In this paper we study several computational problems related to current post-quantum cryptosystems based on isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves. In particular we prove that the supersingular isogeny path and endomorphism ring problems are unconditionally equivalent under polynomial time reductions. We show that access to a factoring oracle is sufficient to solve the Quaternion path problem of KLPT and prove that these problems are equivalent, where previous results either assumed heuristics or the generalised Riemann Hypothesis (GRH). Consequently, given Shor’s quantum algorithm for factorisation, our results yield unconditional quantum polynomial reductions between the isogeny path and EndRing problems. Recently these reductions have become foundational for the security of isogeny-based cryptography

We show that there exists a unitary quantum oracle relative to which quantum commitments exist but no (efficiently verifiable) one-way state generators exist. Both have been widely considered candidates for replacing one-way functions as the minimal assumption for cryptography—the weakest cryptographic assumption implied by all of computational cryptography. Recent work has shown that commitments can be constructed from one-way state generators, but the other direction has remained open. Our results rule out any black-box construction, and thus settle this crucial open problem, suggesting that quantum commitments (as well as its equivalency class of EFI pairs, quantum oblivious transfer, and secure quantum multiparty computation) appear to be strictly weakest among all known cryptographic primitives.

While in classical cryptography, one-way functions (OWFs) are widely regarded as the “minimal assumption,” the situation in quantum cryptography is less clear. Recent works have put forward two concurrent candidates for the minimal assumption in quantum cryptography: One-way state generators (OWSGs), postulating the existence of a hard search problem with an efficient verification algorithm, and EFI pairs, postulating the existence of a hard distinguishing problem. Two recent papers [Khurana and Tomer STOC’24; Batra and Jain FOCS’24] showed that OWSGs imply EFI pairs, but the reverse direction remained open. In this work, we give strong evidence that the opposite direction does not hold: We show that there is a quantum unitary oracle relative to which EFI pairs exist, but OWSGs do not. In fact, we show a slightly stronger statement that holds also for EFI pairs that output classical bits (QEFID). As a consequence, we separate, via our oracle, QEFID, and one-way puzzles from OWSGs and several other Microcrypt primitives, including efficiently verifiable one-way puzzles and unclonable state generators. In particular, this solves a problem left open in [Chung, Goldin, and Gray Crypto’24]. Using similar techniques, we also establish a fully black-box separation (which is slightly weaker than an oracle separation) between private-key quantum money schemes and QEFID pairs. One conceptual implication of our work is that the existence of an efficient verification algorithm may lead to qualitatively stronger primitives in quantum cryptography.

In this work, we put forth the notion of dynamic zk-SNARKs. A dynamic zk-SNARK is a zk-SNARK that has an additional update algorithm. The update algorithm takes as input a valid source statement-witness pair $(x,w)\in \mathcal{L}$ along with a verifying proof $\pi$, and a valid target statement-witness pair $(x',w')\in \mathcal{L}$. It outputs a verifying proof $\pi'$ for $(x',w')$ in sublinear time (for $(x,w)$ and $(x',w')$ with small Hamming distance) potentially with the help of a data structure. To the best of our knowledge, none of the commonly-used zk-SNARKs are dynamic---a single update in $(x,w)$ can be handled only by recomputing the proof, which requires at least linear time. After presenting the formal definition of dynamic zk-SNARKs, we provide two constructions. The first one is based on recursive SNARKs and has $O(\log n)$ update time. However it suffers from heuristic security---it must encode the random oracle in the SNARK circuit. The second one and our central contribution, $\mathsf{Dynaverse}$, is based solely on KZG commitments and has $O(\sqrt{n}\log n)$ update time. Our preliminary evaluation shows, that, while worse asymptotically, $\mathsf{Dynaverse}$ outperforms the recursive-based approach by at least one order of magnitude.

The Fiat-Shamir transformation is a key technique for removing interactivity from cryptographic proof systems in real-world applications. In this work, we discuss five types of Fiat-Shamir-related protocol design errors and illustrate them with concrete examples mainly taken from real-life applications. We discuss countermeasures for such vulnerabilities.

Secure key leasing (a.k.a. key-revocable cryptography) enables us to lease a cryptographic key as a quantum state in such a way that the key can be later revoked in a verifiable manner. We propose a simple framework for constructing cryptographic primitives with secure key leasing via the certified deletion property of BB84 states. Based on our framework, we obtain the following schemes. - A public key encryption scheme with secure key leasing that has classical revocation based on any IND-CPA secure public key encryption scheme. Prior works rely on either quantum revocation or stronger assumptions such as the quantum hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. - A pseudorandom function with secure key leasing that has classical revocation based on one-way functions. Prior works rely on stronger assumptions such as the quantum hardness of the LWE problem. - A digital signature scheme with secure key leasing that has classical revocation based on the quantum hardness of the short integer solution (SIS) problem. Our construction has static signing keys, i.e., the state of a signing key almost does not change before and after signing. Prior constructions either rely on non-static signing keys or indistinguishability obfuscation to achieve a stronger goal of copy-protection. In addition, all of our schemes remain secure even if a verification key for revocation is leaked after the adversary submits a valid certificate of deletion. To our knowledge, all prior constructions are totally broken in this setting. Moreover, in our view, our security proofs are much simpler than those for existing schemes.

SQIsign is a well-known post-quantum signature scheme due to its small combined signature and public-key size. However, SQIsign suffers from notably long signing times, and verification times are not short either. To improve this, recent research has explored both one-dimensional and two-dimensional variants of SQIsign, each with distinct characteristics. In particular, SQIsign2D’s efficient signing and verification times have made it a focal point of recent research. However, the absence of an optimized one-dimensional verification implementation hampers a thorough comparison between these different variants. This work bridges this gap in the literature: we provide a state-of-the-art implementation of one-dimensional SQIsign verification, including novel optimizations. We report a record-breaking one-dimensional SQIsign verification time of 8.6 Ice Lake Mcycles, closely matching SQIsign2D. For uncompressed signatures, the signature size doubles and we verify in only 5.6 Mcycles. Taking advantage of the inherent parallelism available in isogeny computations, we present 5-core variants that can go as low as 1.3 Mcycles. Furthermore, we present the first implementation that supports both 32-bit and 64-bit processors. It includes optimized assembly code for the Cortex-M4 and has been integrated with the pqm4 project. Our results motivate further research into one-dimensional SQIsign, as it boasts unique features among isogeny-based schemes.

Peer-to-peer energy trading markets enable users to exchange electricity, directly offering them increased financial benefits. However, discrepancies often arise between the electricity volumes committed to in trading auctions and the volumes actually consumed or injected. Solutions designed to address this issue often require access to sensitive information that should be kept private. This paper presents a novel, fully privacy-preserving billing protocol designed to protect users' sensitive consumption and production data in the context of billing protocols for energy trading. Leveraging advanced cryptographic techniques, including fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and pseudorandom zero sharing (PRZS), our protocol ensures robust security and confidentiality while addressing the critical issue of managing discrepancies between promised and actual electricity volumes. The proposed protocol guarantees that users' sensitive information remains inaccessible to external parties, including the trading platform and billing server. By utilizing FHE, the protocol allows computations on encrypted data without compromising privacy, while PRZS ensures secure aggregation of individual discrepancies of each household. This combination of cryptographic primitives maintains data privacy and enhances billing accuracy, even when fluctuations in energy supply and demand occur. We analyze real-time consumption and production data from 100 households to experimentally validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our billing model. By implementing a flexible framework compatible with any billing method, we demonstrate that our protocol can accurately compute individual bills for 100 households in approximately 0.17 seconds.

In modern business to customer interactions, handling private or confidential data is essential. Private Function Evaluation (PFE) protocols ensure the privacy of both the customers' input data and the business' function evaluated on it which is often sensitive intellectual property (IP). However, fully hiding the function in PFE results in high performance overhead. Semi-Private Function Evaluation (SPFE) is a generalization of PFE to only partially hide the function, whereas specific non-critical components remain public. Our paper introduces a novel framework designed to make SPFE accessible to non-experts and practical for real-world deployments. To achieve this, we improve on previous SPFE solutions in two aspects. First, we enhance the developer experience by leveraging High-Level Synthesis (HLS), making our tool more user-friendly than previous SPFE frameworks. Second, we achieve a \(2 \times\) speedup compared to the previous state-of-the-art through more efficient underlying constructions and the usage of Lookup Tables (LUTs). We evaluate the performance of our framework in terms of communication and runtime efficiency. Our final implementation is available as an open-source project, aiming to bridge the gap between advanced cryptographic protocols and their practical application in industry scenarios.

A Private Set Union (PSU) allows two parties having sets $X$ and $Y$ to securely compute the union $X \cup Y$ while revealing no additional information. Recently, there have been proposed so-called shuffle-based PSU protocols due to Garimella et. al. (PKC'21) and Jia et. al. (USENIX'22). Except a few base oblivious transfers, those proposals are fully based on symmetric key primitives and hence enjoy quite low computation costs. However, they commonly have drawbacks on large communication cost of $O(\ell n\log n)$ with input set size $n$ and $\ell \ge O(\lambda + \log n)$ where $\lambda$ is a statistical security parameter. We propose two optimizations for each work that reduce communication cost while maintaining strength in computation cost; the first one optimizes Garimella et. al. to have $O(\ell n + n \log n)$, and the second one optimizes Jia et. al. by reducing the concrete value of $\ell$ by $\log n$. Concretely, the first (second, resp) optimization provides $3.3 - 3.9$x ($1.7 - 1.8$x, resp) lower communication input set sizes $n = 2^{16} - 2^{20}$. We demonstrate by comprehensive analysis and implementation that our optimization leads to better PSU protocol, compared to the state-of-the-art proposal of Zhang et. al. (USENIX'23) as well as previous shuffle-based PSUs. As a concrete amount of improvement, we see $1.4-1.5$x speed up for $100$Mbps network, and $1.8-2.2$x speed up for $10$Mbps network on input set sizes $n = 2^{16} - 2^{20}$.

This paper reveals a critical flaw in the design of ARADI, a recently proposed low-latency block cipher by NSA researchers -- Patricia Greene, Mark Motley, and Bryan Weeks. The weakness exploits the specific composition of Toffoli gates in the round function of ARADI's nonlinear layer, and it allows the extension of a given algebraic distinguisher to one extra round without any change in the data complexity. More precisely, we show that the cube-sum values, though depending on the secret key bits, are always equal in two of the state words. Such a structural property is difficult to obtain by the direct application of division property and has never been seen before in any state-of-the-art block cipher. We call this structural property \textit{weakly-composed-Toffoli gates}, and introduce a theoretical framework which can describe it in general terms. We present algebraic distinguishers that reach 8 out of 16 rounds of ARADI. Most notably, we show that these distinguishers have better data complexities than the division property-based distinguishers for the same number of rounds. We further investigate whether changing the linear layer or the order of composition of Toffoli gates could avoid this property. We give a negative answer to the same and show that it is impossible to prevent this structural property unless the nonlinear layer is re-designed. As a side result, we provide a key-recovery attack on 10 rounds ARADI with $2^{124}$ data and $2^{177}$ time for a 256-bit key. Our work highlights the significance of security analysis during the cipher design phase, and shows that these strong structural distinguishers could have been avoided during this phase.

Searchable encryption, or more generally, structured encryption, permits search over encrypted data. It is an important cryptographic tool for securing cloud storage. The standard security notion for structured encryption mandates that a protocol leaks nothing about the data or queries, except for some allowed leakage, defined by the leakage function. This is due to the fact that some leakage is unavoidable for efficient schemes. Unfortunately, it was shown by numerous works that even innocuous-looking leakage can often be exploited by attackers to undermine users' privacy and recover their queries and/or data, despite the structured encryption schemes being provably secure. Nevertheless, the standard security remains the go-to notion used to show the "security" of structured encryption schemes. While it is not likely that researchers will design practical structured encryption schemes with no leakage, it is not satisfactory that very few works study ways to assess leakage. This work proposes a novel framework to quantify leakage. Our methodology is inspired by the quantitative information flow, and we call our method $q$-leakage analysis. We show how $q$-leakage analysis is related to the standard security. We also demonstrate the usefulness of $q$-leakage analysis by analyzing the security of two existing schemes with complex leakage functions.

Threshold signatures have been drawing lots of attention in recent years. Of particular interest are threshold signatures that are proven secure under adaptive corruptions (NIST Call 2023). Sadly, existing constructions with provable adaptive security suffer from at least one of the following drawbacks: (i) strong idealizations such as the algebraic group model (AGM), (ii) an unnatural restriction on the corruption threshold being $t/2$ where $t$ is the signing threshold, or (iii) prohibitively large security loss under established assumptions. Notably, point (iii) has received little to no attention in the literature on this subject. In this work, we introduce Twinkle-T, a new threshold signature scheme which overcomes these limitations. Twinkle-T is the first scheme to have a fully tight security proof under up to $t$ adaptive corruptions without relying on the AGM. It also has a signing protocol consisting of only three rounds and thus matches the currently best threshold signature with full adaptive security Twinkle (Eurocrypt 2024) in the pairing-free discrete logarithm setting. We prove security from a standard non-interactive assumption, namely, the Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption.

We extend the usual ideal action on oriented elliptic curves to a (Hermitian) module action on oriented (polarised) abelian varieties. Oriented abelian varieties are naturally enriched in $R$-modules, and our module action comes from the canonical power object construction on categories enriched in a closed symmetric monoidal category. In particular our action is canonical and gives a fully fledged symmetric monoidal action. Furthermore, we give algorithms to compute this action in practice, generalising the usual algorithms in rank~$1$. The action allows us to unify in the same framework, on the one hand isogeny based cryptography based on ordinary or oriented elliptic curves, and on the other hand the one based on supersingular elliptic curves defined over $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$. In particular, from our point of view, supersingular elliptic curves over $\mathbb{F}_p$ are given by a rank~$1$ module action, while (the Weil restriction) of those defined over $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$ are given by a rank~$2$ module action. As a consequence, rank~$2$ module action inversion is at least as hard as the supersingular isogeny path problem. We thus propose to use Hermitian modules as an avatar of a cryptographic symmetric monoidal action framework. This generalizes the more standard cryptographic group action framework, and still allows for a NIKE (Non Interactive Key Exchange). The main advantage of our action is that, presumably, Kuperberg's algorithm does not apply. Compared to CSIDH, this allows for more compact keys and much better scaling properties. In practice, we propose the key exchange scheme $\otimes$-MIKE (Tensor Module Isogeny Key Exchange). Alice and Bob start from a supersingular elliptic curve $E_0/\mathbb{F}_p$ and both compute a $2^n$-isogeny over $\mathbb{F}_{p^2}$. They each send the $j$-invariant of their curve. Crucially, unlike SIDH, no torsion information at all is required. Their common secret, given by the module action, is then a dimension~$4$ principally polarised abelian variety. We obtain a very compact post-quantum NIKE: only 64B for NIST level~$1$ security.

