concretely small proofs for enormous binary multilinears, shrinking the proofs of Diamond and Posen ('23) by an order of magnitude.
Last updated:  2024-04-01
Two Levels are Better than One: Dishonest Majority MPC with $\widetilde{O}(|C|)$ Total Communication
Alexander Bienstock and Kevin Yeo
In recent years, there has been tremendous progress in improving the communication complexity of dishonest majority MPC. In the sub-optimal corruption threshold setting, where $t<(1-\varepsilon)\cdot n$ for some constant $0<\varepsilon\leq 1/2$, the recent works Sharing Transformation (Goyal $\textit{et al.}$, CRYPTO'22) and SuperPack (Escudero $\textit{et al.}$, EUROCRYPT'23) presented protocols with information-theoretic online phases achieving $O(1)$ communication per multiplication gate, across all parties. However, the former assumes that their offline phase is instantiated by a trusted party, while the latter instantiates their offline phase with $\Omega(n)$ communication per multiplication gate assuming oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) correlations. In this work, we present a dishonest majority MPC protocol for $t< (1-\varepsilon)\cdot n$ with $\widetilde{O}(1)$ total communication per multiplication gate across both the offline and online phases, or $\widetilde{O}(|C|)$ total communication for any arithmetic circuit $C$. To do so, we securely instantiate the offline phase of Sharing Transformation, assuming some OLE correlations. The major bottleneck in instantiating the offline phases of both Sharing Transformation and SuperPack is generating random packed beaver triples of the form $[\boldsymbol{a}], [\boldsymbol{b}], [\boldsymbol{c}]$, for random $\boldsymbol{a},\boldsymbol{b}\in\mathbb{F}^k$, and $\boldsymbol{c}=\boldsymbol{a}*\boldsymbol{b}\in\mathbb{F}^k$, where $k=\Omega(n)$ is the $\textit{packing parameter}$. We overcome this barrier by presenting a packed beaver triple protocol with $\widetilde{O}(n)$ total communication, or $\widetilde{O}(1)$ communication per underlying triple. Our packed beaver triple protocol consists of two levels of randomness extraction. The first level uses a relaxation of super-invertible matrices that we introduce, called $\textit{weakly}$ super-invertible matrices, in which sub-matrices have sufficiently high (but not necessarily full) rank. This weakening enables matrix constructions with only $O(n)$ non-zero entries, which is a primary reason for the efficiency of our protocol. Our second level of extraction is based on the $\textit{triple extraction}$ protocol of (Choudhury and Patra, Trans. Inform. Theory '17).
Last updated:  2024-03-29
Best of Two Worlds: Efficient, Usable and Auditable Biometric ABC on the Blockchain
Neyire Deniz Sarier
In [1], two generic constructions for biometric-based non-transferable Attribute Based Credentials (biometric ABC) are presented, which offer different trade-offs between efficiency and trust assumptions. In this paper, we focus on the second scheme denoted as BioABC-ZK that tries to remove the strong (and unrealistic) trust assumption on the Reader R, and show that BioABC-ZK has a security flaw for a colluding R and Verifier V. Besides, BioABC-ZK lacks GDPR-compliance, which requires secure processing of biometrics, for instance in form of Fuzzy Extractors, as opposed to (i) storing the reference biometric template aBio in the user's mobile phone and (ii) processing of biometrics using an external untrusted R, whose foreign manufacturers are unlikely to adjust their products according to GDPR. The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we review efficient biometric ABC schemes to identify the privacy-by-design criteria for them. In view of these principles, we propose a new architecture for biometric ABC of [2] by adapting the recently introduced core/helper setting of [3]. Briefly, a user in our modified setting is composed of a constrained core device (a SIM card) inside a helper device (a smart phone with dual SIM and face recognition feature), which -as opposed to [1]- does not need to store aBio. This way, the new design provides Identity Privacy without the need for an external R and/or a dedicated hardware per user such as a biometric smart card reader or a tamper proof smart card as in current hardware-bound credential systems. Besides, the new system maintains minimal hardware requirements on the SIM card -only responsible for storing ABC and helper data-, which results in easy adoption and usability without loosing efficiency, if recently introduced key derivation scheme of [4] and the modified ABC scheme of [2] are employed together. As a result, a total overhead of 500 milliseconds to a showing of a comparable non-biometric ABC is obtained instead of the 2.1 seconds in [1] apart from the removal of computationally expensive pairings. Finally, as different from [1], auditing is achieved via Blockchain instead of proving in zero-knowledge the actual biometric matching by the user to reveal malicious behavior of R and V.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
Anonymous Revocable Identity-Based Encryption Supporting Anonymous Revocation
Kwangsu Lee
Anonymous identity-based encryption (AIBE) is an extension of identity-based encryption (IBE) that enhances the privacy of a ciphertext by providing ciphertext anonymity. In this paper, we introduce the concept of revocable IBE with anonymous revocation (RIBE-AR), which is capable of issuing an update key and hiding the revoked set of the update key that efficiently revokes private keys of AIBE. We first define the security models of RIBE-AR and propose an efficient RIBE-AR scheme in bilinear groups. Our RIBE-AR scheme is similar to the existing RIBE scheme in terms of efficiency, but is the first RIBE scheme to provide additional ciphertext anonymity and revocation privacy. We show that our RIBE-AR scheme provides the selective message privacy, selective identity privacy, and selective revocation privacy.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
Side Channel Resistant Sphincs+
Scott Fluhrer
Here is a potential way to create a SLH-DSA-like\cite{DraftFIPS205} key generation/signer that aspires to be resistant to DPA side channel attacks. We say that it is “SLH-DSA-like”, because it does not follow the FIPS 205 method of generating signatures (in particular, it does not have the same mapping from private key, messages, opt\_rand to signatures), however it does generate public keys and signatures that are compatible with the standard signature verification method, and with the same security (with a small security loss against side channel attacks). In our tests, this idea performed 1.7 times slower compared to an unprotected version.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
CCA Secure Updatable Encryption from Non-Mappable Group Actions
Jonas Meers and Doreen Riepel
Ciphertext-independent updatable encryption (UE) allows to rotate encryption keys and update ciphertexts via a token without the need to first download the ciphertexts. Although, syntactically, UE is a symmetric-key primitive, ciphertext-independent UE with forward secrecy and post-compromise security is known to imply public-key encryption (Alamati, Montgomery and Patranabis, CRYPTO 2019). Constructing post-quantum secure UE turns out to be a difficult task. While lattices offer the necessary homomorphic properties, the introduced noise allows only a bounded number of updates. Group actions have become an important alternative, however, their structure is limited. The only known UE scheme by Leroux and Roméas (IACR ePrint 2022/739) uses effective triple orbital group actions which uses additional algebraic structure of CSIDH. Using an ideal cipher, similar to the group-based scheme $\mathsf{SHINE}$ (Boyd et al., CRYPTO 2020), requires the group action to be mappable, a property that natural isogeny-based group actions do not satisfy. At the same time, other candidates based on non-commutative group actions suffer from linearity attacks. For these reasons, we explicitly ask how to construct UE from group actions that are not mappable. As a warm-up, we present $\mathsf{BIN}\text{-}\mathsf{UE}$ which uses a bit-wise approach and is CPA secure based on the well-established assumption of weak pseudorandomness and in the standard model. We then construct the first actively secure UE scheme from post-quantum assumptions. Our scheme $\mathsf{COM}\text{-}\mathsf{UE}$ extends $\mathsf{BIN}\text{-}\mathsf{UE}$ via the Tag-then-Encrypt paradigm. We prove CCA security in the random oracle model based on a stronger computational assumption. We justify the hardness of our new assumption in the algebraic group action model.
