Paper 2010/153

Founding Cryptography on Tamper-Proof Hardware Tokens

Vipul Goyal, Yuval Ishai, Amit Sahai, Ramarathnam Venkatesan, and Akshay Wadia

Abstract

A number of works have investigated using tamper-proof hardwaretokens as tools to achieve a variety of cryptographic tasks. In particular, Goldreich and Ostrovsky considered the goal of software protection via oblivious RAM. Goldwasser, Kalai, and Rothblum introduced the concept of \emph{one-time programs}: in a one-time program, an honest sender sends a set of {\em simple} hardware tokens to a (potentially malicious) receiver. The hardware tokens allow the receiver to execute a secret program specified by the sender's tokens exactly once (or, more generally, up to a fixed $t$ times). A recent line of work initiated by Katz examined the problem ofachieving UC-secure computation using hardware tokens. Motivated by the goal of unifying and strengthening these previous notions, we consider the general question of basing secure computation on hardware tokens. We show that the following tasks, which cannot be realized in the ``plain'' model, become feasible if the parties are allowed to generate and exchange tamper-proof hardware tokens. Unconditional non-interactive secure computation: We show that by exchanging simple stateful hardware tokens, any functionality can be realized with unconditional security against malicious parties. In the case of two-party functionalities $f(x,y)$ which take their inputs from a sender and a receiver and deliver their output to the receiver, our protocol is non-interactive and only requires a unidirectional communication of simple stateful tokens from the sender to the receiver. This strengthens previous feasibility results for one-time programs both by providing unconditional security and by offering general protection against malicious senders. As is typically the case for unconditionally secure protocols, our protocol is in fact UC-secure. This improves over previous works on UC-secure computation based on hardware tokens, which provided computational security under cryptographic assumptions. Interactive Secure computation from stateless tokens based on one-way functions: We show that stateless hardware tokens are sufficient to base general secure (in fact, UC-secure) computation on the existence of one-way functions. One cannot hope for security against unbounded adversaries with stateless tokens since an unbounded adversary could query the token multiple times to ``learn" the functionality it contains. Non-interactive secure computation from stateless tokens: We consider the problem of designing non-interactive secure computation from stateless tokens for stateless oblivious reactive functionalities, i.e., reactive functionalities which allow unlimited queries from the receiver (these are the only functionalities one can hope to realize non-interactively with stateless tokens). By building on recent techniques from resettably secure computation, we give a general positive result for stateless oblivious reactive functionalities under standard cryptographic assumption. This result generalizes the notion of (unlimited-use) obfuscation by providing security against a malicious sender, and also provides the first general feasibility result for program obfuscation using stateless tokens.