Laconic cryptography studies two-message protocols that securely compute on large amounts of data with minimal communication cost. Laconic oblivious transfer (OT) is a central primitive where the receiver's input is a large database $\mathsf{DB}$ and the sender's inputs are two messages $m_0$, $m_1$ along with an index $i$, such that the receiver learns the message determined by the choice bit $\mathsf{DB}_i$. OT becomes even more useful for secure computation when considering its laconic variants, which offer succinctness and round optimality. However, existing constructions are not practically efficient because they rely on heavy cryptographic machinery and non-black-box techniques. In this work, we initiate the study of laconic OT correlations, where the model allows an offline phase to generate the correlations later used in a lightweight online phase. Our correlation is conceptually simple, captured by an inner product computation, and enables us to achieve a private laconic OT protocol where the sender's index $i$ is also hidden from the receiver. Our construction is the first private laconic OT with database-dependent preprocessing based solely on symmetric-key assumptions, achieving sublinear online computational complexity for the receiver. Furthermore, we enhance our construction with updatability and receiver privacy. Finally, we demonstrate the applications of private laconic OT to laconic function evaluation for RAM programs and laconic private set intersection with preprocessing.

Tweakable enciphering modes (TEMs) provide security in a variety of storage and space-critical applications like disk and file-based encryption, and packet-based communication protocols, among others. XCB-AES (known as XCBv2) is specified in the IEEE 1619.2 standard for encryption of sector-oriented storage media and it comes with a proof of security for block-aligned input messages. In this work, we demonstrate an attack on XCBv2. We show that XCBv2 is $\textit{insecure}$ also for full block messages by presenting a plaintext recovery attack using $\textit{only}$ two queries. We demonstrate that our attack further applies to the HCI and MXCB TEMs, which follow a similar design approach to XCBv2. We then propose a simple, ``quick'' fix that is not vulnerable to our attack and provably restore the security for XCBv2. Following the responsible disclosure process, we communicated the attack details to IEEE and the authors of XCB-AES. The authors have confirmed the validity of our attack on 02/09/2024. Our next contribution is to strengthen the provable security of XCBv2 (currently $n/3$ bits). We propose a new modular TEM called GEM which can be seen as a generalization of the Hash-CTR-Hash approach as used in XCB-style and HCTR-style TEMs. We are able to prove that GEM achieves full $n$-bit security using $\textit{only}$ $n$-bit PRP/PRF. We also give two concrete GEM instantiations: $\mathsf{KohiNoor}$ and $\mathsf{DaryaiNoor}$, both of which are based on AES-128 and GHASH-256, and internally use variants of the CTR-based weak pseudorandom functions GCTR-3 and SoCTR, respectively. SoCTR uses AES-128 and GCTR-3 is based on $\mathsf{ButterKnife}$-256. Our security proofs show that both $\mathsf{KohiNoor}$ and $\mathsf{DaryaiNoor}$ provide full $n$-bit security. From applications perspective, $\mathsf{DaryaiNoor}$ addresses the need for reusing classical components, while $\mathsf{KohiNoor}$ enhances performance by leveraging a more modern primitive based on the AES/Deoxys round function. Our implementation demonstrates competitive performance: For typical 4KiB sector size, $\mathsf{KohiNoor}$'s performance is on par with AES$_{6}$-CTET+, yet achieving higher standard security guarantees. $\mathsf{DaryaiNoor}$ is on par with AES-CTET+ performance-wise while also maintaining higher security with standard components. Our GEM instances triple the security margin of XCBv2 and double that of HCTR2 at the cost of performance loss of only $12\%$ ($\mathsf{KohiNoor}$) and $68\%$ ($\mathsf{DaryaiNoor}$) for 4KiB messages.

This work describes a digital signature scheme constructed from a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of a pre-image of the Rescue Prime Optimized (RPO) permutation. The proof of knowledge is constructed with the DEEP-ALI interactive oracle proof combined with the Ben-Sasson--Chiesa--Spooner (BCS) transformation in the random oracle model. The EUF-CMA security of the resulting signature scheme is established from the UC-friendly security properties of the BCS transformation and the pre-image hardness of the RPO permutation. The implementation of the scheme computes signatures in 13 ms and verifies them in 1 ms on a single core when the BCS transform is implemented with the Blake3 hash function. (The multi-threaded implementation signs in 9.2 ms and also verifies in 1 ms.) These speeds are obtained with parameters achieving 122 bits of average-case security for \( 2^{122} \)-bounded adversaries with access to at most \( 2^{64} \) signatures.

Keyed-verification anonymous credentials are widely recognized as among the most efficient tools for anonymous authentication. In this work, we revisit two prominent credential systems: the scheme by Chase et al. (CCS 2014), commonly referred to as CMZ or PS MAC, and the scheme by Barki et al. (SAC 2016), known as BBDT or BBS MAC. We show how to make CMZ statistically anonymous and BBDT compatible with the BBS RFC draft. We provide a comprehensive security analysis for strong(er) properties of unforgeability and anonymity. These properties allow them to be composed with extensions that users can pick and choose. We show that simpler variants satisfying one-more unforgeability can still be anonymous tokens (Kreuter et al., CRYPTO 2020). To enable faster proofs for complex presentations, we present a compiler that uses an interactive oracle proof and a designated-verifier polynomial commitment to construct a designated-verifier non-interactive argument. For keyed-verification anonymous credentials, designated-verifier proofs suffice since the verifier is known in advance. We explore extensions that could benefit from this approach.

Cryptographic proof systems have a plethora of applications: from building other cryptographic tools (e.g., malicious security for MPC protocols) to concrete settings such as private transactions or rollups. In several settings it is important for proof systems to be non-malleable: an adversary should not to be able to modify a proof they have observed into another for a statement for which they do not know the witness. Proof systems that have been deployed in practice should arguably satisfy this notion: it is crucial in settings such as transaction systems and in order to securely compose proofs with other cryptographic protocols. As a consequence, results on non-malleability should keep up with designs of proofs being deployed. Recently, Arun et al. proposed $\mathsf{Jolt}$ (Eurocrypt 2024), arguably the first efficient proof system whose architecture is based on the lookup singularity approach (Barry Whitehat, 2022). This approach consists in representing a general computation as a series of table lookups. The final result is a SNARK for a Virtual Machine execution (or SNARK VM). Both SNARK VMs and lookup-singularity SNARKs are architectures with enormous potential and will probably be adopted more and more in the next years (and they already are). As of today, however, there is no literature regarding the non-malleability of SNARK VMs. The goal of this work is to fill this gap by providing both concrete non-malleability results and a set of technical tools for a more general study of SNARK VMs security (as well as "modular" SNARKs in general). As a concrete result, we study the non-malleability of (an idealized version of) $\mathsf{Jolt}$ and its fundamental building block, the lookup argument $\mathsf{Lasso}$. While connecting our new result on the non-malleability of $\mathsf{Lasso}$ to that of $\mathsf{Jolt}$, we develop a set of tools that enable the composition of non-malleable SNARKs. We believe this toolbox to be valuable in its own right.

As the industry prepares for the transition to post-quantum secure public key cryptographic algorithms, vulnerability analysis of their implementations is gaining importance. A theoretically secure cryptographic algorithm should also be able to withstand the challenges of physical attacks in real-world environments. MAYO is a candidate in the ongoing first round of the NIST post-quantum standardization process for selecting additional digital signature schemes. This paper demonstrates three first-order single-execution fault injection attacks on a MAYO implementation in an ARM Cortex-M4 processor. By using voltage glitching to disrupt the computation of the vinegar seed during the signature generation, we enable the recovery of the secret key directly from the faulty signatures. Our experimental results show that the success rates of the fault attacks in a single execution are 36%, 82%, and 99%, respectively. They emphasize the importance of developing countermeasures against fault attacks prior to the widespread deployment of post-quantum algorithms like MAYO.

Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs allow a prover to convince a verifier about the validity of an NP-statement by sending a single message and without disclosing any additional information (besides the validity of the statement). Single-message cryptographic proofs are very versatile, which has made them widely used both in theory and in practice. This is particularly true for succinct proofs, where the length of the message is sublinear in the size of the NP relation. This versatility, unfortunately, comes at a price, since any NIZK proof system requires some form of setup, like a common reference string. One way to circumvent the need for a setup is by relying on a Random Oracle. Unfortunately, if the Random Oracle is modeled as a Global resource that the simulator is not allowed to program, then it is impossible to obtain a secure NIZK. This impossibility has been circumvented by allowing the simulator (and the real-world adversary) to program the RO, and allowing the honest parties to check, via a special interface, if the RO outputs have been programmed. In this work, we show that this impossibility can be circumvented by meaningfully weakening the Universal Composability framework following the model proposed by Broadnax et al. (Eurocrypt 2017). In this model, the ideal world functionalities are allowed to interact with oracles that have quasi-polynomial time capabilities. As our main result, we propose the first composable NIZK proof system that relies on a global (non-programmable) random oracle as its only form of setup. The NIZK scheme we propose is witness-succinct (with proofs logarithmic in the size of the witness). Our results break both the barrier of programmability of the random oracle and of polylogarithmic proof size for UC-secure NIZKs with transparent setups. We are able to construct our NIZK using the framework proposed by Ganesh et al. (Eurocrypt 2023), which requires—among other building blocks—a polynomial commitment scheme with special features and a polynomial encoding scheme (a primitive that appropriately masks a witness as a polynomial). As a core technical contribution, we show a polynomial commitment of this type using a basic component of Bulletproofs as a building block, as well as a polynomial encoding based on techniques completely different from the ones from Ganesh et al..

Succinct arguments of knowledge allow an untrusted prover to establish that they know a witness for an NP relation. Many recent efficient constructions of such schemes work over arithmetic computations expressed in finite fields. Several common settings, however, have an extremely simple representation when expressed over the integers (e.g., RSA signatures/accumulators, range checks for committed values, computations over rational numbers). Efficient arguments of knowledge working natively over $\mathbb{Z}$ could be applied to such computations without the overhead from emulating integer arithmetic over a finite field. We propose the first native construction of SNARKs over the integers that is fully succinct, thus resolving an open problem from Towa and Vergnaud (Asiacrypt 2020). By fully succinct, we mean that \textit{both} the proof size and the verifier's running time should be sublinear in both $|\vec w|$—the size of the witness as a vector of integers—and $\log_2 \lVert \vec w \rVert_\infty$—the size in bits of the largest integer in the witness vector (in absolute value). As a stepping stone for our results we provide a general theoretical framework for building succinct arguments over the integers. Its most attractive feature is that it allows to reuse already existing constructions of SNARKs in a modular way and can be used as a starting point for constructions following up our work. We build these systematic foundations by leveraging a common technique in theoretical computer science—fingerprinting—and applying it to a new setting. Our framework consists of two main ingredients: idealized protocols and polynomial commitments such that an object ``committed over the integers'' can however be ``queried modulo $q$'', for a randomly sampled prime $q$. We obtain our final construction, $\mathbb{Z}$aratan, by lifting the $\mathsf{Spartan}$ construction (Setty, CRYPTO 2020) to the integers and applying a form of polynomial commitment based on the techniques from DARK (Bünz et al., Eurocrypt 2020). $\mathbb{Z}$aratan has a transparent setup, is proven secure in the generic group model for groups of unknown order and can be heuristically made non-interactive in the ROM via the Fiat-Shamir transform.

We use the HHL algorithm to retrieve a quantum state holding the algebraic normal formal of a Boolean function. Unlike the standard HHL applications, we do not describe the cipher as an exponentially big system of equations. Rather, we perform a set of small matrix inversions which corresponds to the Boolean Möbius transform. This creates a superposition holding information about the ANF in the form: $\ket{\mathcal{A}_{f}} =\frac{1}{C} \sum_{I=0}^{2^n-1} c_I \ket{I}$, where $c_I$ is the coefficient of the ANF and $C$ is a scaling factor. The procedure has a time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n)$ for a Boolean function with $n$ bit input. We also propose two approaches how some information about the ANF can be extracted from such a state.

Masking is a sound countermeasure to protect against differential power analysis. Since the work by Balasch et al. in ASIACRYPT 2012, inner product masking has been explored as an alternative to the well known Boolean masking. In CARDIS 2017, Poussier et al. showed that inner product masking achieves higher-order security versus Boolean masking, for the same shared size, in the bit-probing model. Wang et al. in TCHES 2020 verified the inner product masking's security order amplification in practice and proposed new gadgets for inner product masking. Finally, Wu et al. in TCHES 2022 showed that this security amplification comes from the bit-probing model, but that Wang al.'s gadgets are not higher-order bit-probing secure reducing the computation's practical security. The authors concluded their work with the open question of providing an inner product multiplication gadget which maintains the masking's bit-probing security, and conjectured that such gadget maintains the practical security order amplification of the masking during its computation. In this paper, we answer positively to Wu et al.'s open problems. We are the first to present a multiplication gadget for inner product masking which is proven secure in the bit-level probing model using the t-Strong Non-Interference (SNI) property. Moreover, we provide practical evidence that the gadget indeed maintains the security amplification of its masking. This is done via an evaluation of an assembly implementation of the gadget on an ARM Cortex-M4 core. We used this implementation to take leakage measurements and show no leakage happens for orders below the gadget's bit-probing security level either for its univariate or multivariate analysis.

The traditional definition of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is not composable, i.e., it does not guarantee that evaluating two (or more) homomorphic computations in a sequence produces correct results. We formally define and investigate a stronger notion of homomorphic encryption which we call "fully composable homomorphic encryption", or "composable FHE". The definition is both simple and powerful: it does not directly involve the evaluation of multiple functions, and yet it supports the arbitrary composition of homomorphic evaluations. On the technical side, we compare the new definition with other definitions proposed in the past, proving both implications and separations, and show how the "bootstrapping" technique of (Gentry, STOC 2009) can be formalized as a method to transform a (non-composable, circular secure) homomorphic encryption scheme into a fully composable one. We use this formalization of bootstrapping to formulate a number of conjectures and open problems.