Last updated:  2024-04-01
Number-Theoretic Transform Architecture for Fully Homomorphic Encryption from Hypercube Topology
Jingwei Hu, Yuhong Fang, and Wangchen Dai
This paper introduces a high-performance and scalable hardware architecture designed for the Number-Theoretic Transform (NTT), a fundamental component extensively utilized in lattice-based encryption and fully homomorphic encryption schemes. The underlying rationale behind this research is to harness the advantages of the hypercube topology. This topology serves to significantly diminish the volume of data exchanges required during each iteration of the NTT, reducing it to a complexity of $\Omega(\log N)$. Concurrently, it enables the parallelization of $N$ processing elements. This reduction in data exchange operations is of paramount importance. It not only facilitates the establishment of interconnections among the $N$ processing elements but also lays the foundation for the development of a high-performance NTT design. This is particularly valuable when dealing with large values of $N$.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
On the Security of Data Markets and Private Function Evaluation
István Vajda
The income of companies working on data markets steadily grows year by year. Private function evaluation (PFE) is a valuable tool in solving corresponding security problems. The task of Controlled Private Function Evaluation and its relaxed version was introduced in [Horvath et.al., 2019]. In this article, we propose and examine several different approaches for such tasks with computational and information theoretical security against static corruption adversary. The latter level of security implies quantum-security. We also build known techniques and constructions into our solution where they fit into our tasks. The main cryptographic primitive, naturally related to the task is 1-out-of-n oblivious transfer. We use Secure Multiparty Computation techniques and in one of the constructions functional encryption primitive. The analysis of the computational complexity of the constructions shows that the considered tasks can efficiently be implemented, however it depends on the range of parameter values (e.g. size of database, size of the set of permitted function), the execution environment (e.g. concurrency) and of course on the level of security.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
Two-Round Threshold Signature from Algebraic One-More Learning with Errors
Thomas Espitau, Shuichi Katsumata, and Kaoru Takemure
Threshold signatures have recently seen a renewed interest due to applications in cryptocurrency while NIST has released a call for multi-party threshold schemes, with a deadline for submission expected for the first half of 2025. So far, all lattice-based threshold signatures requiring less than two-rounds are based on heavy tools such as (fully) homomorphic encryption (FHE) and homomorphic trapdoor commitments (HTDC). This is not unexpected considering that most efficient two-round signatures from classical assumptions either rely on idealized model such as algebraic group models or on one-more type assumptions, none of which we have a nice analogue in the lattice world. In this work, we construct the first efficient two-round lattice-based threshold signature without relying on FHE or HTDC. It has an offline-online feature where the first round can be preprocessed without knowing message or the signer sets, effectively making the signing phase non-interactive. The signature size is small and shows great scalability. For example, even for a threshold as large as 1024 signers, we achieve a signature size roughly 11 KB. At the heart of our construction is a new lattice-based assumption called the algebraic one-more learning with errors (AOMMLWE) assumption. We believe this to be a strong inclusion to our lattice toolkits with an independent interest. We establish the selective security of AOMMLWE based on the standard MLWE and MSIS assumptions, and provide an in depth analysis of its adaptive security, which our threshold signature is based on.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
Reducing Signature Size of Matrix-code-based Signature Schemes
Tung Chou, Ruben Niederhagen, Lars Ran, and Simona Samardjiska
This paper shows novel techniques to reduce the signature size of the code-based signature schemes MEDS and ALTEQ, by a large factor. For both schemes, the signature size is dominated by the responses for rounds with nonzero challenges, and we reduce the signature size by reducing the size of these responses. For MEDS, each of the responses consists of $m^2 + n^2$ field elements,while in our new protocol each response consists of only $2k$ ($k$ is usually chosen to be close to $m$ and $n$) field elements. For ALTEQ, each of the responses consists of $n^2$ field elements, while in our new protocol each response consists of about $\sqrt{2} n^{3/2}$ field elements. In both underlying $\Sigma$-protocols of the schemes, the prover generates a random isometry and sends the corresponding isometry to the verifier as the response. Instead of doing this, in our new protocols, the prover derives an isometry from some random code words and their presumed (full or partial) images. The prover sends the corresponding code words and images to the verifier as the response, so that the verifier can derive an isometry in the same way. Interestingly, it turns out that each response takes much fewer field elements to represent in this way.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
HW-token-based Common Random String Setup
István Vajda
In the common random string model, the parties executing a protocol have access to a uniformly random bit string. It is known that under standard intractability assumptions, we can realize any ideal functionality with universally composable (UC) security if a trusted common random string (CrS) setup is available. It was always a question of where this CrS should come from since the parties provably could not compute it themselves. Trust assumptions are required, so minimizing the level of such trust is a fundamentally important task. Our goal is to design a CrS setup protocol under a weakened trust assumption. We present an HW-token-based CrS setup for 2-party cryptographic protocols using a single token only. Our protocol is a UC-secure realization of ideal common random string functionality FCrS. We show the multiple-session security of the protocol and we also consider the multi-party extension of it.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
Reckle Trees: Updatable Merkle Batch Proofs with Applications
Charalampos Papamanthou, Shravan Srinivasan, Nicolas Gailly, Ismael Hishon-Rezaizadeh, Andrus Salumets, and Stjepan Golemac
We propose Reckle trees, a new vector commitment based on succinct RECursive arguments and MerKLE trees. Reckle trees' distinguishing feature is their support for succinct batch proofs that are updatable - enabling new applications in the blockchain setting where a proof needs to be computed and efficiently maintained over a moving stream of blocks. Our technical approach is based on embedding the computation of the batch hash inside the recursive Merkle verification via a hash-based accumulator called canonical hashing. Due to this embedding, our batch proofs can be updated in logarithmic time, whenever a Merkle leaf (belonging to the batch or not) changes, by maintaining a data structure that stores previously-computed recursive proofs. Assuming enough parallelism, our batch proofs are also computable in $O(\log n)$ parallel time - independent of the size of the batch. As a natural extension of Reckle trees, we also introduce Reckle+ trees. Reckle+ trees provide updatable and succinct proofs for certain types of Map/Reduce computations. In this setting, a prover can commit to a memory $\mathsf{M}$ and produce a succinct proof for a Map/Reduce computation over a subset $I$ of $\mathsf{M}$. The proof can be efficiently updated whenever $I$ or $\mathsf{M}$ changes. We present and experimentally evaluate two applications of Reckle+ trees, dynamic digest translation and updatable BLS aggregation. In dynamic digest translation we are maintaining a proof of equivalence between Merkle digests computed with different hash functions, e.g., one with a SNARK-friendly Poseidon and the other with a SNARK-unfriendly Keccak. In updatable BLS aggregation we maintain a proof for the correct aggregation of a $t$-aggregate BLS key, derived from a $t$-subset of a Merkle-committed set of individual BLS keys. Our evaluation using Plonky2 shows that Reckle trees and Reckle+ trees have small memory footprint, significantly outperform previous approaches in terms of updates and verification time, enable applications that were not possible before due to huge costs involved (Reckle trees are up to 200 times faster), and have similar aggregation performance with previous implementations of batch proofs.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
Statistical testing of random number generators and their improvement using randomness extraction
Cameron Foreman, Richie Yeung, and Florian J. Curchod
Random number generators (RNGs) are notoriously hard to build and test, especially in a cryptographic setting. Although one cannot conclusively determine the quality of an RNG by testing the statistical properties of its output alone, running numerical tests is both a powerful verification tool and the only universally applicable method. In this work, we present and make available a comprehensive statistical testing environment (STE) that is based on existing statistical test suites. The STE can be parameterised to run lightweight (i.e. fast) all the way to intensive testing, which goes far beyond what is required by certification bodies. With it, we benchmark the statistical properties of several RNGs, comparing them against each other. We then present and implement a variety of post-processing methods, in the form of randomness extractors, which improve the RNG's output quality under different sets of assumptions and analyse their impact through numerical testing with the STE.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
Updatable Policy-Compliant Signatures
Christian Badertscher, Monosij Maitra, Christian Matt, and Hendrik Waldner
Policy-compliant signatures (PCS) are a recently introduced primitive by Badertscher et al. [TCC 2021] in which a central authority distributes secret and public keys associated with sets of attributes (e.g., nationality, affiliation with a specific department, or age) to its users. The authority also enforces a policy determining which senders can sign messages for which receivers based on a joint check of their attributes. For example, senders and receivers must have the same nationality, or only senders that are at least 18 years old can send to members of the computer science department. PCS further requires attribute-privacy – nothing about the users’ attributes is revealed from their public keys and signatures apart from whether the attributes satisfy the policy or not. The policy in a PCS scheme is fixed once and for all during the setup. Therefore, a policy update requires a redistribution of all keys. This severely limits the practicality of PCS. In this work, we introduce the notion of updatable policy-compliant signatures (UPCS) extending PCS with a mechanism to efficiently update the policy without redistributing keys to all participants. We define the notion of UPCS and provide the corresponding security definitions. We then provide a generic construction of UPCS based on digital signatures, a NIZK proof system, and a so-called secret-key two-input partially-hiding predicate encryption (2-PHPE) scheme. Unfortunately, the only known way to build the latter for general two-input predicates is using indistinguishability obfuscation. We show that the reliance on the heavy tool of 2-PHPE is inherent to build UPCS by proving that non-interactive UPCS implies 2-PHPE. To circumvent the reliance on 2-PHPE, we consider interactive UPCS, which allows the sender and receiver to interact during the message signing procedure. In this setting, we present two schemes: the first one requires only a digital signature scheme, a NIZK proof system, and secure two-party computation. This scheme works for arbitrary policies, but requires sender and receiver to engage in a two-party computation protocol for each policy update. Our second scheme additionally requires a (single-input) predicate-encryption scheme but, in turn, only requires a single interaction between sender and receiver, independent of the updates. In contrast to 2-PHPE, single-input predicate encryption for certain predicate classes is known to exist (e.g., from pairings) under more concrete and well-understood assumptions.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
One Tree to Rule Them All: Optimizing GGM Trees and OWFs for Post-Quantum Signatures
Carsten Baum, Ward Beullens, Shibam Mukherjee, Emmanuela Orsini, Sebastian Ramacher, Christian Rechberger, Lawrence Roy, and Peter Scholl
The use of MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH)-based zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZKPoK) to prove knowledge of a preimage of a one-way function (OWF) is a popular approach towards constructing efficient post-quantum digital signatures. Starting with the Picnic signature scheme, many optimized MPCitH signatures using a variety of (candidate) OWFs have been proposed. Recently, Baum et al. (CRYPTO 2023) showed a fundamental improvement to MPCitH, called VOLE-in-the-Head (VOLEitH), which can generically reduce the signature size by at least a factor of two without decreasing computational performance or introducing new assumptions. Based on this, they designed the FAEST signature which uses AES as the underlying OWF. However, in comparison to MPCitH, the behavior of VOLEitH when using other OWFs is still unexplored. In this work, we improve a crucial building block of the VOLEitH and MPCitH approaches, the so-called all-but-one vector commitment, thus decreasing the signature size of VOLEitH and MPCitH signature schemes. Moreover, by introducing a small Proof of Work into the signing procedure, we can improve the parameters of VOLEitH (further decreasing signature size) without compromising the computational performance of the scheme. Based on these optimizations, we propose three VOLEitH signature schemes FAESTER, KuMQuat, and MandaRain based on AES, MQ, and Rain, respectively. We carefully explore the parameter space for these schemes and implement each, showcasing their performance with benchmarks. Our experiments show that these three signature schemes outperform MPCitH-based competitors that use comparable OWFs, in terms of both signature size and signing/verification time.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
Guess and Determine Analysis Based on Set Split
Zhe CEN, Xiutao FENG, Zhangyi WANG, Yamin ZHU, and Chunping CAO
The guess and determine attack is a common method in cryptanalysis. Its idea is to firstly find some variables which can deduced all remaining variables in a cipher and then traverse all values of these variables to find a solution. People usually utilize the exhausted search to find these variables. However, it is not applicable any more when the number of variables is a bit large. In this work we propose a guess and determine analysis based on set split to find as few variables as possible in the first step of guess and determine attack, which is a kind of exhausted search based on trading space for time and is more effective than the latter. Firstly we give an idea of set split in detail by introducing some conceptions such as base set, likely solution region and so on. And then we discuss how to utilize the set split to achieve a guess and determine analysis and give its specific implementation scheme. Finally, comparing it with the other two guess and determine analysis based on the exhausted search and the MILP method, we illustrate the effectiveness of our method by two ciphers Snow 2.0 and Enocoro-128v2. Our method spends about 0.000103 seconds finding a best solution of 9 variables for the former and 0.13 seconds finding a best solution of 18 variables for the latter in a personal Macbook respectively, which are better than those of both the exhausted search and the MILP method.
