In this work we study metric properties of the well-known family of binary Reed-Muller codes. Let $A$ be an arbitrary subset of the Boolean cube, and $\widehat{A}$ be the metric complement of $A$ --- the set of all vectors of the Boolean cube at the maximal possible distance from $A$. If the metric complement of $\widehat{A}$ coincides with $A$, then the set $A$ is called a metrically regular set. The problem of investigating metrically regular sets appeared when studying bent functions, which have important applications in cryptography and coding theory and are also one of the earliest examples of a metrically regular set. In this work we describe metric complements and establish the metric regularity of the codes $\mathcal{RM}(0,m)$ and $\mathcal{RM}(k,m)$ for $k \geqslant m-3$. Additionally, the metric regularity of the codes $\mathcal{RM}(1,5)$ and $\mathcal{RM}(2,6)$ is proved. Combined with previous results by Tokareva N. (2012) concerning duality of affine and bent functions, this establishes the metric regularity of most Reed-Muller codes with known covering radius. It is conjectured that all Reed-Muller codes are metrically regular.

Vélu's formulas for computing isogenies over Weierstrass model of elliptic curves has been extended to other models of elliptic curves such as the Huff model, the Edwards model and the Jacobi model of elliptic curves. This work continues this line of research by providing efficient formulas for computing isogenies over elliptic curves of Hessian form. We provide explicit formulas for computing isogenies of degree 3 and isogenies of degree l not divisible by 3. The theoretical cost of computing these maps in this case is slightly faster than the case with other curves. We also extend the formulas to obtain isogenies over twisted and generalized Hessian forms of elliptic curves. The formulas in this work have been verified with the Sage software and are faster than previous results on the same curve.

We present an advanced encoding framework for predicate encryption (PE) in prime order groups. Our framework captures a wider range of adaptively secure PE schemes such as non-monotonic attribute-based encryption by allowing PE schemes to have more flexible structures. Prior to our work, frameworks featuring adaptively secure PE schemes in prime order groups require strong structural restrictions on the schemes. In those frameworks, exponents of public keys and master secret keys of PE schemes, which are also referred to as common variables, must be linear. In our work, we introduce a modular framework which includes non-linear common variables in PE schemes. First, we formalize non-linear structures which can appear in PE by improving Attrapadung's pair encoding framework (Eurocrypt'14). Then, we provide a generic compiler that features encodings under our framework to PE schemes in prime order groups. Particularly, the security of our compiler is proved by introducing a new technique which decomposes common variables into two types and makes one of them be shared between semi-functional and normal spaces on processes of the dual system encryption to mitigate the linear restriction. As instances of our new framework, we introduce new attribute-based encryption schemes supporting non-monotonic access structures, namely non-monotonic ABE, in prime order groups. We introduce adaptively secure non-monotonic ABE schemes having either short ciphertexts (if KP-ABE) or short keys (if CP-ABE) for the first time. Additionally, we introduce the first non-monotonic ABE schemes supporting both adaptive security and multi-use of attributes property in prime order groups.

Leakage detection seeking the evidence of sensitive data dependencies in the side-channel traces instead of trying to recover the sensitive data directly under the enormous efforts with numerous leakage models and state-of-the-art distinguishers can provide a fast preliminary security assessment on the cryptographic devices for designers and evaluators. Therefore, it is a popular topic in recent side-channel research of which the Welch's $t$-test-based Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) methodology is the most widely used one. However, the TVLA is not always the best option under all kinds of conditions (as we can see in the latter section of this paper). Kolmogorov-Smirnov test is a well-known nonparametric method for statistical analysis to determine whether the samples are from the same distribution by analyzing the cumulative distribution. It has been proposed into side-channel analysis as a successful distinguisher. This paper proposes---to our knowledge, for the first time---Kolmogorov-Smirnov test as a new method for leakage detection. Besides, we propose two implementations to speed up the KS leakage detection procedure. Experimental results on simulated leakage with various parameters and the practical traces verify that KS is an effective and robust leakage detection tool and the comprehensive comparison with TVLA shows that KS-based leakage detection can be a right-hand supplement to TVLA when performing the side-channel assessment.

While several works have explored the application of deep learning for efficient profiled side-channel analysis, explainability or in other words what neural networks learn remains a rather untouched topic. As a first step, this paper explores the Singular Vector Canonical Correlation Analysis (SVCCA) tool to interpret what neural networks learn while training on different side-channel datasets, by concentrating on deep layers of the network. Information from SVCCA can help, to an extent, with several practical problems in a profiled side-channel analysis like portability issue and criteria to choose a number of layers/neurons to fight portability, provide insight on the correct size of training dataset and detect deceptive conditions like over-specialization of networks.

In profiling side-channel analysis, machine learning-based analysis nowadays offers the most powerful performance. This holds especially for techniques stemming from the neural network family: multilayer perceptron and convolutional neural networks. Convolutional neural networks are often favored as results suggest better performance, especially in scenarios where targets are protected with countermeasures. Multilayer perceptron receives significantly less attention, and researchers seem less interested in this method, narrowing the results in the literature to comparisons with convolutional neural networks. On the other hand, a multilayer perceptron has a much simpler structure, enabling easier hyperparameter tuning and, hopefully, contributing to the explainability of this neural network inner working. We investigate the behavior of a multilayer perceptron in the context of the side-channel analysis of AES. By exploring the sensitivity of multilayer perceptron hyperparameters over the attack's performance, we aim to provide a better understanding of successful hyperparameters tuning and, ultimately, this algorithm's performance. Our results show that MLP (with a proper hyperparameter tuning) can easily break implementations with a random delay or masking countermeasures. This work aims to reiterate the power of simpler neural network techniques in the profiled SCA.

The sponge duplex is a popular mode of operation for constructing authenticated encryption schemes. In fact, one can assess the popularity of this mode from the fact that around $ 25 $ out of the $ 56 $ round 1 submissions to the ongoing NIST lightweight cryptography (LwC) standardization process are based on this mode. Among these, $14$ sponge-type constructions are selected for the second round consisting of $32$ submissions. In this paper, we generalize the duplexing interface of the duplex mode, which we call Transform-then-Permute. It encompasses Beetle as well as a new sponge-type mode SpoC (both are round 2 submissions to NIST LwC). We show a tight security bound for Transform-then-Permute based on $b$-bit permutation, which reduces to finding an exact estimation of the expected number of multi-chains (defined in this paper). As a corollary of our general result, authenticated encryption advantage of Beetle and SpoC is about $\frac{T(D+r2^r)}{2^b}$ where $T$, $D$ and $r$ denotes the number of offline queries (related to time complexity of the attack), number of construction queries (related to data complexity) and rate of the construction (related to efficiency). Previously the same bound has been proved for Beetle under the limitation that $ T << min\{2^r, 2^{b/2}\} $ (that compels to choose larger permutation with higher rate). In the context of NIST LwC requirement, SpoC based on $ 192 $-bit permutation achieves the desired security with $ 64 $-bit rate, which is not achieved by either duplex or Beetle (as per the previous analysis).

In the profiled side-channel analysis, deep learning-based techniques proved to be very successful even when attacking targets protected with countermeasures. Still, there is no guarantee that deep learning attacks will always succeed. Various countermeasures make attacks significantly more complicated, and those countermeasures can be further combined to make the attacks even more challenging. An intuitive solution to improve the performance of attacks would be to reduce the effect of countermeasures. In this paper, we investigate whether we can consider certain types of hiding countermeasures as noise and then use a deep learning technique called the denoising autoencoder to remove that noise. We conduct a detailed analysis of five different types of noise and countermeasures either separately or combined and show that in all scenarios, denoising autoencoder improves the attack performance significantly.

We demonstrate that the Interpose PUF proposed at CHES 2019, an Arbiter PUF based design for so-called Strong Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs), can be modeled by novel machine learning strategies up to very substantial sizes and complexities. Our attacks require in the most difficult cases considerable, but realistic, numbers of CRPs, while consuming only moderate computation times, ranging from few seconds to few days. The attacks build on a new divide-and-conquer approach that allows us to model the two building blocks of the Interpose PUF separately. For non-reliability based Machine Learning (ML) attacks, this eventually leads to attack times on \((k_\text{up},k_\text{down})\)-Interpose PUFs that are comparable to the ones against \(\max\{k_\text{up}, k_\text{down}\}\)-XOR Arbiter PUFs, refuting the original claim that Interpose PUFs provide security similar to $(k_\text{down}+\frac{k_\text{up}}{2})$-XOR Arbiter PUFs (CHES 2019). On the technical side, our novel divide-and-conquer technique might also be useful in analyzing other designs where XOR Arbiter PUF challenge bits are unknown to the attacker.

Encryption is an indispensable tool for securing digital infra- structures as it reduces the problem of protecting the data to just protecting decryption keys. Unfortunately, this also makes it easier for users to share protected data by simply sharing decryption keys. Kiayias and Tang (ACM CCS 2013) were the first to address this important issue pre-emptively rather than a posteriori like traitor tracing schemes do. They proposed leakage-deterring encryption schemes that work as follows. For each user, a piece of secret information valuable to her is embedded into her public key. As long as she does not share her ability to decrypt with someone else, her secret is safe. As soon as she does, her secret is revealed to her beneficiaries. However, their solution suffers from serious drawbacks: (1) their model requires a fully-trusted registration authority that is privy to user secrets; (2) it only captures a CPA-type of privacy for user secrets, which is a very weak guarantee; (3) in their construction which turns any public-key encryption scheme into a leakage-deterring one, the new public keys consist of linearly (in the bit-size of the secrets) many public keys of the original scheme, and the ciphertexts are large. In this paper, we redefine leakage-deterring schemes. We remove the trust in the authority and guarantee full protection of user secrets under CCA attacks. Furthermore, in our construction, all keys and ciphertexts are short and constant in the size of the secrets. We achieve this by taking a different approach: we require users to periodically refresh their secret keys by running a protocol with a third party. Users do so anonymously, which ensures that they cannot be linked, and that the third party cannot perform selective failure attacks. We then leverage this refresh protocol to allow for the retrieval of user secrets in case they share their decryption capabilities. This refresh protocol also allows for the revocation of user keys and for the protection of user secrets in case of loss or theft of a decryption device. We provide security definitions for our new model as well as efficient instantiations that we prove secure.