Decentralized storage networks, including IPFS and Filecoin, have created a marketplace where individuals exchange storage space for profit. These networks employ protocols that reliably ensure data storage providers accurately store data without alterations, safeguarding the interests of storage purchasers. However, these protocols lack an effective and equitable payment mechanism for data retrieval, particularly when multiple data queriers are involved. This necessitates a protocol that ensures both data integrity and fair compensation for data providers. In decentralized storage, data is fragmented into small blocks and stored across multiple nodes, a process known as data swarming. Due to this property, traditional data exchange protocols are inadequate in terms of communication and economic efficiency. We propose the Proof of Unified Data Retrieval protocol (PoUDR). PoUDR incorporates ZK-SNARK to facilitate a fair data exchange protocol. PoUDR reduces the number of blockchain transactions for both single block and data swarming retrieval. The protocol requires only a single key-revealing transaction submitted by the provider to the blockchain for each data block. This architecture allows for further optimization of transaction numbers through a batched proof technique on the provider's side. This approach necessitates only $N_P$ transactions within a specific time frame when data consisting of $N_D$ blocks, provided by $N_P$ providers, is queried by $N_Q$ queriers. This work provides a comprehensive definition for Secure Swarming Data Exchange (SSDE), including security assumptions. Also it offers a detailed game-based security analysis for the PoUDR protocol. Moreover, the PoUDR protocol has been fully integrated into the Bitswap protocol (IPFS). Within this integration, our proposed Relaxed Groth16 algorithm addresses the significant technical challenge of generating zero-knowledge proofs, leading to substantial cost reductions for overall feasibility of secure data retrieval in decentralized storage networks.

HEonGPU is a high-performance library designed to optimize Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) operations on Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). By leveraging the parallel processing capac- ity of GPUs, HEonGPU significantly reduces the computational overhead typically associated with FHE by executing complex operation concurrently. This allows for faster execution of homomorphic computations on encrypted data, enabling real-time applications in privacy-preserving machine learn- ing and secure data processing. A key advantage of HEonGPU lies in its multi-stream architecture, which not only allows parallel processing of tasks to improve throughput but also eliminates the over- head of data transfers between the host device (i.e., CPU) and GPU. By efficiently managing data within the GPU using multi-streams, HEonGPU minimizes the need for repeated memory transfers, further enhancing performance. HEonGPU’s GPU-optimized design makes it ideal for large-scale encrypted computations, providing users with reduced latency and higher performance across various FHE schemes.

There has been a recent interest to develop and standardize Robust Authenticated Encryption (Robust AE) schemes. NIST, for example, is considering an Accordion mode (a wideblock tweakable blockcipher), with Robust AE as a primary application. On the other hand, recent attacks and applications suggest that encryption needs to be committing. Indeed, committing security isalso a design consideration in the Accordion mode. Yet it is unclear how to build a Robust AE with committing security. In this work, we give a modular solution for this problem. We first show how to transform any wideblock tweakable blockcipher TE to a Robust AE scheme SE that commits just the key. The overhead is cheap, just a few finite-field multiplications and blockcipher calls. If one wants to commit the entire encryption context, one can simply hash the context to derive a 256-bit subkey, and uses SE on that subkey. The use of 256-bit key on SE only means that it has to rely on AES-256 but doesn't require TE to have 256-bit key. Our approach frees the Accordion designs from consideration of committing security. Moreover, it gives a big saving for several key-committing applications that don't want to pay the inherent hashing cost of full committing.

State-of-the-art database implementations offer a wide range of functionalities and impressive performances while supporting highly concurrent loads. However they all rely on the server knowing the content of the database, which raises issues when sensitive information is being stored on a server that cannot be trusted. Encrypting documents before sending them to a remote server solves the confidentiality issue at the cost of loosing the keyword search functionality. Cryptographic primitives such as Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) schemes have been proposed to recover this functionality. However, no SSE construction properly defines correctness and successfully guarantees security in a concurrent setting. This paper attempts a first step in this direction by recommending linearizability as the standard notion of correctness for a concurrent SSE. We study the impact of concurrency on security and stress the need for finer-grained security models. Hence, we propose the log-security model that guarantees security against an adversary having access to persistency-related logs, fixing a blind spot in the snapshot model while capturing security in a concurrent setting. We also build the first concurrent SSE solution proven correct and secure in a concurrent setting, that can be implemented on top of any database. Our scheme proved to be fast thanks to optimal wait-free search operations and sequentially-optimal, lock-free modifications, that both execute under one micro-second per binding, while only incurring a 13.3% storage expansion.

FAPI 2.0 is a suite of Web protocols developed by the OpenID Foundation's FAPI Working Group (FAPI WG) for third-party data sharing and digital identity in high-risk environments. Even though the specifications are not completely finished, several important entities have started to adopt the FAPI 2.0 protocols, including Norway's national HelseID, Australia's Consumer Data Standards, as well as private companies like Authlete and Australia-based connectID; the predecessor FAPI 1.0 is in widespread use with millions of users. The FAPI WG asked us to accompany the standardization of the FAPI 2.0 protocols with a formal security analysis to proactively identify vulnerabilities before widespread deployment and to provide formal security guarantees for the standards. In this paper, we report on our analysis and findings. Our analysis is based on a detailed model of the Web infrastructure, the so-called Web Infrastructure Model (WIM), which we extend to be able to carry out our analysis of the FAPI 2.0 protocols including important extensions like FAPI-CIBA. Based on the (extended) WIM and formalizations of the security goals and attacker model laid out in the FAPI 2.0 specifications, we provide a formal model of the protocols and carry out a formal security analysis, revealing several attacks. We have worked with the FAPI WG to fix the protocols, resulting in several amendments to the specifications. With these changes in place, we have adjusted our protocol model and formally proved that the security properties hold true under the strong attacker model defined by the FAPI WG.

In classical cryptography, one-way functions (OWFs) are the minimal assumption, while recent active studies have demonstrated that OWFs are not necessarily the minimum assumption in quantum cryptography. Several new primitives have been introduced such as pseudorandom unitaries (PRUs), pseudorandom function-like state generators (PRFSGs), pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), one-way state generators (OWSGs), one-way puzzles (OWPuzzs), and EFI pairs. They are believed to be weaker than OWFs, but they still imply many useful applications such as private-key quantum money schemes, secret-key encryption, message authentication codes, digital signatures, commitments, and multiparty computations. Now that the possibility of quantum cryptography without OWFs has opened up, the most important goal in the field is to provide them with concrete instantiations. For example, in classical cryptography, there are many instantiations of OWFs based on concrete hardness assumptions, such as the hardness of discrete logarithms or learning with errors. The study of generic primitives is justified by the existence of concrete instantiations. On the other hand, in quantum cryptography, all known constructions of those primitives are only from OWFs. We therefore have the following important open problem: Do they have instantiations based on some concrete hardness assumptions that will not imply OWFs? Ideally, the assumptions should be the ones that are studied in other contexts than cryptography. In this paper, we give a candidate answer to the question by showing that quantum-average-hardness of GapK problem implies the existence of OWPuzzs. A GapK problem is a promise problem to decide whether a given bit string has a small Kolmogorov complexity or not. Its quantum-average-hardness means that an instance is sampled from a quantum-polynomial-time-samplable distribution, and no quantum-polynomial-time algorithm can solve the problem with high probability. As far as we know, this is the first time that a ``Microcrypt'' primitive is constructed based on concrete hardness assumptions that do not seem to imply OWFs. Moreover, the assumptions are studied in other contexts than cryptography, especially in the field of meta-complexity. (Note: During the preparation of this manuscript, Khurana and Tomer \cite{cryptoeprint:2024/1490} uploaded a concurrent work.)

Stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to another asset to maintain a stable price, have become an important part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Prior studies have primarily focused on examining the security of stablecoins from technical and theoretical perspectives, with limited investigation into users’ risk perceptions and security behaviors in stablecoin practices. To address this research gap, we conducted a mixed-method study that included constructing a stablecoin interaction framework based on the literature, which informed the design of our interview protocol, semi-structured interviews (n=21), and Reddit data analysis (9,326 posts). We found that participants see stable value and regulatory compliance as key security advantages of stablecoins over other cryptocurrencies. However, participants also raised concerns about centralization risks in fiat-backed stablecoins, perceived challenges in crypto-backed stablecoins due to limited reliance on fully automated execution, and confusion regarding the complex mechanisms of algorithmic stablecoins. We proposed improving user education and optimizing mechanisms to address these concerns and promote the safer use of stablecoins.

In this paper, we introduce a new method to construct a signature scheme based on the subfield bilinear collision problem published at Crypto 2024. We use techniques based on vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) to significantly improve the running time and signature size of the scheme compared to the MPC-in-the-head version.

Quantum computational advantage refers to an existence of computational tasks that are easy for quantum computing but hard for classical one. Unconditionally showing quantum advantage is beyond our current understanding of complexity theory, and therefore some computational assumptions are needed. Which complexity assumption is necessary and sufficient for quantum advantage? In this paper, we show that inefficient-verifier proofs of quantumness (IV-PoQ) exist if and only if classically-secure one-way puzzles (OWPuzzs) exist. As far as we know, this is the first time that a complete cryptographic characterization of quantum advantage is obtained. IV-PoQ capture various types of quantum advantage previously studied, such as sampling advantage and searching advantage. Previous work [Morimae and Yamakawa 2024] showed that IV-PoQ can be constructed from OWFs, but a construction of IV-PoQ from weaker assumptions was left open. Our result solves the open problem. OWPuzzs are one of the most fundamental quantum cryptographic primitives implied by many quantum cryptographic primitives weaker than one-way functions (OWFs). The equivalence between IV-PoQ and classically-secure OWPuzzs therefore highlights that if there is no quantum advantage, then these fundamental primitives do not exist. The equivalence also means that quantum advantage is an example of the applications of OWPuzzs. Except for commitments, no application of OWPuzzs was known before. Our result shows that quantum advantage is another application of OWPuzzs. Moreover, it is the first quantum computation classical communication (QCCC) application of OWPuzzs.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of relaxed lattice-based programmable hash function (RPHF), which is a novel variant of lattice-based programmable hash functions (PHFs). Lattice-based PHFs, together with preimage trapdoor functions (TDFs), have been widely utilized (implicitly or explicitly) in the construction of adaptively secure identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes. The preimage length and the output length of the underlying PHF and TDF together determine the user secret key and ciphertext lengths of the IBE schemes. However, the current lattice-based PHF definition imposes the restriction that the preimage length of TDF in the IBE schemes cannot be too short, hindering the utilization of size-efficient NTRU TDF. To overcome this hurdle, RPHF relaxes the hash key distribution requirement in the definition of PHF from statistical indistinguishability to computational indistinguishability. This relaxation eliminates limitations on the preimage length of underlying TDFs in IBE, enabling the construction of IBEs from NTRU TDFs. We introduce two instantiations of RPHF: the first produces a hash output length of $2$ ring elements, with a hash key size linear to the input length, and the second yields an output length of $14$ ring elements, with a hash key size proportional to the square root of the input length. Building upon these RPHF instantiations, we propose two adaptively secure lattice-based IBE schemes with ciphertext lengths of $5$ and $17$ ring elements and user secret key lengths of $4$ and $16$ ring elements, respectively. The length of the IBE master public key is roughly equivalent to the size of the hash key of the underlying RPHF. In comparison to existing IBE constructions, our proposed schemes achieve a significant reduction (over an order of magnitude) in ciphertext and secret key sizes. Notably, state-of-the-art constructions from ideal lattices exhibit secret key and ciphertext sizes over 100 ring elements, making our proposed schemes highly efficient. Moreover, the master public key sizes of our IBEs remain comparable.

We present a new and efficient method to obtain circuit privacy for lattice-based linearly homomorphic encryptions (LHE). In particular, our method does not involve noise-flooding with exponetially large errors or iterative bootstrapping. As a direct result, we obtain a semi-honest oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) protocol with the same efficiency, reducing the communication cost of the prior state of the art by 50%. Consequently, the amortized time of our protocol improves the prior work by 33% under 100Mbps network setting. Our semi-honest OLE is the first to achieve both concrete efficiency and asymptotic quasi-optimality. Together with an extension of the recent zero-knowledge proof of plaintext knowledge, our LHE yields actively-secure OLE with 2.7x reduced communication from the prior work. When applied to Overdrive (Eurocrypt '18), an MPC preprocessing protocol, our method provides 1.4x improvement in communication over the state of the art.

In decentralized finance (DeFi), the public availability of pending transactions presents significant privacy concerns, enabling market manipulation through miner extractable value (MEV). MEV occurs when block proposers exploit the ability to reorder, omit, or include transactions, causing financial loss to users from frontrunning. Recent research has focused on encrypting pending transactions, hiding transaction data until block finalization. To this end, Choudhuri et al. (USENIX '24) introduce an elegant new primitive called Batched Threshold Encryption (BTE) where a batch of encrypted transactions is selected by a committee and only decrypted after block finalization. Crucially, BTE achieves low communication complexity during decryption and guarantees that all encrypted transactions outside the batch remain private. An important shortcoming of their construction is, however, that it progresses in epochs and requires a costly setup in MPC for each batch decryption. In this work, we introduce a novel BTE scheme addressing the limitations by eliminating the need for an expensive epoch setup while achieving practical encryption and decryption times. Additionally, we explore the problem of how users can coordinate their transactions, which is crucial for the functionality of the system. Along the way, we present several optimizations and trade-offs between communication and computational complexity that allow us to achieve practical performance on standard hardware ($<2$ ms for encryption and $<440$ ms for decrypting $512$ transactions). Finally, we prove our constructions secure in a model that captures practical attacks on MEV-prevention mechanisms.