Last updated:  2024-03-28
Improving Generic Attacks Using Exceptional Functions
Xavier Bonnetain, Rachelle Heim Boissier, Gaëtan Leurent, and André Schrottenloher
Over the past ten years, the statistical properties of random functions have been particularly fruitful for generic attacks. Initially, these attacks targeted iterated hash constructions and their combiners, developing a wide array of methods based on internal collisions and on the average behavior of iterated random functions. More recently, Gilbert et al. (EUROCRYPT 2023) introduced a forgery attack on so-called duplex-based Authenticated Encryption modes which was based on exceptional random functions, i.e., functions whose graph admits a large component with an exceptionally small cycle. In this paper, we expand the use of such functions in generic cryptanalysis with several new attacks. First, we improve the attack of Gilbert et al. from O(2^3c/4) to O(2^2c/3), where c is the capacity. This new attack uses a nested pair of functions with exceptional behavior, where the second function is defined over the cycle of the first one. Next, we introduce several new generic attacks against hash combiners, notably using small cycles to improve the complexities of the best existing attacks on the XOR combiner, Zipper Hash and Hash-Twice. Last but not least, we propose the first quantum second preimage attack against Hash-Twice, reaching a quantum complexity O(2^3n/7).
Last updated:  2024-04-16
Real-Valued Somewhat-Pseudorandom Unitaries
Zvika Brakerski and Nir Magrafta
We explore a very simple distribution of unitaries: random (binary) phase -- Hadamard -- random (binary) phase -- random computational-basis permutation. We show that this distribution is statistically indistinguishable from random Haar unitaries for any polynomial set of orthogonal input states (in any basis) with polynomial multiplicity. This shows that even though real-valued unitaries cannot be completely pseudorandom (Haug, Bharti, Koh, arXiv:2306.11677), we can still obtain some pseudorandom properties without giving up on the simplicity of a real-valued unitary. Our analysis shows that an even simpler construction: applying a random (binary) phase followed by a random computational-basis permutation, would suffice, assuming that the input is orthogonal and flat (that is, has high min-entropy when measured in the computational basis). Using quantum-secure one-way functions (which imply quantum-secure pseudorandom functions and permutations), we obtain an efficient cryptographic instantiation of the above.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Anamorphic Encryption: New Constructions and Homomorphic Realizations
Dario Catalano, Emanuele Giunta, and Francesco Migliaro
The elegant paradigm of Anamorphic Encryption (Persiano et al., Eurocrypt 2022) considers the question of establishing a private communication in a world controlled by a dictator. The challenge is to allow two users, sharing some secret anamorphic key, to exchange covert messages without the dictator noticing, even when the latter has full access to the regular secret keys. Over the last year several works considered this question and proposed constructions, novel extensions and strengthened definitions. In this work we make progress on the study of this primitive in three main directions. First, we show that two general and well established encryption paradigms, namely hybrid encryption and the IBE-to-CCA transform, admit very simple and natural anamorphic extensions. Next, we show that anamorphism, far from being a phenomenon isolated to "basic" encryption schemes, extends also to homomorphic encryption. We show that some existing homomorphic schemes, (and most notably the fully homomorphic one by Gentry, Sahai and Waters) can be made anamorphic, while retaining their homomorphic properties both with respect to the regular and the covert message. Finally we refine the notion of anamorphic encryption by envisioning the possibility of splitting the anamorphic key into an encryption component (that only allows to encrypt covert messages) and a decryption component. This makes possible for a receiver to set up several, independent, covert channels associated with a single covert key.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
A Variation on Knellwolf and Meier's Attack on the Knapsack Generator
Florette Martinez
Pseudo-random generators are deterministic algorithms that take in input a random secret seed and output a flow of random-looking numbers. The Knapsack generator, presented by Rueppel and Massey in 1985 is one of the many attempt at designing a pseudo-random generator that is cryptographically secure. It is based on the subset-sum problem, a variant of the Knapsack optimization problem, which is considered computationally hard. In 2011 Simon Knellwolf et Willi Meier found a way to go around this hard problem and exhibited a weakness of this generator. In addition to be able to distinguish the outputs from the uniform distribution, they designed an algorithm that retrieves a large portion of the secret. We present here an alternate version of the attack, with similar costs, that works on the same range of parameters but retrieves a larger portion of the secret.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Harmonizing PUFs for Forward Secure Authenticated Key Exchange with Symmetric Primitives
Harishma Boyapally, Durba Chatterjee, Kuheli Pratihar, Sayandeep Saha, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Shivam Bhasin
Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been a potent choice for enabling low-cost, secure communication. However, in most applications, one party holds the PUF, and the other securely stores the challenge-response pairs (CRPs). It does not remove the need for secure storage entirely, which is one of the goals of PUFs. This paper proposes a PUF-based construction called Harmonizing PUFs ($\textsf{H_PUF}$s), allowing two independent PUFs to generate the same outcome without storing any confidential data. As an application of $\textsf{H_PUF}$ construction, we present $\textsf{H-AKE}$: a low-cost authenticated key exchange protocol for resource-constrained nodes that is secure against replay and impersonation attacks. The novelty of the protocol is that it achieves forward secrecy without requiring to perform asymmetric group operations like elliptic curve scalar multiplications underlying traditional key-exchange techniques.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Lower data attacks on Advanced Encryption Standard
Orhun Kara
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the most commonly used and analyzed encryption algorithms. In this work, we present new combinations of some prominent attacks on AES, achieving new records in data requirements among attacks, utilizing only $2^4$ and $2^{16}$ chosen plaintexts (CP) for 6-round and 7-round AES-192/256 respectively. One of our attacks is a combination of a meet-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack with a square attack mounted on 6-round AES-192/256 while another attack combines an MiTM attack and an integral attack, utilizing key space partitioning technique, on 7-round AES-192/256. Moreover, we illustrate that impossible differential (ID) attacks can be viewed as the dual of MiTM attacks in certain aspects which enables us to recover the correct key using the meet-in-the-middle (MiTM) technique instead of sieving through all potential wrong keys in our ID attack. Furthermore, we introduce the constant guessing technique in the inner rounds which significantly reduces the number of key bytes to be searched. The time and memory complexities of our attacks remain marginal.
Last updated:  2024-03-27
Single Server PIR via Homomorphic Thorp Shuffles
Ben Fisch, Arthur Lazzaretti, Zeyu Liu, and Charalampos Papamanthou
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a two player protocol where the client, given some query $x \in [N]$ interacts with the server, which holds a $N$-bit string $\textsf{DB}$ in order to privately retrieve $\textsf{DB}[x]$. In this work, we focus on the single server client-preprocessing model, initially idealized by Corrigan-Gibbs and Kogan (EUROCRYPT 2020), where the client and server first run some joint preprocessing algorithm, after which the client can retrieve elements of the server's string $\textsf{DB}$ privately in time sublinear in $N$. All known constructions of single server client-preprocessing PIR rely on one of the following two paradigms: (1) a linear-bandwidth offline phase where the client downloads the whole database from the server, or (2) a sublinear-bandwidth offline phase where however the server has to compute a large-depth ($O_\lambda (N)$) circuit under FHE in order to execute the preprocessing phase. In this paper, we construct a single server client-preprocessing PIR scheme which achieves both sublinear offline bandwidth (the client does not have to download the whole database offline) and a low-depth (i.e. $O_\lambda(1)$), highly parallelizable preprocessing circuit. We estimate that on a single thread, our scheme's preprocessing time should be more than 350x times faster than in prior single server client-preprocessing PIR constructions. Moreover, with parallelization, the latency reduction would be even more drastic. In addition, this construction also allows for updates in $O_\lambda (1)$ time, something not achieved before in this model.
Last updated:  2024-03-22
Watermarkable and Zero-Knowledge Verifiable Delay Functions from any Proof of Exponentiation
Charlotte Hoffmann and Krzysztof Pietrzak
A verifiable delay function $\texttt{VDF}(x,T)\rightarrow (y,\pi)$ maps an input $x$ and time parameter $T$ to an output $y$ together with an efficiently verifiable proof $\pi$ certifying that $y$ was correctly computed. The function runs in $T$ sequential steps, and it should not be possible to compute $y$ much faster than that. The only known practical VDFs use sequential squaring in groups of unknown order as the sequential function, i.e., $y=x^{2^T}$. There are two constructions for the proof of exponentiation (PoE) certifying that $y=x^{2^T}$, with Wesolowski (Eurocrypt'19) having very short proofs, but they are more expensive to compute and the soundness relies on stronger assumptions than the PoE proposed by Pietrzak (ITCS'19). A recent application of VDFs by Arun, Bonneau and Clark (Asiacrypt'22) are short-lived proofs and signatures, which are proofs and signatures which are only sound for some time $t$, but after that can be forged by anyone. For this they rely on "watermarkable VDFs", where the proof embeds a prover chosen watermark. To achieve stronger notions of proofs/signatures with reusable forgeability, they rely on "zero-knowledge VDFs", where instead of the output $y$, one just proves knowledge of this output. The existing proposals for watermarkable and zero-knowledge VDFs all build on Wesolowski's PoE, for the watermarkable VDFs there's currently no security proof. In this work we give the first constructions that transform any PoEs in hidden order groups into watermarkable VDFs and into zkVDFs, solving an open question by Arun et al.. Unlike our watermarkable VDF, the zkVDF (required for reusable forgeability) is not very practical as the number of group elements in the proof is a security parameter. To address this, we introduce the notion of zero-knowledge proofs of sequential work (zkPoSW), a notion that relaxes zkVDFs by not requiring that the output is unique. We show that zkPoSW are sufficient to construct proofs or signatures with reusable forgeability, and construct efficient zkPoSW from any PoE, ultimately achieving short lived proofs and signatures that improve upon Arun et al's construction in several dimensions (faster forging times, weaker assumptions). A key idea underlying our constructions is to not directly construct a (watermarked or zk) proof for $y=x^{2^T}$, but instead give a (watermarked or zk) proof for the more basic statement that $x',y'$ satisfy $x'=x^r,y'=y^r$ for some $r$, together with a normal PoE for $y'=(x')^{2^T}$.