The world has seen an influx of connected devices through both smart devices and smart cities, paving the path forward for the Internet of Things (IoT). These emerging intelligent infrastructures and applications based on IoT can be beneficial to users only if essential private and secure features are assured. However, with constrained devices being the norm in IoT, security and privacy are often minimized. In this paper, we first categorize various existing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and assessment of their suitability for privacy-requiring services within IoT. We also categorize potential privacy risks, threats, and leakages related to various IoT use cases. Furthermore, we propose a simple novel privacy-preserving framework based on a set of suitable privacy-enhancing technologies in order to maintain security and privacy within IoT services. Our study can serve as a baseline of privacy-by-design strategies applicable to IoT based services, with a particular focus on smart things, such as safety equipment.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is becoming an increasingly popular authentication method for users that leverages a trusted Identity Provider (IdP) to bootstrap secure authentication tokens from a single user password. It alleviates some of the worst security issues of passwords, as users no longer need to memorize individual passwords for all service providers, and it removes the burden of these service to properly protect huge password databases. However, SSO also introduces a single point of failure. If compromised, the IdP can impersonate all users and learn their master passwords. To remedy this risk while preserving the advantages of SSO, Agrawal et al. (CCS'18) recently proposed a distributed realization termed PASTA (password-authenticated threshold authentication) which splits the role of the IdP across $n$ servers. While PASTA is a great step forward and guarantees security as long as not all servers are corrupted, it uses a rather inflexible corruption model: servers cannot be corrupted adaptively and --- even worse --- cannot recover from corruption. The latter is known as proactive security and allows servers to re-share their keys, thereby rendering all previously compromised information useless. In this work, we improve upon the work of PASTA and propose a distributed SSO protocol with proactive and adaptive security (PESTO), guaranteeing security as long as not all servers are compromised at the same time. We prove our scheme secure in the UC framework which is known to provide the best security guarantees for password-based primitives. The core of our protocol are two new primitives we introduce: partially-oblivious distributed PRFs and a class of distributed signature schemes. Both allow for non-interactive refreshs of the secret key material and tolerate adaptive corruptions. We give secure instantiations based on the gap one-more BDH and RSA assumption respectively, leading to a highly efficient 2-round PESTO protocol. We also present an implementation and benchmark of our scheme in Java, realizing OAuth-compatible bearer tokens for SSO, demonstrating the viability of our approach.

Learning with Errors (LWE) and Ring-LWE (RLWE) problems allow the construction of efficient key exchange and public-key encryption schemes. However, while improving the security through the use of error distributions with large standard deviations, the decryption failure rate increases as well. Currently, the independence of individual coefficient failures is assumed to estimate the overall decryption failure rate of many LWE/RLWE schemes. However, previous work has shown that this assumption is not correct. This assumption leads to wrong estimates of the decryption failure probability and consequently of the security level of the LWE/RLWE cryptosystem. An exploration of the influence of the LWE/RLWE parameters on the stochastic dependence among the coefficients is still missing. In this paper, we propose a method to analyze the stochastic dependence between decryption failures in LWE/RLWE cryptosystems. We present two main contributions. First, we use statistical methods to analyze the influence of fixing the norm of the error distribution on the stochastic dependence among decryption failures. The results have shown that fixing the norm of the error distribution indeed reduces the stochastic dependence of decryption failures. Therefore, the independence assumption gives a very close approximation to the true behavior of the cryptosystem. Second, we analyze and explore the influence of the LWE/RLWE parameters on the stochastic dependence. This exploration gives designers of LWE/RLWE based schemes the opportunity to compare different schemes with respect to the inaccuracy made by using the independence assumption. This work shows that the stochastic dependence depends on three LWE/RLWE parameters in different ways: i) it increases with higher lattice dimensions ($n$) and higher standard deviations of the error distribution ($\sqrt{k/2}$); and ii) it decreases with higher modulus ($q$).

A trapdoor over NTRU lattice proposed by Ducas, Lyubashevsky and Prest~(ASIACRYPT 2014) has been widely used in various crytographic primitives such as identity-based encryption~(IBE) and digital signature, due to its high efficiency compared to previous lattice trapdoors. However, the most of applications use this trapdoor with the power-of-two cyclotomic rings, and hence to obtain higher security level one should double the ring dimension which results in a huge loss of efficiency. In this paper, we give a new way to overcome this problem by introducing a generalized notion of NTRU lattices which we call \emph{Module-NTRU}~(MNTRU) lattices, and show how to efficiently generate a trapdoor over MNTRU lattices. Moreover, beyond giving parameter flexibility, we further show that the Gram-Schmidt norm of the trapdoor can be reached to about $q^{1/d},$ where MNTRU covers $d \ge 2$ cases while including NTRU as $d = 2$ case. Since the efficiency of trapdoor-based IBE is closely related to the Gram-Schmidt norm of trapdoor, our trapdoor over MNTRU lattice brings more efficient IBE scheme than the previously best one of Ducas, Lyubashevsky and Prest, while providing the same security level.

Distributed computational networks allow for effective hardware encryption systems and the rise of Quantum level encryption as well for Qubit based processing. Part of the reason distributed architecture can lead to Qubit level encryption is similar mechanisms applied to cryptographic hashing. In the work presented in this paper, we will look at the decentralized-internet SDK and protocol, grid computing architecture, and mathematical approaches to parallel Qubit-based processing. The utilization for hardware oriented cryptography, modeled around distributed computing, will allow for an even more secure approach to Quantum authentication. The importance of works such as these, are due to the lack of security classical computing has in relation to encryption. Once mathematical formalities surpass NP-hardness, classical encryption mechanisms can be easily surpassed. However, a latent model for increased complexity in post-quantum level encryption likely forbids this trade-off. Given that Quantum Algorithms speed up superpolynomially, than deterministic NP-hardness would likely pose less harm to quantum encryption networks. Furthermore, with Qubit-based parallel processing, complexity models for encryption can harden in difficulty over time.

In a highly influential paper from fifteen years ago, Canetti, Goldreich, and Halevi showed a fundamental separation between the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and the Standard Model. They constructed a signature scheme which can be shown to be secure in the ROM, but is insecure when instantiated with any hash function (and thus insecure in the standard model). In 2011, Boneh et al. defined the notion of the Quantum Random Oracle Model (QROM), where queries to the random oracle may be made in quantum superposition. Because the QROM generalizes the ROM, a proof of security in the QROM is stronger than one in the ROM. This leaves open the possibility that security in the QROM could imply security in the standard model. In this work, we show that this is not the case, and that security in the QROM cannot imply standard model security. We do this by showing that the original schemes that show a separation between the standard model and the ROM are also secure in the QROM. We consider two schemes that establish such a separation, one with length-restricted messages, and one without, and show both to be secure in the QROM. Our results give further understanding to the landscape of proofs in the ROM versus the QROM or standard model, and point towards the QROM and ROM being much closer to each other than either is to standard model security.

Simplistic assumptions, modeling attack discovery by a Poisson point process, lead to quantifiable statistical estimates for security assurances, supporting the wisdom that more independent effort spent on cryptanalysis leads to better security assurance, but hinting security assurance also relies significantly upon general optimism. The estimates also suggest somewhat better security assurance from compounding two independent cryptosystems, but perhaps not enough to outweigh the extra cost.

We present a transformation from NIZK with inefficient provers in the uniform random string (URS) model to ZAPs (two message witness indistinguishable proofs) with inefficient provers. While such a transformation was known for the case where the prover is efficient, the security proof breaks down if the prover is inefficient. Our transformation is obtained via new applications of Nisan-Wigderson designs, a combinatorial object originally introduced in the derandomization literature. We observe that our transformation is applicable both in the setting of super-polynomial provers/poly-time adversaries, as well as a new fine-grained setting, where the prover is polynomial time and the verifier/simulator/zero knowledge distinguisher are in a lower complexity class, such as $\mathsf{NC}^1$. We also present $\mathsf{NC}^1$-fine-grained NIZK in the URS model for all of $\mathsf{NP}$ from the worst-case assumption $\oplus L/\mathsf{\poly} \not\subseteq \mathsf{NC}^1$. Our techniques yield the following applications: 1. ZAPs for $\mathsf{AM}$ from Minicrypt assumptions (with super-polynomial time provers), 2. $\mathsf{NC}^1$-fine-grained ZAPs for $\mathsf{NP}$ from worst-case assumptions, 3. Protocols achieving an "offline'' notion of NIZK (oNIZK) in the standard (no-CRS) model with uniform soundness in both the super-polynomial setting (from Minicrypt assumptions) and the $\mathsf{NC}^1$-fine-grained setting (from worst-case assumptions). The oNIZK notion is sufficient for use in indistinguishability-based proofs.

