Paper 2019/108

Minicrypt Primitives with Algebraic Structure and Applications

Navid Alamati, Hart Montgomery, Sikhar Patranabis, and Arnab Roy

Abstract

Algebraic structure lies at the heart of much of Cryptomania as we know it. An interesting question is the following: instead of building (Cryptomania) primitives from concrete assumptions, can we build them from simple Minicrypt primitives endowed with additional algebraic structure? In this work, we affirmatively answer this question by adding algebraic structure to the following Minicrypt primitives: • One-Way Function (OWF) • Weak Unpredictable Function (wUF) • Weak Pseudorandom Function (wPRF) The algebraic structure that we consider is group homomorphism over the input/output spaces of these primitives. We also consider a “bounded” notion of homomorphism where the primitive only supports an a priori bounded number of homomorphic operations in order to capture lattice-based and other “noisy” assumptions. We show that these structured primitives can be used to construct many cryptographic protocols. In particular, we prove that: • (Bounded) Homomorphic OWFs (HOWFs) imply collision-resistant hash functions, Schnorr-style signatures, and chameleon hash functions. • (Bounded) Input-Homomorphic weak UFs (IHwUFs) imply CPA-secure PKE, non-interactive key exchange, trapdoor functions, blind batch encryption (which implies anonymous IBE, KDM-secure and leakage-resilient PKE), CCA2 deterministic PKE, and hinting PRGs (which in turn imply transformation of CPA to CCA security for ABE/1-sided PE). • (Bounded) Input-Homomorphic weak PRFs (IHwPRFs) imply PIR, lossy trapdoor functions, OT and MPC (in the plain model). In addition, we show how to realize any CDH/DDH-based protocol with certain properties in a generic manner using IHwUFs/IHwPRFs, and how to instantiate such a protocol from many concrete assumptions. We also consider primitives with substantially richer structure, namely Ring IHwPRFs and L-composable IHwPRFs. In particular, we show the following: • Ring IHwPRFs with certain properties imply FHE. • 2-composable IHwPRFs imply (black-box) IBE, and $L$-composable IHwPRFs imply non-interactive $(L + 1)$-party key exchange. Our framework allows us to categorize many cryptographic protocols based on which structured Minicrypt primitive implies them. In addition, it potentially makes showing the existence of many cryptosystems from novel assumptions substantially easier in the future.

Note: fixed some typos