Last updated:  2024-03-22
Folding-based zkLLM
Wilbert W
This paper introduces a new approach to construct zero-knowledge large language models (zkLLM) based on the Folding technique. We first review the concept of Incrementally Verifiable Computation (IVC) and compare the IVC constructions based on SNARK and Folding. Then we discuss the necessity of Non-uniform IVC (NIVC) and present several Folding schemes that support more expressive circuits, such as SuperNova, Sangria, Origami, HyperNova, and Protostar. Based on these techniques, we propose a zkLLM design that uses a RAM machine architecture with a set of opcodes. We define corresponding constraint circuits for each opcode and describe the workflows of the prover and verifier. Finally, we provide examples of opcodes to demonstrate the circuit construction methods. Our zkLLM design achieves high efficiency and expressiveness, showing great potential for practical applications.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Making Hash-based MVBA Great Again
Hanwen Feng, Zhenliang Lu, Tiancheng Mai, and Qiang Tang
Multi-valued Validated Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement ($\mathsf{MVBA}$) is one essential primitive for many distributed protocols, such as asynchronous Byzantine fault-tolerant scenarios like atomic broadcast ($\mathsf{ABC}$), asynchronous distributed key generation, and many others. Recent efforts (Lu et al, PODC' 20) have pushed the communication complexity of $\mathsf{MVBA}$ to optimal $O(\ell n + \lambda n^2)$, which, however, heavily rely on ``heavyweight'' cryptographic tools, such as non-interactive threshold signatures. The computational cost of algebraic operations, the susceptibility to quantum attacks, and the necessity of a trusted setup associated with threshold signatures present significant remaining challenges. There is a growing interest in information-theoretic or hash-based constructions (historically called signature-free constructions). Unfortunately, the state-of-the-art hash-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$ (Duan et al., CCS'23) incurs a large $O(\ell n^2 + \lambda n^3)$-bits communication, which in turn makes the hash-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$inferior performance-wise comparing with the ``classical'' ones. Indeed, this was clearly demonstrated in our experimental evaluations. To make hash-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$ actually realize its full potential, in this paper, we introduce an $\mathsf{MVBA}$ with adaptive security, and $\widetilde{O}(\ell n + \lambda n^2)$ communication, exclusively leveraging conventional hash functions. Our new $\mathsf{MVBA}$ achieves nearly optimal communication, devoid of heavy operations, surpassing both threshold signature-based schemes and the hash-based scheme in many practical settings, as demonstrated in our experiments. For example, in scenarios with a network size of $n = 201$ and an input size of $1.75$ MB, our $\mathsf{MVBA}$ exhibits a latency that is 81\% lower than that of the existing hash-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$ and 47\% lower than the threshold signature-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$. Our new construction also achieves optimal parameters in other metrics such as $O(1)$ rounds and $O(n^2)$ message complexity, except with a sub-optimal resilience, tolerating up to $20\%$ Byzantine corruptions (instead of $33\%$). Given its practical performance advantages, our new hash-based $\mathsf{MVBA}$ naturally leads to better asynchronous distributed protocols, by simply plugging it into existing frameworks.
Last updated:  2024-04-19
The Insecurity of SHA2 under the Differential Fault Characteristic of Boolean Functions
Weiqiong Cao, Hua Chen, Hongsong Shi, Haoyuan Li, Jian Wang, and Jingyi Feng
SHA2 has been widely adopted across various traditional public-key cryptosystems, post-quantum cryptography, personal identification, and network communication protocols, etc. Hence, ensuring the robust security of SHA2 is of critical importance. There have been several differential fault attacks based on random word faults targeting SHA1 and SHACAL-2. However, extending such random word-based fault attacks to SHA2 proves significantly more difficult due to the heightened complexity of the boolean functions in SHA2. In this paper, assuming random word faults, we find some distinctive differential properties within the boolean functions in SHA2. Leveraging these findings, we propose a new differential fault attack methodology that can be effectively utilized to recover the final message block and its corresponding initial vector in SHA2, forge HMAC-SHA2 messages, extract the key of SHACAL-2, and extend our analysis to similar algorithm like SM3. We validate the effectiveness of these attacks through rigorous simulations and theoretical deductions, revealing that they indeed pose substantial threats to the security of SHA2. In our simulation-based experiments, our approach necessitates guessing $T$ bits within a register, with $T$ being no more than $5$ at most, and having a approximate $95\%$ (for SHA512) probability of guessing just $1$ bit. Moreover, upon implementing a consecutive series of 15 fault injections, the success probability for recovering one register (excluding the guessed bits) approaches $100\%$. Ultimately, approximately 928 faulty outputs based on random word faults are required to carry out the attack successfully.
Last updated:  2024-04-21
Large Language Models for Blockchain Security: A Systematic Literature Review
Zheyuan He, Zihao Li, and Sen Yang
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in various domains involving blockchain security (BS). Several recent studies are exploring LLMs applied to BS. However, there remains a gap in our understanding regarding the full scope of applications, impacts, and potential constraints of LLMs on blockchain security. To fill this gap, we conduct a literature review on LLM4BS. As the first review of LLM's application on blockchain security, our study aims to comprehensively analyze existing research and elucidate how LLMs contribute to enhancing the security of blockchain systems. Through a thorough examination of scholarly works, we delve into the integration of LLMs into various aspects of blockchain security. We explore the mechanisms through which LLMs can bolster blockchain security, including their applications in smart contract auditing, identity verification, anomaly detection, vulnerable repair, and so on. Furthermore, we critically assess the challenges and limitations associated with leveraging LLMs for blockchain security, considering factors such as scalability, privacy concerns, and adversarial attacks. Our review sheds light on the opportunities and potential risks inherent in this convergence, providing valuable insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers alike.
Last updated:  2024-03-21
OPSA: Efficient and Verifiable One-Pass Secure Aggregation with TEE for Federated Learning
Zhangshuang Guan, Yulin Zhao, Zhiguo Wan, and Jinsong Han
In federated learning, secure aggregation (SA) protocols like Flamingo (S\&P'23) and LERNA (ASIACRYPT'23) have achieved efficient multi-round SA in the malicious model. However, each round of their aggregation requires at least three client-server round-trip communications and lacks support for aggregation result verification. Verifiable SA schemes, such as VerSA (TDSC'21) and Eltaras et al.(TIFS'23), provide verifiable aggregation results under the security assumption that the server does not collude with any user. Nonetheless, these schemes incur high communication costs and lack support for efficient multi-round aggregation. Executing SA entirely within Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), as desined in SEAR (TDSC'22), guarantees both privacy and verifiable aggregation. However, the limited physical memory within TEE poses a significant computational bottleneck, particularly when aggregating large models or handling numerous clients. In this work, we introduce OPSA, a multi-round one-pass secure aggregation framework based on TEE to achieve efficient communication, streamlined computation and verifiable aggregation all at once. OPSA employs a new strategy of revealing shared keys in TEE and instantiates two types of masking schemes. Furthermore, a result verification module is designed to be compatible with any type of SA protocol instantiated under the OPSA framework with weaker security assumptions. Compared with the state-of-the-art schemes, OPSA achieves a 2$\sim$10$\times$ speedup in multi-round aggregation while also supporting result verification simultaneously. OPSA is more friendly to scenarios with high network latency and large-scale model aggregation.
Last updated:  2024-03-21
CheckOut: User-Controlled Anonymization for Customer Loyalty Programs
Matthew Gregoire, Rachel Thomas, and Saba Eskandarian
To resist the regimes of ubiquitous surveillance imposed upon us in every facet of modern life, we need technological tools that subvert surveillance systems. Unfortunately, while cryptographic tools frequently demonstrate how we can construct systems that safeguard user privacy, there is limited motivation for corporate entities engaged in surveillance to adopt these tools, as they often clash with profit incentives. This paper demonstrates how, in one particular aspect of everyday life -- customer loyalty programs -- users can subvert surveillance and attain anonymity, without necessitating any cooperation or modification in the behavior of their surveillors. We present the CheckOut system, which allows users to coordinate large anonymity sets of shoppers to hide the identity and purchasing habits of each particular user in the crowd. CheckOut scales up and systematizes past efforts to subvert loyalty surveillance, which have been primarily ad-hoc and manual affairs where customers physically swap loyalty cards to mask their real identities. CheckOut allows increased scale while ensuring that the necessary computing infrastructure does not itself become a new centralized point of privacy failure. Of particular importance to our scheme is a protocol for loyalty programs that offer reward points, where we demonstrate how CheckOut can assist users in paying each other back for loyalty points accrued while using each others' loyalty accounts. We present two different mechanisms to facilitate redistributing rewards points, offering trade-offs in functionality, performance, and security.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Accumulation without Homomorphism
Benedikt Bünz, Pratyush Mishra, Wilson Nguyen, and William Wang
Accumulation schemes are a simple yet powerful primitive that enable highly efficient constructions of incrementally verifiable computation (IVC). Unfortunately, all prior accumulation schemes rely on homomorphic vector commitments whose security is based on public-key assumptions. It is an interesting open question to construct efficient accumulation schemes that avoid the need for such assumptions. In this paper, we answer this question affirmatively by constructing an accumulation scheme from *non-homomorphic* vector commitments which can be realized from solely symmetric-key assumptions (e.g. Merkle trees). We overcome the need for homomorphisms by instead performing spot-checks over error-correcting encodings of the committed vectors. Unlike prior accumulation schemes, our scheme only supports a bounded number of accumulation steps. We show that such *bounded-depth* accumulation still suffices to construct proof-carrying data (a generalization of IVC). We also demonstrate several optimizations to our PCD construction which greatly improve concrete efficiency.