The active participation of external entities in the manufacturing flow has produced numerous hardware security issues in which piracy and overproduction are likely to be the most ubiquitous and expensive ones. The main approach to prevent unauthorized products from functioning is logic encryption that inserts key-controlled gates to the original circuit in a way that the valid behavior of the circuit only happens when the correct key is applied. The challenge for the security designer is to ensure neither the correct key nor the original circuit can be revealed by different analyses of the encrypted circuit. However, in state-of-the-art logic encryption works, a lot of performance is sold to guarantee security against powerful logic and structural attacks. This contradicts the primary reason of logic encryption that is to protect a precious design from being pirated and overproduced. In this paper, we propose a bilateral logic encryption platform that maintains high degree of security with small circuit modification. The robustness against exact and approximate attacks is also demonstrated.

Common for the overwhelming majority of privacy-preserving greater-than integer comparison schemes is that cryptographic computations are conducted in a bitwise manner. To ensure the secrecy, each bit must be encoded in such a way that nothing is revealed to the opposite party. The most noted disadvantage is that the computational and communication cost of the bitwise encoding is as best linear to the number of bits. Also, many proposed schemes have complex designs that may be difficult to implement and are not intuitive. Carlton et al. proposed in 2018 an interesting scheme that avoids bitwise decomposition and works on whole integers. % It uses a special composite RSA modulus. A variant was proposed by Bourse et al. in 2019. In this paper, we show that in particular the Bourse scheme does not provide the claimed security. Inspired by the two mentioned papers, we propose a comparison scheme with a somewhat simpler construction and with clear security reductions.

Internet of Things(IoT) consists of a large number of interconnected coexist heterogeneous entities, including Radio-frequency identification(RFIDs) based devices and other sensors to detect and transfer various information such as temperature, personal health data, brightness, etc. Security, in particular, authentication, is one of the most important parts of information security infrastructure in  IoT systems. Given that an IoT system has many resource-constrained devices, a goal could be designing a proper authentication protocol that is lightweight and can resist against various common attacks, targeting such devices. Recently, using Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) to design lightweight authentication protocols has received a lot of attention among researchers. In this paper, we analyze two recently proposed authentication protocols based on PUF chains called PHEMAP and Salted PHEMAP. We show that these protocols are vulnerable to impersonate, desynchronization and traceability attacks.

The problem of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) in partial synchronous networks has received a lot of attention in the last 30 years. There are two types of widely accepted definitions for partial synchronous networks. This paper shows that several widely deployed BFT protocols would reach deadlocks in the widely accepted Type II partial synchronous networks (that is, they will not achieve liveness property). Based on the analysis of BFT security requirements for partial synchronous networks, this paper proposes a BFT protocol BDLS and proves its security in partial synchronous networks. It is shown that BDLS is one of the most efficient BFT protocols in partial synchronous networks. Specifically, during synchrony with threshold digital signature schemes, BDLS participants could reach agreement in 4 steps with linear communication/authenticator complexity. It is noted that best existing linear communication/authenticator complexity protocols require at least 7 steps to achieve agreement. The BDLS protocol could be used in several application scenarios such as state machine replication or as blockchain finality gadgets. The GO-Language implementation of the BDLS protocol could be found at https://github.com/Sperax/bdls.

This paper presents an attack based on side-channel information and Information Set Decoding (ISD) on the Niederreiter cryptosystem and an evaluation of the practicality of the attack using an electromagnetic side channel. First, we describe a basic plaintext-recovery attack on the decryption algorithm of the Niederreiter cryptosystem. In case the cryptosystem is used as Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) in a key exchange, the plaintext corresponds to a session key. Our attack is an adaptation of the timing side-channel plaintext-recovery attack by Shoufan et al. from 2010 on the McEliece cryptosystem using the non-constant time Patterson’s decoding algorithm to the Niederreiter cryptosystem using the constant time Berlekamp-Massey decoding algorithm. We then enhance our attack by utilizing an ISD approach to support the basic attack and we introduce iterative column chunking to further significantly reduce the number of required side-channel measurements. We theoretically show that our attack improvements have a significant impact on reducing the number of required side-channel measurements. Our practical evaluation of the attack targets the FPGA-implementation of the Niederreiter cryptosystem in the NIST submission "Classic McEliece" with a constant time decoding algorithm and is feasible for all proposed parameters sets of this submission. For example, for the 256bit-security parameter set kem/mceliece6960119 we improve the basic attack that requires 5415 measurements to on average of about 560 measurements to mount a successful plaintext recovery attack. Further reductions can be achieved at increasing cost of the ISD computations.

Given the inherent ad-hoc nature of popular communication platforms, out-of-band authenticated key-exchange protocols are becoming widely deployed: Key exchange protocols that enable users to detect man-in-the-middle attacks by manually authenticating one short value. In this work we put forward the notion of immediate key delivery for such protocols, requiring that even if some users participate in the protocol but do not complete it (e.g., due to losing data connectivity or to other common synchronicity issues), then the remaining users should still agree on a shared secret. A property of a similar flavor was introduced by Alwen, Coretti and Dodis (EUROCRYPT '19) asking for immediate decryption of messages in user-to-user messaging while assuming that a shared secret has already been established -- but the underlying issue is crucial already during the initial key exchange and goes far beyond the context of messaging. Equipped with our immediate key delivery property, we formalize strong notions of security for out-of-band authenticated group key exchange, and demonstrate that the existing protocols either do not satisfy our notions of security or are impractical (these include, in particular, the protocols deployed by Telegram, Signal and WhatsApp). Then, based on the existence of any passively-secure key-exchange protocol (e.g., the Diffie-Hellman protocol), we construct an out-of-band authenticated group key-exchange protocol satisfying our notions of security. Our protocol is inspired by techniques that have been developed in the context of fair string sampling in order to minimize the effect of adversarial aborts, and offers the optimal tradeoff between the length of its out-of-band value and its security.

Updatable encryption allows a client to outsource ciphertexts to some untrusted server and periodically rotate the encryption key. The server can update ciphertexts from an old key to a new key with the help of an update token, received from the client, which should not reveal anything about keys or plaintexts to an adversary. We provide a new and highly efficient suite of updatable encryption schemes that we collectively call SHINE. In the variant designed for short messages, ciphertext generation consists of applying one permutation and one exponentiation (per message block), while updating ciphertexts requires just one exponentiation. Variants for longer messages provide much stronger security guarantees than prior work that has comparable efficiency. We present a new confidentiality notion for updatable encryption schemes that implies prior notions. We prove that SHINE is secure under our new confidentiality definition while also providing ciphertext integrity.

Lattices lead to promising practical post-quantum digital signatures, combining asymptotic efficiency with strong theoretical security guarantees. However, tuning their parameters into practical instantiations is a delicate task. On the one hand, NIST round 2 candidates based on Lyubashevsky's design (such as Dilithium and qTesla) allow several tradeoffs between security and efficiency, but at the expense of a large bandwidth consumption. On the other hand, the hash-and-sign falcon signature is much more compact and is still very efficient, but it allows only two security levels, with large compactness and security gaps between them. We introduce a new family of signature schemes based on the Falcon design, which relies on module lattices. Our concrete instantiation enjoys the compactness and efficiency of Falcon, and allows an intermediate security level. It leads to the most compact lattice-based signature achieving a quantum security above 128 bits.

In this paper, we extend the notion of server-aided revocable identity-based encryption (SR-IBE) to the hierarchical IBE (HIBE) setting and propose a generic construction of server-aided revocable hierarchical IBE (SR-HIBE) schemes with decryption key exposure resistance (DKER) from any (weak) L-level revocable HIBE scheme without DKER and (L+1)-level HIBE scheme. In order to realize the server-aided revocation mechanism, we use the “double encryption” technique, and this makes our construction has short ciphertext size. Furthermore, when the maximum hierarchical depth is one, we obtain a generic construction of SR-IBE schemes with DKER from any IBE scheme and two-level HIBE scheme.

In this work we consider the following problem: in a Multi-Prover environment, how close can we get to prove the validity of an NP statement in Zero-Knowledge ? We exhibit a set of two novel Zero-Knowledge protocols for the 3-COLorability problem that use two (local) provers or three (entangled) provers and only require them to reply two trits each. This greatly improves the ability to prove Zero-Knowledge statements on very short distances with very minimal equipment.

Saber, a CCA-secure lattice-based post-quantum key encapsulation scheme, is one of the second round candidate algorithms in the post-quantum cryptography standardization process of the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2019. In this work, we provide an efficient implementation of Saber on ESP32, an embedded microcontroller designed for IoT environment with WiFi and Bluetooth support. RSA coprocessor was used to speed up the polynomial multiplications for Kyber variant in a CHES 2019 paper. We propose an improved implementation utilizing the big integer coprocessor for the polynomial multiplications in Saber, which contains significant lower software overhead and takes a better advantage of the big integer coprocessor on ESP32. By using the fast implementation of polynomial multiplications, our single-core version implementation of Saber takes 1639K, 2123K, 2193K clock cycles on ESP32 for key generation, encapsulation and decapsulation respectively. Benefiting from the dual core feature on ESP32, we speed up the implementation of Saber by rearranging the computing steps and assigning proper tasks to two cores executing in parallel. Our dual-core version implementation takes 1176K, 1625K, 1514K clock cycles for key generation, encapsulation and decapsulation respectively.

