All papers in 2019 (Page 13 of 1498 results)

Last updated:  2020-06-03
Improved Classical Cryptanalysis of SIKE in Practice
Craig Costello, Patrick Longa, Michael Naehrig, Joost Renes, Fernando Virdia
The main contribution of this work is an optimized implementation of the vanOorschot-Wiener (vOW) parallel collision finding algorithm. As is typical for cryptanalysis against conjectured hard problems (e. g. factoring or discrete logarithms), challenges can arise in the implementation that are not captured in the theory, making the performance of the algorithm in practice a crucial element of estimating security. We present a number of novel improvements, both to generic instantiations of the vOW algorithm finding collisions in arbitrary functions, and to its instantiation in the context of the supersingular isogeny key encapsulation (SIKE) protocol, that culminate in an improved classical cryptanalysis of the computational supersingular isogeny (CSSI) problem. In particular, we present a scalable implementation that can be applied to the Round-2 parameter sets of SIKE that can be used to give confidence in their security levels.
Last updated:  2019-03-20
Towards Optimized and Constant-Time CSIDH on Embedded Devices
Amir Jalali, Reza Azarderakhsh, Mehran Mozaffari Kermani, David Jao
We present an optimized, constant-time software library for commutative supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman key exchange (CSIDH) proposed by Castryck et al. which targets 64-bit ARM processors. The proposed library is implemented based on highly-optimized field arithmetic operations and computes the entire key exchange in constant-time. The proposed implementation is resistant to timing attacks. We adopt optimization techniques to evaluate the highest performance CSIDH on ARM-powered embedded devices such as cellphones, analyzing the possibility of using such a scheme in the quantum era. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed implementation is the first constant-time implementation of CSIDH and the first evaluation of this scheme on embedded devices. The benchmark result on a Google Pixel 2 smartphone equipped with 64-bit high-performance ARM Cortex-A72 core shows that it takes almost 12 seconds for each party to compute a commutative action operation in constant-time over the 511-bit finite field proposed by Castryck et al. However, using uniform but variable-time Montgomery ladder with security considerations improves these results significantly.
Last updated:  2020-03-06
Hash functions from superspecial genus-2 curves using Richelot isogenies
Wouter Castryck, Thomas Decru, Benjamin Smith
Last year Takashima proposed a version of Charles, Goren and Lauter’s hash function using Richelot isogenies, starting from a genus-2 curve that allows for all subsequent arithmetic to be performed over a quadratic finite field Fp^2 . In a very recent paper Flynn and Ti point out that Takashima’s hash function is insecure due to the existence of small isogeny cycles. We revisit the construction and show that it can be repaired by imposing a simple restriction, which moreover clarifies the security analysis. The runtime of the resulting hash function is dominated by the extraction of 3 square roots for every block of 3 bits of the message, as compared to one square root per bit in the elliptic curve case; however in our setting the extractions can be parallelized and are done in a finite field whose bit size is reduced by a factor 3. Along the way we argue that the full supersingular isogeny graph is the wrong context in which to study higher-dimensional analogues of Charles, Goren and Lauter’s hash function, and advocate the use of the superspecial subgraph, which is the natural framework in which to view Takashima’s Fp^2-friendly starting curve.
Last updated:  2019-03-20
Balancing Image Privacy and Usability with Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption
Kimia Tajik, Akshith Gunasekaran, Rhea Dutta, Brandon Ellis, Rakesh B. Bobba, Mike Rosulek, Charles V. Wright, Wu-chi Feng
In this paper, we motivate the need for image encryption techniques that preserve certain visual features in images and hide all other information, to balance privacy and usability in the context of cloud-based image storage services. In particular, we introduce the concept of ideal or exact Thumbnail-Preserving Encryption (TPE), a special case of format-preserving encryption, and present a concrete construction. In TPE, a ciphertext is itself an image that has the same thumbnail as the plaintext (unencrypted) image, but that provably leaks nothing about the plaintext beyond its thumbnail. We provide a formal security analysis for the construction, and a prototype implementation to demonstrate compatibility with existing services. We also study the ability of users to distinguish between thumbnail images preserved by TPE. Our findings indicate that TPE is an efficient and promising approach to balance usability and privacy concerns for images. Our code and a demo are available at http://photoencryption.org.
Last updated:  2020-05-23
Semi-parallel Logistic Regression for GWAS on Encrypted Data
Miran Kim, Yongsoo Song, Baiyu Li, Daniele Micciancio
The sharing of biomedical data is crucial to enable scientific discoveries across institutions and improve health care. For example, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) based on a large number of samples can identify disease-causing genetic variants. The privacy concern, however, has become a major hurdle for data management and utilization. Homomorphic encryption is one of the most powerful cryptographic primitives which can address the privacy and security issues. It supports the computation on encrypted data, so that we can aggregate data and perform an arbitrary computation on an untrusted cloud environment without the leakage of sensitive information. This paper presents a secure outsourcing solution to assess logistic regression models for quantitative traits to test their associations with genotypes. We adapt the semi-parallel training method by Sikorska et al., which builds a logistic regression model for covariates, followed by one-step parallelizable regressions on all individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In addition, we modify our underlying approximate homomorphic encryption scheme for performance improvement. We evaluated the performance of our solution through experiments on real-world dataset. It achieves the best performance of homomorphic encryption system for GWAS analysis in terms of both complexity and accuracy. For example, given a dataset consisting of 245 samples, each of which has 10643 SNPs and 3 covariates, our algorithm takes about 43 seconds to perform logistic regression based genome wide association analysis over encryption. We demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of our solution.
Last updated:  2019-03-20
Impossibility of Strong KDM Security with Auxiliary Input
Cody Freitag, Ilan Komargodski, Rafael Pass
In this note, we show that a strong notion of KDM security cannot be obtained by any encryption scheme in the auxiliary input setting, assuming Learning With Errors (LWE) and one-way permutations. The notion of security we deal with guarantees that for any (possibly inefficient) function $f$, it is computationally hard to distinguish between an encryption of 0s and an encryption of f(pk, z), where pk is the public key and z is the auxiliary input. Furthermore, we show that this holds even when restricted to bounded-length auxiliary input where z is much shorter than pk under the additional assumption that (non-leveled) fully homomorphic encryption exists.
Last updated:  2019-09-03
Timing attacks on Error Correcting Codes in Post-Quantum Schemes
Jan-Pieter D'Anvers, Marcel Tiepelt, Frederik Vercauteren, Ingrid Verbauwhede
While error correcting codes (ECC) have the potential to significantly reduce the failure probability of post-quantum schemes, they add an extra ECC decoding step to the algorithm. Even though this additional step does not compute directly on the secret key, it is susceptible to side-channel attacks. We show that if no precaution is taken, it is possible to use timing information to distinguish between ciphertexts that result in an error before decoding and ciphertexts that do not contain errors, due to the variable execution time of the ECC decoding algorithm. We demonstrate that this information can be used to break the IND-CCA security of post-quantum secure schemes by presenting an attack on two round 1 candidates to the NIST Post-Quantum Standardization Process: the Ring-LWE scheme LAC and the Mersenne prime scheme Ramstake. This attack recovers the full secret key using a limited number of timed decryption queries and is implemented on the reference and the optimized implementations of both submissions. It is able to retrieve LAC's secret key for all security levels in under 2 minutes using less than $2^{16}$ decryption queries and Ramstake's secret key in under 2 minutes using approximately $2400$ decryption queries. The attack generalizes to other lattice-based schemes with ECC in which any side-channel information about the presence of errors is leaked during decoding.
Last updated:  2021-06-04
CCA Security and Trapdoor Functions via Key-Dependent-Message Security
Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takahiro Matsuda, Keisuke Tanaka
We study the relationship among public-key encryption (PKE) satisfying indistinguishability against chosen plaintext attacks (IND-CPA security), that against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA security), and trapdoor functions (TDF). Specifically, we aim at finding a unified approach and some additional requirement to realize IND-CCA secure PKE and TDF based on IND-CPA secure PKE, and show the following two main results. As the first main result, we show how to achieve IND-CCA security via a weak form of key-dependent-message (KDM) security. More specifically, we construct an IND-CCA secure PKE scheme based on an IND-CPA secure PKE scheme and a secret-key encryption (SKE) scheme satisfying one-time KDM security with respect to projection functions (projection-KDM security). Projection functions are elementary functions with respect to which KDM security has been widely studied. Since the existence of projection-KDM secure PKE implies that of the above two building blocks, as a corollary of this result, we see that the existence of IND-CCA secure PKE is implied by that of projection-KDM secure PKE. As the second main result, we extend the above construction of IND-CCA secure PKE into that of TDF by additionally requiring a mild requirement for each building block. Our TDF satisfies adaptive one-wayness. We can instantiate our TDF based on a wide variety of computational assumptions. Especially, we obtain the first TDF (with adaptive one-wayness) based on the sub-exponential hardness of the constant-noise learning-parity-with-noise (LPN) problem. In addition, we show that by extending the above constructions, we can obtain PKE schemes satisfying advanced security notions under CCA, that is, optimal rate leakage-resilience under CCA and selective-opening security under CCA. As a result, we obtain the first PKE schemes satisfying these security notions based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption or the low-noise LPN assumption.
Last updated:  2019-03-20
Cost effective techniques for chip delayering and in-situ depackaging
Uncategorized
Philippe Loubet Moundi
Show abstract
Uncategorized
Invasive or semi-invasive attacks require, of course, because of their nature, the removal of metal layers or at least the package de-capsulation of the chip. For many people - not expert in those sample preparation techniques - the simple access to the die surface and the observation of the chip structure after metal layers removal are the first obstacles to conduct an attack. In another direction, the development of embedded secure devices, sometime with very dense and complex assembly process, adds a new difficulty for an attacker to get a physical access to the silicon without intensive use of advanced soldering capabilities. This paper will deal with those two challenges: the first one is to provide an in-situ depackaging solution with limited ressources and then, the second one consists in finding the minimum mandatory tools required to perform chip delayering before metal layers imaging - or reverse engineering.
Last updated:  2019-04-18
Cryptanalysis of ForkAES
Subhadeep Banik, Jannis Bossert, Amit Jana, Eik List, Stefan Lucks, Willi Meier, Mostafizar Rahman, Dhiman Saha, Yu Sasaki
Forkciphers are a new kind of primitive proposed recently by Andreeva et al. for efficient encryption and authentication of small messages. They fork the middle state of a cipher and encrypt it twice under two smaller independent permutations. Thus, forkciphers produce two output blocks in one primitive call. Andreeva et al. proposed ForkAES, a tweakable AES-based forkcipher that splits the state after five out of ten rounds. While their authenticated encrypted schemes were accompanied by proofs, the security discussion for ForkAES was not provided, and founded on existing results on the AES and KIASU-BC. Forkciphers provide a unique interface called reconstruction queries that use one ciphertext block as input and compute the respective other ciphertext block. Thus, they deserve a careful security analysis. This work fosters the understanding of the security of ForkAES with three contributions: (1) We observe that security in reconstruction queries differs strongly from the existing results on the AES. This allows to attack nine out of ten rounds with differential, impossible-differential and yoyo attacks. (2) We observe that some forkcipher modes may lack the interface of reconstruction queries, so that attackers must use encryption queries. We show that nine rounds can still be attacked with rectangle and impossible-differential attacks. (3) We present forgery attacks on the AE modes proposed by Andreeva et al. with nine-round ForkAES.
Last updated:  2019-03-19
On the construction of S-boxes using the leaders and followers metaheuristic
Alejandro Freyre-Echevarría, Ismel Martínez-Díaz
Modern block ciphers are facing the threat of side-channel attacks by power leakage whose main target are the non-linear components known as S-boxes. A theoretical measure for the resistance of an S-box against this type of attacks is the confusion coefficient variance property. A higher value of this property represents a better theoretical resistance. In this work we use the leaders and followers meta-heuristic in order to achieve good confusion coefficient variance’s valued S-boxes.
Last updated:  2019-12-18
Security Evaluation for Snow 2.0-like Stream Ciphers Against Correlation Attacks over Extension Fields
A. N. Alekseychuk, S. M. Koniushok, M. V. Poremskyi
We propose a general method for security evaluation of SNOW 2.0-like ciphers against correlation attacks that are built similarly to known attacks on SNOW 2.0. Unlike previously known methods, the method we propose is targeted at security proof and allows obtaining lower bounds for efficiency of attacks from the class under consideration directly using parameters of stream cipher components similarly to techniques for security proofs of block ciphers against linear cryptanalysis. The method proposed is based upon automata-theoretic approach to evaluation the imbalance of discrete functions. In particular, we obtain a matrix representation and upper bounds for imbalance of an arbitrary discrete function being realized by a sequence of finite automata. These results generalize a number of previously known statements on matrix (linear) representations for imbalance of functions having specified forms, and may be applied to security proofs for other stream ciphers against correlation attacks. Application of this method to SNOW 2.0 and Strumok ciphers shows that any of the considered correlation attacks on them over the field of the order 256 has an average time complexity not less than $2^{146.20}$ and $2^{249.40}$ respectively, and requires not less than $2^{142.77}$ and, respectively, $2^{249.38}$ keystream symbols.
Last updated:  2019-03-19
Fast Algebraic Immunity of $2^m+2$ & $2^m+3$ variables Majority Function
Yindong Chen, Fei Guo, Liu Zhang
Boolean functions used in some cryptosystems of stream ciphers should satisfy various criteria simultaneously to resist some known attacks. The fast algebraic attack (FAA) is feasible if one can find a nonzero function $g$ of low algebraic degree and a function $h$ of algebraic degree significantly lower than $n$ such that $f\cdot g=h$. Then one new cryptographic property fast algebraic immunity was proposed, which measures the ability of Boolean functions to resist FAAs. It is a great challenge to determine the exact values of the fast algebraic immunity of an infinite class of Boolean functions with optimal algebraic immunity. In this letter, we explore the exact fast algebraic immunity of two subclasses of the majority function.
Last updated:  2019-03-19
SpaceFlip : Unbound Geometry Cryptography
Gideon Samid
A geometry is a measure of restraint over the allowed 0.5n(n-1) distances between a set of n points (e.g. the metric and topological spaces). So defined, geometries lead to associated algebra. The complexities of such algebras are used to build cryptographic primitives. We propose then to push geometries to the limit -- unbound geometries -- where any two points may be assigned an arbitrary distance value, which may reflect a planning process or a randomized assignment. Regarding these distances as a cryptographic key, one could use the resultant algebras to carry out cryptographic missions. We define the mathematical framework for this aim, then present a few cryptographic primitives. Most effective implementation is through the new technology for “rock of randomness” establishing random distances through 3D printed molecular compounds. Security is proportional to the size of the ‘rock’. We use the term SpaceFlip to collectively refer to the unbound geometry, its associated algebra and the cryptographic tools derived from it.