At Eurocrypt 2015, Zahur, Rosulek, and Evans proposed the model of Linear Garbling Schemes. This model proved a $2\kappa$-bit lower bound of ciphertexts for a broad class of garbling schemes. Since then, several methods have been developed that bypass this lower bound, albeit with a notable limitation: Their reliance on specifically correlated input wire labels restricts their applicability across most gates. At Crypto 2021, Rosulek and Roy presented the innovative "three-halves" garbling scheme in which AND gates cost $1.5\kappa+5$ bits and XOR gates are free. A noteworthy aspect of their scheme is the slicing-and-dicing technique, which is applicable universally to all AND gates when garbling a boolean circuit. Following this revelation, Rosulek and Roy presented several open problems. Our research primarily addresses one of them: ``Is $1.5\kappa$ bits optimal for garbled AND gates in a more inclusive model than Linear Garbling Schemes?'' In this paper, we propose the Bitwise Garbling Schemes, a model that seamlessly incorporates the slicing-and-dicing technique. Our key revelation is that $1.5\kappa$ bits is indeed optimal for arbitrary garbled AND gates in our model. Since Rosulek and Roy also suggested another problem which questions the necessity of free-XOR, we explore constructions without free-XOR and prove a $2\kappa$-bit lower bound. Therefore, sacrificing compatibility with free-XOR does not lead to a more efficient scheme.

We introduce two folding schemes for lookup instances: FLI and FLI+SOS. Both use a PIOP to check that a matrix has elementary basis vectors as rows, with FLI+SOS adding a twist based on Lasso’s SOS-decomposability. FLI takes two lookup instances $\{\mathbf{a}_1\}, \{\mathbf{a}_2\}\subseteq\mathbf{t}$, and expresses them as matrix equations $M_i\cdot\mathbf{t}^\mathsf{T}=\mathbf{a}_i^\mathsf{T}$ for $i=1,2$, where each matrix $M_i\in\mathbb{F}^{m\times N}$ has rows which are elementary basis vectors in $\mathbb{F}^N$. Matrices that satisfy this condition are said to be in $R_{\mathsf{elem}}$. Then, a folding scheme for $R_{\mathsf{elem}}$ into a relaxed relation is used, which combines the matrices $M_1, M_2$ as $M_1+\alpha M_2$ for a random $\alpha\in\mathbb{F}$. Finally, the lookup equations are combined as $(M_1+\alpha M_2)\cdot \mathbf{t}^{\mathsf{T}} = (\mathbf{a}_1+\alpha \mathbf{a}_2)^\mathsf{T}$. In FLI, only the property that a matrix is in $R_{\mathsf{elem}}$ is folded, and this makes the FLI folding step the cheapest among existing solutions. The price to pay is in the cost for proving accumulated instances. FLI+SOS builds upon FLI to enable folding of large SOS-decomposable tables. This is achieved through a variation of Lasso's approach to SOS-decomposability, which fits FLI naturally. For comparison, we describe (for the first time to our knowledge) straightforward variations of Protostar and Proofs for Deep Thought that also benefit from SOS-decomposability. We see that for many reasonable parameter choices, and especially those arising from lookup-based zkVMs, FLI+SOS can concretely be the cheapest folding solution.

Folding schemes are an exciting new primitive, transforming the task of performing multiple zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for a relation into performing just one zero-knowledge proof, for the same relation, and a number of cheap inclusion-proofs. Recently, folding schemes have been used to amortize the cost associated with proving different statements to multiple distinct verifiers, which has various applications. We observe that for these uses, leaking information about the statements folded together can be problematic, yet this happens with previous constructions. Towards resolving this issue, we give a natural definition of privacy preserving folding schemes, and what security they should offer. To construct privacy preserving folding schemes, we first define a statement hiders, a primitive which might be of independent interest. In a nutshell, a statement hider hides an instance of a relation as a new instance in the same relation. The new instance is in the relation if and only if the initial instance is. With this building block, we can utilize existing folding schemes to construct a privacy preserving folding scheme, by first hiding each of the statements. Folding schemes allow verifying that a statement was folded into another statement, while statement hiders allow verifying that a statement was hidden as another statement.

Time-lock puzzles are unique cryptographic primitives that use computational complexity to keep information secret for some period of time, after which security expires. This topic, while over 25 years old, is still in a state where foundations are not well understood: For example, current analysis techniques of time-lock primitives provide no sound mechanism to build composed multi-party cryptographic protocols which use expiring security as a building block. Further, there are analyses that employ idealizations and simulators of unrealistic computational power to be an acceptable sound security argument. Our goal with this short paper is to advocate for understanding what approaches may lead to sound modeling beyond idealization, and what approaches may, in fact, be hopeless at this task of sound modeling. We explain in this paper how existing attempts at this subtle problem lack either composability, a fully consistent analysis, or functionality. The subtle flaws in the existing frameworks reduce to an impossibility result by Mahmoody et al., who showed that time-lock puzzles with super-polynomial gaps (between committer and solver) cannot be constructed from random oracles alone (or any repetitive computation where the next state is completely random given the prior state); yet still the analyses of algebraic puzzles today treat the solving process as if each step is a generic or random oracle. We point out that if the generation process relies on a trapdoor function that cannot be treated as a random oracle (to allow efficient generation while avoiding this impossibility result), then, to be consistent, the analysis of the solving process should also not treat such a trapdoor function (and its intermediate states) as a random oracle. We also delineate additional issues with the proof techniques used for time-lock puzzles. Specifically, when a time-lock puzzle must retain privacy for some amount of time, the reduction should bound the running time of the simulator. A simulator that can ``simulate" if given time that if given to an adversary allows said adversary to solve the puzzle is not a valid security argument. We survey the adherence of various attempts to this principle, as well as the properties that different attempts achieve toward composition.

We show that the Schnorr signature scheme meets existential unforgeability under chosen-message attack (EUF-CMA) in the random oracle model (ROM) if the circular discrete-logarithm (CDL) assumption, a new, non-interactive variant of DL we introduce, holds in the underlying group. Our reduction is completely tight, meaning the constructed adversary against CDL has both essentially the same running time and success probability as the assumed forger. To our knowledge, we are the first to exhibit such a reduction. Previously, Bellare and Dai (INDOCRYPT 2020) showed the scheme is EUF-CMA the ROM if their multi-base DL assumption holds in the underlying group. However, multi-base DL is interactive; moreover, their reduction, while tighter than the initial result of Pointcheval and Stern (EUROCRYPT 1996), still incurs a security loss that is linear in the number of the adversary’s RO queries. We justify CDL by showing it holds in two carefully chosen idealized models, which idealize different aspects of our assumption. Our quantitative bounds in these models are essentially the same as for DL, giving strong evidence that CDL is as hard DL in appropriate elliptic-curve groups groups.

XCB, a tweakable enciphering mode, is part of IEEE Std. 1619.2 for shared storage media. We show that all versions of XCB are not secure through three plaintext recovery attacks. A key observation is that XCB behaves like an LRW1-type tweakable block cipher for single-block messages, which lacks CCA security. The first attack targets one-block XCB, using three queries to recover the plaintext. The second one requires four queries to recover the plaintext that excludes one block. The last one requires seven queries to recover the full plaintext. The first attack applies to any scheme that follows the XCB structure, whereas the latter two attacks work on all versions of XCB, exploiting the separable property of the underlying universal hash function. We also discuss the impact of these vulnerabilities on XCB-based applications, such as disk encryption, nonce-based encryption, deterministic authenticated encryption and robust authenticated encryption, highlighting the risks due to XCB's failure to achieve STPRP security. To address these flaws, we propose the XCB* structure, an improved version of XCB that adds only two XOR operations. We prove that XCB* is STPRP-secure when using AXU hash functions, SPRPs, and a secure IV-based stream cipher.

Overpass Channels presents a groundbreaking approach to blockchain scalability, offering a horizontally scalable, privacy-enhanced payment network with independent verification, fluid liquidity, and robust censorship resistance. This paper introduces a novel architecture that leverages zero-knowledge proofs, specifically zk-SNARKs, to ensure transaction validity and privacy while enabling unprecedented throughput and efficiency. By eliminating the need for traditional consensus mechanisms and miners, Overpass Channels achieves remarkable cost-effectiveness and energy efficiency. The system's design focuses on unilateral payment channels and off-chain transaction processing, allowing for high-speed, low-latency operations without compromising security or decentralization. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Overpass Channels system, including its cryptographic foundations, scalability metrics, integration, and potential applications across various domains, from global payments to confidential voting systems and secure health record management.

Encrypted Search Algorithms (ESAs) are a technique to encrypt data while the user can still search over it. ESAs can protect privacy and ensure security of sensitive data stored on a remote storage. Originally, ESAs were used in the context of documents that consist of keywords. The user encrypts the documents, sends them to a remote server and is still able to search for keywords, without exposing information about the plaintext. The idea of ESAs has also been applied to relational databases, where queries (similar to SQL statements) can be privately executed on an encrypted database.But just as traditional schemes for Keyword-ESAs, also Relational-ESAs have the drawback of exposing some information, called leakage. Leakage attacks have been proposed in the literature that use this information together with auxiliary information to learn details about the plaintext. However, these leakage attacks have overwhelmingly been designed for and applied to Keyword-ESAs and not Relational-ESAs. In this work, we review the suitability of major leakage attacks against ESAs in the relational setting by adapting them accordingly. We perform extensive re-evaluations of the attacks on various relational datasets with different properties. Our evaluations show that major attacks can work against Relational-ESAs in the known-data setting. However, the attack performance differs between datasets, exploited patterns, and attacks.

We consider indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for multi-output circuits $C:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^n$ of size s, where s is the number of AND/OR/NOT gates in C. Under the worst-case assumption that NP $\nsubseteq$ BPP, we establish that there is no efficient indistinguishability obfuscation scheme that outputs circuits of size $s + o(s/ \log s)$. In other words, to be secure, an efficient iO scheme must incur an $\Omega(s/ \log s)$ additive overhead in the size of the obfuscated circuit. The hardness assumption under which this negative result holds is minimal since an optimal iO scheme with no circuit size overhead exists if NP$\nsubseteq$ BPP. Expanding on this result, we also rule out iO for single-output database-aided circuits with an arbitrary polynomial overhead in circuit size. This strengthens an impossibility result by Goldwasser and Rothblum [GR07], which considered circuits with access to an exponential-length database that the obfuscator has oracle access to; in contrast, our impossibility result holds even w.r.t. polynomial-size databases and even w.r.t. obfuscators that may run in time polynomial in the size of the database (and thus may read the whole database). The proof of our main result builds on a connection between obfuscation and meta-complexity put forward by Mazor and Pass [MP24], and on the NP-hardness of circuit minimization for multi-output circuits established by Loff, Ilango, and Oliveira [ILO20], together with other techniques from cryptography and complexity theory.

In scenarios where a seller holds sensitive data $x$, like employee / patient records or ecological data, and a buyer seeks to obtain an evaluation of specific function $f$ on this data, solutions in trustless digital environments like blockchain-based Web3 systems typically fall into two categories: (1) Smart contract-powered solutions and (2) cryptographic solutions leveraging tools such as adaptor signatures. The former approach offers atomic transactions where the buyer learns the function evaluation $f(x)$ (and not $x$ entirely) upon payment. However, this approach is often inefficient, costly, lacks privacy for the seller's data, and is incompatible with systems that do not support smart contracts with required functionalities. In contrast, the adaptor signature-based approach addresses all of the above issues but comes with an "all-or-nothing" guarantee, where the buyer fully extracts $x$ and does not support functional extraction of the sensitive data. In this work, we aim to bridge the gap between these approaches, developing a solution that enables fair functional sales of information while offering improved efficiency, privacy, and compatibility similar to adaptor signatures. Towards this, we propose functional adaptor signatures (FAS) a novel cryptographic primitive that achieves all the desired properties as listed above. Using FAS, the seller can publish an advertisement committing to $x$. The buyer can pre-sign the payment transaction w.r.t. a function $f$, and send it along with the transaction to the seller. The seller adapts the pre-signature into a valid (buyer's) signature and posts the payment and the adapted signature on the blockchain to get paid. Finally, using the pre-signature and the posted signature, the buyer efficiently extracts $f(x)$, and completes the sale. We formalize the security properties of FAS, among which is a new notion called witness privacy to capture seller's privacy, which ensures the buyer does not learn anything beyond $f(x)$. We present multiple variants of witness privacy, namely, witness hiding, witness indistinguishability, and zero-knowledge, to capture varying levels of leakage about $x$ beyond $f(x)$ to a malicious buyer. We introduce two efficient constructions of FAS supporting linear functions (like statistics/aggregates, kernels in machine learning, etc.), that satisfy the strongest notion of witness privacy. One construction is based on prime-order groups and compatible with Schnorr signatures for payments, and the other is based on lattices and compatible with a variant of Lyubashevsky's signature scheme. A central conceptual contribution of our work lies in revealing a surprising connection between functional encryption, a well-explored concept over the past decade, and adaptor signatures, a relatively new primitive in the cryptographic landscape. On a technical level, we avoid heavy cryptographic machinery and achieve improved efficiency, by making black-box use of building blocks like inner product functional encryption (IPFE) while relying on certain security-enhancing techniques for the IPFE in a non-black-box manner. We implement our FAS construction for Schnorr signatures and show that for reasonably sized seller witnesses, the different operations are quite efficient even for commodity hardware.

Keccak acts as the hash algorithm and eXtendable-Output Function (XOF) specified in the NIST standard drafts for Kyber and Dilithium. The Keccak output is highly correlated with sensitive information. While in RSA and ECDSA, hash-like components are only used to process public information, such as the message. The importance and sensitivity of hash-like components like Keccak are much higher in Kyber and Dilithium than in traditional public-key cryptography. However, few works study Keccak regarding the physical security of Kyber and Dilithium. In this paper, we propose a practical fault attack scheme on Keccak to compromise Kyber and Dilithium on ARM Cortex-M devices. Specifically, by injecting loop-abort faults in the iterative assignments or updates of Keccak, we propose six attacks that can set the Keccak output to a known value. These attacks can be exploited to disrupt the random number expansion or other critical processes in Kyber and Dilithium, thereby recovering sensitive information derived from the Keccak output. In this way, we propose eight attack strategies on Kyber and seven on Dilithium, achieving key recovery, signature forgery, and verification bypass. To validate the practicality of the proposed attack strategies, we perform fault characterization on five real-world devices belonging to four different series (ARM Cortex-M0+, M3, M4, and M33). The success rate is up to 89.5%, demonstrating the feasibility of loop-abort faults. This paper also provides a guide for reliably inducing loop-abort faults on ARM Cortex-M devices using electromagnetic fault injection. We further validate our complete attacks on Kyber and Dilithium based on the official implementations, achieving a success rate of up to 55.1%. The results demonstrate that the excessive use of Keccak in generating and computing secret information leads to severe vulnerabilities. Our work can potentially be migrated to other post-quantum cryptographic algorithms that use Keccak, such as Falcon, BIKE, and HQC.