Blind signature schemes (BSS) play a pivotal role in privacy-oriented cryptography. However, with blind signature schemes, the signed message remains unintelligible to the signer, giving them no guarantee that the blinded message he signed actually contained valid information. Partially-blind signature schemes (PBSS) were introduced to address precisely this problem. In this paper we present the first leakage-resilient, lattice-based partially-blind signature scheme in the literature. Our construction is provably secure in the random oracle model (ROM) and offers quasilinear complexity w.r.t. key/signature sizes and signing speed. In addition, it offers statistical partial blindness and its unforgeability is based on the computational hardness of worst-case ideal lattice problems for approximation factors in $˜ O(n^4)$ in dimension $n$. Our scheme benefits from the subexponential hardness of ideal lattice problems and remains secure even if a (1-o(1)) fraction of the signer’s secret key leaks to an adversary via arbitrary side-channels. Several extensions of the security model, such as honest-user unforgeability and selective failure blindness, are also considered and concrete parameters for instantiation are proposed.

NewHope Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) has been presented at USENIX 2016 by Alchim et al. and is one of the remaining lattice-based candidates to the post-quantum standardization initiated by the NIST. However, despite the relative simplicity of the protocol, the bound on the decapsulation failure probability resulting from the original analysis is not tight. In this work we refine this analysis to get a tight upper-bound on this probability which happens to be much lower than what was originally evaluated. As a consequence we propose a set of alternnative parameters, increasing the security and the compactness of the scheme. However using a smaller modulus prevent the use of a full NTT algorithm to perform multiplications of elements in dimension 512 or 1024. Nonetheless, similarly to previous works, we combine different multiplication algorithms and show that our new parameters are competitive on a constant time vectorized implementation. Our most compact parameters bring a speed- up of 17% (resp. 11%) in performance but allow to gain more than 19% over the bandwidth requirements and to increase the security of 10% (resp. 7%) in dimension 512 (resp. 1024).

Randomness extraction is a fundamental problem that has been studied for over three decades. A well-studied setting assumes that one has access to multiple independent weak random sources, each with some entropy. However, this assumption is often unrealistic in practice. In real life, natural sources of randomness can produce samples with no entropy at all or with unwanted dependence. Motivated by this and applications from cryptography, we initiate a systematic study of randomness extraction for the class of adversarial sources defined as follows. A weak source $\mathbf{X}$ of the form $\mathbf{X}_1,...,\mathbf{X}_N$, where each $\mathbf{X}_i$ is on $n$ bits, is an $(N,K,n,k)$-source of locality $d$ if the following hold: (1) Somewhere good sources: at least $K$ of the $\mathbf{X}_i$'s are independent, and each contains min-entropy at least $k$. We call these $\mathbf{X}_i$'s good sources, and their locations are unknown. (2) Bounded dependence: each remaining (bad) source can depend arbitrarily on at most $d$ good sources. We focus on constructing extractors with negligible error, in the regime where most of the entropy is contained within a few sources instead of across many (i.e., $k$ is at least polynomial in $K$). In this setting, even for the case of $0$-locality, very little is known prior to our work. For $d \geq 1$, essentially no previous results are known. We present various new extractors for adversarial sources in a wide range of parameters, and some of our constructions work for locality $d = K^{\Omega(1)}$. As an application, we also give improved extractors for small-space sources. The class of adversarial sources generalizes several previously studied classes of sources, and our explicit extractor constructions exploit tools from recent advances in extractor machinery, such as two-source non-malleable extractors and low-error condensers. Thus, our constructions can be viewed as a new application of non-malleable extractors. In addition, our constructions combine the tools from extractor theory in a novel way through various sorts of explicit extremal hypergraphs. These connections leverage recent progress in combinatorics, such as improved bounds on cap sets and explicit constructions of Ramsey graphs, and may be of independent interest.

Multi-Party Computation (MPC) allows multiple parties to compute a function together while keeping their inputs private. Large scale implementations of MPC protocols are becoming practical thus it is important to have strong guarantees for the whole development process, from the underlying cryptography to the implementation. Computer aided proofs are a way to provide such guarantees. We use CryptHOL to formalise a framework for reasoning about two party protocols using the security definitions for MPC. In particular we consider protocols for 1-out-of-2 Oblivious Transfer ($OT^1_2$) --- a fundamental MPC protocol --- in both the semi-honest and malicious models. We then extend our semi-honest formalisation to $OT^1_4$ which is a building block for our proof of security for the two party GMW protocol --- a protocol that can securely compute any Boolean circuit. The semi-honest $OT^1_2$ protocol we formalise is constructed from Extended Trapdoor Permutations (ETP), we first prove the general construction secure and then instantiate for the RSA collection of functions --- a known ETP. Our general proof assumes only the existence of ETPs, meaning any instantiated results come without needing to prove any security properties, only that the requirements of an ETP are met.

Recent publications describe profiled side-channel attacks (SCAs) against the DES key-schedule of a “commercially available security controller”. They report a significant reduction of the average remaining entropy of cryptographic keys after the attack, with large, key-dependent variations and results as low as a few bits using only a single attack trace. Unfortunately, they leave important questions unanswered: Is the reported wide distribution of results plausible? Are the results device-specific or more general? What is the impact on the security of 3-key triple DES? In this contribution, we systematically answer those and several other questions. We also analyze two commercial security controllers reproducing reported results, while explaining details of algorithmic choices. We verified the overall reduction and large variations in single DES key security levels (49.4 bit mean and 0.9 % of keys < 40 bit) and observe a fraction of keys with exceptionally low security levels, called weak keys. A simplified simulation of device leakage shows that the distribution of security levels is predictable to some extend given a leakage model. We generalize results to other leakage models by attacking the hardware DES accelerator of a general purpose microcontroller. We conclude that weaker keys are mainly caused by switching noise, which is always present in template attacks on any key-schedule, regardless of the algorithm and implementation. Further, we describe a sound approach to estimate 3-key triple-DES security levels from empirical single DES results and find that the impact on the security of 3-key triple-DES is limited (96.1 bit mean and 0.24 % of key-triples < 80 bit).

Post-quantum cryptographic primitives have a range of trade-offs compared to traditional public key algorithms, either having slower computation or larger public keys and ciphertexts/signatures, or both. While the performance of these algorithms in isolation is easy to measure and has been a focus of optimization techniques, performance in realistic network conditions has been less studied. Google and Cloudflare have reported results from running experiments with post-quantum key exchange algorithms in the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol with real users' network traffic. Such experiments are highly realistic, but cannot be replicated without access to Internet-scale infrastructure, and do not allow for isolating the effect of individual network characteristics. In this work, we develop and make use of a framework for running such experiments in TLS cheaply by emulating network conditions using networking features of the Linux kernel. Our testbed allows us to independently control variables such as link latency and packet loss rate, and then examine the impact on TLS connection establishment performance of various post-quantum primitives, specifically hybrid elliptic curve/post-quantum key exchange and post-quantum digital signatures, based on implementations from the Open Quantum Safe project. Among our key results, we observe that packet loss rates above 3-5% start to have a significant impact on post-quantum algorithms that fragment across many packets, such as those based on unstructured lattices. The results from this emulation framework are also complemented by results on the latency of loading entire web pages over TLS in real network conditions, which show that network latency hides most of impact from algorithms with slower computations (such as supersingular isogenies).

The proliferation of small embedded devices having growing but still limited computing and data storage facilities, and the related development of cloud services with extensive storage and computing means, raise nowadays new privacy issues because of the outsourcing of data processing. This has led to a need for symmetric cryptosystems suited for hybrid symmetric-FHE encryption protocols, ensuring the practicability of the FHE solution. Recent ciphers meant for such use have been introduced, such as LowMC, Kreyvium, FLIP, and Rasta. The introduction of stream ciphers devoted to symmetric-FHE frameworks such as FLIP and its recent modification has in its turn posed new problems on the Boolean functions to be used in them as filter functions. We recall the state of the art in this matter and present further studies (without proof).

Since their introduction over two decades ago, side-channel attacks have presented a serious security threat. While many ciphers' implementations employ masking techniques to protect against such attacks, they often leak secret information due to unintended interactions in the hardware. We present Rosita, a code rewrite engine that uses a leakage emulator which we amend to correctly emulate the micro-architecture of a target system. We use Rosita to automatically protect masked implementations of AES, ChaCha, and Xoodoo. For AES and Xoodoo, we show the absence of observable leakage at 1,000,000 traces with less than 21% penalty to the performance. For ChaCha, which has significantly more leakage, Rosita eliminates over 99% of the leakage, at a performance cost of 64%.

Blocks in proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains satisfy the PoW equation $H(B) \leq T$. If additionally a block satisfies $H(B) \leq T2^{-\mu}$, it is called a $\mu$-superblock. Superblocks play an important role in the construction of compact blockchain proofs which allows the compression of PoW blockchains into so-called Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work (NIPoPoWs). These certificates are essential for the construction of superlight clients, which are blockchain wallets that can synchronize exponentially faster than traditional SPV clients. In this work, we measure the distribution of superblocks in the Bitcoin blockchain. We find that the superblock distribution within the blockchain follows expectation, hence we empirically verify that the distribution of superblocks within the Bitcoin blockchain has not been adversarially biased. NIPoPoWs require that each block in a blockchain points to a sample of previous blocks in the blockchain. These pointers form a data structure called the interlink. We give efficient ways to store the interlink data structure. Repeated superblock references within an interlink can be omitted with no harm to security. Hence, it is more efficient to store a set of superblocks rather than a list. We show that, in honest executions, this simple observation reduces the number of superblock references by approximately a half in expectation. We then verify our theoretical result by measuring the improvement over existing blockchains in terms of the interlink sizes (which we improve by $79\%$) and the sizes of succinct NIPoPoWs (which we improve by $25\%$). As such, we show that deduplication allows superlight clients to synchronize $25\%$ faster.