Last updated:  2019-07-05
Proper Usage of the Group Signature Scheme in ISO/IEC 20008-2
Ai Ishida, Yusuke Sakai, Keita Emura, Goichiro Hanaoka, Keisuke Tanaka
In ISO/IEC 20008-2, several anonymous digital signature schemes are specified. Among these, the scheme denoted as Mechanism 6, is the only plain group signature scheme that does not aim at providing additional functionalities. The Intel Enhanced Privacy Identification (EPID) scheme, which has many applications in connection with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), is in practice derived from Mechanism 6. In this paper, we firstly show that Mechanism 6 does not satisfy anonymity in the standard security model, i.e., the Bellare-Shi-Zhang model [CT-RSA 2005]. We then provide a detailed analysis of the security properties offered by Mechanism 6 and characterize the conditions under which its anonymity is preserved. Consequently, it is seen that Mechanism 6 is secure under the condition that the issuer, who generates user signing keys, does not join the attack. We also derive a simple patch for Mechanism 6 from the analysis.
Last updated:  2019-05-10
An Attack on Small Private Keys of RSA Based on Euclidean Algorithm
Dimitrios Poulakis
In this paper, we describe an attack on RSA cryptosystem which is based on Euclid's algorithm. Given a public key $(n,e)$ with corresponding private key $d$ such that $e$ has the same order of magnitude as $n$ and one of the integers $k = (ed-1)/\phi(n)$ and $e-k$ has at most one-quarter as many bits as $e$, it computes the factorization of $n$ in deterministic time $O((\log n)^2)$ bit operations.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
A Framework for Cryptographic Problems from Linear Algebra
Carl Bootland, Wouter Castryck, Alan Szepieniec, Frederik Vercauteren
We introduce a general framework encompassing the main hard problems emerging in lattice-based cryptography, which naturally includes the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystem, but also code-based cryptography. The framework allows to easily instantiate new hard problems and to automatically construct post-quantum secure primitives from them. As a first basic application, we introduce two new hard problems and the corresponding encryption schemes. Concretely, we study generalizations of hard problems such as SIS, LWE and NTRU to free modules over quotients of \(\mathbb{Z}[X]\) by ideals of the form \((f,g)\), where \(f\) is a monic polynomial and \(g \in \mathbb{Z}[X]\) is a ciphertext modulus coprime to \(f\). For trivial modules (i.e. of rank one) the case \(f=X^n+1\) and \(g = q \in \mathbb{Z}_{>0}\) corresponds to ring-LWE, ring-SIS and NTRU, while the choices \(f = X^n- 1\) and \(g = X - 2\) essentially cover the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystems. At the other extreme, when considering modules of large rank and letting \(\deg f = 1\) one recovers the framework of LWE and SIS.
Last updated:  2019-12-13
Make Some ROOM for the Zeros: Data Sparsity in Secure Distributed Machine Learning
Phillipp Schoppmann, Adria Gascon, Mariana Raykova, Benny Pinkas
Exploiting data sparsity is crucial for the scalability of many data analysis tasks. However, while there is an increasing interest in efficient secure computation protocols for distributed machine learning, data sparsity has so far not been considered in a principled way in that setting. We propose sparse data structures together with their corresponding secure computation protocols to address common data analysis tasks while utilizing data sparsity. In particular, we define a Read-Only Oblivious Map primitive (ROOM) for accessing elements in sparse structures, and present several instantiations of this primitive with different trade-offs. Then, using ROOM as a building block, we propose protocols for basic linear algebra operations such as Gather, Scatter, and multiple variants of sparse matrix multiplication. Our protocols are easily composable by using secret sharing. We leverage this, at the highest level of abstraction, to build secure end-to-end protocols for non-parametric models ($k$-nearest neighbors and naive Bayes classification) and parametric models (logistic regression) that enable secure analysis on high-dimensional datasets. The experimental evaluation of our protocol implementations demonstrates a manyfold improvement in the efficiency over state-of-the-art techniques across all applications. Our system is designed and built mirroring the modular architecture in scientific computing and machine learning frameworks, and inspired by the Sparse BLAS standard.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption from LWE in the OT Model
Sam Kim
In a (ciphertext policy) attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, a ciphertext is associated with a predicate $\phi$ and a secret key is associated with a string $x$ such that a key decrypts a ciphertext if and only of $\phi(x) = 1$. Moreover, the scheme should be collusion-resistant meaning that no colluding set of users can learn about the message if none of their secret keys can individually decrypt the ciphertext. Traditionally, in an ABE scheme, there exists a central authority that generates the keys for each users. In a multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE) scheme, individual components of the secret keys are generated by different key-generating authorities. Although the notion of MA-ABE is a natural extension of the standard ABE, its realization has so far been limited. Indeed, all existing MA-ABE constructions rely solely on bilinear maps and can only support predicates that are computable by monotone boolean formulas. In this work, we construct the first collusion-resistant MA-ABE scheme that can support circuit predicates from the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. Our construction works in a new model that we call the OT model, which can be viewed as a direct relaxation of the traditional GID model that previous MA-ABE constructions consider. We believe that the new OT model is a compelling alternative to the traditional GID model as it captures the core requirements for an MA-ABE scheme. The techniques that are used to construct MA-ABE in this model can also be used as a stepping stone towards constructing MA-ABE in the stronger GID model in the future.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
A Note on Key Agreement and Non-Interactive Commitments
Alex Lombardi, Luke Schaeffer
We observe that any key agreement protocol satisfying perfect completeness, regardless of its round complexity, can be used to construct a non-interactive commitment scheme. This observation simplifies the cryptographic assumptions required for some protocols that utilize non-interactive commitments and removes the need for ad-hoc constructions of non-interactive commitments from specific assumptions such as Learning with Errors.
Last updated:  2019-05-01
Uncovering Algebraic Structures in the MPC Landscape
Navneet Agarwal, Sanat Anand, Manoj Prabhakaran
A fundamental problem in the theory of secure multi-party computation (MPC) is to characterize functions with more than 2 parties which admit MPC protocols with information-theoretic security against passive corruption. This question has seen little progress since the work of Chor and Ishai (1996), which demonstrated difficulties in resolving it. In this work, we make significant progress towards resolving this question in the important case of aggregating functionalities, in which m parties P1, . . . , Pm hold inputs x1, . . . , xm and an aggregating party P0 must learn f(x1,...,xm). We uncover a rich class of algebraic structures that are closely related to secure computability, namely, “Commuting Permutations Systems” (CPS) and its variants. We present an extensive set of results relating these algebraic structures among themselves and to MPC, including new protocols, impossibility results and separations. Our results include a necessary algebraic condition and slightly stronger sufficient algebraic condition for a function to admit information-theoretically secure MPC protocols. We also introduce and study new models of minimally interactive MPC (called UNIMPC and UNIMPC*), which not only help in understanding our positive and negative results better, but also open up new avenues for studying the cryptographic complexity landscape of multi-party functionalities. Our positive results include novel protocols in these models, which may be of independent practical interest. Finally, we extend our results to a definition that requires UC security as well as semi-honest security (which we term strong security). In this model we are able to carry out the characterization of all computable functions, except for a gap in the case of aggregating functionalities.
Last updated:  2019-09-04
On the boomerang uniformity of quadratic permutations
Sihem Mesnager, Chunming Tang, Maosheng Xiong
At Eurocrypt'18, Cid, Huang, Peyrin, Sasaki, and Song introduced a new tool called Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT) for measuring the resistance of a block cipher against the boomerang attack which is an important cryptanalysis technique introduced by Wagner in 1999 against block ciphers. Next, Boura and Canteaut introduced an important parameter related to the BCT for cryptographic Sboxes called boomerang uniformity. The purpose of this paper is to present a brief state-of-the-art on the notion of boomerang uniformity of vectorial Boolean functions (or Sboxes) and provide new results. More specifically, we present a slightly different but more convenient formulation of the boomerang uniformity and prove some new identities. Moreover, we focus on quadratic permutations in even dimension and obtain general criteria by which they have optimal BCT. {As a consequence of the new criteria}, two previously known results can be derived, and many new quadratic permutations with optimal BCT (optimal means that the maximal value in the Boomerang Connectivity Table equals the lowest known differential uniformity) can be found. In particular, we show that the boomerang uniformity of the binomial differentially $4$-uniform permutations presented by Bracken, Tan, and Tan equals $4$. Furthermore, we show a link between the boomerang uniformity and the nonlinearity for some special quadratic permutations. {Finally, we present a characterization of quadratic permutations with boomerang uniformity $4$. With this characterization, we show that the boomerang uniformity of a quadratic permutation with boomerang uniformity $4$ is preserved by the extended affine (EA) equivalence.
Last updated:  2020-09-08
BOREALIS: Building Block for Sealed Bid Auctions on Blockchains
Erik-Oliver Blass, Florian Kerschbaum
We focus on securely computing the ranks of sealed integers distributed among $n$ parties. For example, we securely compute the largest or smallest integer, the median, or in general the $k^{th}$-ranked integer. Such computations are a useful building block to securely implement a variety of sealed-bid auctions. Our objective is efficiency, specifically low interactivity between parties to support blockchains or other scenarios where multiple rounds are time-consuming. Hence, we dismiss powerful, yet highly-interactive MPC frameworks and propose BOREALIS, a special-purpose protocol for secure computation of ranks among integers. BOREALIS uses additively homomorphic encryption to implement core comparisons, but computes under distinct keys, chosen by each party to optimize the number of rounds. By carefully combining cryptographic primitives, such as ECC Elgamal encryption, encrypted comparisons, ciphertext blinding, secret sharing, and shuffling, BOREALIS sets up systems of multi-scalar equations which we efficiently prove with Groth-Sahai ZK proofs. Therewith, BOREALIS implements a multi-party computation of pairwise comparisons and rank zero-knowledge proofs secure against malicious adversaries. BOREALIS completes in at most $4$ rounds which is constant in both bit length $\ell$ of integers and the number of parties $n$. This is not only asymptotically optimal, but surpasses generic constant-round secure multi-party computation protocols, even those based on shared-key fully homomorphic encryption. Furthermore, our implementation shows that BOREALIS is very practical. Its main bottleneck, ZK proof computations, is small in practice. Even for a large number of parties ($n=200$) and high-precision integers ($\ell=32$), computation time of all proofs is less than a single Bitcoin block interval.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
MPCircuits: Optimized Circuit Generation for Secure Multi-Party Computation
M. Sadegh Riazi, Mojan Javaheripi, Siam U. Hussain, Farinaz Koushanfar
Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) is one of the most influential achievements of modern cryptography: it allows evaluation of an arbitrary function on private inputs from multiple parties without revealing the inputs. A crucial step of utilizing contemporary MPC protocols is to describe the function as a Boolean circuit. While efficient solutions have been proposed for special case of two-party secure computation, the general case of more than two-party is not addressed. This paper proposes MPCircuits, the first automated solution to devise the optimized Boolean circuit representation for any MPC function using hardware synthesis tools with new customized libraries that are scalable to multiple parties. MPCircuits creates a new end-to-end tool-chain to facilitate practical scalable MPC realization. To illustrate the practicality of MPCircuits, we design and implement a set of five circuits that represent real-world MPC problems. Our benchmarks inherently have different computational and communication complexities and are good candidates to evaluate MPC protocols. We also formalize the metrics by which a given protocol can be analyzed. We provide extensive experimental evaluations for these benchmarks; two of which are the first reported solutions in multi-party settings. As our experimental results indicate, MPCircuits reduces the computation time of MPC protocols by up to 4.2x.
Last updated:  2019-11-10
Path Oblivious Heap: Optimal and Practical Oblivious Priority Queue
Elaine Shi
We propose Path Oblivious Heap, an extremely simple, practical, and optimal oblivious priority queue. Our construction also implies a practical and optimal oblivious sorting algorithm which we call Path Oblivious Sort. Not only are our algorithms asymptotically optimal, we show that their practical performance is only a small constant factor worse than insecure baselines. More specificially, assuming roughly logarithmic client private storage, Path Oblivious Heap consumes 2× to 7× more bandwidth than the ordinary insecure binary heap; and Path Oblivious Sort consumes 4.5× to 6× more bandwidth than the insecure Merge Sort. We show that these performance results improve existing works by 1-2 orders of magnitude. Finally, we evaluate our algorithm for a multi-party computation scenario and show 7× to 8× reduction in the number of symmetric encryptions relative to the state of the art.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
Compressing Vector OLE
Elette Boyle, Geoffroy Couteau, Niv Gilboa, Yuval Ishai
Oblivious linear-function evaluation (OLE) is a secure two-party protocol allowing a receiver to learn a secret linear combination of a pair of field elements held by a sender. OLE serves as a common building block for secure computation of arithmetic circuits, analogously to the role of oblivious transfer (OT) for boolean circuits. A useful extension of OLE is vector OLE (VOLE), allowing the receiver to learn a linear combination of two vectors held by the sender. In several applications of OLE, one can replace a large number of instances of OLE by a smaller number of long instances of VOLE. This motivates the goal of amortizing the cost of generating long instances of VOLE. We suggest a new approach for fast generation of pseudo-random instances of VOLE via a deterministic local expansion of a pair of short correlated seeds and no interaction. This provides the first example of compressing a non-trivial and cryptographically useful correlation with good concrete efficiency. Our VOLE generators can be used to enhance the efficiency of a host of cryptographic applications. These include secure arithmetic computation and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs with reusable preprocessing. Our VOLE generators are based on a novel combination of function secret sharing (FSS) for multi-point functions and linear codes in which decoding is intractable. Their security can be based on variants of the learning parity with noise (LPN) assumption over large fields that resist known attacks. We provide several constructions that offer tradeoffs between different efficiency measures and the underlying intractability assumptions.