Last updated:  2024-03-25
Extremely Simple (Almost) Fail-Stop ECDSA Signatures
Mario Yaksetig
Fail-stop signatures are digital signatures that allow a signer to prove that a specific forged signature is indeed a forgery. After such a proof is published, the system can be stopped. We introduce a new simple ECDSA fail-stop signature scheme. Our proposal is based on the minimal assumption that an adversary with a quantum computer is not able to break the (second) preimage resistance of a cryptographically-secure hash function. Our scheme is as efficient as traditional ECDSA, does not limit the number of signatures that a signer can produce, and relies on minimal security assumptions. Using our construction, the signer has minimal computational overhead in the signature producing phase and produces a signature indistinguishable from a 'regular' ECDSA signature.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Sailfish: Towards Improving Latency of DAG-based BFT
Nibesh Shrestha, Aniket Kate, and Kartik Nayak
Existing DAG-based BFT protocols exhibit long latency to commit decisions. The primary reason for such a long latency is having a leader every 2 or more “rounds”. Even under honest leaders, these protocols require two or more reliable broadcast (RBC) instances to commit the proposal submitted by the leader (leader vertex), and additional RBCs to commit other proposals (non-leader vertices). In this work, we present Sailfish, the first DAG-based BFT that supports a leader vertex in each round. Under honest leaders, Sailfish maintains a commit latency of one RBC round plus $1\delta$ to commit the leader vertex (where $\delta$ is the actual transmission latency of a message) and only an additional RBC round to commit non-leader vertices.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Knot-based Key Exchange protocol
Silvia Sconza and Arno Wildi
We propose a new key exchange protocol based on the Generalised Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange. In the latter, instead of using a group-action, we consider a semigroup action. In our proposal, the semigroup is the set of oriented knots in $\mathbb{S}^3$ with the operation of connected sum. As a semigroup action, we choose the action of the semigroup on itself through the connected sum. For the protocol to work, we need to use knot invariants, which allow us to create the shared secret key starting from the same knot represented in two different ways. In particular, we use finite type invariants. The security of the protocol is guaranteed by the hardness of decomposing knots in the semigroup.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Fast Secure Computations on Shared Polynomials and Applications to Private Set Operations
Pascal Giorgi, Fabien Laguillaumie, Lucas Ottow, and Damien Vergnaud
Secure multi-party computation aims to allow a set of players to compute a given function on their secret inputs without revealing any other information than the result of the computation. In this work, we focus on the design of secure multi-party protocols for shared polynomial operations. We consider the classical model where the adversary is honest-but-curious, and where the coefficients (or any secret values) are either encrypted using an additively homomorphic encryption scheme or shared using a threshold linear secret-sharing scheme. Our protocols terminate after a constant number of rounds and minimize the number of secure multiplications. In their seminal article at PKC 2006, Mohassel and Franklin proposed constant-rounds protocols for the main operations on (shared) polynomials. In this work, we improve the fan-in multiplication of nonzero polynomials, the multi-point polynomial evaluation and the polynomial interpolation (on secret points) to reach a quasi-linear complexity (instead of quadratic in Mohassel and Franklin's work) in the degree of shared input/output polynomials. Computing with shared polynomials is a core component of designing multi-party protocols for privacy-preserving operations on private sets, like private disjointness test or private set intersection. Using our new protocols, we are able to improve the complexity of such protocols and to design the first variant which always returns a correct result.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Malicious Security for Sparse Private Histograms
Lennart Braun, Adrià Gascón, Mariana Raykova, Phillipp Schoppmann, and Karn Seth
We present a construction for secure computation of differentially private sparse histograms that aggregates the inputs from a large number of clients. Each client contributes a value to the aggregate at a specific index. We focus on the case where the set of possible indices is superpolynomially large. Hence, the resulting histogram will be sparse, i.e., most entries will have the value zero. Our construction relies on two non-colluding servers and provides security against malicious adversaries that may control one of the servers and any numbers of clients. It achieves communication and computation complexities linear in the input size, and achieves the optimal error $O\big(\frac{\log(1/\delta)}{\epsilon}\big)$, independent of the size of the domain of indices. We compute the communication cost of our protocol, showing its scalability. For a billion clients, the communication cost for each server is under 26 KiB per client. Our paper solves an open problem of the work of Bell et al. (CCS'22) which presented a solution for the semi-honest setting while incurring sublinear overhead in its efficiency. We formalize a proof approach for proving malicious security in settings where the output and possible additional information revealed during the execution need to provide differential privacy.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Zero-Dimensional Gröbner Bases for Rescue-XLIX
Matthias Johann Steiner
Rescue-XLIX is an Arithmetization-Oriented Substitution-Permutation Network over prime fields $\mathbb{F}_p$ which in one full round first applies a SPN based on $x \mapsto x^d$ followed by a SPN based on the inverse power map $x \mapsto x^\frac{1}{d}$. In a recent work, zero-dimensional Gröbner bases for SPN and Poseidon sponge functions have been constructed by utilizing weight orders. Following this approach we construct zero-dimensional Gröbner bases for Rescue-XLIX ciphers and sponge functions.
Last updated:  2024-04-01
Partially Non-Interactive Two-Round Lattice-Based Threshold Signatures
Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Stefano Tessaro, and Chenzhi Zhu
This paper gives the first lattice-based two-round threshold signature based on lattice assumptions for which the first message is independent of the message being signed without relying on fully-homomorphic encryption, and our construction supports arbitrary thresholds. Our construction provides a careful instantiation of a generic threshold signature construction by Tessaro and Zhu (EUROCRYPT ’23) based on specific linear hash functions, which in turns can be seen as a generalization of the FROST scheme by Komlo and Goldberg (SAC ’20). Our reduction techniques are new in the context of lattice-based cryptography. Also, our scheme does not use any heavy tools, such as NIZKs or homomorphic trapdoor commitments.
Last updated:  2024-03-20
Arctic: Lightweight and Stateless Threshold Schnorr Signatures
Chelsea Komlo and Ian Goldberg
Threshold Schnorr signatures are seeing increased adoption in practice, and offer practical defenses against single points of failure. However, one challenge with existing randomized threshold Schnorr signature schemes is that signers must carefully maintain secret state across signing rounds, while also ensuring that state is deleted after a signing session is completed. Failure to do so will result in a fatal key-recovery attack by re-use of nonces. While deterministic threshold Schnorr signatures that mitigate this issue exist in the literature, all prior schemes incur high complexity and performance overhead in comparison to their randomized equivalents. In this work, we seek the best of both worlds; a deterministic and stateless threshold Schnorr signature scheme that is also simple and efficient. Towards this goal, we present Arctic, a lightweight two-round threshold Schnorr signature that is deterministic, and therefore does not require participants to maintain state between signing rounds. As a building block, we formalize the notion of a Verifiable Pseudorandom Secret Sharing (VPSS) scheme, and define Shine, an efficient VPSS construction. Shine is secure when the total number of participants is at least 2t − 1 and the adversary is assumed to corrupt at most t − 1; i.e., in the honest majority model. We prove that Arctic is secure under the discrete logarithm assumption in the random oracle model, similarly assuming at minimum 2t − 1 number of signers and a corruption threshold of at most t − 1. For moderately sized groups (i.e., when n ≤ 20), Arctic is more than an order of magnitude more efficient than prior deterministic threshold Schnorr signatures in the literature. For small groups where n ≤ 10, Arctic is three orders of magnitude more efficient.
Last updated:  2024-03-19
Shorter VOLEitH Signature from Multivariate Quadratic
Dung Bui
VOLE-in-the-head paradigm recently introduced by Baum et al. (Crypto 2023) allows transforming zero-knowledge protocols in the designated verifier setting into public-coin protocols, which can be made non-interactive and publicly verifiable. Our transformation applies to a large class of ZK protocols based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) and leads to resulting ZK protocols that have linear proof size and are simpler, smaller, and faster than related approaches based on MPC-in-the-head. We propose a new candidate post-quantum signature scheme from the Multivariate Quadratic(MQ) problem based on a new protocol for the VOLE-in-the-head paradigm, which significantly reduces the signature size compared to previous works. We achieve a signature size of 2.5KB for a 128-bit security level. Compared to the state-of-the-art MQ-based signature schemes, our signature scheme achieves a factor from 3 to 4 improvement in terms of the signature size while keeping the computational efficiency competitive
Last updated:  2024-03-19
ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A LATTICE-BASED DAA FOR VANET SYSTEM
Doryan Lesaignoux and Mikael Carmona
Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) is a cryptographic protocol that enables users with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to authenticate without revealing their identity. Thus, DAA emerged as a good privacy-enhancing solution. Current standards have security based on factorization and discrete logarithm problem making them vulnerable to quantum computer attacks. Recently, a number of lattice-based DAA has been propose in the literature to start transition to quantum-resistant cryptography. In addition to these, DAA has been adapted to Vehicle Ad-hoc NETwork system (VANETs) to offer secure vehicule-to-vehicule/infrastructure communication (V2V and V2I). In this paper, we provide an implementation of the most advanced post-quantum DAA for VANETs. We explore the cryptographic foundations, construction methodologies, and the performance of this scheme, offering insights into their suitability for various real-world use cases.
Last updated:  2024-03-19
Security Guidelines for Implementing Homomorphic Encryption
Jean-Philippe Bossuat, Rosario Cammarota, Jung Hee Cheon, Ilaria Chillotti, Benjamin R. Curtis, Wei Dai, Huijing Gong, Erin Hales, Duhyeong Kim, Bryan Kumara, Changmin Lee, Xianhui Lu, Carsten Maple, Alberto Pedrouzo-Ulloa, Rachel Player, Luis Antonio Ruiz Lopez, Yongsoo Song, Donggeon Yhee, and Bahattin Yildiz
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a cryptographic primitive that allows performing arbitrary operations on encrypted data. Since the conception of the idea in [RAD78], it was considered a holy grail of cryptography. After the first construction in 2009 [Gen09], it has evolved to become a practical primitive with strong security guarantees. Most modern constructions are based on well-known lattice problems such as Learning with Errors (LWE). Besides its academic appeal, in recent years FHE has also attracted significant attention from industry, thanks to its applicability to a considerable number of real-world use-cases. An upcoming standardization effort by ISO/IEC aims to support the wider adoption of these techniques. However, one of the main challenges that standards bodies, developers, and end users usually encounter is establishing parameters. This is particularly hard in the case of FHE because the parameters are not only related to the security level of the system, but also to the type of operations that the system is able to handle. In this paper, we provide examples of parameter sets for LWE targeting particular security levels that can be used in the context of FHE constructions. We also give examples of complete FHE parameter sets, including the parameters relevant for correctness and performance, alongside those relevant for security. As an additional contribution, we survey the parameter selection support offered in open-source FHE libraries.