CAS-Lock (cascaded locking) is a SAT-resilient locking technique, which can simultaneously thwart SAT and bypass attack, while maintaining non-trivial output corruptibility. Despite all of its theoretical guarantees, in this report we expose a serious flaw in its design that can be exploited to break CAS-Lock. Further, this attack neither requires access to a reverse-engineered netlist, nor it requires a working oracle with the correct key loaded onto the chip's memory. We demonstrate that we can activate any CAS-Locked IC without knowing the secret key.

Efficient user revocation has always been a challenging problem in identity-based encryption (IBE). Boldyreva et al. (CCS 2008) first proposed and formalized the notion of revocable IBE (RIBE) based on a tree-based revocation method. In their scheme, each user is required to store a number of long-term secret keys and all non-revoked users have to communicate with the key generation center periodically to update its decryption key. To reduce the workload on the user side, Qin et al. (ESORICS 2015) proposed a new system model, server-aided revocable IBE (SR-IBE). In SR-IBE model, each user is required to keep only one private key $\prid$ and unnecessary to communicate with the key generation center or the server during key updating. However, in their security model, the challenge identity $\starid$ must be revoked once the private key $\mathsf{Priv}_{\starid}$ was revealed to the adversary. This is too restrictive since decrypting a ciphertext requires both the private key $\prid$ and the long-term transformation key $\skid$. In this paper, we first revisit Qin et al.'s security model and propose a stronger one called SSR-sID-CPA security. Specifically, $\starid$ is revoked only when both $\sskid$ and $\sprid$ are revealed and the adversary is allowed to access short-term transformation keys oracle. We also prove that Qin et al.'s scheme is insecure under our new security model. Second, we construct a lattice-based SR-IBE scheme based on Katsumata's RIBE scheme (PKC 19), and show that our lattice-based SR-IBE scheme is SSR-sID-CPA secure. Finally, we propose a generic construction of SR-IBE scheme by combining a RIBE and a 2-level HIBE scheme. The security of the generic SR-IBE scheme inherits those of the underlying building blocks.

Characterizing the decoding failure rate of iteratively decoded Low- and Moderate-Density Parity Check (LDPC/MDPC) codes is paramount to build cryptosystems based on them, able to achieve indistinguishability under adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks. In this paper, we provide a statistical worst-case analysis of our proposed iterative decoder obtained through a simple modification of the classic in-place bit-flipping decoder. This worst case analysis allows both to derive the worst-case behavior of an LDPC/MDPC code picked among the family with the same length, rate and number of parity checks, and a code-specific bound on the decoding failure rate. The former result allows us to build a code-based cryptosystem enjoying the $\delta$-correctness property required by IND-CCA2 constructions, while the latter result allows us to discard code instances which may have a decoding failure rate significantly different from the average one (i.e., representing weak keys), should they be picked during the key generation procedure.

Winkle protects any validator-based byzantine fault tolerant consensus mechanisms, such as those used in modern Proof-of-Stake blockchains, against long-range attacks where old validators’ signature keys get compromised. Winkle is a decentralized secondary layer of client-based validation, where a client includes a single additional field into a transaction that they sign: a hash of the previously sequenced block. The block that gets a threshold of signatures (confirmations) weighted by clients’ coins is called a “confirmed” checkpoint. We show that under plausible and flexible security assumptions about clients the confirmed checkpoints can not be equivocated. We discuss how client key rotation increases security, how to accommodate for coins’ minting and how delegation allows for faster checkpoints. We evaluate checkpoint latency experimentally using Bitcoin and Ethereum transaction graphs, with and without delegation of stake.

Proxy re-encryption(PRE) is a primitive that is used to facilitate secure access delegation in the cloud. Proxy re-encryption allows a proxy server to transform ciphertexts encrypted under one user's public key to that under another user's public key without learning anything about the underlying message or the secret key. Over the years proxy re-encryption schemes have been proposed in different settings. In this paper we restrict our analysis to certificate based proxy re-encryption. The first CCA secure certificate based PRE without bilinear pairings was proposed by Lu and Li in Future Generation Computer Systems, 2016. In this paper we present a concrete attack on their scheme and prove that it is not CCA secure.

In this paper, we propose an automatic tool to search for optimal differential and linear trails in ARX ciphers. It's shown that a modulo addition can be divided into sequential small modulo additions with carry bit, which turns an ARX cipher into an S-box-like cipher. From this insight, we introduce the concepts of carry-bit-dependent difference distribution table (CDDT) and carry-bit-dependent linear approximation table (CLAT). Based on them, we give efficient methods to trace all possible output differences and linear masks of a big modulo addition, with returning their differential probabilities and linear correlations simultaneously. Then an adapted Matsui's algorithm is introduced, which can find the optimal differential and linear trails in ARX ciphers. Besides, the superiority of our tool's potency is also confirmed by experimental results for round-reduced versions of HIGHT and SPECK. More specifically, we find the optimal differential trails for up to 10 rounds of HIGHT, reported for the first time. We also find the optimal differential trails for 10, 12, 16, 8 and 8 rounds of SPECK32/48/64/96/128, and report the provably optimal differential trails for SPECK48 and SPECK64 for the first time. The optimal linear trails for up to 9 rounds of HIGHT are reported for the first time, and the optimal linear trails for 22, 13, 15, 9 and 9 rounds of SPECK32/48/64/96/128 are also found respectively. These results evaluate the security of HIGHT and SPECK against differential and linear cryptanalysis. Also, our tool is useful to estimate the security in the design of ARX ciphers.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a cryptographic technique known for ensuring fine-grained access control on encrypted data. One of the main drawbacks of ABE is the time required to decrypt the ciphertext is considerably expensive, since it grows with the complexity of access policy. Green et al. [USENIX, 2011] provided the outsourced ABE scheme, in which most computational overhead of ciphertext decryption is outsourced from end user to the cloud. However, their method inevitably increases the computational burden of the cloud. While millions of users are enjoying cloud computing services simultaneously, it may cause huge congestion and latency. In this paper, we propose a heuristic primitive called reverse outsourcing to reduce the cloud's workload. Specifically, the cloud is allowed to transform the ciphertext decryption outsourced by the end user into several computing tasks and dispatches them to idle users, who have some smart devices connected to the internet but not in use. These devices can provide computing resources for the cloud, just like the cloud hires many employees to complete the computing work. Besides, the computing results returned by the idle users should be verified by the cloud. We propose a reverse outsourced CP-ABE scheme in the rational idle user model, where idle users will be rewarded by the cloud after returning the correct computing results and they prefer to get rewards instead of saving resources. According to the Nash equilibrium, we prove that the best strategy for idle users is to follow our protocol honestly, because the probability of deceiving the cloud with incorrect computing results is negligible. Therefore, in our scheme, most computational overhead of ciphertext decryption is shifted from the cloud to idle users, leaving a constant number of operations for the cloud.

We introduce a framework generalizing lattice reduction algorithms to module lattices in order to practically and efficiently solve the $\gamma$-Hermite Module-SVP problem over arbitrary cyclotomic fields. The core idea is to exploit the structure of the subfields for designing a doubly-recursive strategy of reduction: both recursive in the rank of the module and in the field we are working in. Besides, we demonstrate how to leverage the inherent symplectic geometry existing in the tower of fields to provide a significant speed-up of the reduction for rank two modules. The recursive strategy over the rank can also be applied to the reduction of Euclidean lattices, and we can perform a reduction in asymptotically almost the same time as matrix multiplication. As a byproduct of the design of these fast reductions, we also generalize to all cyclotomic fields and provide speedups for many previous number theoretical algorithms. Quantitatively, we show that a module of rank 2 over a cyclotomic field of degree $n$ can be heuristically reduced within approximation factor $2^{\tilde{O}(n)}$ in time $\tilde{O}(n^2B)$, where $B$ is the bitlength of the entries. For $B$ large enough, this complexity shrinks to $\tilde{O}(n^{\log_2 3}B)$. This last result is particularly striking as it goes below the estimate of $n^2B$ swaps given by the classical analysis of the LLL algorithm using the so-called potential. Finally, all this framework is fully parallelizable, and we provide a full implementation. We apply it to break multilinear cryptographic candidates on concrete proposed parameters. We were able to reduce matrices of dimension 4096 with 6675-bit integers in 4 days, which is more than a million times faster than previous state-of-the-art implementations. Eventually, we demonstrate a quasicubic time for the Gentry-Szydlo algorithm which finds a generator given the relative norm and a basis of an ideal. This algorithm is important in cryptanalysis and requires efficient ideal multiplications and lattice reductions; as such we can practically use it in dimension 1024.

This paper proposes a solution for implementing Confidential Assets on MimbleWimble, which allows users to issue and transfer multiple assets on a blockchain without showing transaction addresses, amounts, and asset types. We first introduce the basic principles of MimbleWimble and then describe the implementation in detail.

McEliece-like code-based key exchange mechanisms using QC-MDPC codes can reach IND-CPA security under hardness assumptions from coding theory, namely quasi-cyclic syndrome decoding and quasi-cyclic codeword finding. To reach higher security requirements, like IND-CCA security, it is necessary in addition to prove that the decoding failure rate (DFR) is negligible, for some decoding algorithm and a proper choice of parameters. Getting a formal proof of a low DFR is a difficult task. Instead, we propose to ensure this low DFR under some additional security assumption on the decoder. This assumption relates to the asymptotic behavior of the decoder and is supported by several other works. We define a new decoder, Backflip, which features a low DFR. We evaluate the Backflip decoder by simulation and extrapolate its DFR under the decoder security assumption. We also measure the accuracy of our simulation data, in the form of confidence intervals, using standard techniques from communication systems.

