Paper 2025/281

Securely Instantiating 'Half Gates' Garbling in the Standard Model

Abstract

Garbling is a fundamental cryptographic primitive, with numerous theoretical and practical applications. Since the first construction by Yao (FOCS’82, ’86), a line of work has concerned itself with reducing the communication and computational complexity of that construction. One of the most efficient garbling schemes presently is the ‘Half Gates’ scheme by Zahur, Rosulek, and Evans (Eurocrypt’15). Despite its widespread adoption, the provable security of this scheme has been based on assumptions whose only instantiations are in idealized models. For example, in their original paper, Zahur, Rosulek, and Evans showed that hash functions satisfying a notion called circular correlation robustness (CCR) suffice for this task, and then proved that CCR secure hash functions can be instantiated in the random permutation model. In this work, we show how to securely instantiate the Half Gates scheme in the standard model. To this end, we first show how this scheme can be securely instantiated given a (family of) weak CCR hash function, a notion that we introduce. Furthermore, we show how a weak CCR hash function can be used to securely instantiate other efficient garbling schemes, namely the ones by Rosulek and Roy (Crypto’21) and Heath (Eurocrypt’24). Thus we believe this notion to be of independent interest. Finally, we construct such weak CCR hash functions using indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions. The security proof of this construction constitutes our main technical contribution. While our construction is not practical, it serves as a proof of concept supporting the soundness of these garbling schemes, which we regard to be particularly important given the recent initiative by NIST to standardize garbling, and the optimizations in Half Gates being potentially adopted.