Last updated:  2024-03-19
Perfect Zero-Knowledge PCPs for #P
Tom Gur, Jack O'Connor, and Nicholas Spooner
We construct perfect zero-knowledge probabilistically checkable proofs (PZK-PCPs) for every language in #P. This is the first construction of a PZK-PCP for any language outside BPP. Furthermore, unlike previous constructions of (statistical) zero-knowledge PCPs, our construction simultaneously achieves non-adaptivity and zero knowledge against arbitrary (adaptive) polynomial-time malicious verifiers. Our construction consists of a novel masked sumcheck PCP, which uses the combinatorial nullstellensatz to obtain antisymmetric structure within the hypercube and randomness outside of it. To prove zero knowledge, we introduce the notion of locally simulatable encodings: randomised encodings in which every local view of the encoding can be efficiently sampled given a local view of the message. We show that the code arising from the sumcheck protocol (the Reed--Muller code augmented with subcube sums) admits a locally simulatable encoding. This reduces the algebraic problem of simulating our masked sumcheck to a combinatorial property of antisymmetric functions.
Last updated:  2024-03-19
Atlas-X Equity Financing: Unlocking New Methods to Securely Obfuscate Axe Inventory Data Based on Differential Privacy
Antigoni Polychroniadou, Gabriele Cipriani, Richard Hua, and Tucker Balch
Banks publish daily a list of available securities/assets (axe list) to selected clients to help them effectively locate Long (buy) or Short (sell) trades at reduced financing rates. This reduces costs for the bank, as the list aggregates the bank's internal firm inventory per asset for all clients of long as well as short trades. However, this is somewhat problematic: (1) the bank's inventory is revealed; (2) trades of clients who contribute to the aggregated list, particularly those deemed large, are revealed to other clients. Clients conducting sizable trades with the bank and possessing a portion of the aggregated asset exceeding $50\%$ are considered to be concentrated clients. This could potentially reveal a trading concentrated client's activity to their competitors, thus providing an unfair advantage over the market. Atlas-X Axe Obfuscation, powered by new differential private methods, enables a bank to obfuscate its published axe list on a daily basis while under continual observation, thus maintaining an acceptable inventory Profit and Loss (P\&L) cost pertaining to the noisy obfuscated axe list while reducing the clients' trading activity leakage. Our main differential private innovation is a differential private aggregator for streams (time series data) of both positive and negative integers under continual observation. For the last two years, Atlas-X system has been live in production across three major regions—USA, Europe, and Asia—at J.P. Morgan, a major financial institution, facilitating significant profitability. To our knowledge, it is the first differential privacy solution to be deployed in the financial sector. We also report benchmarks of our algorithm based on (anonymous) real and synthetic data to showcase the quality of our obfuscation and its success in production.
Last updated:  2024-03-18
Encrypted Image Classification with Low Memory Footprint using Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Lorenzo Rovida and Alberto Leporati
Classifying images has become a straightforward and accessible task, thanks to the advent of Deep Neural Networks. Nevertheless, not much attention is given to the privacy concerns associated with sensitive data contained in images. In this study, we propose a solution to this issue by exploring an intersection between Machine Learning and cryptography. In particular, Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) emerges as a promising solution, as it enables computations to be performed on encrypted data. We, therefore, propose a Residual Network implementation based on FHE which allows the classification of encrypted images, ensuring that only the user can see the result. We suggest a circuit which reduces the memory requirements by more than 85% compared to the most recent works, while maintaining a high level of accuracy and a short computational time. We implement the circuit using the well-known CKKS scheme, which enables approximate encrypted computations. We evaluate the results from three perspectives: memory requirements, computational time and calculations precision. We demonstrate that it is possible to evaluate an encrypted ResNet20 in less than five minutes on a laptop using approximately 15GB of memory, achieving an accuracy of 91.67% on the CIFAR-10 dataset, which is almost equivalent to the accuracy of the plain model (92.60%).
Last updated:  2024-03-18
Isogeny problems with level structure
Luca De Feo, Tako Boris Fouotsa, and Lorenz Panny
Given two elliptic curves and the degree of an isogeny between them, finding the isogeny is believed to be a difficult problem---upon which rests the security of nearly any isogeny-based scheme. If, however, to the data above we add information about the behavior of the isogeny on a large enough subgroup, the problem can become easy, as recent cryptanalyses on SIDH have shown. Between the restriction of the isogeny to a full $N$-torsion subgroup and no ''torsion information'' at all lies a spectrum of interesting intermediate problems, raising the question of how easy or hard each of them is. Here we explore modular isogeny problems where the torsion information is masked by the action of a group of $2\times 2$ matrices. We give reductions between these problems, classify them by their difficulty, and link them to security assumptions found in the literature.
Last updated:  2024-03-18
Classical and Quantum Generic Attacks on 6-round Feistel Schemes
Maya Chartouny, Benoit Cogliati, and Jacques Patarin
In this paper, we describe new quantum generic attacks on 6 rounds balanced Feistel networks with internal functions or internal permutations. In order to obtain our new quantum attacks, we revisit a result of Childs and Eisenberg that extends Ambainis' collision finding algorithm to the subset finding problem. In more details, we continue their work by carefully analyzing the time complexity of their algorithm. We also use four points structures attacks instead of two points structures attacks that leads to a complexity of $\mathcal{O}(2^{8n/5})$ instead of $\mathcal{O}(2^{2n})$. Moreover, we have also found a classical (i.e. non quantum) improved attack on $6$ rounds with internal permutations. The complexity here will be in $\mathcal{O}(2^{2n})$ instead of $\mathcal{O}(2^{3n})$ previously known.
Last updated:  2024-03-18
Studying Lattice-Based Zero-Knowlege Proofs: A Tutorial and an Implementation of Lantern
Lena Heimberger, Florian Lugstein, and Christian Rechberger
Lattice-based cryptography has emerged as a promising new candidate to build cryptographic primitives. It offers resilience against quantum attacks, enables fully homomorphic encryption, and relies on robust theoretical foundations. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are an essential primitive for various privacy-preserving applications. For example, anonymous credentials, group signatures, and verifiable oblivious pseudorandom functions all require ZKPs. Currently, the majority of ZKP systems are based on elliptic curves, which are susceptible to attacks from quantum computers. This project presents the first implementation of Lantern, a state-of-the-art lattice-based ZKP system that can create compact proofs, which are a few dozen kilobytes large, for basic statements. We thoroughly explain the theory behind the scheme and give a full implementation in a Jupyter Notebook using SageMath to make Lantern more accessible to researchers. Our interactive implementation allows users to fully understand the scheme and its building blocks, providing a valuable resource to understand both ZKPs and lattice cryptography. Albeit not optimized for performance, this implementation allows us to construct a Module-LWE secret proof in 35s on a consumer laptop. Through our contributions, we aim to advance the understanding and practical utilization of lattice-based ZKP systems, particularly emphasizing accessibility for the broader research community.
Last updated:  2024-03-18
Tight ZK CPU: Batched ZK Branching with Cost Proportional to Evaluated Instruction
Yibin Yang, David Heath, Carmit Hazay, Vladimir Kolesnikov, and Muthuramakrishnan Venkitasubramaniam
We explore Zero-Knowledge proofs (ZKP) of statements expressed as programs written in high-level languages, e.g., C or assembly. At the core of executing such programs in ZK is the repeated evaluation of a CPU step, achieved by branching over the CPU’s instruction set. This approach is general and covers traversal-execution of a program’s control flow graph (CFG): here CPU instructions are straight-line program fragments (of various sizes) associated with the CFG nodes. This highlights the usefulness of ZK CPUs with a large number of instructions of varying sizes. We formalize and design an efficient tight ZK CPU, where the cost (both computation and communication, for each party) of each step depends only on the instruction taken. This qualitatively improves over state-of-the-art, where cost scales with the size of the largest CPU instruction (largest CFG node). Our technique is formalized in the standard commit-and-prove paradigm, so our results are compatible with a variety of (interactive and non-interactive) general-purpose ZK. We implemented an interactive tight arithmetic (over $\mathbb{F}_{2^{61}-1}$) ZK CPU based on Vector Oblivious Linear Evaluation (VOLE) and compared it to the state-of-the-art non-tight VOLE-based ZK CPU Batchman (Yang et al. CCS’23). In our experiments, under the same hardware configuration, we achieve comparable performance when instructions are of the same size and a $5$-$18×$ improvement when instructions are of varied size. Our VOLE-based ZK CPU can execute $100$K (resp. $450$K) multiplication gates per second in a WAN-like (resp. LAN-like) setting. It requires ≤ $102$ Bytes per multiplication gate. Our basic building block, ZK Unbalanced Read-Only Memory (ZK UROM), may be of an independent interest.
Last updated:  2024-03-17
Anonymous Complaint Aggregation for Secure Messaging
Connor Bell and Saba Eskandarian
Private messaging platforms provide strong protection against platform eavesdropping, but malicious users can use privacy as cover for spreading abuse and misinformation. In an attempt to identify the sources of misinformation on private platforms, researchers have proposed mechanisms to trace back the source of a user-reported message (CCS '19,'21). Unfortunately, the threat model considered by initial proposals allowed a single user to compromise the privacy of another user whose legitimate content the reporting user did not like. More recent work has attempted to mitigate this side effect by requiring a threshold number of users to report a message before its origins can be identified (NDSS '22). However, the state of the art scheme requires the introduction of new probabilistic data structures and only achieves a "fuzzy" threshold guarantee. Moreover, false positives, where the source of an unreported message is identified, are possible. This paper introduces a new threshold source tracking technique that allows a private messaging platform, with the cooperation of a third-party moderator, to operate a threshold reporting scheme with exact thresholds and no false positives. Unlike prior work, our techniques require no modification of the message delivery process for a standard source tracking scheme, affecting only the abuse reporting procedure, and do not require tuning of probabilistic data structures.