Maintaining privacy on the Internet with the presence of powerful adversaries such as nation-state attackers is a challenging topic, and the Tor project is currently the most important tool to protect against this threat. The circuit construction protocol (CCP) negotiates cryptographic keys for Tor circuits, which overlay TCP/IP by routing Tor cells over n onion routers. The current circuit construction protocol provides strong security guarantees such as forward secrecy by exchanging O(n^2) messages. For several years it has been an open question if the same strong security guarantees could be achieved with less message overhead, which is desirable because of the inherent latency in overlay networks. Several publications described CCPs which require only O(n) message exchanges, but significantly reduce the security of the resulting Tor circuit. It was even conjectured that it is impossible to achieve both message complexity O(n) and forward secrecy immediately after circuit construction (so-called immediate forward secrecy). Inspired by the latest advancements in zero round-trip time key exchange (0-RTT), we present a new CCP protocol Tor 0-RTT (T0RTT). Using modern cryptographic primitives such as puncturable encryption allow to achieve immediate forward secrecy using only O(n) messages. We implemented these new primitives to give a first indication of possible problems and how to overcome them in order to build practical CCPs with O(n) messages and immediate forward secrecy in the future.

We present a generalization of Maurer's unified zero-knowledge (UZK) protocol, namely a unified generic zero-knowledge (UGZK) construction. We prove the security of our UGZK protocol and discuss special cases. Compared to UZK, the new protocol allows to prove knowledge of a vector of secrets instead of only one secret. We also provide the reader with a hash variant of UGZK and the corresponding security analysis. Last but not least, we extend Cogliani \emph{et al.}'s lightweight authentication protocol by describing a new distributed unified authentication scheme suitable for wireless sensor networks and, more generally, the Internet of Things.

The functioning of blockchain networks can be analyzed and abstracted into simple properties that allow for their usage as blackboxes in cryptographic protocols. One such abstraction is that of the growth of the blockchain over time. In this work, we build on the analysis of Garay et al. to develop an interface of functions that allow us to predict which block a submitted transaction will be added by. For cross-chain applications, we develop similar prediction functions for submitting related transactions to multiple independent networks in parallel. We then define a general ``receipt functionality'' for blockchains that provides a proof, in the form of a short string, that a particular transaction was added to the blockchain. We use these tools to obtain an efficient solution to the Train-and-Hotel Problem, which asks for a cross-chain booking protocol that allows a user to atomically book a train ticket on one blockchain and a hotel room on another. We formally prove that our protocol satisfies atomicity and liveness. We further highlight the versatility of blockchain receipts by discussing their applicability to general cross-chain communication and multi-party computation. We then detail a construction of ``Proof-of-Work receipts'' for Proof-of-Work blockchains using efficient and compact zero-knowledge proofs for arithmetic circuits.

We initiate the systematic study of probabilistic proofs in relativized worlds. The goal is to understand, for a given oracle, if there exist "non-trivial" probabilistic proofs for checking deterministic or nondeterministic computations that make queries to the oracle. This question is intimately related to a recent line of work that builds cryptographic primitives (e.g., hash functions) via constructions that are "friendly" to known probabilistic proofs. This improves the efficiency of probabilistic proofs for computations calling these primitives. We prove that "non-trivial" probabilistic proofs relative to several natural oracles do not exist. Our results provide strong complexity-theoretic evidence that certain functionalities cannot be treated as black boxes, and thus investing effort to instantiate these functionalities via constructions tailored to known probabilistic proofs may be inherent.

In this paper we prove that embedding parity bits and other function outputs in share string enables us to construct a secret sharing scheme (over binary alphabet) robust against a resource bounded adversary. Constructing schemes robust against adversaries in higher complexity classes requires an increase in the share size and increased storage. By connecting secret sharing with the randomized decision tree of a Boolean function we construct a scheme which is robust against an infinitely powerful adversary while keeping the constructions in a very low complexity class, viz. $AC^0$. As an application, we construct a robust secret sharing scheme in $AC^0$ that can accommodate new participants (dynamically) over time. Our construction requires a new redistribution of secret shares and can accommodate a bounded number of new participants.

Classical secret sharing schemes are built on the assumptions that the number of participants and the access structure remain fixed over time. Evolving secret sharing addresses the question of accommodating new participants with changeable access structures. One goal of this article is to initiate the study of evolving secret sharing sharing such that both share generation and reconstruction algorithms can be implemented by $AC^0$ circuits. We give a concrete construction with some minor storage assumption. Furthermore, allowing certain trade-offs we consider the novel problem of robust redistribution of secret shares (in $AC^0$) in the spirit of dynamic access structure by suitably modifying a construction of Cheng-Ishai-Li (TCC $2017$). A naive solution to the problem is to increase the alphabet size. We avoid this by modifying shares of some of the old participants. This modification is also necessary to make newly added participant(s) non-redundant to the secret sharing scheme.

Differential branch number and linear branch number are critical for the security of symmetric ciphers. The recent trend in the designs like PRESENT block cipher, ASCON authenticated encryption shows that applying S-boxes that have nontrivial differential and linear branch number can significantly reduce the number of rounds. As we see in the literature that the class of 4 x 4 S-boxes have been well-analysed, however, a little is known about the n x n S-boxes for n >= 5. For instance, the complete classification of 5 x 5 affine equivalent S-boxes is still unknown. Therefore, it is challenging to obtain “the best” S-boxes with dimension >= 5 that can be used in symmetric cipher designs. In this article, we present a novel approach to construct S-boxes that identifies classes of n x n S-boxes (n = 5, 6) with differential branch number 3 and linear branch number 3, and ensures other cryptographic properties. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report 6 x 6 S-boxes with linear branch number 3, differential branch number 3, and with other good cryptographic properties such as nonlinearity 24 and differential uniformity 4.

The problem of constructing effective statistical tests for random number generators (RNG) is considered. Currently, statistical tests for RNGs are a mandatory part of cryptographic information protection systems, but their effectiveness is mainly estimated based on experiments with various RNGs. We find an asymptotic estimate for the p-value of an optimal test in the case where the alternative hypothesis is a known stationary ergodic source, and then describe a family of tests each of which has the same asymptotic estimate of the p-value for any (unknown) stationary ergodic source.

Internet-of-Things enables interconnection of billions of devices, which perform autonomous operations and collect various types of data. These things, along with their generated huge amount of data, need to be handled efficiently and securely. Centralized solutions are not desired due to security concerns and scalability issue. In this paper, we propose HIBEChain, a hierarchical blockchain system that realizes scalable and accountable management of IoT devices and data. HIBEChain consists of multiple permissioned blockchains that form a hierarchical tree structure. To support the hierarchical structure of HIBEChain, we design a decentralized hierarchical identity-based signature (DHIBS) scheme, which enables IoT devices to use their identities as public keys. Consequently, HIBEChain achieves high scalability through parallel processing as blockchain sharding schemes, and it also implements accountability by use of identity-base keys. Identity-based keys not only make HIBEChain more user-friendly, they also allow private key recovery by validators when necessary. We provide detailed analysis of its security and performance, and implement HIBEChain based on Ethereum source code. Experiment results show that a 6-ary, (7,10)-threshold, 4-level HIBEChain can achieve 32,000 TPS, and it needs only 9 seconds to confirm a transaction.

We investigate constructing message authentication schemes from symmetric cryptographic primitives, with the goal of achieving security when most intermediate values during tag computation and verification are leaked (i.e., mode-level leakage-resilience). Existing efficient proposals typically follow the plain Hash-then-MAC paradigm $T=MAC_K(H(M))$. When the domain of the MAC function $MAC_K$ is $\{0,1\}^{128}$, e.g., when instantiated with the AES, forgery is possible within time $2^{64}$ and data complexity 1. To dismiss such cheap attacks, we propose two modes: LRW1-based Hash-then-MAC (LRWHM) that is built upon the LRW1 tweakable blockcipher of Liskov, Rivest, and Wagner, and Rekeying Hash-then-MAC (RHM) that employs internal rekeying. Built upon secure AES implementations, LRWHM is provably secure up to (beyond-birthday) $2^{78.3}$ time complexity, while RHM is provably secure up to $2^{121}$ time. Thus in practice, their main security threat is expected to be side-channel key recovery attacks against the AES implementations. Finally, we benchmark the performance of instances of our modes based on the AES and SHA3 and confirm their efficiency.

QC-MDPC code-based KEMs rely on decoders that have a small or even negligible Decoding Failure Rate (DFR). These decoders should be efficient and implementable in constant-time. One example for a QC-MDPC KEM is the Round-2 candidate of the NIST PQC standardization project, "BIKE". We have recently shown that the Black-Gray decoder achieves the required properties. In this paper, we deffine several new variants of the Black-Gray decoder. One of them, called Black-Gray-Flip, needs only 7 steps to achieve a smaller DFR than Black-Gray with 9 steps, for the same block size. On current AVX512 platforms, our BIKE-1 (Level-1) constant-time decapsulation is 1:9x faster than the previous decapsulation with Black-Gray. We also report an additional 1:25x decapsulating speedup using the new AVX512-VBMI2 and vector-PCLMULQDQ instructions available on "Ice-Lake" micro-architecture.