Datasets of side-channel leakage measurements are widely used in research to develop and benchmarking side-channel attack and evaluation methodologies. Compared to using custom and/or one-off datasets, widely-used and publicly available datasets improve research reproducibility and comparability. Further, performing high-quality measurements requires specific equipment and skills, while also taking a significant amount of time. Therefore, using publicly available datasets lowers the barriers to entry into side-channel research. This paper introduces the SMAesH dataset. SMAesH is an optimized masked hardware implementation of the AES with a provably secure arbitrary-order masking scheme. The SMAesH dataset contains power traces of the first-order SMAesH on two FPGAs of different generations, along with key, plaintext and masking randomness. A part of the dataset use uniformly random key and plaintext to enable leakage profiling, while another part uses a fixed key (still with uniformly random plaintext) to enable attack validation or leakage assessment in a fixed-versus-random setting. We document the experimental setup used to acquire the dataset. It is built from components that are widely available. We also discuss particular methods employed to maximize the information content in the leakage traces, such as power supply selection, fine-grained trace alignment and resolution optimization.

In this paper, we investigate the rough order assumption (\(RO_C\)) introduced by Braun, Damgård, and Orlandi at CRYPTO 23, which posits that class groups of imaginary quadratic fields with no small prime factors in their order are computationally indistinguishable from general class groups. We present a novel attack that challenges the validity of this assumption by leveraging properties of Mordell curves over the rational numbers. Specifically, we demonstrate that if the rank of the Mordell curve \( E_{-16D} \) is at least 2, it contradicts the rough order assumption. Our attack deterministically breaks the \(RO_C\) assumption for discriminants of a special form, assuming the parity conjecture holds and certain conditions are met. Additionally, for both special and generic cases, our results suggest that the presence of nontrivial 3-torsion elements in class groups can undermine the \(RO_C\) assumption. Although our findings are concrete for specific cases, the generic scenario relies on heuristic arguments related to the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer (BSD) conjecture, a significant and widely believed conjecture in number theory. Attacks against 2-torsion elements in class groups are already well known, but our work introduces a distinct approach targeting 3-torsion elements. These attacks are fundamentally different in nature, and both have relatively straightforward countermeasures, though they do not generalize to higher torsions. While these results do not entirely invalidate the \(RO_C\) assumption, they highlight the need for further exploration of its underlying assumptions, especially in the context of specific torsion structures within class groups.

Isogeny-based cryptography is one of the candidates for post-quantum cryptography. Recently, many isogeny-based cryptosystems using isogenies between Kummer surfaces were proposed. Most of those cryptosystems use $(2,2)$-isogenies. However, to enhance the possibility of cryptosystems, higher degree isogenies, say $(\ell,\ell)$-isogenies for an odd $\ell$, is also crucial. For an odd $\ell$, the Lubicz-Robert gave a formula to compute $(\ell)^g$-isogenies in general dimension $g$. In this paper, we propose explicit and efficient algorithms to compute $(\ell,\ell)$-isogenies between Kummer surfaces, based on the Lubicz-Robert formula.In particular, we propose two algorithms for computing the codomain of the isogeny and two algorithms for evaluating the image of a point under the isogeny. Then, we count the number of arithmetic operations required for each of our proposed algorithms, and determine the most efficient algorithm in terms of the number of arithmetic operations from each of two types of algorithms for each $\ell$. As an application, using the most efficient one, we implemented the SIDH attack on B-SIDH in SageMath.In setting that originally claimed 128-bit security, our implementation was able to recover that secret key in about 11 hours.

To date, the strongest notions of security achievable for two-round publicly-verifiable cryptographic proofs for $\mathsf{NP}$ are witness indistinguishability (Dwork-Naor 2000, Groth-Ostrovsky-Sahai 2006), witness hiding (Bitansky-Khurana-Paneth 2019, Kuykendall-Zhandry 2020), and super-polynomial simulation (Pass 2003, Khurana-Sahai 2017). On the other hand, zero-knowledge and even weak zero-knowledge (Dwork-Naor-Reingold-Stockmeyer 1999) are impossible in the two-round publicly-verifiable setting (Goldreich-Oren 1994). This leaves an enormous gap in our theoretical understanding of known achievable security and the impossibility results for two-round publicly-verifiable cryptographic proofs for $\mathsf{NP}$. Towards filling this gap, we propose a new and natural notion of security, called witness semantic security, that captures the natural and strong notion that an adversary should not be able to learn any partial information about the prover's witness beyond what it could learn given only the statement $x$. Not only does our notion of witness semantic security subsume both witness indistinguishability and witness hiding, but it also has an easily appreciable interpretation. Moreover, we show that assuming the subexponential hardness of LWE, there exists a two-round public-coin publicly-verifiable witness semantic secure argument. To our knowledge, this is the strongest form of security known for this setting. As a key application of our work, we show that non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments in the common reference string (CRS) model can additionally maintain witness semantic security even when the CRS is maliciously generated. Our work gives the first construction from (subexponential) standard assumptions that achieves a notion stronger than witness-indistinguishability against a malicious CRS authority. In order to achieve our results, we give the first construction of a ZAP from subexponential LWE that is adaptively sound. Additionally, we propose a notion of simulation using non-uniform advice about a malicious CRS, which we also believe will be of independent interest.

SNOVA is one of the submissions in the NIST Round 1 Additional Signature of the Post-Quantum Signature Competition. SNOVA is a UOV variant that uses the noncommutative-ring technique to educe the size of the public key. SNOVA's public key size and signature size are well-balanced and have good performance. Recently, Beullens proposed a forgery attack against SNOVA, pointing out that the parameters of SNOVA can be attacked. Beullens also argued that with some slight adjustments his attacks can be prevented. In this note, we explain Beullens' forgery attack and show that the attack can be invalid by two different approaches. Finally, we show that these two approaches do not increase the sizes of the public keys or signatures and the current parameters satisfy the security requirement of NIST.

An important consideration with the growth of the DeFi ecosystem is the protection of clients who submit transactions to the system. As it currently stands, the public visibility of these transactions in the memory pool (mempool) makes them susceptible to market manipulations such as frontrunning and backrunning. More broadly, for various reasons—ranging from avoiding market manipulation to including time-sensitive information in their transactions—clients may want the contents of their transactions to remain private until they are executed, i.e. they have *pending transaction privacy*. Therefore, *mempool privacy* is becoming an increasingly important feature as DeFi applications continue to spread. We construct the first *practical* mempool privacy scheme that uses a *one-time* DKG setup for $n$ decryption servers. Our scheme ensures the strong privacy requirement by not only hiding the transactions until they are decrypted but also guaranteeing privacy for transactions that were not selected in the epoch (*pending transaction privacy*). For each epoch (or block), clients can encrypt their transactions so that, once $B$ (encrypted) transactions are selected for the epoch, they can be decrypted by each decryption server while communicating only $O(1)$ information. Our result improves upon the best-known prior works, which either: (i) require an expensive initial setup involving a (special purpose) multiparty computation protocol executed by the $n$ decryption servers, along with an additional *per-epoch* setup; (ii) require each decryption server to communicate $O(B)$ information; or (iii) do not guarantee pending transaction privacy. We implement our scheme and find that transactions can be encrypted in approximately 8.5 ms, independent of committee size, and the communication required to decrypt an entire batch of transactions is 48 bytes per party, independent of the number of transactions. If deployed on Ethereum, which processes close to 500 transactions per block, it takes close to 3.2 s for each committee member to compute a partial decryption and 3.0 s to decrypt all transactions for a block in single-threaded mode. Compared to prior work, which had an expensive setup phase per epoch, we incur $<2\times$ overhead in the worst case. On some metrics such as partial decryptions size, we actually fare better.

With the standardization of NIST post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) schemes, optimizing these PQC schemes across various platforms presents significant research value. While most existing software implementation efforts have concentrated on ARM platforms, research on PQC implementations utilizing various RISC-V instruction set architectures (ISAs) remains limited. In light of this gap, this paper proposes comprehensive and efficient optimizations of Keccak, Kyber, and Dilithium on RV{32,64}IM{B}{V}. We thoroughly optimize these implementations for dual-issue CPUs, believing that our work on various RISC-V ISAs will provide valuable insights for future PQC deployments. Specifically, for Keccak, we revisit a range of optimization techniques, including bit interleaving, lane complementing, in-place processing, and hybrid vector/scalar implementations. We construct an optimal combination of methods aimed at achieving peak performance on dual-issue CPUs for various RISC-V ISAs. For the NTT implementations of Kyber and Dilithium, we deliver optimized solutions based on Plantard and Montgomery arithmetic for diverse RISC-V ISAs, incorporating extensive dual-issue enhancements. Additionally, we improve the signed Plantard multiplication algorithm proposed by Akoi et al. Ultimately, our testing demonstrates that our implementations of Keccak and NTT across various ISAs achieve new performance records. More importantly, they significantly enrich the PQC software ecosystem for RISC-V.

We present a new approach for constructing non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof systems from vector trapdoor hashing (VTDH) -- a generalization of trapdoor hashing [Döttling et al., Crypto'19]. Unlike prior applications of trapdoor hash to NIZKs, we use VTDH to realize the hidden bits model [Feige-Lapidot-Shamir, FOCS'90] leading to black-box constructions of NIZKs. This approach gives us the following new results: - A statistically-sound NIZK proof system based on the hardness of decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) and learning parity with noise (LPN) over finite fields with inverse polynomial noise rate. This gives the first statistically sound NIZK proof system that is not based on either LWE, or bilinear maps, or factoring. - A dual-mode NIZK satisfying statistical zero-knowledge in the common random string mode and statistical soundness in the common reference string mode assuming the hardness of learning with errors (LWE) with polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio. This gives the first black-box construction of such a dual-mode NIZK under LWE. This improves the recent work of Waters (STOC'24) which relied on LWE with super-polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio and required a setup phase with private coins. The above constructions are black-box and satisfy single-theorem zero-knowledge property. Building on the works of Feige et al.(FOCS'90) and Fishclin and Rohrback (PKC'21), we upgrade these constructions (under the same assumptions) to satisfy multi-theorem zero-knowledge property at the expense of making non-black-box use of cryptography.

Homomorphic encryption has long been used to build voting schemes. Additively homomorphic encryption only allows simple count- ing functions. Lattice-based fully (or somewhat) homomorphic encryp- tion allows more general counting functions, but the required parameters quickly become impractical if used naively. It is safe to leak information during the counting function evaluation, as long as the information could be derived from the public result. To exploit this observation, we de- sign a flexible framework for using somewhat homomorphic encryption for voting that incorporates random input and allows controlled leakage of information. We instantiate the framework using novel circuits with low but significant multiplicative depth exploiting the fact that, in the context of voting, leakage of certain information during homomorphic evaluation can be permitted. We also instantiate the framework with a circuit that uses random input to shuffle without the use of mixnets.

We enhance the provable soundness of FRI, an interactive oracle proof of proximity (IOPP) for Reed-Solomon codes introduced by Ben-Sasson et al. in ICALP 2018. More precisely, we prove the soundness error of FRI is less than $\max\left\{O\left(\frac{1}{\eta}\cdot \frac{n}{|\mathbb{F}_q|}\right), (1-\delta)^{t}\right\}$, where $\delta\le 1-\sqrt{\rho}-\eta$ is within the Johnson bound and $\mathbb{F}_q$ is a finite field with characteristic greater than $2$. Previously, the best-known provable soundness error for FRI was $\max\left\{O\left(\frac{\rho^2}{\eta^7}\cdot \frac{n^2}{|\mathbb{F}_q|}\right), (1-\delta)^{t}\right\}$, as established by Ben-Sasson et al. in FOCS 2020. We prove the number of \emph{bad} folding points in FRI is linear in the length $n$ of codeword when it is $\delta$-far from the Reed-Solomon code. This implies the linear proximity gaps for Reed-Solomon codes and improves the provable soundness of batched FRI. Our results indicate that the FRI protocol can be implemented over a smaller field, thereby enhancing its efficiency. Furthermore, for a fixed finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$, we prove that FRI can achieve improved security.

It is well known that estimating a sharp lower bound on the second-order nonlinearity of a general class of cubic Booleanfunction is a difficult task. In this paper for a given integer $n \geq 4$, some values of $s$ and $t$ are determined for which cubic monomial Boolean functions of the form $h_{\mu}(x)=Tr( \mu x^{2^s+2^t+1})$ $(n>s>t \geq 1)$ possess good lower bounds on their second-order nonlinearity. The obtained functions are worth considering for securing symmetric cryptosystems against various quadratic approximation attacks and fast algebraic attacks.

Cryptographic group actions have gained significant attention in recent years for their application on post-quantum Sigma protocols and digital signatures. In NIST's recent additional call for post-quantum signatures, three relevant proposals are based on group actions: LESS, MEDS, and ALTEQ. This work explores signature optimisations leveraging a group's factorisation. We show that if the group admits a factorisation as a semidirect product of subgroups, the group action can be restricted on a quotient space under the equivalence relation induced by the factorisation. If the relation is efficiently decidable, we show that it is possible to construct an equivalent Sigma protocol for a relationship that depends only on one of the subgroups. Moreover, if a special class of representative of the quotient space is efficiently computable via a canonical form, the restricted action is effective and does not incur in security loss. Finally, we apply these techniques to the group actions underlying LESS and MEDS, showing how they will affect the length of signatures and public keys.