Last updated:  2019-06-07
Quantum Security Analysis of AES
Xavier Bonnetain, María Naya-Plasencia, André Schrottenloher
In this paper we analyze for the first time the post-quantum security of AES. AES is the most popular and widely used block cipher, established as the encryption standard by the NIST in 2001. We consider the secret key setting and, in particular, AES-256, the recommended primitive and one of the few existing ones that aims at providing a post-quantum security of 128 bits. In order to determine the new security margin, i.e., the lowest number of non-attacked rounds in time less than $2^{128}$ encryptions, we first provide generalized and quantized versions of the best known cryptanalysis on reduced-round AES, as well as a discussion on attacks that don't seem to benefit from a significant quantum speed-up. We propose a new framework for structured search that encompasses both the classical and quantum attacks we present, and allows to efficiently compute their complexity. We believe this framework will be useful for future analysis. Our best attack is a quantum Demirci-Selçuk meet-in-the-middle attack. Unexpectedly, using the ideas underlying its design principle also enables us to obtain new, counter-intuitive classical TMD trade-offs. In particular, we can reduce the memory in some attacks against AES-256 and AES-128. One of the building blocks of our attacks is solving efficiently the AES S-Box differential equation, with respect to the quantum cost of a reversible S-Box. We believe that this generic quantum tool will be useful for future quantum differential attacks. Judging by the results obtained so far, AES seems a resistant primitive in the post-quantum world as well as in the classical one, with a bigger security margin with respect to quantum generic attacks.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
A Simple Key Reuse Attack on LWE and Ring LWE Encryption Schemes as Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs)
Jintai Ding, Chi Cheng, Yue Qin
In this paper, we present a simple attack on LWE and Ring LWE encryption schemes used directly as Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs). This attack could work due to the fact that a key mismatch in a KEM is accessible to an adversary. Our method clearly indicates that any LWE or RLWE (or any similar type of construction) encryption directly used as KEM can be broken by modifying our attack method according to the respective cases.
Last updated:  2020-05-04
Sync HotStuff: Simple and Practical Synchronous State Machine Replication
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Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, Maofan Yin
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Synchronous solutions for Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) can tolerate up to minority faults. In this work, we present Sync HotStuff, a surprisingly simple and intuitive synchronous BFT solution that achieves consensus with a latency of $2\Delta$ in the steady state (where $\Delta$ is a synchronous message delay upper bound). In addition, Sync HotStuff ensures safety in a weaker synchronous model in which the synchrony assumption does not have to hold for all replicas all the time. Moreover, Sync HotStuff has optimistic responsiveness, i.e., it advances at network speed when less than one-quarter of the replicas are not responding. Borrowing from practical partially synchronous BFT solutions, Sync HotStuff has a two-phase leader-based structure, and has been fully prototyped under the standard synchrony assumption. When tolerating a single fault, Sync HotStuff achieves a throughput of over 280 Kops/sec under typical network performance, which is comparable to the best known partially synchronous solution.
Last updated:  2019-05-20
Digital Signatures for Consensus
Sergey Gorbunov, Hoeteck Wee
We present a pairing-based signature scheme for use in blockchains that achieves substantial savings in bandwidth and storage requirements while providing strong security guarantees. Our signature scheme supports aggregation on the same message, which allows us to compress multiple signatures on the same block during consensus, and achieves forward security, which prevents adaptive attacks on the blockchain. Our signature scheme can be applied to all blockchains that rely on multi-party consensus protocols to agree on blocks of transactions (such as proof-of-stake or permissioned blockchains).
Last updated:  2019-03-06
Lightweight Authentication for Low-End Control Units with Hardware Based Individual Keys*
Sergei Bauer, Martin Brunner, Peter Schartner
With increasing autonomous features of vehicles, key issues of robotic- and automotive engineering converge toward each other. Closing existing security gaps of device communication networks will be an enabling feature for connecting autonomously interacting systems in a more secure way. We introduce a novel approach for deriving a secret key using a lightweight cipher in the firmware of a low-end control unit. In this approach, we propose to use a non-standardized lightweight algorithm with unique hardware based parameters to prevent duplicate key generation. The randomness of the selected cipher was assessed by applying the NIST statistical test suite to produced key values. By evaluating the method on a typical low-end automotive platform, we could demonstrate the realistic applicability of the solution. The proposed method counteracts a known security issue in device communication between control units not only present in automotive solutions but also in the robotics domain. The security of the implemented solution has been compared to current automotive guidelines and recommendations for the security of resource constrained devices, also present in robotics. This approach allows low-end communication systems to be enhanced by message- and device authentication.
Last updated:  2019-05-02
Pushing the speed limit of constant-time discrete Gaussian sampling. A case study on Falcon.
Angshuman Karmakar, Sujoy Sinha Roy, Frederik Vercauteren, Ingrid Verbauwhede
Sampling from discrete Gaussian distribution has applications in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography. Several efficient solutions have been proposed in recent years. However, making a Gaussian sampler secure against timing attacks turned out to be a challenging research problem. In this work, we observed an important property of the input random bit strings that generate samples in Knuth-Yao sampling. We delineate a generic step-by-step method to instantiate a discrete Gaussian sampler of arbitrary standard deviation and precision by efficiently minimizing the Boolean expressions by exploiting this prop- erty. Discrete Gaussian samplers generated in this method can be up to 37% faster than the state of the art method. Finally, we show that the signing algorithm of post-quantum signature scheme Falcon using our constant-time sampler is at most 33% slower than the fastest non-constant time sampler.
Last updated:  2019-04-13
Fast constant-time gcd computation and modular inversion
Daniel J. Bernstein, Bo-Yin Yang
This paper introduces streamlined constant-time variants of Euclid's algorithm, both for polynomial inputs and for integer inputs. As concrete applications, this paper saves time in (1) modular inversion for Curve25519, which was previously believed to be handled much more efficiently by Fermat's method, and (2) key generation for the ntruhrss701 and sntrup4591761 lattice-based cryptosystems.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
TEX - A Securely Scalable Trustless Exchange
Rami Khalil, Arthur Gervais, Guillaume Felley
Financial exchanges are typically built out of two trusted components: a trade matching and a trade settlement system. With the advent of decentralized ledgers, that perform transactions without a trusted intermediary, so called decentralized exchanges (DEX) emerged. Some DEXs propose to off-load trade order matching to a centralized system outside the blockchain to scale, but settle each trade trustlessly as an expensive on-chain transaction. While DEX are non-custodial, their order books remains trusted, a malicious exchange operator or miner could front-run trades --- i.e. alter trade order execution for financial gain. The scalability limitations of the settlement layer (e.g. Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains) moreover hinders the practical growth of such DEX architectures. We propose TEX, a front-running resilient, non-custodial centralized exchange. Our matching system enforces the trade order sequence provided by traders, i.e. is resilient against trade sequence alteration by the exchange operator. As such the matching system can operate in conjunction with a blockchain based settlement layer (as proposed in the following), or make custodian exchanges provably accountable for their matching process. Our layer-two settlement system executes a trade without holding the assets, and allows to reach similar scales as traditional exchanges (trading volume in USD, number of trades/second), despite a slow underlying ledger. TEX might become a point of availability-failure, but we show how the settlement system's security properties would not compromise the trader's assets, even if the centralized operator is compromised and/or colludes with all other traders. We provide an evaluation on a PoW blockchain.
Last updated:  2019-08-20
Unifying computational entropies via Kullback-Leibler divergence
Rohit Agrawal, Yi-Hsiu Chen, Thibaut Horel, Salil Vadhan
We introduce hardness in relative entropy, a new notion of hardness for search problems which on the one hand is satisfied by all one-way functions and on the other hand implies both next-block pseudoentropy and inaccessible entropy, two forms of computational entropy used in recent constructions of pseudorandom generators and statistically hiding commitment schemes, respectively. Thus, hardness in relative entropy unifies the latter two notions of computational entropy and sheds light on the apparent "duality" between them. Additionally, it yields a more modular and illuminating proof that one-way functions imply next-block inaccessible entropy, similar in structure to the proof that one-way functions imply next-block pseudoentropy (Vadhan and Zheng, STOC '12).
Last updated:  2019-03-06
Monoxide: Scale Out Blockchain with Asynchronous Consensus Zones
Jiaping Wang, Hao Wang
Cryptocurrencies have provided a promising infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments. However, low throughput has significantly hindered the scalability and usability of cryptocurrency systems for increasing numbers of users and transactions. Another obstacle to achieving scalability is the requirement for every node to duplicate the communication, storage, and state representation of the entire network. In this paper, we introduce the Asynchronous Consensus Zones, which scales blockchain system linearly without compromising decentralization or security. We achieve this by running multiple independent and parallel instances of single-chain consensus systems termed as zones. The consensus happens independently within each zone with minimized communication, which partitions the workload of the entire network and ensures a moderate burden for each individual node as the network grows. We propose eventual atomicity to ensure transaction atomicity across zones, which achieves the efficient completion of transactions without the overhead of a two-phase commit protocol. Additionally, we propose Chu-ko-nu mining to ensure the effective mining power in each zone to be at the same level of the entire network, making an attack on any individual zone as hard as that on the full network. Our experimental results show the effectiveness of our work: on a testbed including 1,200 virtual machines worldwide to support 48,000 nodes, our system delivers 1,000x throughput and 2,000x capacity over the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
Revisiting Post-Quantum Fiat-Shamir
Qipeng Liu, Mark Zhandry
The Fiat-Shamir transformation is a useful approach to building non-interactive arguments (of knowledge) in the random oracle model. Unfortunately, existing proof techniques are incapable of proving the security of Fiat-Shamir in the quantum setting. The problem stems from (1) the difficulty of quantum rewinding, and (2) the inability of current techniques to adaptively program random oracles in the quantum setting. In this work, we show how to overcome the limitations above in many settings. In particular, we give mild conditions under which Fiat-Shamir is secure in the quantum setting. As an application, we show that existing lattice signatures based on Fiat-Shamir are secure without any modifications.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
Forward-Secure Multi-Signatures
Manu Drijvers, Gregory Neven
Multi-signatures allow a group of signers to jointly sign a message in a compact and efficiently verifiable signature, ideally independent of the number of signers in the group. We present the first provably secure forward-secure multi-signature scheme by deriving a forward-secure signature scheme from the hierarchical identity-based encryption of Boneh, Boyen, and Goh (Eurocrypt 2005) and showing how the signatures in that scheme can be securely composed. Multi-signatures in our scheme contain just two group elements (one from each of the base groups) and require one exponentation and three pairing computations to verify.
Last updated:  2024-03-10
A Modular Treatment of Blind Signatures from Identification Schemes
Eduard Hauck, Eike Kiltz, and Julian Loss
We propose a modular security treatment of blind signatures derived from linear identification schemes in the random oracle model. To this end, we present a general framework that captures several well known schemes from the literature and allows to prove their security. Our modular security reduction introduces a new security notion for identification schemes called One-More-Man In the Middle Security which we show equivalent to the classical One-More-Unforgeability notion for blind signatures. We also propose a generalized version of the Forking Lemma due to Bellare and Neven (CCS 2006) and show how it can be used to greatly improve the understandability of the classical security proofs for blind signatures schemes by Pointcheval and Stern (Journal of Cryptology 2000).
Last updated:  2019-03-06
A Practical Method to Recover Exact Superpoly in Cube Attack
SenPeng Wang, Bin Hu, Jie Guan, Kai Zhang, TaiRong Shi
Cube attack is an important cryptanalytic technique against symmetric cryptosystems, especially for stream ciphers. The key step in cube attack is recovering superpoly. However, when cube size is large, the large time complexity of recovering the exact algebraic normal form (ANF) of superpoly confines cube attack. At CRYPTO 2017, Todo et al. applied conventional bit-based division property (CBDP) into cube attack which could exploit large cube sizes. However, CBDP based cube attacks cannot ensure that the superpoly of a cube is non-constant. Hence the key recovery attack may be just a distinguisher. Moreover, CBDP based cube attacks can only recover partial ANF coefficients of superpoly. The time complexity of recovering the reminding ANF coefficients is very large, because it has to query the encryption oracle and sum over the cube set. To overcome these limits, in this paper, we propose a practical method to recover the ANF coefficients of superpoly. This new method is developed based on bit-based division property using three subsets (BDPT) proposed by Todo at FSE 2016. We apply this new method to reduced-round Trivium. To be specific, the time complexity of recovering the superpoly of 832-round Trivium at CRYPTO 2017 is reduced from $2^{77}$ to practical, and the time complexity of recovering the superpoly of 839-round Trivium at CRYPTO 2018 is reduced from $2^{79}$ to practical. Then, we propose a theoretical attack which can recover the superpoly of Trivium up to 842 round. As far as we know, this is the first time that the superpoly can be recovered for Trivium up to 842 rounds.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
Tight Time-Memory Trade-offs for Symmetric Encryption
Joseph Jaeger, Stefano Tessaro
Concrete security proofs give upper bounds on the attacker's advantage as a function of its time/query complexity. Cryptanalysis suggests however that other resource limitations - most notably, the attacker's memory - could make the achievable advantage smaller, and thus these proven bounds too pessimistic. Yet, handling memory limitations has eluded existing security proofs. This paper initiates the study of time-memory trade-offs for basic symmetric cryptography. We show that schemes like counter-mode encryption, which are affected by the Birthday Bound, become more secure (in terms of time complexity) as the attacker's memory is reduced. One key step of this work is a generalization of the Switching Lemma: For adversaries with $S$ bits of memory issuing $q$ distinct queries, we prove an $n$-to-$n$ bit random function indistinguishable from a permutation as long as $S \times q \ll 2^n$. This result assumes a combinatorial conjecture, which we discuss, and implies right away trade-offs for deterministic, stateful versions of CTR and OFB encryption. We also show an unconditional time-memory trade-off for the security of randomized CTR based on a secure PRF. Via the aforementioned conjecture, we extend the result to assuming a PRP instead, assuming only one-block messages are encrypted. Our results solely rely on standard PRF/PRP security of an underlying block cipher. We frame the core of our proofs within a general framework of indistinguishability for streaming algorithms which may be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2021-06-25
Uncloneable Quantum Encryption via Oracles
Anne Broadbent, Sébastien Lord
Quantum information is well-known to achieve cryptographic feats that are unattainable using classical information alone. Here, we add to this repertoire by introducing a new cryptographic functionality called uncloneable encryption. This functionality allows the encryption of a classical message such that two collaborating but isolated adversaries are prevented from simultaneously recovering the message, even when the encryption key is revealed. Clearly, such functionality is unattainable using classical information alone. We formally define uncloneable encryption, and show how to achieve it using Wiesner's conjugate coding, combined with a quantum-secure pseudorandom function (qPRF). Modelling the qPRF as an oracle, we show security by adapting techniques from the quantum one-way-to-hiding lemma, as well as using bounds from quantum monogamy-of-entanglement games.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
DLCT: A New Tool for Differential-Linear Cryptanalysis
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Achiya Bar-On, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Ariel Weizman
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Differential cryptanalysis and linear cryptanalysis are the two best-known techniques for cryptanalysis of block ciphers. In 1994, Langford and Hellman introduced the differential-linear (DL) attack based on dividing the attacked cipher $E$ into two subciphers $E_0$ and $E_1$ and combining a differential characteristic for $E_0$ with a linear approximation for $E_1$ into an attack on the entire cipher $E$. The DL technique was used to mount the best known attacks against numerous ciphers, including the AES finalist Serpent, ICEPOLE, COCONUT98, Chaskey, CTC2, and 8-round DES. Several papers aimed at formalizing the DL attack, and formulating assumptions under which its complexity can be estimated accurately. These culminated in a recent work of Blondeau, Leander, and Nyberg (Journal of Cryptology, 2017) which obtained an accurate expression under the sole assumption that the two subciphers $E_0$ and $E_1$ are independent. In this paper we show that in many cases, dependency between the two subcipher s significantly affects the complexity of the DL attack, and in particular, can be exploited by the adversary to make the attack more efficient. We present the Differential-Linear Connectivity Table (DLCT) which allows us to take into account the dependency between the two subciphers, and to choose the differential characteristic in $E_0$ and the linear approximation in $E_1$ in a way that takes advantage of this dependency. We then show that the DLCT can be constructed efficiently using the Fast Fourier Transform. Finally, we demonstrate the strength of the DLCT by using it to improve differential-linear attacks on ICEPOLE and on 8-round DES, and to explain published experimental results on Serpent and on the CAESAR finalist Ascon which did not comply with the standard differential-linear framework.