While there have been many successes in verifying cryptographic security proofs of noninter- active primitives such as encryption and signatures, less attention has been paid to interactive cryptographic protocols. Interactive protocols introduce the additional verification challenge of concurrency, which is notoriously hard to reason about in a cryptographically sound manner. When proving the (approximate) observational equivalance of protocols, as is required by simulation based security in the style of Universal Composability (UC), a bisimulation is typically performed in order to reason about the nontrivial control flows induced by concurrency. Unfortunately, bisimulations are typically very tedious to carry out manually and do not capture the high-level intuitions which guide informal proofs of UC security on paper. Because of this, there is currently a large gap of formality between proofs of cryptographic protocols on paper and in mechanized theorem provers. We work towards closing this gap through a new methodology for iteratively constructing bisimulations in a manner close to on-paper intuition. We present this methodology through Interactive Probabilistic Dependency Logic (IPDL), a simple calculus and proof system for specifying and reasoning about (a certain subclass of) distributed probabilistic computations. The IPDL framework exposes an equational logic on protocols; proofs in our logic consist of a number of rewriting rules, each of which induce a single low-level bisimulation between protocols. We show how to encode simulation-based security in the style of UC in our logic, and evaluate our logic on a number of case studies; most notably, a semi-honest secure Oblivious Transfer protocol, and a simple multiparty computation protocol robust to Byzantine faults. Due to the novel design of our logic, we are able to deliver mechanized proofs of protocols which we believe are comprehensible to cryptographers without verification expertise. We provide a mechanization in Coq of IPDL and all case studies presented in this work.

This paper describes a vulnerability in Apple's CoreCrypto library, which affects 11 out of the 12 implemented hash functions: every implemented hash function except MD2 (Message Digest 2), as well as several higher-level operations such as the Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) and the Ed25519 signature scheme. The vulnerability is present in each of Apple's CoreCrypto libraries that are currently validated under FIPS 140-2 (Federal Information Processing Standard). For inputs of about $2^{32}$ bytes (4 GiB) or more, the implementations do not produce the correct output, but instead enter into an infinite loop. The vulnerability shows a limitation in the Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which currently does not perform tests on hash functions for inputs larger than 65 535 bits. To overcome this limitation of NIST's CAVP, we introduce a new test type called the Large Data Test (LDT). The LDT detects vulnerabilities similar to that in CoreCrypto in implementations submitted for validation under FIPS 140-2.

A shuffle argument is a cryptographic primitive for proving correct behaviour of mix-networks without leaking any private information. Several recent constructions of non-interactive shuffle arguments avoid the random oracle model but require the public key to be trusted. We augment the most efficient argument by Fauzi et al. [Asiacrypt 2017] with a distributed key generation protocol that assures soundness of the argument if at least one party in the protocol is honest and additionally provide a key verification algorithm which guarantees zero-knowledge even if all the parties are malicious. Furthermore, we simplify their construction and improve security by using weaker assumptions while retaining roughly the same level of efficiency. We also provide an implementation to the distributed key generation protocol and the shuffle argument.

Printed Electronics (PE) has a rapidly growing market, thus, the counterfeiting/overbuilding of PE components is anticipated to grow. The common solution for the counterfeiting is Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). In PUFs, a unique fingerprint is extracted from (irreproducible) process variations in the production and used in the authentication of valid components. Many commonly used PUFs are electrical PUFs by leveraging the impact of process variations on electrical properties of devices, circuits and chips. Hence, they add overhead to the production which results in additional costs. While such costs may be negligible for many application domains targeted by silicon-based VLSI technologies, they are detrimental to the ultra-low-cost PE applications. In this paper, we propose an optical PUF (iPUF) extracting a fingerprint from the optically visible variation of printed inks in the PE components. Since iPUF does not require any additional circuitry, the PUF production cost consists of merely acquisition, processing and saving an image of the circuit components, matching the requirements of ultra-low-cost margin applications of PE. To further decrease the storage costs for iPUF, we utilize image downscaling resulting in a compression rate of 484x, while still preserving the reliability and uniqueness of the fingerprints. The proposed fingerprint extraction methodology is applied to four datasets for evaluation. The results show that the process variation of the optical shapes of printed inks is suitable as an optical PUF to prevent counterfeiting in PE.

Public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS), proposed by Boneh \textit{et al.}, allows users to search encrypted keywords without losing data privacy. Although extensive studies have been conducted on this topic, only a few have focused on insider keyword guessing attacks (IKGA) that can reveal a user's sensitive information. In particular, after receiving a trapdoor used to search ciphertext from a user, a malicious insider (\textit{e.g}., a server) can randomly encrypt possible keywords using a user's public key, and then test whether the trapdoor corresponds to the selected keyword. This paper introduces a new concept called \textit{designated-ciphertext searchable encryption} (DCSE), which provides the same desired functionality as a PEKS scheme and prevents IKGA. Each trapdoor in DCSE is designated to a specific ciphertext, and thus malicious insiders cannot perform IKGA. We further propose a generic DCSE scheme that employs identity-based encryption and a key encapsulation mechanism. We provide formal proofs to demonstrate that the generic construction satisfies the security requirements. Moreover, we provide a lattice-based instantiation whose security is based on NTRU and ring-learning with errors assumptions; the proposed scheme is thus considered to be resistant to the quantum-computing attacks.

Isogenies on elliptic curves are of great interest in post-quantum cryptography and appeal to more and more researchers. Many protocols have been proposed such as OIDH, SIDH and CSIDH with their own advantages. We now focus on the CSIDH which based on the Montgomery curves in finite fields Fp with p=3 mod 8 whose endomorphism ring is O. We try to change the form of elliptic curves into y^2=x^3+Ax^2-x and the characteristic of the prime field into p=7 mod 8 , which induce the endomorphism ring becomes O_K. Moreover, many propositions&#65292;including the formula of isogenies between elliptic curves of the special form and the unique of the representation of Fp-isomorphism class, are given to illustrate the rationality of our idea. An important point to notice that the efficiency can't be reduced because the only difference between our formula of isogenies and that of CSIDH is the sign of some items. Furthermore, we also give a proposition that the protocol based on our case can avoid the collision proposed in [17].

In this paper we present a system for maintaining a membership list of users in a group, designed for use in the Signal Messenger secure messaging app. The goal is to support \(\mathit{private}\) \(\mathit{groups}\) where membership information is readily available to all group members but hidden from the service provider or anyone outside the group. In the proposed solution, a central server stores the group membership in the form of encrypted entries. Members of the group authenticate to the server in a way that reveals only that they correspond to some encrypted entry, then read and write the encrypted entries. Authentication in our design uses a primitive called a keyed-verification anonymous credential (KVAC), and we construct a new KVAC scheme based on an algebraic MAC, instantiated in a group \(\mathbb{G}\) of prime order. The benefit of the new KVAC is that attributes may be elements in \(\mathbb{G}\), whereas previous schemes could only support attributes that were integers modulo the order of \(\mathbb{G}\). This enables us to encrypt group data using an efficient Elgamal-like encryption scheme, and to prove in zero-knowledge that the encrypted data is certified by a credential. Because encryption, authentication, and the associated proofs of knowledge are all instantiated in \(\mathbb{G}\) the system is efficient, even for large groups.

In this paper, we propose a new method to launch a more efficient algebraic cryptanalysis. Algebraic cryptanalysis aims at finding the secret key of a cipher by solving a collection of polynomial equations that describe the internal structure of the cipher, while chosen correlated plaintexts, as what appear in higher order differential cryptanalysis and its derivatives such as cube attack or integral cryptanalysis, forces many linear relation between intermediate state bits in the cipher. In this paper, we take these polynomial relations into account, so it become possible to simplify the equation system arising from algebraic cryptanalysis, and consequently solve the polynomial system more efficiently. We take advantage of Universal Proning technique to provide an efficient method to recover such linear polynomials. Another important parameter in algebraic cryptanalysis of ciphers is to effectively describe the cipher. We employ FWBW representation of S-boxes together with Universal Proning to help provide a more powerful algebraic cryptanalysis based on Gröbner-basis computation. We show our method is more efficient than doing algebraic cryptanalysis with MQ representation, and also than employing MQ together with Universal Proning. To show the effectiveness of our approach, we applied it for the cryptanalysis of several light weight block ciphers. A by-product of employing this approach is that we have achieved such an efficiency to algebraic cryptanalyse 12-round LBlock, 6-round MIBS, 7-round PRESENT and 9-round SKINNY light-weight block ciphers, so far.

In this article we put forward an encryption mechanism that dwells on the problem of identifying the correct subset of primes from a known set. By utilizing our specially constructed public key when computing the ciphertext equation, the decryption mechanism can correctly output the shared secret parameter. The scheme has short key length, no decryption failure issues, plaintext-to-ciphertext expansion of one-to-two as well as uses \simple" mathematics in order to achieve maximum simplicity in design, such that even practitioners with limited mathematical background will be able to understand the arithmetic. Due to in-existence of efficient algorithms running upon a quantum computer to obtain the roots of our ciphertext equation and also to retrieve the private key from the public key, our encryption mechanism can be a probable candidate for seamless post quantum drop-in replacement for current traditional asymmetric schemes.