Lookup arguments enable a prover to convince a verifier that a committed vector of lookup elements $\vec{f} \in \mathbb{F}^m$ is contained within a predefined table $T \in \mathbb{F}^N$. These arguments are particularly beneficial for enhancing the performance of SNARKs in handling non-arithmetic operations, such as batched range checks or bitwise operations. While existing works have achieved efficient and succinct lookup arguments, challenges remain, particularly when dealing with large vectors of lookup elements in privacy-sensitive applications. In this paper, we introduce $\duplex$, a scalable zero-knowledge lookup argument scheme that offers significant improvements over previous approaches. Notably, we present the first lookup argument designed to operate over the RSA group. Our core technique allows for the transformation of elements into prime numbers to ensure compatibility with the RSA group, all without imposing substantial computational costs on the prover. Given $m$ lookup elements, $\duplex$ achieves an asymptotic proving time of $O(m \log m)$, with constant-sized proofs, constant-time verification, and a public parameter size independent of the table size $N$. Additionally, $\duplex$ ensures the privacy of lookup elements and is robust against dynamic table updates, making it highly suitable for scalable verifiable computation in real-world applications. We implemented and empirically evaluated $\duplex$, comparing it with the state-of-the-art zero-knowledge lookup argument Caulk [CCS'22]. Our experimental results demonstrate that $\duplex$ significantly outperforms Caulk in proving time for both single and batched lookup arguments, while maintaining practical proof size and verification time.

In this paper, we explore a new type of key collisions called target-plaintext key collisions of AES, which emerge as an open problem in the key committing security and are directly converted into single-block collision attacks on Davies-Meyer (DM) hashing mode. For this key collision, a ciphertext collision is uniquely observed when a specific plaintext is encrypted under two distinct keys. We introduce an efficient automatic search tool designed to find target-plaintext key collisions. This tool exploits bit-wise behaviors of differential characteristics and dependencies among operations and internal variables of both data processing and key scheduling parts. This allows us to hierarchically perform rebound-type attacks to identify key collisions. As a result, we demonstrate single-block collision attacks on 2/5/6-round AES-128/192/256-DM and semi-free-start collision attacks on 5/7/9-round AES-128/192/256-DM, respectively. To validate our attacks, we provide an example of fixed-target-plaintext key collision/semi-free-start collisions on 9-round AES-256-DM. Furthermore, by exploiting a specific class of free-start collisions with our tool, we present two-block collision attacks on 3/9-round AES-128/256-DM, respectively.

We introduce new lattice-based techniques for building ABE for circuits with unbounded attribute length based on the LWE assumption, improving upon the previous constructions of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan (CRYPTO 16) and Goyal, Koppula, and Waters (TCC 16). Our main result is a simple and more efficient unbounded ABE scheme for circuits where only the circuit depth is fixed at set-up; this is the first unbounded ABE scheme for circuits that rely only on black-box access to cryptographic and lattice algorithms. The scheme achieves semi-adaptive security against unbounded collusions under the LWE assumption. The encryption time and ciphertext size are roughly $3 \times$ larger than the prior bounded ABE of Boneh et al. (EUROCRYPT 2014), substantially improving upon the encryption times in prior works. As a secondary contribution, we present an analogous result for unbounded inner product predicate encryption that satisfies weak attribute-hiding.

We investigate the notion of bit-security for decisional cryptographic properties, as originally proposed in (Micciancio & Walter, Eurocrypt 2018), and its main variants and extensions, with the goal clarifying the relation between different definitions, and facilitating their use. Specific contributions of this paper include: (1) identifying the optimal adversaries achieving the highest possible MW advantage, showing that they are deterministic and have a very simple threshold structure; (2) giving a simple proof that a competing definition proposed by (Watanabe & Yasunaga, Asiacrypt 2021) is actually equivalent to the original MW definition; and (3) developing tools for the use of the extended notion of computational-statistical bit-security introduced in (Li, Micciancio, Schultz & Sorrell, Crypto 2022), showing that it fully supports common cryptographic proof techniques like hybrid arguments and probability replacement theorems. On the technical side, our results are obtained by introducing a new notion of "fuzzy" distinguisher (which we prove equivalent to the "aborting" distinguishers of Micciancio and Walter), and a tight connection between the MW advantage and the Le Cam metric, a standard quantity used in statistics.

Multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (MKFHE), a generalization of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), enables a computation over encrypted data under multiple keys. The first MKFHE schemes were based on the NTRU primitive, however these early NTRU based FHE schemes were found to be insecure due to the problem of over-stretched parameters. Recently, in the case of standard (non-multi key) FHE a secure version, called FINAL, of NTRU has been found. In this work we extend FINAL to an MKFHE scheme, this allows us to benefit from some of the performance advantages provided by NTRU based primitives. Thus, our scheme provides competitive performance against current state-of-the-art multi-key TFHE, in particular reducing the computational complexity from quadratic to linear in the number of keys.

In August 2021, Liu et al. (IEEE TIFS'21) proposed a privacy-enhanced framework named PEFL to efficiently detect poisoning behaviours in Federated Learning (FL) using homomorphic encryption. In this article, we show that PEFL does not preserve privacy. In particular, we illustrate that PEFL reveals the entire gradient vector of all users in clear to one of the participating entities, thereby violating privacy. Furthermore, we clearly show that an immediate fix for this issue is still insufficient to achieve privacy by pointing out multiple flaws in the proposed system.

A mix network, or mixnet, is a cryptographic tool for anonymous routing, taking messages from multiple (identifiable) senders and delivering them in a randomly permuted order. Traditional mixnets employ encryption and proofs of correct shuffle to cut the link between each sender and their input. Hébant et al. (PKC '20) introduced a novel approach to scalable mixnets based on linearly homomorphic signatures. Unfortunately, their security model is too weak to support voting applications. Building upon their work, we leverage recent advances in equivalence class signatures, replacing linearly homomorphic signatures to obtain more efficient mixnets with security in a more robust model. More concretely, we introduce the notion of mercurial signatures on randomizable ciphertexts along with an efficient construction, which we use to build a scalable mixnet protocol suitable for voting. We compare our approach to other (scalable) mixnet approaches, implement our protocols, and provide concrete performance benchmarks. Our findings show our mixnet significantly outperforms existing alternatives in efficiency and scalability. Verifying the mixing process for 50k ciphertexts takes 135 seconds on a commodity laptop (without parallelization) when employing ten mixers.

The SPDZ protocol family is a popular choice for secure multi-party computation (MPC) in a dishonest majority setting with active adversaries. Over the past decade, a series of studies have focused on improving its offline phase, where special additive shares, called authenticated triples, are generated. However, to accommodate recent demands for matrix operations in secure machine learning and big integer arithmetic in distributed RSA key generation, updates to the offline phase are required. In this work, we propose a new protocol for the SPDZ offline phase, TopGear 2.0, which improves upon the previous state-of-the-art construction, TopGear (Baum et al., SAC'19), and its variant for matrix triples (Chen et al., Asiacrypt'20). Our protocol aims to achieve a speedup in matrix triple generation and support for larger prime fields, up to 4096 bits in size. To achieve this, we employ a variant of the BFV scheme and a homomorphic matrix multiplication algorithm optimized for our purpose. As a result, our protocol achieves about 3.6x speedup for generating scalar triples in a 1024-bit prime field and about 34x speedup for generating 128x128 matrix triples. In addition, we reduce the size of evaluation keys from 27.4 GB to 0.22 GB and the communication cost for MAC key generation from 816 MB to 16.6 MB.

In the rapidly evolving Web3 ecosystem, transparent auditing has emerged as a critical component for both applications and users. However, there is a significant gap in understanding how users perceive this new form of auditing and its implications for Web3 security. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates a case study, user interviews, and social media data analysis, our study leverages a risk perception model to comprehensively explore Web3 users' perceptions regarding information accessibility, the role of auditing, and its influence on user behavior. Based on these extensive findings, we discuss how this open form of auditing is shaping the security of the Web3 ecosystem, identifying current challenges, and providing design implications.

Although one-way functions are well-established as the minimal primitive for classical cryptography, a minimal primitive for quantum cryptography is still unclear. Universal extrapolation, first considered by Impagliazzo and Levin (1990), is hard if and only if one-way functions exist. Towards better understanding minimal assumptions for quantum cryptography, we study the quantum analogues of the universal extrapolation task. Specifically, we put forth the classical$\rightarrow$quantum extrapolation task, where we ask to extrapolate the rest of a bipartite pure state given the first register measured in the computational basis. We then use it as a key component to establish new connections in quantum cryptography: (a) quantum commitments exist if classical$\rightarrow$quantum extrapolation is hard; and (b) classical$\rightarrow$quantum extrapolation is hard if any of the following cryptographic primitives exists: quantum public-key cryptography (such as quantum money and signatures) with a classical public key or 2-message quantum key distribution protocols. For future work, we further generalize the extrapolation task and propose a fully quantum analogue. We show that it is hard if quantum commitments exist, and it is easy for quantum polynomial space.

Homomorphic message authenticators allow a user to perform computation on previously authenticated data producing a tag $\sigma$ that can be used to verify the authenticity of the computation. We extend this notion to consider a multi-party setting where we wish to produce a tag that allows verifying (possibly different) computations on all party's data at once. Moreover, the size of this tag should not grow as a function of the number of parties or the complexity of the computations. We construct the first aggregate homomorphic MAC scheme that achieves such aggregation of homomorphic tags. Moreover, the final aggregate tag consists of only a single group element. Our construction supports aggregation of computations that can be expressed by bounded-depth arithmetic circuits and is secure in the random oracle model based on the hardness of the Computational Co-Diffie-Hellman problem over an asymmetric bilinear map.

Groth16 is a pairing-based zero-knowledge proof scheme that has a constant proof size and an efficient verification algorithm. Bitcoin Script is a stack-based low-level programming language that is used to lock and unlock bitcoins. In this paper, we present a practical implementation of the Groth16 verifier in Bitcoin Script deployable on the mainnet of a Bitcoin blockchain called BSV. Our result paves the way for a framework of verifiable computation on Bitcoin: a Groth16 proof is generated for the correctness of an off-chain computation and is verified in Bitcoin Script on-chain. This approach not only offers privacy but also scalability. Moreover, this approach enables smart contract capability on Bitcoin which was previously thought rather limited if not non-existent.

The planted random subgraph detection conjecture of Abram et al. (TCC 2023) asserts the pseudorandomness of a pair of graphs $(H, G)$, where $G$ is an Erdos-Renyi random graph on $n$ vertices, and $H$ is a random induced subgraph of $G$ on $k$ vertices. Assuming the hardness of distinguishing these two distributions (with two leaked vertices), Abram et al. construct communication-efficient, computationally secure (1) 2-party private simultaneous messages (PSM) and (2) secret sharing for forbidden graph structures. We prove the low-degree hardness of detecting planted random subgraphs all the way up to $k\leq n^{1 - \Omega(1)}$. This improves over Abram et al.'s analysis for $k \leq n^{1/2 - \Omega(1)}$. The hardness extends to $r$-uniform hypergraphs for constant $r$. Our analysis is tight in the distinguisher's degree, its advantage, and in the number of leaked vertices. Extending the constructions of Abram et al, we apply the conjecture towards (1) communication-optimal multiparty PSM protocols for random functions and (2) bit secret sharing with share size $(1 + \epsilon)\log n$ for any $\epsilon > 0$ in which arbitrary minimal coalitions of up to $r$ parties can reconstruct and secrecy holds against all unqualified subsets of up to $\ell = o(\epsilon \log n)^{1/(r-1)}$ parties.

Frontrunning is rampant in blockchain ecosystems, yielding attackers profits that have already soared into several million. Most existing frontrunning attacks focus on manipulating transaction order (namely, prioritizing attackers' transactions before victims' transactions) $\textit{within}$ a block. However, for the emerging directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based blockchains, these intra-block frontrunning attacks may not fully reveal the frontrunning vulnerabilities as they introduce block ordering rules to order transactions belonging to distinct blocks. This work performs the first in-depth analysis of frontrunning attacks toward DAG-based blockchains. We observe that the current block ordering rule is vulnerable to a novel $\textit{inter-block}$ frontrunning attack, which enables the attacker to prioritize ordering its transactions before the victim transactions across blocks. We introduce three attacking strategies: $\textit{(i)}$ Fissure attack, where attackers render the victim transactions ordered later by disconnecting the victim's blocks. $\textit{(ii)}$ Speculative attack, where attackers speculatively construct order-priority blocks. $\textit{(iii)}$ Sluggish attack, where attackers deliberately create low-round blocks assigned a higher ordering priority by the block ordering rule. We implement our attacks on two open-source DAG-based blockchains, Bullshark and Tusk. We extensively evaluate our attacks in geo-distributed AWS and local environments by running up to $n=100$ nodes. Our experiments show remarkable attack effectiveness. For instance, with the speculative attack, the attackers can achieve a $92.86\%$ attack success rate (ASR) on Bullshark and an $86.27\%$ ASR on Tusk. Using the fissure attack, the attackers can achieve a $94.81\%$ ASR on Bullshark and an $87.31\%$ ASR on Tusk. We also discuss potential countermeasures for the proposed attack, such as ordering blocks randomly and reordering transactions globally based on transaction fees. However, we find that they either compromise the performance of the system or make the protocol more vulnerable to frontrunning using the existing frontrunning strategies.

Post-quantum cryptography has gained attention due to the need for secure cryptographic systems in the face of quantum computing. Code-based and lattice-based cryptography are two promi- nent approaches, both heavily studied within the NIST standardization project. Code-based cryptography—most prominently exemplified by the McEliece cryptosystem—is based on the hardness of decoding random linear error-correcting codes. Despite the McEliece cryptosystem having been unbroken for several decades, it suffers from large key sizes, which has led to exploring variants using metrics than the Hamming metric, such as the Lee metric. This alternative metric may allow for smaller key sizes, but requires further analysis for potential vulnerabilities to lattice- based attack techniques. In this paper, we consider a generic Lee met- ric based McEliece type cryptosystem and evaluate its security against lattice-based attacks.

Private set intersection (PSI) is a type of private set operation (PSO) for which concretely efficient linear-complexity protocols do exist. However, the situation is currently less satisfactory for other relevant PSO problems such as private set union (PSU): For PSU, the most promising protocols either rely entirely on computationally expensive public-key operations or suffer from substantial communication overhead. In this work, we present the first PSU protocol that is mainly based on efficient symmetric-key primitives yet enjoys comparable communication as public-key-based alternatives. Our core idea is to re-purpose state-of-the-art circuit-based PSI to realize a multi-query reverse private membership test (mq-RPMT), which is instrumental for building PSU. We carefully analyze a privacy leakage issue resulting from the hashing paradigm commonly utilized in circuit-based PSI and show how to mitigate this via oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF) and new shuffle sub-protocols. Our protocol is modularly designed as a sequential execution of different building blocks that can be easily replaced by more efficient variants in the future, which will directly benefit the overall performance. We implement our resulting PSU protocol, showing a run-time improvement of 10% over the state-of-the-art public-key-based protocol of Chen et al. (PKC'24) for input sets of size $2^{20}$. Furthermore, we improve communication by $1.6\times$ over the state-of-the-art symmetric-key-based protocol of Zhang et al. (USENIX Sec'23).