Last updated:  2020-06-02
Designated Verifier/Prover and Preprocessing NIZKs from Diffie-Hellman Assumptions
Shuichi Katsumata, Ryo Nishimaki, Shota Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa
In a non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof, a prover can non-interactively convince a verifier of a statement without revealing any additional information. Thus far, numerous constructions of NIZKs have been provided in the common reference string (CRS) model (CRS-NIZK) from various assumptions, however, it still remains a long standing open problem to construct them from tools such as pairing-free groups or lattices. Recently, Kim and Wu (CRYPTO'18) made great progress regarding this problem and constructed the first lattice-based NIZK in a relaxed model called NIZKs in the preprocessing model (PP-NIZKs). In this model, there is a trusted statement-independent preprocessing phase where secret information are generated for the prover and verifier. Depending on whether those secret information can be made public, PP-NIZK captures CRS-NIZK, designated-verifier NIZK (DV-NIZK), and designated-prover NIZK (DP-NIZK) as special cases. It was left as an open problem by Kim and Wu whether we can construct such NIZKs from weak paring-free group assumptions such as DDH. As a further matter, all constructions of NIZKs from Diffie-Hellman (DH) type assumptions (regardless of whether it is over a paring-free or paring group) require the proof size to have a multiplicative-overhead $|C| \cdot \mathsf{poly}(\kappa)$, where $|C|$ is the size of the circuit that computes the $\mathbf{NP}$ relation. In this work, we make progress of constructing (DV, DP, PP)-NIZKs with varying flavors from DH-type assumptions. Our results are summarized as follows: 1. DV-NIZKs for $\mathbf{NP}$ from the CDH assumption over pairing-free groups. This is the first construction of such NIZKs on pairing-free groups and resolves the open problem posed by Kim and Wu (CRYPTO'18). 2. DP-NIZKs for $\mathbf{NP}$ with short proof size from a DH-type assumption over pairing groups. Here, the proof size has an additive-overhead $|C|+\mathsf{poly}(\kappa)$ rather then an multiplicative-overhead $|C| \cdot \mathsf{poly}(\kappa)$. This is the first construction of such NIZKs (including CRS-NIZKs) that does not rely on the LWE assumption, fully-homomorphic encryption, indistinguishability obfuscation, or non-falsifiable assumptions. 3. PP-NIZK for $\mathbf{NP}$ with short proof size from the DDH assumption over pairing-free groups. This is the first PP-NIZK that achieves a short proof size from a weak and static DH-type assumption such as DDH. Similarly to the above DP-NIZK, the proof size is $|C|+\mathsf{poly}(\kappa)$. This too serves as a solution to the open problem posed by Kim and Wu (CRYPTO'18). Along the way, we construct two new homomorphic authentication (HomAuth) schemes which may be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
A Quantum-Proof Non-Malleable Extractor With Application to Privacy Amplification against Active Quantum Adversaries
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Divesh Aggarwal, Kai-Min Chung, Han-Hsuan Lin, Thomas Vidick
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In privacy amplification, two mutually trusted parties aim to amplify the secrecy of an initial shared secret X in order to establish a shared private key K by exchanging messages over an insecure communication channel. If the channel is authenticated the task can be solved in a single round of communication using a strong randomness extractor; choosing a quantum-proof extractor allows one to establish security against quantum adversaries. In the case that the channel is not authenticated, this simple solution is no longer secure. Nevertheless, Dodis and Wichs (STOC'09) showed that the problem can be solved in two rounds of communication using a non-malleable extractor, a stronger pseudo-random construction than a strong extractor. We give the first construction of a non-malleable extractor that is secure against quantum adversaries. The extractor is based on a construction by Li (FOCS'12), and is able to extract from source of min-entropy rates larger than 1/2. Combining this construction with a quantum-proof variant of the reduction of Dodis and Wichs, due to Cohen and Vidick (unpublished) we obtain the first privacy amplification protocol secure against active quantum adversaries.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Founding Secure Computation on Blockchains
Arka Rai Choudhuri, Vipul Goyal, Abhishek Jain
We study the foundations of secure computation in the blockchain-hybrid model, where a blockchain -- modeled as a global functionality -- is available as an Oracle to all the participants of a cryptographic protocol. We demonstrate both destructive and constructive applications of blockchains: - We show that classical rewinding-based simulation techniques used in many security proofs fail against blockchain-active adversaries that have read and post access to a global blockchain. In particular, we show that zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs with black-box simulation are impossible against blockchain-active adversaries. - Nevertheless, we show that achieving security against blockchain-active adversaries is possible if the honest parties are also blockchain active. We construct an $\omega(1)$-round ZK protocol with black-box simulation. We show that this result is tight by proving the impossibility of constant-round ZK with black-box simulation. - Finally, we demonstrate a novel application of blockchains to overcome the known impossibility results for concurrent secure computation in the plain model. We construct a concurrent self-composable secure computation protocol for general functionalities in the blockchain-hybrid model based on standard cryptographic assumptions. We develop a suite of techniques for constructing secure protocols in the blockchain-hybrid model that we hope will find applications to future research in this area.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Reversible Proofs of Sequential Work
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Hamza Abusalah, Chethan Kamath, Karen Klein, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michael Walter
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Proofs of sequential work (PoSW) are proof systems where a prover, upon receiving a statement $\chi$ and a time parameter $T$ computes a proof $\phi(\chi,T)$ which is efficiently and publicly verifiable. The proof can be computed in $T$ sequential steps, but not much less, even by a malicious party having large parallelism. A PoSW thus serves as a proof that $T$ units of time have passed since $\chi$ was received. PoSW were introduced by Mahmoody, Moran and Vadhan [MMV11], a simple and practical construction was only recently proposed by Cohen and Pietrzak [CP18]. In this work we construct a new simple PoSW in the random permutation model which is almost as simple and efficient as [CP18] but conceptually very different. Whereas the structure underlying [CP18] is a hash tree, our construction is based on skip lists and has the interesting property that computing the PoSW is a reversible computation. The fact that the construction is reversible can potentially be used for new applications like constructing \emph{proofs of replication}. We also show how to ``embed" the sloth function of Lenstra and Weselowski [LW17] into our PoSW to get a PoSW where one additionally can verify correctness of the output much more efficiently than recomputing it (though recent constructions of ``verifiable delay functions" subsume most of the applications this construction was aiming at).
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Consensus through Herding
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T-H. Hubert Chan, Rafael Pass, Elaine Shi
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State Machine Replication (SMR) is an important abstraction for a set of nodes to agree on an ever-growing, linearly-ordered log of transactions. In decentralized cryptocurrency applications, we would like to design SMR protocols that 1) resist adaptive corruptions; and 2) achieve small bandwidth and small confirmation time. All past approaches towards constructing SMR fail to achieve either small confirmation time or small bandwidth under adaptive corruptions (without resorting to strong assumptions such as the erasure model or proof-of-work). We propose a novel paradigm for reaching consensus that departs significantly from classical approaches. Our protocol is inspired by a social phenomenon called herding, where people tend to make choices considered as the social norm. In our consensus protocol, leader election and voting are coalesced into a single (randomized) process: in every round, every node tries to cast a vote for what it views as the {\it most popular} item so far: such a voting attempt is not always successful, but rather, successful with a certain probability. Importantly, the probability that the node is elected to vote for $v$ is independent from the probability it is elected to vote for $v' \neq v$. We will show how to realize such a distributed, randomized election process using appropriate, adaptively secure cryptographic building blocks. We show that amazingly, not only can this new paradigm achieve consensus (e.g., on a batch of unconfirmed transactions in a cryptocurrency system), but it also allows us to derive the first SMR protocol which, even under adaptive corruptions, requires only polylogarithmically many rounds and polylogarithmically many honest messages to be multicast to confirm each batch of transactions; and importantly, we attain these guarantees under standard cryptographic assumptions.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Function-Dependent Commitments from Homomorphic Authenticators
Lucas Schabhüser, Denis Butin, Johannes Buchmann
In cloud computing, delegated computing raises the security issue of guaranteeing data authenticity during a remote computation. In this context, the recently introduced function-dependent commitments (FDCs) are the only approach providing both fast correctness verification, information-theoretic input-output privacy, and strong unforgeability. Homomorphic authenticators--- the established approach to this problem ---do not provide information-theoretic privacy and always reveal the computation's result upon verification, thus violating output privacy. Since many homomorphic authenticator schemes already exist, we investigate the relation between them and FDCs to clarify how existing schemes can be supplemented with information-theoretic output privacy. Specifically, we present a generic transformation turning any structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme into an FDC scheme. This facilitates the design of multi-party computation schemes with full information-theoretic privacy. We also introduce a new structure-preserving, linearly homomorphic authenticator scheme suitable for our transformation. It is the first both context hiding and structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme. Our scheme is also the first structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme to achieve efficient verification.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Revisiting Variable Output Length XOR Pseudorandom Function
Srimanta Bhattacharya, Mridul Nandi
Let $\sigma$ be some positive integer and $\mathcal{C} \subseteq \{(i,j): 1 \leq i < j \leq \sigma \}$. The theory behind finding a lower bound on the number of distinct blocks $P_1, \ldots, P_{\sigma} \in \{0,1\}^n$ satisfying a set of linear equations $\{ P_i \oplus P_j = c_{i,j} : (i,j) \in \mathcal{C} \}$ for some $c_{i,j} \in \{0,1\}^n$, is called {\em mirror theory}. Patarin introduced the mirror theory and provided a proof for this. However, the proof, even for a special class of equations, is complex and contains several non-trivial gaps. As an application of mirror theory, $XORP[w]$ (known as XOR construction) which returns $(w-1)$-block output, is a {\em pseudorandom function} (PRF) for some parameter $w$, called {\em width}. The XOR construction can be seen as a basic structure of some encryption algorithms, e.g., the CENC encryption and the CHM authenticated encryption, proposed by Iwata in 2006. Due to potential application of $XORP[w]$ and the nontrivial gaps in the proof of mirror theory, an alternative simpler analysis of the PRF-security of $XORP[w]$ would be much desired. Recently (in Crypto 2017), Dai {\em et al.} have introduced a tool, called the $\chi^2$ method, for analyzing PRF-security. Using this tool, the authors have provided a proof of the PRF-security of $XORP[2]$ without relying on the mirror theory. In this paper, we resolve the general case; we apply the $\chi^2$ method to obtain {\em a simpler security proof of $XORP[w]$ for any $w \geq 2$}. For $w =2$, we obtain {\em a tighter bound for a wider range of parameters} than that of Dai {\em et al.}. Moreover, we consider variable width construction $XORP[*]$ (in which the widths are chosen by the adversary adaptively), and also provide {\em variable output length pseudorandom function} (VOLPRF) security analysis for it. As an application of VOLPRF, we propose {\em an authenticated encryption which is a simple variant of CHM or AES-GCM and provides much higher security} than those at the cost of one extra blockcipher call for every message.