Last updated:  2024-03-16
The Systemic Errors of Banded Quantum Fourier Transformation
Zhengjun Cao and Zhenfu Cao
Quantum Fourier Transformation (QFT) needs to construct the rotation gates with extremely tiny angles. Since it is impossible to physically manipulate such tiny angles (corresponding to extremely weak energies), those gates should be replaced by some scaled and controllable gates. The version of QFT is called banded QFT (BQFT), and can be mathematically specified by Kronecker product and binary fraction. But the systemic errors of BQFT has never been heuristically estimated. In this paper, we generate the programming code for BQFT and argue that its systemic errors are not negligible, which means the physical implementation of QFT with a huge transform size is still a challenge. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to obtain the result.
Last updated:  2024-03-16
Verifiable Information-Theoretic Function Secret Sharing
Stanislav Kruglik, Son Hoang Dau, Han Mao Kiah, Huaxiong Wang, and Liang Feng Zhang
A function secret sharing (FSS) (Boyle et al., Eurocrypt 2015) is a cryptographic primitive that enables additive secret sharing of functions from a given function family $\mathcal{F}$. FSS supports a wide range of cryptographic applications, including private information retrieval (PIR), anonymous messaging systems, private set intersection and more. Formally, given positive integers $r \geq 2$ and $t < r$, and a class $\mathcal{F}$ of functions $f: [n] \to \mathbb{G}$ for an Abelian group $\mathbb{G}$, an $r$-party $t$-private FSS scheme for $\mathcal{F}$ allows a dealer to split each $f \in \mathcal{F}$ into $r$ function shares $f_1, \ldots, f_r$ among $r$ servers. Shares have the property that $f = f_1 + \cdots + f_r$ and functions are indistinguishable for any coalition of up to $t$ servers. FSS for point function $f_{\alpha_1,\ldots,\alpha_l,\beta_1,\ldots,\beta_l}$ for different $\alpha$ and $l<t$ that evaluates to $\beta_i$ on input $\alpha_i$ for all $i\in[l]$ and to zero on all other inputs for $l=1$ are known under the name of distributed point functions (DPF). FSS for special interval functions $f^{<}_{\alpha,\beta}$ that evaluate to $\beta$ on inputs lesser than $\alpha$ and to zero on all other inputs are known under the name of distributed comparison functions (DCF). Most existing FSS schemes are based on the existence of one-way functions or pseudo-random generators, and as a result, hiding of function $f$ holds only against computationally bounded adversaries. Protocols employing them as building blocks are computationally secure. Several exceptions mostly focus on DPF for four, eight or $d(t+1)$ servers for positive integer $d$, and none of them provide verifiability. In this paper, we propose DPF for $d(t+l-1)+1$ servers, where $d$ is a positive integer, offering a better key size compared to the previously proposed DPF for $d(t+1)$ servers and DCF for $dt+1$ servers, also for positive integer $d$. We introduce their verifiable extension in which any set of servers holding $t$ keys cannot persuade us to accept the wrong value of the function. This verifiability notion differs from existing verifiable FSS schemes in the sense that we verify not only the belonging of the function to class $\mathcal{F}$ but also the correctness of computation results. Our schemes provide a secret key size $O(n^{1/d}\cdot s\log(p))$ for DPF and $O(n^{1/d}\cdot s\log(p))$ for DCF, where $p^s$ is the size of group $\mathbb{G}$.
Last updated:  2024-03-16
Modeling Mobile Crash in Byzantine Consensus
Hans Schmiedel, Runchao Han, Qiang Tang, Ron Steinfeld, and Jiangshan Yu
Targeted Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks have been a practical concern for permissionless blockchains. Potential solutions, such as random sampling, are adopted by blockchains. However, the associated security guarantees have only been informally discussed in prior work. This is due to the fact that existing adversary models are either not fully capturing this attack or giving up certain design choices (as in the sleepy model or asynchronous network model), or too strong to be practical (as in the mobile Byzantine adversary model). This paper provides theoretical foundations and desired properties for consensus protocols that resist against targeted DoS attacks. In particular, we define the Mobile Crash Adaptive Byzantine (MCAB) model to capture such an attack. In addition, we identify and formalize two properties for consensus protocols under the MCAB model, and analyze their trade-offs. As case studies, we prove that Ouroboros Praos and Algorand are secure in our MCAB model, giving the first formal proofs supporting their security guarantee against targeted DoS attacks, which were previously only informally discussed. We also illustrate an application of our properties to secure a streamlined BFT protocol, chained Hotstuff, against targeted DoS attacks.
Last updated:  2024-04-03
Towards Verifiable FHE in Practice: Proving Correct Execution of TFHE's Bootstrapping using plonky2
Louis Tremblay Thibault and Michael Walter
In this work we demonstrate for the first time that a full FHE bootstrapping operation can be proven using a SNARK in practice. We do so by designing an arithmetic circuit for the bootstrapping operation and prove it using plonky2. We are able to prove the circuit on an AWS C6i.metal instance in about 20 minutes. Proof size is about 200kB and verification takes less than 10ms. As the basis of our bootstrapping operation we use TFHE's programmable bootstrapping and modify it in a few places to more efficiently represent it as an arithmetic circuit (while maintaining full functionality and security). In order to achieve our results in a memory-efficient way, we take advantage of the structure of the computation and plonky2's ability to efficiently prove its own verification circuit to implement a recursion-based IVC scheme.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
The 2Hash OPRF Framework and Efficient Post-Quantum Instantiations
Ward Beullens, Lucas Dodgson, Sebastian Faller, and Julia Hesse
An Oblivious Pseudo-Random Function (OPRF) is a two-party protocol for jointly evaluating a Pseudo-Random Function (PRF), where a user has an input x and a server has an input k. At the end of the protocol, the user learns the evaluation of the PRF using key k at the value x, while the server learns nothing about the user's input or output. OPRFs are a prime tool for building secure authentication and key exchange from passwords, private set intersection, private information retrieval, and many other privacy-preserving systems. While classical OPRFs run as fast as a TLS Handshake, current *quantum-safe* OPRF candidates are still practically inefficient. In this paper, we propose a framework for constructing OPRFs from post-quantum multi-party computation. The framework captures a family of so-called "2Hash PRFs", which sandwich a function evaluation in between two hashes. The core of our framework is a compiler that yields an OPRF from a secure evaluation of any function that is key-collision resistant and one-more unpredictable. We instantiate this compiler by providing such functions built from Legendre symbols, and from AES encryption. We then give a case-tailored protocol for securely evaluating our Legendre-based function, built from oblivious transfer (OT) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). Instantiated with lattice-based OT and ZKPs, we obtain a quantum-safe OPRF that completes in 0.57 seconds, with less than 1MB of communication.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
Practical Lattice-Based Distributed Signatures for a Small Number of Signers
Nabil Alkeilani Alkadri, Nico Döttling, and Sihang Pu
$n$-out-of-$n$ distributed signatures are a special type of threshold $t$-out-of-$n$ signatures. They are created by a group of $n$ signers, each holding a share of the secret key, in a collaborative way. This kind of signatures has been studied intensively in recent years, motivated by different applications such as reducing the risk of compromising secret keys in cryptocurrencies. Towards maintaining security in the presence of quantum adversaries, Damgård et al. (J Cryptol 35(2), 2022) proposed lattice-based constructions of $n$-out-of-$n$ distributed signatures and multi-signatures following the Fiat-Shamir with aborts paradigm (ASIACRYPT 2009). Due to the inherent issue of aborts, the protocols either require to increase their parameters by a factor of $n$, or they suffer from a large number of restarts that grows with $n$. This has a significant impact on their efficiency, even if $n$ is small. Moreover, the protocols use trapdoor homomorphic commitments as a further cryptographic building block, making their deployment in practice not as easy as standard lattice-based Fiat-Shamir signatures. In this work, we present a new construction of $n$-out-of-$n$ distributed signatures. It is designed specifically for applications with small number of signers. Our construction follows the Fiat-Shamir with aborts paradigm, but solves the problem of large number of restarts without increasing the parameters by a factor of $n$ and utilizing any further cryptographic primitive. To demonstrate the practicality of our protocol, we provide a software implementation and concrete parameters aiming at 128 bits of security. Furthermore, we select concrete parameters for the construction by Damgård et al. and for the most recent lattice-based multi-signature scheme by Chen (CRYPTO 2023), and show that our approach provides a significant improvement in terms of all efficiency metrics. Our results also show that the multi-signature schemes by Damgård et al. and Chen as well as a multi-signature variant of our protocol produce signatures that are not smaller than a naive multi-signature derived from the concatenation of multiple standard signatures.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
Differential Cryptanalysis of a Lightweight Block Cipher LELBC
Manjeet Kaur, Tarun Yadav, Manoj Kumar, and Dhananjoy Dey
In this study, we investigate the newly developed low energy lightweight block cipher (LELBC), specifically designed for resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices in smart agriculture. The designers conducted a preliminary differential cryptanalysis of LELBC through mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). This paper further delves into LELBC’s differential characteristics in both single and related-key frameworks using MILP, identifying a nine-round differential characteristic with a probability of $2^{-60}$ in a single-key framework and a 12-round differential characteristic with a probability of $2^{-60}$ in a related-key framework.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
ORIGO: Proving Provenance of Sensitive Data with Constant Communication
Jens Ernstberger, Jan Lauinger, Yinnan Wu, Arthur Gervais, and Sebastian Steinhorst
Transport Layer Security ( TLS ) is foundational for safeguarding client-server communication. However, it does not extend integrity guarantees to third-party verification of data authenticity. If a client wants to present data obtained from a server, it cannot convince any other party that the data has not been tampered with. TLS oracles ensure data authenticity beyond the client-server TLS connection, such that clients can obtain data from a server and ensure provenance to any third party, without server-side modifications. Generally, a TLS oracle involves a third party, the verifier, in a TLS session to verify that the data obtained by the client is accurate. Existing protocols for TLS oracles are communication-heavy, as they rely on interactive protocols. We present ORIGO, a TLS oracle with constant communication. Similar to prior work, ORIGO introduces a third party in a TLS session, and provides a protocol to ensure the authenticity of data transmitted in a TLS session, without forfeiting its confidentiality. Compared to prior work, we rely on intricate details specific to TLS 1.3, which allow us to prove correct key derivation, authentication and encryption within a Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP). This, combined with optimizations for TLS 1.3, leads to an efficient protocol with constant communication in the online phase. Our work reduces online communication by $375 \times$ and online runtime by up to $4.6 \times$, compared to prior work.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