We show that every NP relation that can be verified by a bounded-depth polynomial-sized circuit, or a bounded-space polynomial-time algorithm, has a computational zero-knowledge proof (with statistical soundness) with communication that is only additively larger than the witness length. Our construction relies only on the minimal assumption that one-way functions exist. In more detail, assuming one-way functions, we show that every NP relation that can be verified in NC has a zero-knowledge proof with communication $|w|+poly(\lambda,\log(|x|))$ and relations that can be verified in SC have a zero-knowledge proof with communication $|w|+|x|^\epsilon \cdot poly(\lambda)$. Here $\epsilon>0$ is an arbitrarily small constant and \lambda denotes the security parameter. As an immediate corollary, we also get that any NP relation, with a size S verification circuit (using unbounded fan-in XOR, AND and OR gates), has a zero-knowledge proof with communication $S+poly(\lambda,\log(S))$. Our result improves on a recent result of Nassar and Rothblum (Crypto, 2022), which achieve length $(1+\epsilon) \cdot |w|+|x|^\epsilon \cdot poly(\lambda)$ for bounded-space computations, and is also considerably simpler. Building on a work of Hazay et al. (TCC 2023), we also give a more complicated version of our result in which the parties only make a black-box use of the one-way function, but in this case we achieve only an inverse polynomial soundness error.

In this paper, we initiate the study of multi-designated detector watermarking (MDDW) for large language models (LLMs). This technique allows model providers to generate watermarked outputs from LLMs with two key properties: (i) only specific, possibly multiple, designated detectors can identify the watermarks, and (ii) there is no perceptible degradation in the output quality for ordinary users. We formalize the security definitions for MDDW and present a framework for constructing MDDW for any LLM using multi-designated verifier signatures (MDVS). Recognizing the significant economic value of LLM outputs, we introduce claimability as an optional security feature for MDDW, enabling model providers to assert ownership of LLM outputs within designated-detector settings. To support claimable MDDW, we propose a generic transformation converting any MDVS to a claimable MDVS. Our implementation of the MDDW scheme highlights its advanced functionalities and flexibility over existing methods, with satisfactory performance metrics.

Peer-to-peer communication systems can provide many functions, including anonymized routing of network traffic, massive parallel computing environments, and distributed storage. Anonymity refers to the state of being completely nameless, with no attached identifiers. Pseudonymity involves the use of a fictitious name that can be consistently linked to a particular user, though not necessarily to the real identity. Both provide a layer of privacy, shielding the user's true identity from public view. But we find their significations are often misunderstood. In this note, we clarify the differences between anonymity and pseudonymity. We also find the Zhong et al.'s key agreement scheme [IEEE TCC, 2022, 10(3), 1592-1603] fails to keep anonymity, not as claimed.

Recent oracle separations [Kretschmer, TQC'21, Kretschmer et. al., STOC'23] have raised the tantalizing possibility of building quantum cryptography from sources of hardness that persist even if the polynomial heirarchy collapses. We realize this possibility by building quantum bit commitments and secure computation from unrelativized, well-studied mathematical problems that are conjectured to be hard for $\mathsf{P}^{\#\mathsf{P}}$ -- such as approximating the permanents of complex gaussian matrices, or approximating the output probabilities of random quantum circuits. Indeed, we show that as long as \any one of the conjectures underlying sampling-based quantum advantage (e.g., BosonSampling, Random Circuit Sampling, IQP, etc.) is true, quantum cryptography can be based on the extremely mild assumption that $\mathsf{P}^{\#\mathsf{P}} \not\subseteq \mathsf{(io)BQP}/\mathsf{qpoly}$. Our techniques uncover strong connections between the hardness of approximating the probabilities of outcomes of quantum processes, the existence of ``one-way'' state synthesis problems, and the existence of useful cryptographic primitives such as one-way puzzles and quantum bit commitments. Specifically, we prove that the following hardness assumptions are equivalent under $\mathsf{BQP}$ reductions. 1. The hardness of approximating the probabilities of outcomes of certain efficiently sampleable distributions. That is, there exist quantumly efficiently sampleable distributions for which it is hard to approximate the probability assigned to a randomly chosen string in the support of the distribution (upto inverse polynomial multiplicative error). 2. The existence of one-way puzzles, where a quantum sampler outputs a pair of classical strings -- a puzzle and its key -- and where the hardness lies in finding the key corresponding to a random puzzle. These are known to imply quantum bit commitments [Khurana and Tomer, STOC'24]. 3. The existence of state puzzles, or one-way state synthesis, where it is hard to synthesize a secret quantum state given a public classical identifier. These capture the hardness of search problems with quantum inputs (secrets) and classical outputs (challenges). These are the first constructions of quantum cryptographic primitives (one-way puzzles, quantum bit commitments, state puzzles) from concrete, well-founded mathematical assumptions that do not imply the existence of classical cryptography. Along the way, we also show that distributions that admit efficient quantum samplers but cannot be pseudo-deterministically efficiently sampled imply quantum commitments.

The problem of reliable/secure all-to-all communication over low-degree networks has been essential for communication-local (CL) n-party MPC (i.e., MPC protocols where every party directly communicates only with a few, typically polylogarithmic in n, parties) and more recently for communication over ad hoc networks, which are used in blockchain protocols. However, a limited number of adaptively secure solutions exist, and they all make relatively strong assumptions on the ability of parties to act in some specific manner before the adversary can corrupt them. Two such assumptions were made in the work of Chandran et al. [ITCS ’15]---parties can (a) multisend messages to several receivers simultaneously; and (b) securely erase the message and the identities of the receivers, before the adversary gets a chance to corrupt the sender (even if a receiver is corrupted). A natural question to ask is: Are these assumptions necessary for adaptively secure CL MPC? In this paper, we characterize the feasibility landscape for all-to-all reliable message transmission (RMT) under these two assumptions, and use this characterization to obtain (asymptotically) tight feasibility results for CL MPC. – First, we prove a strong impossibility result for a broad class of RMT protocols, termed here store-and-forward protocols, which includes all known communication protocols for CL MPC from standard cryptographic assumptions. Concretely, we show that no such protocol with a certain expansion rate can tolerate a constant fraction of parties being corrupted. – Next, under the assumption of only a PKI, we show that assuming secure erasures, we can obtain an RMT protocol between all pairs of parties with polylogarithmic locality (even without assuming multisend) for the honest majority setting. We complement this result by showing a negative result for the setting of dishonest majority. – Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, under stronger assumptions (i.e., trapdoor permutations with a reverse domain sampler, and compact and malicious circuit-private FHE), we construct a polylogarithmic-locality all-to-one RMT protocol, which is adaptively secure and tolerates any constant fraction of corruptions, without assuming either secure erasures or multisend. This last result uses a novel combination of adaptively secure (e.g., non-committing) encryption and (static) FHE to bypass the impossibility of compact adaptively secure FHE by Katz et al. [PKC’13], which we believe may be of independent interest. Intriguingly, even such assumptions do not allow reducing all-to-all RMT to all-to-one RMT (a reduction which is trivial in the non-CL setting). Still, we can implement what we call sublinear output-set RMT (SOS-RMT for short). We show how SOS-RMT can be used for SOS-MPC under the known bounds for feasibility of MPC in the standard (i.e., non-CL) setting assuming, in addition to SOS-RMT, an anonymous PKI.

At CRYPTO '94, Cramer, Damgaard, and Schoenmakers introduced a general technique for constructing honest-verifier zero-knowledge proofs of partial knowledge (PPK), where a prover Alice wants to prove to a verifier Bob she knows $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ claims out of $k$ claims without revealing the indices of those $\tau$ claims. Their solution starts from a base honest-verifier zero-knowledge proof of knowledge $\Sigma$ and requires to run in parallel $k$ execution of the base protocol, giving a complexity of $O(k\gamma(\Sigma))$, where $\gamma(\Sigma)$ is the communication complexity of the base protocol. However, modern practical scenarios require communication-efficient zero-knowledge proofs tailored to handle partial knowledge in specific application-dependent formats. In this paper we propose a technique to compose a large class of $\Sigma$-protocols for atomic statements into $\Sigma$-protocols for PPK over formulae in conjunctive normal form (CNF) that overlap, in the sense that there is a common subset of literals among all clauses of the formula. In such formulae, the statement is expressed as a conjunction of $m$ clauses, each of which consists of a disjunction of $k$ literals (i.e., each literal is an atomic statement) and $\ell$ literals are shared among clauses. The prover, for a threshold parameter $\tau \le k$, proves knowledge of at least $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ distinct literals in each clause. At the core of our protocol, there is a new technique to compose $\Sigma$-protocols for regular CNF relations (i.e., when $ \tau=1$) that exploits the overlap among clauses and that we then generalize to formulae where $\tau>1$ providing improvements over state-of-the-art constructions.

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? No, kids, the road to quantum-safety is long and sturdy. But let me tell you a story: Once upon a time, science discovered a great threat to Cryptography World: The scalable quantum computer! Nobody had ever seen one, but everyone understood it would break the mechanisms used to secure Internet communication since times of yore (or the late 20th century, anyway). The greatest minds from all corners of the land were gathered to invent, implement, and test newer, stronger tools. They worked day and night, but alas, when smaller quantum computers already started to emerge, no end to their research was in sight. How could that be? This paper provides a collection of carefully wrought, more or less creative and more or less consistent metaphors to explain to audiences at all expertise levels the manifold challenges researchers and practitioners face in the ongoing quest for post-quantum migration.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) enables fine-grained control over which ciphertexts various users can decrypt. A master authority can create secret keys $sk_f$ with different functions (circuits) $f$ for different users. Anybody can encrypt a message under some attribute $x$ so that only recipients with a key $sk_f$ for a function such that $f(x)=1$ will be able to decrypt. There are a number of different approaches toward achieving selectively secure ABE, where the adversary has to decide on the challenge attribute $x$ ahead of time before seeing any keys, including constructions via bilinear maps (for NC1 circuits), learning with errors, or witness encryption. However, when it comes adaptively secure ABE, the problem seems to be much more challenging and we only know of two potential approaches: via the ``dual systems'' methodology from bilinear maps, or via indistinguishability obfuscation. In this work, we give a new approach that constructs adaptively secure ABE from witness encryption (along with statistically sound NIZKs and one-way functions). While witness encryption is a strong assumption, it appears to be fundamentally weaker than indistinguishability obfuscation. Moreover, we have candidate constructions of witness encryption from some assumptions (e.g., evasive LWE) from which we do not know how to construct indistinguishability obfuscation, giving us adaptive ABE from these assumptions as a corollary of our work.

Mix networks (mixnets) enhance anonymity by routing client messages through multiple hops, intentionally delaying or reordering these messages to ensure unlinkability. However, this process increases end-to-end latency, potentially degrading the client experience. To address this issue, LARMix (NDSS, 2024) proposed a low-latency routing methodology specifically designed for stratified mixnet architectures. Our paper extends this concept to Free Routes mixnet designs, where, unlike stratified topologies, there are no restrictions on node connections. We adapt several state-of-the-art low-latency routing strategies from both mix and Tor networks to optimize the Free Routes topology. Despite the benefits, low-latency routing can cause certain mixnodes to receive disproportionate amounts of traffic. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel load-balancing algorithm that evenly distributes traffic among nodes without significantly compromising low-latency characteristics. Our analytical and simulation experiments demonstrate a considerable reduction in latency compared to uniform routing methods, with negligible loss in message anonymity, defined as the confusion an adversary experiences when correlating messages exiting the mixnet to an initially targeted input message. Additionally, we provide an analysis of adversarial strategies, revealing a balanced trade-off between low latency and adversary advantages.

We study those $(n,n)$-permutations, and more generally those balanced $(n,m)$-functions, whose component functions all admit a derivative equal to constant function 1 (this property itself implies balancedness). We call these functions quadratic-like permutations (resp. quadratic-like balanced functions) since all quadratic balanced functions have this property. We show that all Feistel permutations, all crooked permutations and (more generally) all balanced strongly plateaued functions have this same property and we observe that the notion is affine invariant. We also study in each of these classes and in the class of quadratic-like APN permutations the "reversed" property that every derivative in a nonzero direction has a component function equal to constant function 1, and we show that this property can be satisfied only if $m\ge n$. We also show that all the quadratic-like power permutations $F(x)=x^d$, $x\in \mathbb F_{2^n}$ must be quadratic, which generalizes a well-known similar result on power crooked functions. We give several constructions of quadratic-like permutations and balanced functions outside the three classes of quadratic balanced functions, permutations affine equivalent to Feistel permutations and crooked permutations. We characterize the property by the Walsh transform.

Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) has emerged as a promising tool for facilitating efficient query processing over encrypted data stored in un-trusted cloud servers. Several techniques have been adopted to enhance the efficiency and security of SSE schemes. The query processing costs, storage costs and communication costs of any SSE are directly related to the size of the encrypted index that is stored in the server. To our knowledge, there is no work directed towards minimizing the index size. In this paper we introduce a novel technique to directly reduce the index size of any SSE. Our proposed technique generically transforms any secure single keyword SSE into an equivalently functional and secure version with reduced storage requirements, resulting in faster search and reduced communication overhead. Our technique involves in arranging the set of document identifiers $\mathsf{db}(w)$ related to a keyword $w$ in leaf nodes of a complete binary tree and eventually obtaining a succinct representation of the set $\mathsf{db}(w)$. This small representation of $\mathsf{db}(w)$ leads to smaller index sizes. We do an extensive theoretical analysis of our scheme and prove its correctness. In addition, our comprehensive experimental analysis validates the effectiveness of our scheme on real and simulated data and shows that it can be deployed in practical situations.