Last updated:  2019-03-12
Preimage Attacks on Round-reduced Keccak-224/256 via an Allocating Approach
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Ting Li, Yao Sun
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We present new preimage attacks on standard Keccak-224 and Keccak-256 that are reduced to 3 and 4 rounds. An allocating approach is used in the attacks, and the whole complexity is allocated to two stages, such that fewer constraints are considered and the complexity is lowered in each stage. Specifically, we are trying to find a 2-block preimage, instead of a 1-block one, for a given hash value, and the first and second message blocks are found in two stages, respectively. Both the message blocks are constrained by a set of newly proposed conditions on the middle state, which are weaker than those brought by the initial values and the hash values. Thus, the complexities in the two stages are both lower than that of finding a 1-block preimage directly. Together with the basic allocating approach, an improved method is given to balance the complexities of two stages, and hence, obtains the optimal attacks. As a result, we present the best theoretical preimage attacks on Keccak-224 and Keccak-256 that are reduced to 3 and 4 rounds. Moreover, we practically found a (second) preimage for 3-round Keccak-224 with a complexity of 2^{39.39}.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Verifier-on-a-Leash: new schemes for verifiable delegated quantum computation, with quasilinear resources
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Andrea Coladangelo, Alex B. Grilo, Stacey Jeffery, Thomas Vidick
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The problem of reliably certifying the outcome of a computation performed by a quantum device is rapidly gaining relevance. We present two protocols for a classical verifier to verifiably delegate a quantum computation to two non-communicating but entangled quantum provers. Our protocols have near-optimal complexity in terms of the total resources employed by the verifier and the honest provers, with the total number of operations of each party, including the number of entangled pairs of qubits required of the honest provers, scaling as O ( g log g ) for delegating a circuit of size g. This is in contrast to previous protocols, whose overhead in terms of resources employed, while polynomial, is far beyond what is feasible in practice. Our first protocol requires a number of rounds that is linear in the depth of the circuit being delegated, and is blind, meaning neither prover can learn the circuit or its input. The second protocol is not blind, but requires only a constant number of rounds of interaction. Our main technical innovation is an efficient rigidity theorem which allows a verifier to test that two entangled provers perform measurements specified by an arbitrary m-qubit tensor product of single-qubit Clifford observables on their respective halves of m shared EPR pairs, with a robustness that is independent of m. Our two-prover classical-verifier delegation protocols are obtained by combining this rigidity theorem with a single-prover quantum-verifier protocol for the verifiable delegation of a quantum computation, introduced by Broadbent.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Towards optimal robust secret sharing with security against a rushing adversary
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Serge Fehr, Chen Yuan
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Robust secret sharing enables the reconstruction of a secret-shared message in the presence of up to $t$ (out of $n$) {\em incorrect} shares. The most challenging case is when $n = 2t+1$, which is the largest $t$ for which the task is still possible, but only up to a small error probability $2^{- \kappa}$ and with some overhead in the share size. Recently, Bishop, Pastro, Rajaraman and Wichs proposed a scheme with an (almost) optimal overhead of $\widetilde{O}(\kappa)$. This seems to answer the open question posed by Cevallos et al. who proposed a scheme with overhead of $\widetilde{O}(n+\kappa)$ and asked whether the linear dependency on $n$ was necessary or not. However, a subtle issue with Bishop et al.'s solution is that it (implicitly) assumes a {\em non-rushing} adversary, and thus it satisfies a {\em weaker} notion of security compared to the scheme by Cevallos et al. or to the classical scheme by Rabin and BenOr. In this work, we almost close this gap. We propose a new robust secret sharing scheme that offers full security against a rushing adversary, and that has an overhead of $O(\kappa n^\varepsilon)$, where $\varepsilon > 0$ is arbitrary but fixed. This $n^\varepsilon$-factor is obviously worse than the $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$-factor hidden in the $\widetilde{O}$ notation of the scheme of Bishop et al., but it greatly improves on the linear dependency on $n$ of the best known scheme that features security against a rushing adversary. A small variation of our scheme has the same $\widetilde{O}(\kappa)$ overhead as the scheme of Bishop et al.\ {\em and} achieves security against a rushing adversary, but suffers from a (slightly) superpolynomial reconstruction complexity.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Distributed Differential Privacy via Shuffling
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Albert Cheu, Adam Smith, Jonathan Ullman, David Zeber, Maxim Zhilyaev
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We consider the problem of designing scalable, robust protocols for computing statistics about sensitive data. Specifically, we look at how best to design differentially private protocols in a distributed setting, where each user holds a private datum. The literature has mostly considered two models: the "central" model, in which a trusted server collects users' data in the clear, which allows greater accuracy; and the "local" model, in which users individually randomize their data, and need not trust the server, but accuracy is limited. Attempts to achieve the accuracy of the central model without a trusted server have so far focused on variants of cryptographic multiparty computation (MPC), which limits scalability. In this paper, we initiate the analytic study of a shuffled model for distributed differentially private algorithms, which lies between the local and central models. This simple-to-implement model, a special case of the ESA framework of (Bittau et al., SOSP 2017), augments the local model with an anonymous channel that randomly permutes a set of user-supplied messages. For sum queries, we show that this model provides the power of the central model while avoiding the need to trust a central server and the complexity of cryptographic secure function evaluation. More generally, we give evidence that the power of the shuffled model lies strictly between those of the central and local models: for a natural restriction of the model, we show that shuffled protocols for a widely studied selection problem require exponentially higher sample complexity than do central-model protocols.
Last updated:  2019-08-25
Attacks Only Get Better: How to Break FF3 on Large Domains
Viet Tung Hoang, David Miller, Ni Trieu
We improve the attack of Durak and Vaudenay (CRYPTO'17) on NIST Format-Preserving Encryption standard FF3, reducing the running time from $O(N^5)$ to $O(N^{17/6})$ for domain $Z_N \times Z_N$. Concretely, DV's attack needs about $2^{50}$ operations to recover encrypted 6-digit PINs, whereas ours only spends about $2^{30}$ operations. In realizing this goal, we provide a pedagogical example of how to use distinguishing attacks to speed up slide attacks. In addition, we improve the running time of DV's known-plaintext attack on 4-round Feistel of domain $Z_N \times Z_N$ from $O(N^3)$ time to just $O(N^{5/3})$ time. We also generalize our attacks to a general domain $Z_M \times Z_N$, allowing one to recover encrypted SSNs using about $2^{50}$ operations. Finally, we provide some proof-of-concept implementations to empirically validate our results.
Last updated:  2020-07-20
4-Round Luby-Rackoff Construction is a qPRP: Tight Quantum Security Bound
Akinori Hosoyamada, Tetsu Iwata
The Luby-Rackoff construction, or the Feistel construction, is one of the most important approaches to construct secure block ciphers from secure pseudorandom functions. The 3-round and 4-round Luby-Rackoff constructions are proven to be secure against chosen-plaintext attacks (CPAs) and chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCAs), respectively, in the classical setting. However, Kuwakado and Morii showed that a quantum superposed chosen-plaintext attack (qCPA) can distinguish the 3-round Luby-Rackoff construction from a random permutation in polynomial time. In addition, Ito et al. showed a quantum superposed chosen-ciphertext attack (qCCA) that distinguishes the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction. Since Kuwakado and Morii showed the result, a problem of much interest has been how many rounds are sufficient to achieve provable security against quantum query attacks. This paper answers this fundamental question by showing that 4-rounds suffice against qCPAs. Concretely, we prove that the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction is secure up to $O(2^{n/6})$ quantum queries. We also prove that the bound is tight by showing an attack that distinguishes the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction from a random permutation with $O(2^{n/6})$ quantum queries. Our result is the first to demonstrate the tight security of a typical block-cipher construction against quantum query attacks, without any algebraic assumptions. To give security proofs, we use an alternative formalization of Zhandry's compressed oracle technique.
Last updated:  2019-06-05
New Constructions of Reusable Designated-Verifier NIZKs
Alex Lombardi, Willy Quach, Ron D. Rothblum, Daniel Wichs, David J. Wu
Non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (NIZKs) for NP are an important cryptographic primitive, but we currently only have instantiations under a few specific assumptions. Notably, we are missing constructions from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption, the Diffie-Hellman (CDH/DDH) assumption, and the learning parity with noise (LPN) assumption. In this paper, we study a relaxation of NIZKs to the designated-verifier setting (DV-NIZK), where a trusted setup generates a common reference string together with a secret key for the verifier. We want reusable schemes, which allow the verifier to reuse the secret key to verify many different proofs, and soundness should hold even if the malicious prover learns whether various proofs are accepted or rejected. Such reusable DV-NIZKs were recently constructed under the CDH assumption, but it was open whether they can also be constructed under LWE or LPN. We also consider an extension of reusable DV-NIZKs to the malicious designated-verifier setting (MDV-NIZK). In this setting, the only trusted setup consists of a common random string. However, there is also an additional untrusted setup in which the verifier chooses a public/secret key needed to generate/verify proofs, respectively. We require that zero-knowledge holds even if the public key is chosen maliciously by the verifier. Such reusable MDV-NIZKs were recently constructed under the ``one-more CDH'' assumption, but constructions under CDH/LWE/LPN remained open. In this work, we give new constructions of (reusable) DV-NIZKs and MDV-NIZKs using generic primitives that can be instantiated under CDH, LWE, or LPN.
Last updated:  2019-03-13
Efficient Circuit-based PSI with Linear Communication
Benny Pinkas, Thomas Schneider, Oleksandr Tkachenko, Avishay Yanai
We present a new protocol for computing a circuit which implements the private set intersection functionality (PSI). Using circuits for this task is advantageous over the usage of specific protocols for PSI, since many applications of PSI do not need to compute the intersection itself but rather functions based on the items in the intersection. Our protocol is the first circuit-based PSI protocol to achieve linear communication complexity. It is also concretely more efficient than all previous circuit-based PSI protocols. For example, for sets of size 2^20 it improves the communication of the recent work of Pinkas et al. (EUROCRYPT’18) by more than 10 times, and improves the run time by a factor of 2.8x in the LAN setting, and by a factor of 5.8x in the WAN setting. Our protocol is based on the usage of a protocol for computing oblivious programmable pseudo-random functions (OPPRF), and more specifically on our technique to amortize the cost of batching together multiple invocations of OPPRF.
Last updated:  2019-07-19
Correlated-Source Extractors and Cryptography with Correlated-Random Tapes
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Vipul Goyal, Yifan Song
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In this paper, we consider the setting where a party uses correlated random tapes across multiple executions of a cryptographic algorithm. We ask if the security properties could still be preserved in such a setting. As examples, we introduce the notion of correlated-tape zero knowledge, and, correlated-tape multi-party computation, where, the zero-knowledge property, and, the ideal/real model security must still be preserved even if a party uses correlated random tapes in multiple executions. Our constructions are based on a new type of randomness extractor which we call correlated-source extractors. Correlated-source extractors can be seen as a dual of non-malleable extractors, and, allow an adversary to choose several tampering functions which are applied to the randomness source. Correlated-source extractors guarantee that even given the output of the extractor on the tampered sources, the output on the original source is still uniformly random. Given (seeded) correlated-source extractors, and, resettably-secure computation protocols, we show how to directly get a positive result for both correlated-tape zero-knowledge and correlated-tape multi-party computation in the CRS model. This is tight considering the known impossibility results on cryptography with imperfect randomness. Our main technical contribution is an explicit construction of a correlated-source extractor where the length of the seed is independent of the number of tamperings. Additionally, we also provide a (non-explicit) existential result for correlated source extractors with almost optimal parameters.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Cheaper Private Set Intersection via Differentially Private Leakage
Adam Groce, Peter Rindal, Mike Rosulek
In this work we demonstrate that allowing differentially private leakage can significantly improve the concrete performance of secure 2-party computation (2PC) protocols. Specifically, we focus on the private set intersection (PSI) protocol of Rindal and Rosulek (CCS 2017), which is the fastest PSI protocol with security against malicious participants. We show that if differentially private leakage is allowed, the cost of the protocol can be reduced by up to 63%, depending on the desired level of differential privacy. On the technical side, we introduce a security model for differentially-private leakage in malicious-secure 2PC. We also introduce two new and improved mechanisms for "differentially private histogram overestimates," the main technical challenge for differentially-private PSI.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Robust Encryption, Extended
Rémi Géraud, David Naccache, Răzvan Roşie
Robustness is a notion often tacitly assumed while working with encrypted data. Roughly speaking, it states that a ciphertext cannot be decrypted under different keys. Initially formalized in a public-key context, it has been further extended to key-encapsulation mechanisms, and more recently to pseudorandom functions, message authentication codes and authenticated encryption. In this work, we motivate the importance of establishing similar guarantees for functional encryption schemes, even under adversarially generated keys. Our main security notion is intended to capture the scenario where a ciphertext obtained under a master key (corresponding to Authority 1) is decrypted by functional keys issued under a different master key (Authority 2). Furthermore, we show there exist simple functional encryption schemes where robustness under adversarial key-generation is not achieved. As a secondary and independent result, we formalize robustness for digital signatures – a signature should not verify under multiple keys – and point out that certain signature schemes are not robust when the keys are adversarially generated. We present simple, generic transforms that turn a scheme into a robust one, while maintaining the original scheme’s security. For the case of public-key functional encryption, we look into ciphertext anonymity and provide a transform achieving it.
Last updated:  2019-09-27
Optimal Oblivious Priority Queues
Zahra Jafargholi, Kasper Green Larsen, Mark Simkin
In this work, we present the first asymptotically optimal oblivious priority queue, which matches the lower bound of Jacob, Larsen, and Nielsen (SODA'19). Our construction is conceptually simple, statistically secure, and has small hidden constants. We illustrate the power of our optimal oblivious priority queue by presenting a conceptually equally simple construction of statistically secure offline ORAMs with $O(\lg n)$ bandwidth overhead.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Designated-verifier pseudorandom generators, and their applications
Geoffroy Couteau, Dennis Hofheinz
We provide a generic construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) schemes. Our construction is a refinement of Dwork and Naor’s (FOCS 2000) implementation of the hidden bits model using verifiable pseudorandom generators (VPRGs). Our refinement simplifies their construction and relaxes the necessary assumptions considerably. As a result of this conceptual improvement, we obtain interesting new instantiations: – A designated-verifier NIZK (with unbounded soundness) based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem. If a pairing is available, this NIZK becomes publicly verifiable. This constitutes the first fully secure CDH-based designated-verifier NIZKs (and more generally, the first fully secure designated-verifier NIZK from a non-generic assumption which does not already imply publicly-verifiable NIZKs), and it answers an open problem recently raised by Kim and Wu (CRYPTO 2018). – A NIZK based on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption, and assuming a non-interactive witness-indistinguishable (NIWI) proof system for bounded distance decoding (BDD). This simplifies and improves upon a recent NIZK from LWE that assumes a NIZK for BDD (Rothblum et al., PKC 2019).
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Reusable Designated-Verifier NIZKs for all NP from CDH
Willy Quach, Ron D. Rothblum, Daniel Wichs
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZKs) are a fundamental cryptographic primitive. Despite a long history of research, we only know how to construct NIZKs under a few select assumptions, such as the hardness of factoring or using bilinear maps. Notably, there are no known constructions based on either the computational or decisional Diffie-Hellman (CDH/DDH) assumption without relying on a bilinear map. In this paper, we study a relaxation of NIZKs in the designated verifier setting (DV-NIZK), in which the public common-reference string is generated together with a secret key that is given to the verifier in order to verify proofs. In this setting, we distinguish between one-time and reusable schemes, depending on whether they can be used to prove only a single statement or arbitrarily many statements. For reusable schemes, the main difficulty is to ensure that soundness continues to hold even when the malicious prover learns whether various proofs are accepted or rejected by the verifier. One-time DV-NIZKs are known to exist for general NP statements assuming only public-key encryption. However, prior to this work, we did not have any construction of reusable DV-NIZKs for general NP statements from any assumption under which we didn't already also have standard NIZKs. In this work, we construct reusable DV-NIZKs for general NP statements under the CDH assumption, without requiring a bilinear map. Our construction is based on the hidden-bits paradigm, which was previously used to construct standard NIZKs. We define a cryptographic primitive called a hidden-bits generator (HBG), along with a designated-verifier variant (DV-HBG), which modularly abstract out how to use this paradigm to get both standard NIZKs and reusable DV-NIZKs. We construct a DV-HBG scheme under the CDH assumption by relying on techniques from the Cramer-Shoup hash-proof system, and this yields our reusable DV-NIZK for general NP statements under CDH. We also consider a strengthening of DV-NIZKs to the malicious designated-verifier setting (MDV-NIZK) where the setup consists of an honestly generated common random string and the verifier then gets to choose his own (potentially malicious) public/secret key pair to generate/verify proofs. We construct MDV-NIZKs under the ``one-more CDH'' assumption without relying on bilinear maps.