Estimating the Unpredictability of Multi-Bit Strong PUF Classes
Ahmed Bendary, Wendson A. S. Barbosa, Andrew Pomerance, and C. Emre Koksal
With the ongoing advances in machine learning (ML), cybersecurity solutions and security primitives are becoming increasingly vulnerable to successful attacks. Strong physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are a potential solution for providing high resistance to such attacks. In this paper, we propose a generalized attack model that leverages multiple chips jointly to minimize the cloning error. Our analysis shows that the entropy rate over different chips is a relevant measure to the new attack model as well as the multi-bit strong PUF classes. We explain the sources of randomness that affect unpredictability and its possible measures using models of state-of-the-art strong PUFs. Moreover, we utilize min-max entropy estimators to measure the unpredictability of multi-bit strong PUF classes for the first time in the PUF community. Finally, we provide experimental results for a multi-bit strong PUF class, the hybrid Boolean network PUF, showing its high unpredictability and resistance to ML attacks.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
Threshold Structure-Preserving Signatures: Strong and Adaptive Security under Standard Assumptions
Aikaterini Mitrokotsa, Sayantan Mukherjee, Mahdi Sedaghat, Daniel Slamanig, and Jenit Tomy
Structure-preserving signatures (SPS) have emerged as an important cryptographic building block, as their compatibility with the Groth-Sahai (GS) NIZK framework allows to construct protocols under standard assumptions with reasonable efficiency. Over the last years there has been a significant interest in the design of threshold signature schemes. However, only very recently Crites et al. (ASIACRYPT 2023) have introduced threshold SPS (TSPS) along with a fully non-interactive construction. While this is an important step, their work comes with several limitations. With respect to the construction, they require the use of random oracles, interactive complexity assumptions and are restricted to so called indexed Diffie-Hellman message spaces. Latter limits the use of their construction as a drop-in replacement for SPS. When it comes to security, they only support static corruptions and do not allow partial signature queries for the forgery. In this paper, we ask whether it is possible to construct TSPS without such restrictions. We start from an SPS from Kiltz, Pan and Wee (CRYPTO 2015) which has an interesting structure, but thresholdizing it requires some modifications. Interestingly, we can prove it secure in the strongest model (TS-UF-1) for fully non-interactive threshold signatures (Bellare et al., CRYPTO 2022) and even under fully adaptive corruptions. Surprisingly, we can show the latter under a standard assumption without requiring any idealized model. All known constructions of efficient threshold signatures in the discrete logarithm setting require interactive assumptions and idealized models. Concretely, our scheme in type III bilinear groups under the SXDH assumption has signatures consisting of 7 group elements. Compared to the TSPS from Crites et al. (2 group elements), this comes at the cost of efficiency. However, our scheme is secure under standard assumptions, achieves strong and adaptive security guarantees and supports general message spaces, i.e., represents a drop-in replacement for many SPS applications. Given these features, the increase in the size of the signature seems acceptable even for practical applications.
Last updated:  2024-03-15
A trust-minimized e-cash for cryptocurrencies
Mario Yaksetig
We introduce a private cryptocurrency design based on the original e-cash protocol. Our proposal allows for private payments on existing blockchain systems. In our design, the issuance of the private cash is transparent and is associated with a blockchain transfer to provide stronger security.
Last updated:  2024-03-14
The cool and the cruel: separating hard parts of LWE secrets
Niklas Nolte, Mohamed Malhou, Emily Wenger, Samuel Stevens, Cathy Yuanchen Li, Francois Charton, and Kristin Lauter
Sparse binary LWE secrets are under consideration for standardization for Homomorphic Encryption and its applications to private computation. Known attacks on sparse binary LWE secrets include the sparse dual attack and the hybrid sparse dual-meet in the middle attack, which requires significant memory. In this paper, we provide a new statistical attack with low memory requirement. The attack relies on some initial parallelized lattice reduction. The key observation is that, after lattice reduction is applied to the rows of a q-ary-like embedded random matrix A, the entries with high variance are concentrated in the early columns of the extracted matrix. This allows us to separate out the “hard part” of the LWE secret. We can first solve the sub-problem of finding the “cruel” bits of the secret in the early columns, and then find the remaining “cool” bits in linear time. We use statistical techniques to distinguish distributions to identify both the cruel and the cool bits of the secret. We provide concrete attack timings for recovering secrets in dimensions n = 256, 512, and 768. For the lattice reduction stage, we leverage recent improvements in lattice reduction (flatter) applied in parallel. We also apply our new attack in the RLWE setting for 2-power cyclotomic rings, showing that these RLWE instances are much more vulnerable to this attack than LWE.
Last updated:  2024-03-14
Fastcrypto: Pioneering Cryptography Via Continuous Benchmarking
Kostas Kryptos Chalkias, Jonas Lindstrøm, Deepak Maram, Ben Riva, Arnab Roy, Alberto Sonnino, and Joy Wang
In the rapidly evolving fields of encryption and blockchain technologies, the efficiency and security of cryptographic schemes significantly impact performance. This paper introduces a comprehensive framework for continuous benchmarking in one of the most popular cryptography Rust libraries, fastcrypto. What makes our analysis unique is the realization that automated benchmarking is not just a performance monitor and optimization tool, but it can be used for cryptanalysis and innovation discovery as well. Surprisingly, benchmarks can uncover spectacular security flaws and inconsistencies in various cryptographic implementations and standards, while at the same time they can identify unique opportunities for innovation not previously known to science, such as providing a) hints for novel algorithms, b) indications for mix-and-match library functions that result in world record speeds, and c) evidences of biased or untested real world algorithm comparisons in the literature. Our approach transcends traditional benchmarking methods by identifying inconsistencies in multi-threaded code, which previously resulted in unfair comparisons. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology in identifying the fastest algorithms for specific cryptographic operations like signing, while revealing hidden performance characteristics and security flaws. The process of continuous benchmarking allowed fastcrypto to break many crypto-operations speed records in the Rust language ecosystem. A notable discovery in our research is the identification of vulnerabilities and unfair speed claims due to missing padding checks in high-performance Base64 encoding libraries. We also uncover insights into algorithmic implementations such as multi-scalar elliptic curve multiplications, which exhibit different performance gains when applied in different schemes and libraries. This was not evident in conventional benchmarking practices. Further, our analysis highlights bottlenecks in cryptographic algorithms where pre-computed tables can be strategically applied, accounting for L1 and L2 CPU cache limitations. Our benchmarking framework also reveals that certain algorithmic implementations incur additional overheads due to serialization processes, necessitating a refined `apples to apples' comparison approach. We identified unique performance patterns in some schemes, where efficiency scales with input size, aiding blockchain technologies in optimal parameter selection and data compression. Crucially, continuous benchmarking serves as a tool for ongoing audit and security assurance. Variations in performance can signal potential security issues during upgrades, such as cleptography, hardware manipulation or supply chain attacks. This was evidenced by critical private key leakage vulnerabilities we found in one of the most popular EdDSA Rust libraries. By providing a dynamic and thorough benchmarking approach, our framework empowers stakeholders to make informed decisions, enhance security measures, and optimize cryptographic operations in an ever-changing digital landscape.
Last updated:  2024-03-14
Cryptanalysis of rank-2 module-LIP in Totally Real Number Fields
Guilhem Mureau, Alice Pellet-Mary, Heorhii Pliatsok, and Alexandre Wallet
We formally define the Lattice Isomorphism Problem for module lattices (module-LIP) in a number field $K$. This is a generalization of the problem defined by Ducas, Postlethwaite, Pulles, and van Woerden (Asiacrypt 2022), taking into account the arithmetic and algebraic specificity of module lattices from their representation using pseudo-bases. We also provide the corresponding set of algorithmic and theoretical tools for the future study of this problem in a module setting. Our main contribution is an algorithm solving module-LIP for modules of rank $2$ in $K^2$, when $K$ is a totally real number field. Our algorithm exploits the connection between this problem, relative norm equations and the decomposition of algebraic integers as sums of two squares. For a large class of modules (including $\mathcal{O}_K^2$), and a large class of totally real number fields (including the maximal real subfield of cyclotomic fields) it runs in classical polynomial time in the degree of the field and the residue at 1 of the Dedekind zeta function of the field (under reasonable number theoretic assumptions). We provide a proof-of-concept code running over the maximal real subfield of some cyclotomic fields.
Last updated:  2024-03-14
Secret and Shared Keys Recovery on Hamming Quasi-Cyclic with SASCA
Chloé Baïsse, Antoine Moran, Guillaume Goy, Julien Maillard, Nicolas Aragon, Philippe Gaborit, Maxime Lecomte, and Antoine Loiseau
Soft Analytical Side Channel Attacks (SASCA) are a powerful family of Side Channel Attacks (SCA) that allow to recover secret values with only a small number of traces. Their effectiveness lies in the Belief Propagation (BP) algorithm, which enables efficient computation of the marginal distributions of intermediate values. Post-quantum schemes such as Kyber, and more recently, Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC), have been targets of SASCA. Previous SASCA on HQC focused on Reed-Solomon (RS) codes and successfully retrieved the shared key with a high success rate for high noise levels using a single trace. In this work, we present new SASCA on HQC where both the shared key and the secret key are targeted. Unlike the previous SASCA, we take a closer look at the Reed-Muller (RM) code. The advantage of this choice, is that the RM decoder is applied before the RS decoder. This is what makes it possible to attack the two keys. We build a factor graph of the Fast Hadamard Transform (FHT) function from the HQC reference implementation of April 2023. The information recovered from BP allows us to retrieve the shared key with a single trace. In addition to the previous SASCA targeting HQC, we also manage to recover the secret key with two chosen ciphertext attacks. One of them require a single trace and is successful until high noise levels.
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