Proofs of partial knowledge, first considered by Cramer, Damgård and Schoenmakers (CRYPTO'94) and De Santis et al. (FOCS'94), allow for proving the validity of $k$ out of $n$ different statements without revealing which ones those are. In this work, we present a new approach for transforming certain proofs system into new ones that allows for proving partial knowledge. The communication complexity of the resulting proof system only depends logarithmically on the total number of statements $n$ and its security only relies on the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. As an example, we show that our transformation is applicable to the proof systems of Goldreich, Micali, and Wigderson (FOCS'86) for the graph isomorphism and the graph 3-coloring problem. Our main technical tool, which we believe to be of independent interest, is a new cryptographic primitive called non-adaptively programmable functions (NAPs). Those functions can be seen as pseudorandom functions which allow for re-programming the output at an input point, which must be fixed during key generation. Even when given the re-programmed key, it remains infeasible to find out where re-programming happened. Finally, as an additional technical tool, we also build explainable samplers for any distribution that can be sampled efficiently via rejection sampling and use them to construct NAPs for various output distributions.

One of the most popular techniques to prove adaptive security of identity-based encryptions (IBE) and verifiable random functions (VRF) is the partitioning technique. Currently, there are only two methods to relate the adversary's advantage and runtime $(\epsilon, {\sf T})$ to those of the reduction's ($\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}$) using this technique: One originates to Waters (Eurocrypt 2005) who introduced the famous artificial abort step to prove his IBE, achieving $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q^2/\epsilon^2))$, where $Q$ is the number of key queries. Bellare and Ristenpart (Eurocrypt 2009) provide an alternative analysis for the same scheme removing the artificial abort step, resulting in $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon^2/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. Importantly, the current reductions all loose quadratically in $\epsilon$. In this paper, we revisit this two decade old problem and analyze proofs based on the partitioning technique through a new lens. For instance, the Waters IBE can now be proven secure with $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon^{3/2}/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$, breaking the quadratic dependence on $\epsilon$. At the core of our improvement is a finer estimation of the failing probability of the reduction in Waters' original proof relying on artificial abort. We use Bonferroni's inequality, a tunable inequality obtained by cutting off higher order terms from the equality derived by the inclusion-exclusion principle. Our analysis not only improves the reduction of known constructions but also opens the door for new constructions. While a similar improvement to Waters IBE is possible for the lattice-based IBE by Agrawal, Boneh, and Boyen (Eurocrypt 2010), we can slightly tweak the so-called partitioning function in their construction, achieving $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. This is a much better reduction than the previously known $ (O(\epsilon^3/Q^2), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. We also propose the first VRF with proof and verification key sizes sublinear in the security parameter under the standard $d$-LIN assumption, while simultaneously improving the reduction cost compared to all prior constructions.

Jordan-Gauss graphs are bipartite graphs given by special quadratic equations over the commutative ring K with unity with partition sets K^n and K^m , n ≥m such that the neighbour of each vertex is defined by the system of linear equation given in its row-echelon form. We use families of this graphs for the construction of new quadratic and cubic surjective multivariate maps F of K^n onto K^m (or K^n onto K^n) with the trapdoor accelerators T , i. e. pieces of information which allows to compute the reimage of the given value of F in poly-nomial time. The technique allows us to use the information on the quadratic map F from K^s to K^r, s ≥ r with the trapdoor accelerator T for the construction of other map G from K^{s+rs} onto K^{r+rs} with trapdoor accelerator. In the case of finite field it can be used for construc-tion of new cryptosystems from known pairs (F, T). So we can introduce enveloping trapdoor accelerator for Matsumoto-Imai cryptosystem over finite fields of characteristic 2, for the Oil and Vinegar public keys over F_q (TUOV in particular), for quadratic multivariate public keys defined over Jordan-Gauss graphs D(n, K) where K is arbitrary finite commutative ring with the nontrivial multiplicative group.

In the context of secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols with guaranteed output delivery (GOD) for the honest majority setting, the state-of-the-art in terms of communication is the work of (Goyal et al. CRYPTO'20), which communicates O(n|C|) field elements, where |C| is the size of the circuit being computed and n is the number of parties. Their round complexity, as usual in secret-sharing based MPC, is proportional to O(depth(C)), but only in the optimistic case where there is no cheating. Under attack, the number of rounds can increase to \Omega(n^2) before honest parties receive output, which is undesired for shallow circuits with depth(C) << n^2. In contrast, other protocols that only require O(depth(C) rounds even in the worst case exist, but the state-of-the-art from (Choudhury and Patra, Transactions on Information Theory, 2017) still requires \Omega(n^4|C|) communication in the offline phase, and \Omega(n^3|C|) in the online (for both point-to-point and broadcast channels). We see there exists a tension between efficient communication and number of rounds. For reference, the recent work of (Abraham et al., EUROCRYPT'23) shows that for perfect security and t<n/3, protocols with both linear communication and O(depth(C)) rounds exist. We address this state of affairs by presenting a novel honest majority GOD protocol that maintains O(depth(C)) rounds, even under attack, while improving over the communication of the most efficient protocol in this setting by Choudhury and Patra. More precisely, our protocol has point-to-point (P2P) online communication of O(n|C|), accompanied by O(n|C|) broadcasted (BC) elements, while the offline has O(n^3|C|) P2P communication with O(n^3|C|) BC. This improves over the previous best result, and reduces the tension between communication and round complexity. Our protocol is achieved via a careful use of packed secret-sharing in order to improve the communication of existing verifiable secret-sharing approaches, although at the expense of weakening their robust guarantees: reconstruction of shared values may fail, but only if the adversary gives away the identities of many corrupt parties. We show that this less powerful notion is still useful for MPC, and we use this as a core building block in our construction. Using this weaker VSS, we adapt the recent secure-with-abort Turbopack protocol (Escudero et al. CCS'22) to the GOD setting without significantly sacrificing in efficiency.

In this work, we revisit the Hosoyamada-Iwata (HI) proof for the quantum CPA security of the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction and identify a gap that appears to undermine the security proof. We emphasize that this is not an attack, and the construction may still achieve the claimed security level. However, this gap raises concerns about the feasibility of establishing a formal security proof for the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction. In fact, the issue persists even if the number of rounds is increased arbitrarily. On a positive note, we restore the security of the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction in the non-adaptive setting, achieving security up to $2^{n/6}$ superposition queries. Furthermore, we establish the quantum CPA security of the 4-round MistyR and 5-round MistyL constructions, up to $2^{n/5}$ and $2^{n/7}$ superposition queries, respectively, where $n$ denotes the size of the underlying permutation.

Signature-based witness encryption (SWE) is a recently proposed notion that allows to encrypt a message with respect to a tag $T$ and a set of signature verification keys. The resulting ciphertext can only be decrypted by a party who holds at least $k$ different valid signatures w.r.t. $T$ and $k$ different verification keys out of the $n$ keys specified at encryption time. Natural applications of this primitive involve distributed settings (e.g., blockchains), where multiple parties sign predictable messages, such as polling or randomness beacons. However, known SWE schemes without trusted setup have ciphertexts that scale linearly in the number of verification keys. This quickly becomes a major bottleneck as the system gets more distributed and the number of parties increases. Towards showing the feasibility of SWE with ciphertext size sub-linear in the number of keys, we give a construction based on indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for Turing machines and strongly puncturable signatures (SPS).

This paper initiates a concrete-security treatment of two-party secure computation. The first step is to propose, as target, a simple, indistinguishability-based definition that we call InI. This could be considered a poor choice if it were weaker than standard simulation-based definitions, but it is not; we show that for functionalities satisfying a condition called invertibility, that we define and show is met by functionalities of practical interest like PSI and its variants, the two definitions are equivalent. Based on this, we move forward to study the concrete security of a canonical OPRF-based construction of PSI, giving a tight proof of InI security of the constructed PSI protocol based on the security of the OPRF. This leads us to the concrete security of OPRFs, where we show how different DH-style assumptions on the underlying group yield proofs of different degrees of tightness, including some that are tight, for the well-known and efficient 2H-DH OPRF, and thus for the corresponding DH PSI protocol. We then give a new PSI protocol, called salted-DH PSI, that is as efficient as DH-PSI, yet enjoys tighter proofs.

This paper addresses the spinor genus, a previously unrecognized classification of quadratic forms in the context of cryptography, related to the lattice isomorphism problem (LIP). The spinor genus lies between the genus and equivalence class, thus refining the concept of genus. We present algorithms to determine whether two quadratic forms belong to the same spinor genus. If they do not, it provides a negative answer to the distinguishing variant of LIP. However, these algorithms have very high complexity, and we show that the proportion of genera splitting into multiple spinor genera is vanishing (assuming rank $n \geq 3$). For the special case of anisotropic integral binary forms ($n = 2$) over number fields with class number 1, we offer an efficient quantum algorithm to test if two forms lie in the same spinor genus. Our algorithm does not apply to the HAWK protocol, which uses integral binary Hermitian forms over number fields with class number greater than 1.

We present a tweakable wide block cipher called Mystrium and show it as the fastest such primitive on low-end processors that lack dedicated AES or other cryptographic instructions, such as ARM Cortex-A7. Mystrium is based on the provably secure double-decker mode, that requires a doubly extendable cryptographic keyed (deck) function and a universal hash function. We build a new deck function called Xymmer that for its compression part uses Multimixer-128, the fastest universal hash for such processors, and for its expansion part uses a newly designed permutation, $\mathcal{G}_{512}$. Deck functions can also be used in modes to build encryption, authenticated encryption, and authentication schemes, and hence, Xymmer is of independent interest. The current state-of-the-art wide tweakable block cipher Adiantum-XChaCha12-AES encrypts 4096-byte messages at 11.5 cycles per byte on ARM Cortex-A7, while for Mystrium it is 6.8 cycles per byte while having a higher claimed security.

We consider the graph-theoretic problem of removing (few) nodes from a directed acyclic graph in order to reduce its depth. While this problem is intractable in the general case, we provide a variety of algorithms in the case where the graph is that of a circuit of fan-in (at most) two, and explore applications of these algorithms to secure multiparty computation with low communication. Over the past few years, a paradigm for low-communication secure multiparty computation has found success based on decomposing a circuit into low-depth ``chunks''. This approach was however previously limited to circuits with a ``layered'' structure. Our graph-theoretic approach extends this paradigm to all circuits. In particular, we obtain the following contributions: 1) Fractionally linear-communication MPC in the correlated randomness model: We provide an $N$-party protocol for computing an $n$-input, $m$-output $\mathsf{F}$-arithmetic circuit with $s$ internal gates (over any basis of binary gates) with communication complexity $(\frac{2}{3}s + n + m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$, which can be improved to $((1+\epsilon)\cdot\frac{2}{5}s+n+m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$ (at the cost of increasing the computational overhead from a small constant factor to a large one). Previously, comparable protocols either used more than $s\cdot N\cdot \log |\mathsf{F}|$ bits of communication, required super-polynomial computation, were restricted to layered circuits, or tolerated a sub-optimal corruption threshold. 2) Sublinear-Communication MPC: Assuming the existence of $N$-party Homomorphic Secret Sharing for logarithmic depth circuits (respectively doubly logarithmic depth circuits), we show there exists sublinear-communication secure $N$-party computation for \emph{all} $\log^{1+o(1)}$-depth (resp.~$(\log\log)^{1+o(1)}$-depth) circuits. Previously, this result was limited to $(\mathcal{O}(\log))$-depth (resp.~$(\mathcal{O}(\log\log))$-depth) circuits, or to circuits with a specific structure (e.g. layered). 3) The 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC: We introduce the `` 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC'' of a function $f$, denoted $C_M(f)$, as the number of oracle calls required to securely compute $f$ in the 1-out-of-M-OT hybrid model. We establish the following upper bound: for every $M\geq 2$, $C_N(f) \leq (1+g(M))\cdot \frac{2 |f|}{5}$, where $g(M)$ is an explicit vanishing function. We also obtain additional contributions to reducing the amount of bootstrapping for fully homomorphic encryption, and to other types of sublinear-communication MPC protocols such as those based on correlated symmetric private information retrieval.

This article presents an in-depth study of isogeny-based cryptographic methods for the development of secure and scalable electronic voting systems. We address critical challenges such as voter privacy, vote integrity, and resistance to quantum attacks. Our work introduces novel cryptographic protocols leveraging isogenies, establishing a robust framework for post-quantum secure electronic voting. We provide detailed mathematical foundations, protocol designs, and security proofs, demonstrating the efficacy and scalability of our proposed system in large-scale elections.

Distributed training that enables multiple parties to jointly train a model on their respective datasets is a promising approach to address the challenges of large volumes of diverse data for training modern machine learning models. However, this approach immedi- ately raises security and privacy concerns; both about each party wishing to protect its data from other parties during training and preventing leakage of private information from the model after training through various inference attacks. In this paper, we ad- dress both these concerns simultaneously by designing efficient Differentially Private, secure Multiparty Computation (DP-MPC) protocols for jointly training a model on data distributed among multiple parties. Our DP-MPC protocol in the two-party setting is 56-794× more communication-efficient and 16-182× faster than previous such protocols. Conceptually, our work simplifies and improves on previous attempts to combine techniques from secure multiparty computation and differential privacy, especially in the context of ML training.

Quantum pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs) have stimulated exciting developments in recent years. A PRSG, on a fixed initial (e.g., all-zero) state, produces an output state that is computationally indistinguishable from a Haar random state. However, pseudorandomness of the output state is not guaranteed on other initial states. In fact, known PRSG constructions provably fail on some initial states. In this work, we propose and construct quantum Pseudorandom State Scramblers (PRSSs), which can produce a pseudorandom state on an arbitrary initial state. In the information-theoretical setting, we obtain a scrambler which maps an arbitrary initial state to a distribution of quantum states that is close to Haar random in total variation distance. As a result, our scrambler exhibits a dispersing property. Loosely, it can span an ɛ-net of the state space. This significantly strengthens what standard PRSGs can induce, as they may only concentrate on a small region of the state space provided that average output state approximates a Haar random state. Our PRSS construction develops a parallel extension of the famous Kac's walk, and we show that it mixes exponentially faster than the standard Kac's walk. This constitutes the core of our proof. We also describe a few applications of PRSSs. While our PRSS construction assumes a post-quantum one-way function, PRSSs are potentially a weaker primitive and can be separated from one-way functions in a relativized world similar to standard PRSGs.