Last updated:  2021-08-23
On the Shortness of Vectors to be found by the Ideal-SVP Quantum Algorithm
Léo Ducas, Maxime Plançon, Benjamin Wesolowski
The hardness of finding short vectors in ideals of cyclotomic number fields (hereafter, Ideal-SVP) can serve as a worst-case assumption for numerous efficient cryptosystems, via the average-case problems Ring-SIS and Ring-LWE. For a while, it could be assumed the Ideal-SVP problem was as hard as the analog problem for general lattices (SVP), even when considering quantum algorithms. But in the last few years, a series of works has lead to a quantum algorithm for Ideal-SVP that outperforms what can be done for general SVP in certain regimes. More precisely, it was demonstrated (under certain hypotheses) that one can find in quantum polynomial time a vector longer by a factor at most $\alpha = \exp({\tilde O(n^{1/2})})$ than the shortest non-zero vector in a cyclotomic ideal lattice, where $n$ is the dimension. In this work, we explore the constants hidden behind this asymptotic claim. While these algorithms have quantum steps, the steps that impact the approximation factor $\alpha$ are entirely classical, which allows us to estimate it experimentally using only classical computing. Moreover, we design heuristic improvements for those steps that significantly decrease the hidden factors in practice. Finally, we derive new provable effective lower bounds based on volumetric arguments. This study allows to predict the crossover point with classical lattice reduction algorithms, and thereby determine the relevance of this quantum algorithm in any cryptanalytic context. For example we predict that this quantum algorithm provides shorter vectors than BKZ-300 (roughly the weakest security level of NIST lattice-based candidates) for cyclotomic rings of rank larger than about $24000$.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Unbounded Dynamic Predicate Compositions in Attribute-Based Encryption
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Nuttapong Attrapadung
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We present several transformations that combine a set of attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for simpler predicates into a new ABE scheme for more expressive composed predicates. Previous proposals for predicate compositions of this kind, the most recent one being that of Ambrona et.al. at Crypto'17, can be considered static (or partially dynamic), meaning that the policy (or its structure) that specifies a composition must be fixed at the setup. Contrastingly, our transformations are dynamic and unbounded: they allow a user to specify an arbitrary and unbounded-size composition policy right into his/her own key or ciphertext. We propose transformations for three classes of composition policies, namely, the classes of any monotone span programs, any branching programs, and any deterministic finite automata. These generalized policies are defined over arbitrary predicates, hence admitting modular compositions. One application from modularity is a new kind of ABE for which policies can be ``nested'' over ciphertext and key policies. As another application, we achieve the first fully secure completely unbounded key-policy ABE for non-monotone span programs, in a modular and clean manner, under the q-ratio assumption. Our transformations work inside a generic framework for ABE called symbolic pair encoding, proposed by Agrawal and Chase at Eurocrypt'17. At the core of our transformations, we observe and exploit an unbounded nature of the symbolic property so as to achieve unbounded-size policy compositions.
Last updated:  2019-03-01
On Quantum Advantage in Information Theoretic Single-Server PIR
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Dorit Aharonov, Zvika Brakerski, Kai-Min Chung, Ayal Green, Ching-Yi Lai, Or Sattath
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In (single-server) Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a server holds a large database $DB$ of size $n$, and a client holds an index $i \in [n]$ and wishes to retrieve $DB[i]$ without revealing $i$ to the server. It is well known that information theoretic privacy even against an ``honest but curious'' server requires $\Omega(n)$ communication complexity. This is true even if quantum communication is allowed and is due to the ability of such an adversarial server to execute the protocol on a superposition of databases instead of on a specific database (``input purification attack''). Nevertheless, there have been some proposals of protocols that achieve sub-linear communication and appear to provide some notion of privacy. Most notably, a protocol due to Le Gall (ToC 2012) with communication complexity $O(\sqrt{n})$, and a protocol by Kerenidis et al. (QIC 2016) with communication complexity $O(\log(n))$, and $O(n)$ shared entanglement. We show that, in a sense, input purification is the only potent adversarial strategy, and protocols such as the two protocols above are secure in a restricted variant of the quantum honest but curious (a.k.a specious) model. More explicitly, we propose a restricted privacy notion called \emph{anchored privacy}, where the adversary is forced to execute on a classical database (i.e. the execution is anchored to a classical database). We show that for measurement-free protocols, anchored security against honest adversarial servers implies anchored privacy even against specious adversaries. Finally, we prove that even with (unlimited) pre-shared entanglement it is impossible to achieve security in the standard specious model with sub-linear communication, thus further substantiating the necessity of our relaxation. This lower bound may be of independent interest (in particular recalling that PIR is a special case of Fully Homomorphic Encryption).
Last updated:  2023-10-06
Secret-Sharing Schemes for General and Uniform Access Structures
Benny Applebaum, Amos Beimel, Oriol Farràs, Oded Nir, and Naty Peter
A secret-sharing scheme allows some authorized sets of parties to reconstruct a secret; the collection of authorized sets is called the access structure. For over 30 years, it was known that any (monotone) collection of authorized sets can be realized by a secret-sharing scheme whose shares are of size $2^{n-o(n)}$ and until recently no better scheme was known. In a recent breakthrough, Liu and Vaikuntanathan (STOC 2018) have reduced the share size to $O(2^{0.994n})$. Our first contribution is improving the exponent of secret sharing down to $0.892$. For the special case of linear secret-sharing schemes, we get an exponent of $0.942$ (compared to $0.999$ of Liu and Vaikuntanathan). Motivated by the construction of Liu and Vaikuntanathan, we study secret-sharing schemes for uniform access structures. An access structure is $k$-uniform if all sets of size larger than $k$ are authorized, all sets of size smaller than $k$ are unauthorized, and each set of size $k$ can be either authorized or unauthorized. The construction of Liu and Vaikuntanathan starts from protocols for conditional disclosure of secrets, constructs secret-sharing schemes for uniform access structures from them, and combines these schemes in order to obtain secret-sharing schemes for general access structures. Our second contribution in this paper is constructions of secret-sharing schemes for uniform access structures. We achieve the following results: a) A secret-sharing scheme for $k$-uniform access structures for large secrets in which the share size is $O(k^2)$ times the size of the secret. b) A linear secret-sharing scheme for $k$-uniform access structures for a binary secret in which the share size is $\tilde{O}(2^{h(k/n)n/2})$ (where $h$ is the binary entropy function). By counting arguments, this construction is optimal (up to polynomial factors). c) A secret-sharing scheme for $k$-uniform access structures for a binary secret in which the share size is $kn\cdot2^{\tilde{O}(\sqrt{k \log n})}$. Our third contribution is a construction of ad-hoc PSM protocols, i.e., PSM protocols in which only a subset of the parties will compute a function on their inputs. This result is based on ideas we used in the construction of secret-sharing schemes for $k$-uniform access structures for a binary secret.
Last updated:  2019-09-11
Location, location, location: Revisiting modeling and exploitation for location-based side channel leakages
Christos Andrikos, Lejla Batina, Lukasz Chmielewski, Liran Lerman, Vasilios Mavroudis, Kostas Papagiannopoulos, Guilherme Perin, Giorgos Rassias, Alberto Sonnino
Near-field microprobes have the capability to isolate small regions of a chip surface and enable precise measurements with high spatial resolution. Being able to distinguish the activity of small regions has given rise to the location-based sidechannel attacks, which exploit the spatial dependencies of cryptographic algorithms in order to recover the secret key. Given the fairly uncharted nature of such leakages, this work revisits the location side-channel to broaden our modeling and exploitation capabilities. Our contribution is threefold. First, we provide a simple spatial model that partially captures the effect of location-based leakages. We use the newly established model to simulate the leakage of different scenarios/countermeasures and follow an information-theoretic approach to evaluate the security level achieved in every case. Second, we perform the first successful location-based attack on the SRAM of a modern ARM Cortex-M4 chip, using standard techniques such as difference of means and multivariate template attacks. Third, we put forward neural networks as classifiers that exploit the location side-channel and showcase their effectiveness on ARM Cortex-M4, especially in the context of single-shot attacks and small memory regions. Template attacks and neural network classifiers are able to reach high spacial accuracy, distinguishing between 2 SRAM regions of 128 bytes each with 100% success rate and distinguishing even between 256 SRAM byte-regions with 32% success rate. Such improved exploitation capabilities revitalize the interest for location vulnerabilities on various implementations, ranging from RSA/ECC with large memory footprint, to lookup-table-based AES with smaller memory usage.
Last updated:  2019-03-06
XOR-counts and lightweight multiplication with fixed elements in binary finite fields
Lukas Kölsch
XOR-metrics measure the efficiency of certain arithmetic operations in binary finite fields. We prove some new results about two different XOR-metrics that have been used in the past. In particular, we disprove an existing conjecture about those XOR-metrics. We consider implementations of multiplication with one fixed element in a binary finite field. Here we achieve a complete characterization of all elements whose multiplication matrix can be implemented using exactly 2 XOR-operations. Further, we provide new results and examples in more general cases, showing that significant improvements in implementations are possible.
Last updated:  2021-03-03
Session Resumption Protocols and Efficient Forward Security for TLS 1.3 0-RTT
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Nimrod Aviram, Kai Gellert, Tibor Jager
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The TLS 1.3 0-RTT mode enables a client reconnecting to a server to send encrypted application-layer data in "0-RTT" ("zero round-trip time"), without the need for a prior interactive handshake. This fundamentally requires the server to reconstruct the previous session's encryption secrets upon receipt of the client's first message. The standard techniques to achieve this are session caches or, alternatively, session tickets. The former provides forward security and resistance against replay attacks, but requires a large amount of server-side storage. The latter requires negligible storage, but provides no forward security and is known to be vulnerable to replay attacks. In this paper, we first formally define session resumption protocols as an abstract perspective on mechanisms like session caches and session tickets. We give a new generic construction that provably provides forward security and replay resilience, based on puncturable pseudorandom functions (PPRFs). This construction can immediately be used in TLS 1.3 0-RTT and deployed unilaterally by servers, without requiring any changes to clients or the protocol. We then describe two new constructions of PPRFs, which are particularly suitable for use for forward-secure and replay-resilient session resumption in TLS 1.3. The first construction is based on the strong RSA assumption. Compared to standard session caches, for "128-bit security" it reduces the required server storage by a factor of almost 20, when instantiated in a way such that key derivation and puncturing together are cheaper on average than one full exponentiation in an RSA group. Hence, a 1 GB session cache can be replaced with only about 51 MBs of storage, which significantly reduces the amount of secure memory required. For larger security parameters or in exchange for more expensive computations, even larger storage reductions are achieved. The second construction combines a standard binary tree PPRF with a new "domain extension" technique. For a reasonable choice of parameters, this reduces the required storage by a factor of up to 5 compared to a standard session cache. It employs only symmetric cryptography, is suitable for high-traffic scenarios, and can serve thousands of tickets per second.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Securing Update Propagation with Homomorphic Hashing
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Kevin Lewi, Wonho Kim, Ilya Maykov, Stephen Weis
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In database replication, ensuring consistency when propagating updates is a challenging and extensively studied problem. However, the problem of securing update propagation against malicious adversaries has received less attention in the literature. This consideration becomes especially relevant when sending updates across a large network of untrusted peers. In this paper we formalize the problem of secure update propagation and propose a system that allows a centralized distributor to propagate signed updates across a network while adding minimal overhead to each transaction. We show that our system is secure (in the random oracle model) against an attacker who can maliciously modify any update and its signature. Our approach relies on the use of a cryptographic primitive known as homomorphic hashing, introduced by Bellare, Goldreich, and Goldwasser. We make our study of secure update propagation concrete with an instantiation of the lattice-based homomorphic hash LtHash of Bellare and Miccancio. We provide a detailed security analysis of the collision resistance of LtHash, and we implement Lthash using a selection of parameters that gives at least 200 bits of security. Our implementation has been deployed to secure update propagation in production at Facebook, and is included in the Folly open-source library.
Last updated:  2020-08-20
Flyclient: Super-Light Clients for Cryptocurrencies
Benedikt Bünz, Lucianna Kiffer, Loi Luu, Mahdi Zamani
To validate transactions, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum require nodes to verify that a blockchain is valid. This entails downloading and verifying all blocks, taking hours and requiring gigabytes of bandwidth and storage. Hence, clients with limited resources cannot verify transactions independently without trusting full nodes. Bitcoin and Ethereum offer light clients known as simplified payment verification (SPV) clients, that can verify the chain by downloading only the block headers. Unfortunately, the storage and bandwidth requirements of SPV clients still increase linearly with the chain length. For example, as of July 2019, an SPV client in Ethereum needs to download and store about 4 GB of data. Recently, Kiayias et al. proposed a solution known as non-interactive proofs of proof-of-work (NIPoPoW) that allows a light client to download and store only a polylogarithmic number of block headers in expectation. Unfortunately, NIPoPoWs are succinct only as long as no adversary influences the honest chain, and can only be used in chains with fixed block difficulty, contrary to most cryptocurrencies which adjust block difficulty frequently according to the network hashrate. We introduce Flyclient, a novel transaction verification light client for chains of variable difficulty. Flyclient is efficient both asymptotically and practically and requires downloading only a logarithmic number of block headers while storing only a single block header between executions. Using an optimal probabilistic block sampling protocol and Merkle Mountain Range (MMR) commitments, Flyclient overcomes the limitations of NIPoPoWs and generates shorter proofs over all measured parameters. In Ethereum, Flyclient achieves a synchronization proof size of less than 500 KB which is roughly 6,600x smaller than SPV proofs. We finally discuss how Flyclient can be deployed with minimal changes to the existing cryptocurrencies via an uncontentious velvet fork.
Last updated:  2019-08-28
Leakage Resilience of the Duplex Construction
Christoph Dobraunig, Bart Mennink
Side-channel attacks, especially differential power analysis (DPA), pose a serious threat to cryptographic implementations deployed in a malicious environment. One way to counter side-channel attacks is to design cryptographic schemes to withstand them, an area that is covered amongst others by leakage resilient cryptography. So far, however, leakage resilient cryptography has predominantly focused on block cipher based designs, and insights in permutation based leakage resilient cryptography are scarce. In this work, we consider leakage resilience of the keyed duplex construction: we present a model for leakage resilient duplexing, derive a fine-grained bound on the security of the keyed duplex in said model, and map it to ideas of Taha and Schaumont (HOST 2014) and Dobraunig et al. (ToSC 2017) in order to use the duplex in a leakage resilient manner.
Last updated:  2019-07-08
Compact Adaptively Secure ABE for NC1 from k-Lin
Lucas Kowalczyk, Hoeteck Wee
We present compact attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for NC1 that are adaptively secure under the k-Lin assumption with polynomial security loss. Our KP-ABE scheme achieves ciphertext size that is linear in the atttribute length and independent of the policy size even in the many-use setting, and we achieve an analogous efficiency guarantee for CP-ABE. This resolves the central open problem posed by Lewko and Waters (CRYPTO 2011). Previous adaptively secure constructions either impose an attribute ``one-use restriction'' (or the ciphertext size grows with the policy size), or require q-type assumptions.
Last updated:  2020-07-24
Optimized Homomorphic Encryption Solution for Secure Genome-Wide Association Studies
Marcelo Blatt, Alexander Gusev, Yuriy Polyakov, Kurt Rohloff, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) refer to observational studies of a genome-wide set of genetic variants across many individuals to see if any genetic variants are associated with a certain trait. A typical GWAS analysis of a disease phenotype involves iterative logistic regression of a case/control phenotype on a single-neuclotide polymorphism (SNP) with quantitative covariates. GWAS have been a highly successful approach for identifying genetic-variant associations with many poorly-understood diseases. However, a major limitation of GWAS is the dependence on individual-level genotype/phenotype data and the corresponding privacy concerns. We present a solution for secure GWAS using homomorphic encryption (HE) that keeps all individual data encrypted throughout the association study. Our solution is based on an optimized semi-parallel GWAS compute model, a new Residue-Number-System (RNS) variant of the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) HE scheme, novel techniques to switch between data encodings, and more than a dozen crypto-engineering optimizations. Our prototype can perform the full GWAS computation for 1,000 individuals, 131,071 SNPs, and 3 covariates in about 10 minutes on a modern server computing node (with 28 cores). Our solution for a smaller dataset was awarded co-first place in iDASH'18 Track 2: ``Secure Parallel Genome Wide Association Studies using HE''. Many of the HE optimizations presented in our paper are general-purpose, and can be used in solving challenging problems with large datasets in other application domains.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
(R)CCA Secure Updatable Encryption with Integrity Protection
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Michael Klooß, Anja Lehmann, Andy Rupp
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An updatable encryption scheme allows a data host to update ciphertexts of a client from an old to a new key, given so-called update tokens from the client. Rotation of the encryption key is a common requirement in practice in order to mitigate the impact of key compromises over time. There are two incarnations of updatable encryption: One is ciphertext-dependent, i.e. the data owner has to (partially) download all of his data and derive a dedicated token per ciphertext. Everspaugh et al. (CRYPTO'17) proposed CCA and CTXT secure schemes in this setting. The other, more convenient variant is ciphertext-independent, i.e., it allows a single token to update all ciphertexts. However, so far, the broader functionality of tokens in this setting comes at the price of considerably weaker security: the existing schemes by Boneh et al. (CRYPTO'13) and Lehmann and Tackmann (EUROCRYPT'18) only achieve CPA security and provide no integrity protection. Arguably, when targeting the scenario of outsourcing data to an untrusted host, plaintext integrity should be a minimal security requirement. Otherwise, the data host may alter or inject ciphertexts arbitrarily. Indeed, the schemes from BLMR13 and LT18 suffer from this weakness, and even EPRS17 only provides integrity against adversaries which cannot arbitrarily inject ciphertexts. In this work, we provide the first ciphertext-independent updatable encryption schemes with security beyond \CPA, in particular providing strong integrity protection. Our constructions and security proofs of updatable encryption schemes are surprisingly modular. We give a generic transformation that allows key-rotation and confidentiality/integrity of the scheme to be treated almost separately, i.e., security of the updatable scheme is derived from simple properties of its static building blocks. An interesting side effect of our generic approach is that it immediately implies the unlinkability of ciphertext updates that was introduced as an essential additional property of updatable encryption by EPRS17 and LT18.
Last updated:  2019-04-25
Group Signatures without NIZK: From Lattices in the Standard Model
Shuichi Katsumata, Shota Yamada
In a group signature scheme, users can anonymously sign messages on behalf of the group they belong to, yet it is possible to trace the signer when needed. Since the first proposal of lattice-based group signatures in the random oracle model by Gordon, Katz, and Vaikuntanathan (ASIACRYPT 2010), the realization of them in the standard model from lattices has attracted much research interest, however, it has remained unsolved. In this paper, we make progress on this problem by giving the first such construction. Our schemes satisfy CCA-selfless anonymity and full traceability, which are the standard security requirements for group signatures proposed by Bellare, Micciancio, and Warinschi (EUROCRYPT 2003) with a slight relaxation in the anonymity requirement suggested by Camenisch and Groth (SCN 2004). We emphasize that even with this relaxed anonymity requirement, all previous group signature constructions rely on random oracles or NIZKs, where currently NIZKs are not known to be implied from lattice-based assumptions. We propose two constructions that provide tradeoffs regarding the security assumption and efficiency: - Our first construction is proven secure assuming the standard LWE and the SIS assumption. The sizes of the public parameters and the signatures grow linearly in the number of users in the system. - Our second construction is proven secure assuming the standard LWE and the subexponential hardness of the SIS problem. The sizes of the public parameters and the signatures are independent of the number of users in the system. Technically, we obtain the above schemes by combining a secret key encryption scheme with additional properties and a special type of attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme, thus bypassing the utilization of NIZKs. More specifically, we introduce the notion of \emph{indexed} ABS, which is a relaxation of standard ABS. The above two schemes are obtained by instantiating the indexed ABS with different constructions. One is a direct construction we propose and the other is based on previous work.
Last updated:  2019-06-01
Communication Lower Bounds for Statistically Secure MPC, with or without Preprocessing
Ivan Damgård, Kasper Green Larsen, Jesper Buus Nielsen
We prove a lower bound on the communication complexity of unconditionally secure multiparty computation, both in the standard model with $n=2t+1$ parties of which $t$ are corrupted, and in the preprocessing model with $n=t+1$. In both cases, we show that for any $g \in \mathbb{N}$ there exists a Boolean circuit $C$ with $g$ gates, where any secure protocol implementing $C$ must communicate $\Omega(n g)$ bits, even if only passive and statistical security is required. The results easily extends to constructing similar circuits over any fixed finite field. This shows that for all sizes of circuits, the $O(n)$ overhead of all known protocols when $t$ is maximal is inherent. It also shows that security comes at a price: the circuit we consider could namely be computed among $n$ parties with communication only $O(g)$ bits if no security was required. Our results extend to the case where the threshold $t$ is suboptimal. For the honest majority case, this shows that the known optimizations via packed secret-sharing can only be obtained if one accepts that the threshold is $t= (1/2 - c)n$ for a constant $c$. For the honest majority case, we also show an upper bound that matches the lower bound up to a constant factor (existing upper bounds are a factor $\log n$ off for Boolean circuits).
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Nitro Protocol
Tom Close
State channels are an important technique for scaling blockchains, allowing a fixed set of participants to jointly run an application in order to determine how a set of assets should be distributed between them. In this paper, we present a new protocol for constructing state channel networks, allowing state channels to be opened and closed without on-chain transactions and decreasing the number of deposits that need to be held. The protocol readily extends to $n$-party channels and we include the construction of a 3-party virtual channel.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Computational Limitations in Robust Classification and Win-Win Results
Akshay Degwekar, Vinod Vaikuntanathan
We continue the study of statistical/computational tradeoffs in learning robust classifiers, following the recent work of Bubeck, Lee, Price and Razenshteyn who showed examples of classification tasks where (a) an efficient robust classifier exists, *in the small-perturbation regime*; (b) a non-robust classifier can be learned efficiently; but (c) it is computationally hard to learn a robust classifier, assuming the hardness of factoring large numbers. Indeed, the question of whether a robust classifier for their task exists in the large perturbation regime seems related to important open questions in computational number theory. In this work, we extend their work in three directions. First, we demonstrate classification tasks where computationally efficient robust classification is impossible, even when computationally unbounded robust classifiers exist. We rely on the hardness of decoding problems with preprocessing on codes and lattices. Second, we show hard-to-robustly-learn classification tasks *in the large-perturbation regime*. Namely, we show that even though an efficient classifier that is very robust (namely, tolerant to large perturbations) exists, it is computationally hard to learn any non-trivial robust classifier. Our first task relies on the existence of one-way functions, a minimal assumption in cryptography, and the second on the hardness of the learning parity with noise problem. In the latter setting, not only does a non-robust classifier exist, but also an efficient algorithm that generates fresh new labeled samples given access to polynomially many training examples (termed as generation by Kearns et. al. (1994)). Third, we show that any such counterexample implies the existence of cryptographic primitives such as one-way functions or even forms of public-key encryption. This leads us to a win-win scenario: either we can quickly learn an efficient robust classifier, or we can construct new instances of popular and useful cryptographic primitives.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
A family of boolean functions with good cryptographic properties
Guillermo Sosa Gómez, Octavio Paez Osuna
In 2005, [2] Philippe Guillot presented a new construction of Boolean functions using linear codes as an extension of Maiorana-McFarland's construction of bent functions. In this paper, we study a new family of Boolean functions with cryptographically strong properties such as non- linearity, propagation criterion, resiliency and balance. The construction of cryptographically strong boolean functions is a daunting task and there is currently a wide range of algebraic techniques and heuristics for constructing such functions , however these methods can be complex, computationally difficult to implement and not always produce a sufficient variety of functions. We present in this paper a construction of Boolean functions using algebraic codes following Guillot's work.
Last updated:  2020-03-09
Round Optimal Secure Multiparty Computation from Minimal Assumptions
Arka Rai Choudhuri, Michele Ciampi, Vipul Goyal, Abhishek Jain, Rafail Ostrovsky
We construct a four round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocol in the plain model that achieves security against any dishonest majority. The security of our protocol relies only on the existence of four round oblivious transfer. This culminates the long line of research on constructing round-efficient MPC from minimal assumptions (at least w.r.t. black-box simulation).
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Approx-SVP in Ideal Lattices with Pre-processing
Alice Pellet-Mary, Guillaume Hanrot, Damien Stehlé
We describe an algorithm to solve the approximate Shortest Vector Problem for lattices corresponding to ideals of the ring of integers of an arbitrary number field $K$. This algorithm has a pre-processing phase, whose run-time is exponential in $\log |\Delta|$ with $\Delta$ the discriminant of $K$. Importantly, this pre-processing phase depends only on $K$. The pre-processing phase outputs an advice, whose bit-size is no more than the run-time of the query phase. Given this advice, the query phase of the algorithm takes as input any ideal $I$ of the ring of integers, and outputs an element of $I$ which is at most $\exp(\widetilde O((\log |\Delta|)^{\alpha+1}/n))$ times longer than a shortest non-zero element of $I$ (with respect to the Euclidean norm of its canonical embedding). This query phase runs in time and space $\exp(\widetilde O( (\log |\Delta|)^{\max(2/3, 1-2\alpha)}))$ in the classical setting, and $\exp(\widetilde O((\log |\Delta|)^{1-2\alpha}))$ in the quantum setting. The parameter $\alpha$ can be chosen arbitrarily in $[0,1/2]$. Both correctness and cost analyses rely on heuristic assumptions, whose validity is consistent with experiments. The algorithm builds upon the algorithms from Cramer al. [EUROCRYPT 2016] and Cramer et al. [EUROCRYPT 2017]. It relies on the framework from Buchmann [Séminaire de théorie des nombres 1990], which allows to merge them and to extend their applicability from prime-power cyclotomic fields to all number fields. The cost improvements are obtained by allowing precomputations that depend on the field only.
Last updated:  2019-03-19
Four-Round Secure Multiparty Computation from General Assumptions
Michele Ciampi, Rafail Ostrovsky
In this work we continue the study on the round complexity of secure multi-party computation with black-box simulation in the simultaneous broadcast model where all the parties get the output. In Eurocrypt 2016 Garg at al. show that four rounds are necessary to obtain a secure multi-party computation protocol for any function in the plain model. Many different works have tried to show that, relying on standard assumptions, four rounds are also sufficient for MPC. In Crypto 2017 Ananth et al. and in TCC 2017 Brakerski at al. propose a four-round protocol based on quasi-polynomial time number theoretic assumptions. In Crypto 2018 the two independent works of Badrinarayanan et al. and Halevi at al. show how reach the four-round barrier relying on number theoretic polynomial-time assumptions. In this work we propose a compiler that takes as input a three-round sub-exponentially secure oblivious transfer protocol, and outputs a four-round MPC protocol. Our compiler is also based on sub-exponentially secure two-round witness indistinguishable proof (zap). We also show how to obtain three-round OT assuming sub-exponentially secure trapdoor permutations and zap. As a corollary we obtain the first four-round MPC protocol that relies on general assumptions.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
On ELFs, Deterministic Encryption, and Correlated-Input Security
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Mark Zhandry
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We construct deterministic public key encryption secure for any constant number of arbitrarily correlated computationally unpredictable messages. Prior works required either random oracles or non-standard knowledge assumptions. In contrast, our constructions are based on the exponential hardness of DDH, which is plausible in elliptic curve groups. Our central tool is a new trapdoored extremely lossy function, which modifies extremely lossy functions by adding a trapdoor.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
A New Variant of the Winternitz One Time Signature Scheme Based on Graded Encoding Schemes
Hossein Oraei, Massoud Hadian Dehkordi
The Winternitz one-time signature (WOTS) scheme, which can be described using a certain number of so-called ``function chains", plays an important role in the design of both stateless and stateful many-time signature schemes. This work introduces WOTS^GES, a new WOTS type signature scheme in which the need for computing all of the intermediate values of the chains is eliminated. This significantly reduces the number of required operations needed to calculate the algorithms of WOTS^GES. To achieve this results, we have used the concept of ``leveled" multilinear maps which is also referred to as graded encoding schemes. In the context of provable security, we reduce the hardness of graded discrete-logarithm (GDL) problem to the EU-CMA security of WOTS^GES in the standard model.
Last updated:  2020-02-02
MonZa: Fast Maliciously Secure Two Party Computation on Z_{2^k}
Dario Catalano, Mario Di Raimondo, Dario Fiore, Irene Giacomelli
In this paper we present a new 2-party protocol for secure computation over rings of the form $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. As many recent efficient MPC protocols supporting dishonest majority, our protocol consists of a heavier (input-independent) pre-processing phase and a very efficient online stage. Our offline phase is similar to BeDOZa (Bendlin et al. Eurocrypt 2011) but employs Joye-Libert (JL, Eurocrypt 2013) as underlying homomorphic cryptosystem and, notably, it can be proven secure without resorting to the expensive sacrifice step. JL turns out to be particularly well suited for the ring setting as it naturally supports $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k} $ as underlying message space. Moreover, it enjoys several additional properties (such has valid ciphertext-verifiability and efficiency) that make it a very good fit for MPC in general. As a main technical contribution we show how to take advantage of all these properties (and of more properties that we introduce in this work, such as a ZK proof of correct multiplication) in order to design a two-party protocol that is efficient, fast and easy to implement in practice. Our solution is particularly well suited for relatively large choices of $k$ (e.g., $k=128$), but compares favorably with the state of the art solution of SPDZ2k (Cramer et al. Crypto 2018) already for the practically very relevant case of $k=64$.
Last updated:  2020-02-10
CRAFT: Lightweight Tweakable Block Cipher with Efficient Protection Against DFA Attacks
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Christof Beierle, Gregor Leander, Amir Moradi, Shahram Rasoolzadeh
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Traditionally, countermeasures against physical attacks are integrated into the implementation of cryptographic primitives after the algorithms have been designed for achieving a certain level of cryptanalytic security. This picture has been changed by the introduction of PICARO, ZORRO, and FIDES, where efficient protection against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) attacks has been considered in their design. In this work we present the tweakable block cipher CRAFT: the efficient protection of its implementations against Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks has been one of the main design criteria, while we provide strong bounds for its security in the related-tweak model. Considering the area footprint of round-based hardware implementations, CRAFT outperforms the other lightweight ciphers with the same state and key size. This holds not only for unprotected implementations but also when fault-detection facilities, side-channel protection, and their combination are integrated into the implementation. In addition to supporting a 64-bit tweak, CRAFT has the additional property that the circuit realizing the encryption can support the decryption functionality as well with very little area overhead.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
SoK: Peigen -- a Platform for Evaluation, Implementation, and Generation of S-boxes
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Zhenzhen Bao, Jian Guo, San Ling, Yu Sasaki
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In this paper, a platform named PEIGEN is presented to evaluate security, find efficient software/hardware implementations, and generate cryptographic S-boxes. Continuously developed for decades, S-boxes are constantly evolving in terms of the design criteria for both security requirements and software/hardware performances. PEIGEN is aimed to be a platform covering a comprehensive check-list of design criteria of S-boxes appearing in the literature. To do so, the security requirements are first intensively surveyed, existing tools of S-boxes are then comprehensively compared, and finally our platform PEIGEN is presented. The survey part is aimed to be a systematic reference for the theoretical study of S-boxes. The platform is aimed to be an assistant tool for the experimental study and practical use of S-boxes. PEIGEN not only integrates most of the features in existing tools, but also equips with functionalities to evaluate new security-related properties, improves the efficiency of the search algorithms for optimized implementations in several aspects. With the help of this powerful platform, many interesting observations are made in-between the security notations, as well as on the S-boxes used in the existing symmetric-key cryptographic primitives. PEIGEN will become an open platform and welcomes contributions from all parties to help the community to facilitate the research and use of S-boxes.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Related-Tweak Statistical Saturation Cryptanalysis and Its Application on QARMA
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Muzhou Li, Kai Hu, Meiqin Wang
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Statistical saturation attack takes advantage of a set of plaintext with some bits fixed while the others vary randomly, and then track the evolution of a non-uniform plaintext distribution through the cipher. Previous statistical saturation attacks are all implemented under single-key setting, and there is no public attack models under related-key/tweak setting. In this paper, we propose a new cryptanalytic method which can be seen as related-key/tweak statistical saturation attack by revealing the link between the related-key/tweak statistical saturation distinguishers and KDIB (Key Difference Invariant Bias) / TDIB (Tweak Difference Invariant Bias) ones. KDIB cryptanalysis was proposed by Bogdanov \emph{et al.} at ASIACRYPT'13 and utilizes the property that there can exist linear trails such that their biases are deterministically invariant under key difference. And this method can be easily extended to TDIB distinguishers if the tweak is also alternated. The link between them provides a new and more efficient way to find related-key/tweak statistical saturation distinguishers in ciphers. Thereafter, an automatic searching algorithm for KDIB/TDIB distinguishers is also given in this paper, which can be implemented to find word-level KDIB distinguishers for S-box based key-alternating ciphers. We apply this algorithm to \texttt{QARMA}-64 and give related-tweak statistical saturation attack for 10-round \texttt{QARMA}-64 with outer whitening key. Besides, an 11-round attack on \texttt{QARMA}-128 is also given based on the TDIB technique. Compared with previous public attacks on \texttt{QARMA} including outer whitening key, all attacks presented in this paper are the best ones in terms of the number of rounds.
Last updated:  2019-10-16
MArBled Circuits: Mixing Arithmetic and Boolean Circuits with Active Security
Dragos Rotaru, Tim Wood
Most modern actively-secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols involve generating random data that is secret-shared and authenticated, and using it to evaluate arithmetic or Boolean circuits in different ways. In this work we present a generic method for converting authenticated secret-shared data between different fields, and show how to use it to evaluate so-called ``mixed'' circuits with active security and in the full-threshold setting. A mixed circuit is one in which parties switch between different subprotocols dynamically as computation proceeds, the idea being that some protocols are more efficient for evaluating arithmetic circuits, and others for Boolean circuits. One use case of our switching mechanism is for converting between secret-sharing-based MPC and garbled circuits (GCs). The former is more suited to the evaluation of arithmetic circuits and can easily be used to emulate arithmetic over the integers, whereas the latter is better for Boolean circuits and has constant round complexity. Much work already exists in the two-party semi-honest setting, but the $n$-party dishonest majority case was hitherto neglected. We call the actively-secure mixed arithmetic/Boolean circuit a marbled circuit. Our implementation showed that mixing protocols in this way allows us to evaluate a linear Support Vector Machine with $400$ times fewer AND gates than a solution using GC alone albeit with twice the preprocessing required using only SPDZ (Damgård et al., CRYPTO '12), and thus our solution offers a tradeoff between online and preprocessing complexity. When evaluating over a WAN network, our online phase is $10$ times faster than the plain SPDZ protocol.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Fault Attack Countermeasures for Error Samplers in Lattice-Based Cryptography
James Howe, Ayesha Khalid, Marco Martinoli, Francesco Regazzoni, Elisabeth Oswald
Lattice-based cryptography is one of the leading candidates for NIST's post-quantum standardisation effort, providing efficient key encapsulation and signature schemes. Most of these schemes base their hardness on variants of LWE, and thus rely heavily on error samplers to provide necessary uncertainty by obfuscating computations on secret information. Because of this it is a clear and obvious target for side-channel analysis, with numerous types of attacks targeting this component to gain secret-key information. In order to bring potential lattice-based cryptographic standards to practical realisation, it is important to protect these modules from past and future fault and side-channel attacks. This paper proposes countermeasures that exploit the distributions expected from these error samples, that is either Gaussian or binomial, by using statistical tests to verify the samplers are operating properly. The novel countermeasures are designed to protect against all previous fault attacks on error samplers. We optimize hardware implementation of the proposed tests to avoid division and square root calculations, however, the countermeasure we propose is sufficiently generic to be suitable also for software. We measure the impact of these countermeasures on performance and area consumption on a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA. Our countermeasure achieve promising performance while resulting in a minimal overhead.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
A note on isogeny-based hybrid verifiable delay functions
Barak Shani
Using the idea behind the recently proposed isogeny- and paring-based verifiable delay function (VDF) by De Feo, Masson, Petit and Sanso, we construct an isogeny-based VDF without the use of pairings. Our scheme is a hybrid of time-lock puzzles and (trapdoor) verifiable delay functions. We explain how to realise the proposed VDF on elliptic curves with commutative endomorphism ring, however this construction is not quantum secure. The more interesting, and potentially quantum-secure, non-commutative case is left open.
Last updated:  2019-10-25
The Security of All Private-key Bits in Isogeny-based Schemes
Barak Shani
We study the computational hardness of recovering single bits of the private key in the supersingular isogeny Diffie--Hellman (SIDH) key exchange and similar schemes. Our objective is to give a polynomial-time reduction between the problem of computing the private key in SIDH to the problem of computing any of its bits. The parties in the SIDH protocol work over elliptic curve torsion groups of different order $N$. Our results depend on the parity of $N$. Our main result shows that if $N$ is odd, then each of the top and lower $O(\log\log N)$ bits of the private key is as hard to compute, with any noticeable advantage, as the entire key. A similar, but conditional, result holds for each of the middle bits. This condition can be checked, and heuristically holds almost always. The case of even $N$ is a bit more challenging. We give several results, one of which is similar to the result for an odd $N$, under the assumption that one always succeeds to recover the designated bit. To achieve these results we extend the solution to the chosen-multiplier hidden number problem, for domains of a prime-power order, by studying the Fourier coefficients of single-bit functions over these domains.
Last updated:  2020-05-16
Versatile ABS: Usage Limited, Revocable, Threshold Traceable, Authority Hiding, Decentralized Attribute Based Signatures
Osman Bicer, Alptekin Kupcu
In this work, we revisit multi-authority attribute based signatures (MA-ABS), and elaborate on the limitations of the current MA-ABS schemes to provide a hard to achieve (yet very useful) combination of features, i.e., decentralization, periodic usage limitation, dynamic revocation of users and attributes, reliable threshold traceability, and authority hiding. In contrast to previous work, we disallow even the authorities to de-anonymize an ABS, and only allow joint tracing by threshold-many tracing authorities. Moreover, in our solution, the authorities cannot sign on behalf of users. In this context, first we define a useful and practical attribute based signature scheme (versatile ABS or VABS) along with the necessary operations and security games to accomplish our targeted functionalities. Second, we provide the first VABS scheme in a modular design such that any application can utilize a subset of the features endowed by our VABS, while omitting the computation and communication overhead of the features that are not needed. Third, we prove the security of our VABS scheme based on standard assumptions, i.e., Strong RSA, DDH, and SDDHI, in the random oracle model. Fourth, we implement our signature generation and verification algorithms, and show that they are practical (for a VABS with 20 attributes, Sign and Verify times are below 1.2 seconds, and the generated signature size is below 0.5 MB).
Last updated:  2019-03-05
The Distinction Between Fixed and Random Generators in Group-Based Assumptions
James Bartusek, Fermi Ma, Mark Zhandry
There is surprisingly little consensus on the precise role of the generator g in group-based assumptions such as DDH. Some works consider g to be a fixed part of the group description, while others take it to be random. We study this subtle distinction from a number of angles. - In the generic group model, we demonstrate the plausibility of groups in which random-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is hard but fixed-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is easy. We observe that such groups have interesting cryptographic applications. - We find that seemingly tight generic lower bounds for the Discrete-Log and CDH problems with preprocessing (Corrigan-Gibbs and Kogan, Eurocrypt 2018) are not tight in the sub-constant success probability regime if the generator is random. We resolve this by proving tight lower bounds for the random generator variants; our results formalize the intuition that using a random generator will reduce the effectiveness of preprocessing attacks. - We observe that DDH-like assumptions in which exponents are drawn from low-entropy distributions are particularly sensitive to the fixed- vs. random-generator distinction. Most notably, we discover that the Strong Power DDH assumption of Komargodski and Yogev (Komargodski and Yogev, Eurocrypt 2018) used for non-malleable point obfuscation is in fact false precisely because it requires a fixed generator. In response, we formulate an alternative fixed-generator assumption that suffices for a new construction of non-malleable point obfuscation, and we prove the assumption holds in the generic group model. We also give a generic group proof for the security of fixed-generator, low-entropy DDH (Canetti, Crypto 1997).
Last updated:  2019-02-27
DL-Extractable UC-Commitment Schemes
Behzad Abdolmaleki, Karim Baghery, Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim, Michał Zając
We define a new UC functionality (DL-extractable commitment scheme) that allows committer to open a commitment to a group element $g^x$; however, the simulator will be able to extract its discrete logarithm $x$. Such functionality is useful in situations where the secrecy of $x$ is important since the knowledge of $x$ enables to break privacy while the simulator needs to know $x$ to be able to simulate the corrupted committer. Based on Fujisaki's UC-secure commitment scheme and the Damgård-Fujisaki integer commitment scheme, we propose an efficient commitment scheme that realizes the new functionality. As another novelty, we construct the new scheme in the weaker RPK (registered public key) model instead of the CRS model used by Fujisaki.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Degree 2 is Complete for the Round-Complexity of Malicious MPC
Benny Applebaum, Zvika Brakerski, Rotem Tsabary
We show, via a non-interactive reduction, that the existence of a secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocol for degree-$2$ functions implies the existence of a protocol with the same round complexity for general functions. Thus showing that when considering the round complexity of MPC, it is sufficient to consider very simple functions. Our completeness theorem applies in various settings: information theoretic and computational, fully malicious and malicious with various types of aborts. In fact, we give a master theorem from which all individual settings follow as direct corollaries. Our basic transformation does not require any additional assumptions and incurs communication and computation blow-up which is polynomial in the number of players and in $S,2^D$, where $S,D$ are the circuit size and depth of the function to be computed. Using one-way functions as an additional assumption, the exponential dependence on the depth can be removed. As a consequence, we are able to push the envelope on the state of the art in various settings of MPC, including the following cases. * $3$-round perfectly-secure protocol (with guaranteed output delivery) against an active adversary that corrupts less than a quarter of the parties. * $2$-round statistically-secure protocol that achieves security with ``selective abort'' against an active adversary that corrupts less than half of the parties. * Assuming one-way functions, $2$-round computationally-secure protocol that achieves security with (standard) abort against an active adversary that corrupts less than half of the parties. This gives a new and conceptually simpler proof to the recent result of Ananth et al. (Crypto 2018). Technically, our non-interactive reduction draws from the encoding method of Applebaum, Brakerski and Tsabary (TCC 2018). We extend these methods to ones that can be meaningfully analyzed even in the presence of malicious adversaries.
Last updated:  2019-03-05
Password-Authenticated Public-Key Encryption
Tatiana Bradley, Jan Camenisch, Stanislaw Jarecki, Anja Lehmann, Gregory Neven, Jiayu Xu
We introduce password-authenticated public-key encryption (PAPKE), a new cryptographic primitive. PAPKE enables secure end-to-end encryption between two entities without relying on a trusted third party or other out-of-band mechanisms for authentication. Instead, resistance to man-in-the-middle attacks is ensured in a human-friendly way by authenticating the public key with a shared password, while preventing offline dictionary attacks given the authenticated public key and/or the ciphertexts produced using this key. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we provide property-based and universally composable (UC) definitions for PAPKE, with the resulting primitive combining CCA security of public-key encryption (PKE) with password authentication. Second, we show that PAPKE implies Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), but the reverse implication does not hold, indicating that PAPKE is a strictly stronger primitive than PAKE. Indeed, PAPKE implies a two-flow PAKE which remains secure if either party re-uses its state in multiple sessions, e.g. due to communication errors, thus strengthening existing notions of PAKE security. Third, we show two highly practical UC PAPKE schemes: a generic construction built from CCA-secure and anonymous PKE and an ideal cipher, and a direct construction based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Finally, applying our PAPKE-to-PAKE compiler to the above PAPKE schemes we exhibit the first 2-round UC PAKE's with efficiency comparable to (unauthenticated) Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.
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