Authenticity can be compromised by information leaked via side-channels (e.g., power consumption). Examples of attacks include direct key recoveries and attacks against the tag verification which may lead to forgeries. At FSE 2018, Berti et al. described two authenticated encryption schemes which provide authenticity assuming a “leak-free implementation” of a Tweakable Block Cipher (TBC). Precisely, security is guaranteed even if all the intermediate computations of the target implementation are leaked in full but the TBC long-term key. Yet, while a leak-free implementation reasonably models strongly protected implementations of a TBC, it remains an idealized physical assumption that may be too demanding in many cases, in particular, if hardware engineers mitigate the leakage to a good extent but (due to performance constraints) do not reach leak-freeness. In this paper, we get rid of this important limitation by introducing the notion of “Strong Unpredictability with Leakage” for BC's and TBC's. It captures the hardness for an adversary to provide a fresh and valid input/output pair for a (T)BC, even having oracle access to the (T)BC, its inverse and their leakages. This definition is game-based and may be verified/falsified by laboratories. Based on it, we then provide two Message Authentication Codes (MAC) which are secure if the (T)BC on which they rely are implemented in a way that maintains a sufficient unpredictability. Thus, we improve the theoretical foundations of leakage-resilient MAC and extend them towards engineering constraints that are easier to achieve in practice.

At ESORICS 2017, Buldas et al. proposed an efficient (software only) server supported signature scheme, geared to mobile devices, termed Smart-ID. A major component of their design is a clone detection mechanism, which allows a server to detect the existence of clones of a client's private key share. We point out a flaw in this mechanism. We show that, under a realistic race condition, an attacker which holds a password camouflaged private share can lunch an online dictionary attack such that (i)if all its password guesses are wrong, it is very likely that the attack will not be detected, and (ii) if one of its guesses is correct, it can generate signatures on messages of its choice, and the attack will \emph{not} be detected. We propose an improvement of Smart-ID to thwart the attack we present.

Gaussian sampling over the integers is a crucial tool in lattice-based cryptography, but has proven over the recent years to be surprisingly challenging to perform in a generic, efficient and provable secure manner. In this work, we present a modular framework for generating discrete Gaussians with arbitrary center and standard deviation. Our framework is extremely simple, and it is precisely this simplicity that allowed us to make it easy to implement, provably secure, portable, efficient, and provably resistant against timing attacks. Our sampler is a good candidate for any trapdoor sampling and it is actually the one that has been recently implemented in the Falcon signature scheme. Our second contribution aims at systematizing the detection of implementation errors in Gaussian samplers. We provide a statistical testing suite for discrete Gaussians called SAGA (Statistically Acceptable GAussian). In a nutshell, our two contributions take a step towards trustable and robust Gaussian sampling real-world implementations.

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In cloud-based outsourced storage systems, many users wish to securely store their files for later retrieval, and additionally to share them with other users. These retrieving users may not be online at the point of the file upload, and in fact they may never come online at all. In this asynchoronous environment, key transport appears to be at odds with any demands for forward secrecy. Recently, Boyd et al. (ISC 2018) presented a protocol that allows an initiator to use a modified key encapsulation primitive, denoted a blinded KEM (BKEM), to transport a file encryption key to potentially many recipients via the (untrusted) storage server, in a way that gives some guarantees of forward secrecy. Until now all known constructions of BKEMs are built using RSA and DDH, and thus are only secure in the classical setting. We further the understanding of the use of blinding in post-quantum cryptography in two aspects. First, we show how to generically build blinded KEMs from homomorphic encryption schemes with certain properties. Second, we construct the first post-quantum secure blinded KEMs, and the security of our constructions are based on hard lattice problems.

A bent function is a Boolean function in even number of variables which is on the maximal Hamming distance from the set of affine Boolean functions. It is called self-dual if it coincides with its dual. It is called anti-self-dual if it is equal to the negation of its dual. A mapping of the set of all Boolean functions in n variables to itself is said to be isometric if it preserves the Hamming distance. In this paper we study isometric mappings which preserve self-duality and anti-self-duality of a Boolean bent function. The complete characterization of these mappings is obtained for n>2. Based on this result, the set of isometric mappings which preserve the Rayleigh quotient of the Sylvester Hadamard matrix, is characterized. The Rayleigh quotient measures the Hamming distnace between bent function and its dual, so as a corollary, all isometric mappings which preserve bentness and the Hamming distance between bent function and its dual are described.

If I commission a long computation, how can I check that the result is correct without re-doing the computation myself? This is the question that efficient verifiable computation deals with. In this work, we address the issue of verifying the computation as it unfolds. That is, at any intermediate point in the computation, I would like to see a proof that the current state is correct. Ideally, these proofs should be short, non-interactive, and easy to verify. In addition, the proof at each step should be generated efficiently by updating the previous proof, without recomputing the entire proof from scratch. This notion, known as incrementally verifiable computation, was introduced by Valiant [TCC 08] about a decade ago. Existing solutions follow the approach of recursive proof composition and can be based on strong and non-falsifiable cryptographic assumptions (so-called ``knowledge assumptions''). In this work, we present a new framework for constructing incrementally verifiable computation schemes in both the publicly verifiable and designated-verifier settings. Our designated-verifier scheme is based on somewhat homomorphic encryption (which can be based on Learning with Errors) and our publicly verifiable scheme is based on the notion of zero-testable homomorphic encryption, which can be constructed from ideal multi-linear maps [Paneth and Rothblum, TCC 17]. Our framework is anchored around the new notion of a probabilistically checkable proof (PCP) with incremental local updates. An incrementally updatable PCP proves the correctness of an ongoing computation, where after each computation step, the value of every symbol can be updated locally without reading any other symbol. This update results in a new PCP for the correctness of the next step in the computation. Our primary technical contribution is constructing such an incrementally updatable PCP. We show how to combine updatable PCPs with recently suggested (ordinary) verifiable computation to obtain our results.

Most electronic voting systems today satisfy the basic requirements of privacy, unreusability, eligibility and fairness in a natural and rather straightforward way. However, receipt-freeness, incoercibility and universal verifiability are much harder to implement and in many cases they require a large amount of computation and communication overhead. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based voting system which achieves all the properties expected from secure elections without requiring too much from the voter. Coercion resistance and receipt-freeness are ensured by means of a randomizer token -- a tamper-resistance source of randomness which acts as a black box in constructing the ballot for the user. Universal verifiability is ensured by the append-only structure of the blockchain, thus minimizing the trust placed in election authorities. Additionally, the system has linear overhead when tallying the votes, hence it is scalable and practical for large scale elections.

White-box cryptography was first introduced by Chow et al. in $2002$ as a software technique for implementing cryptographic algorithms in a secure way that protects secret keys in an untrusted environment. Ever since, Chow et al.'s design has been subject to the well-known Differential Computation Analysis (DCA). To resist DCA, a natural approach that white-box designers investigated is to apply the common side-channel countermeasures such as masking. In this paper, we suggest applying the well-studied leakage detection methods to assess the security of masked white-box implementations. Then, we extend some well-known side-channel attacks (i.e. the bucketing computational analysis, the mutual information analysis, and the collision attack) to the higher-order case to defeat higher-order masked white-box implementations. To illustrate the effectiveness of these attacks, we perform a practical evaluation against a first-order masked white-box implementation. The obtained results have demonstrated the practicability of these attacks in a real-world scenario.

For primes \(p \equiv 3 \bmod 4\), we show that setting up CSIDH on the surface, i.e., using supersingular elliptic curves with endomorphism ring \(Z[(1 + \sqrt{-p})/2]\), amounts to just a few sign switches in the underlying arithmetic. If \(p \equiv 7 \bmod 8\) then the availability of very efficient horizontal 2-isogenies allows for a noticeable speed-up, e.g., our resulting CSURF-512 protocol runs about 5.68% faster than CSIDH-512. This improvement is completely orthogonal to all previous speed-ups, constant-time measures and construction of cryptographic primitives that have appeared in the literature so far. At the same time, moving to the surface gets rid of the redundant factor \(Z_3\) of the acting ideal-class group, which is present in the case of CSIDH and offers no extra security.

We investigate multiple implementations of a hash-based digital signature scheme in software and hardware for a RISC-V processor. For this, different instantiations of XMSS by leveraging SHA-256 and SHA-3 are considered. Moreover, we propose various optimisations for accelerating the signature scheme on resource-constrained FPGAs. Compared to the pure software version, the implemented hardware accelerators for SHA-256 and SHA-3 achieve a significant speedup of 25x and 87x respectively for generating 2^10 key pairs. Signing and verifying with such key pairs achieves a speedup of 17x and 10x in the case of SHA-256 and respectively 55x and 20x for SHA-3. Recently, Wang et al. presented an XMSS-specific software-hardware co-design, resulting in significant speedups. Our general-purpose hardware accelerator for SHA-256 further reduces the calculation cost for signing by 26%, and by 28% for verifying in comparison to results of Wang et al., and achieves as well a better time-area product for signing (3.3x) and verifying (2.5x).

Lattice-based cryptography offers quantum-resistant cryptosystems but there is not yet official recommendations to choose parameters with standard security levels. Some of these cryptosystems permit secure computations and aim at a wider audience than cryptographic community. We focus on one of them, a leveled homomorphic cryptosystem (LHE): Brakersi/Fan-Vercauteren's (BFV) one. The family of LHE cryptosystems needs to be well-instantiated not only to protect input and output ciphertexts and to perform efficiently computations, but also, for them, parametrization constrains the quantity of homomorphic computations that can be performed with guarantee of correctness. It demands to choose parameters accordingly. In addition, each implementation brings external constraints to optimize performance. All of this makes it tedious for the non-expert user to choose parameters. To solve this, we have developed CinguParam to help user to instantiate implementations of BFV in different libraries: Cingulata, FV-NFLlib and Microsoft SEAL. CinguParam permits to generate an up-to-date database of parameter sets in function of computation budget, security parameters and implementation choices. This tool includes a notion of budget to ensure correct homomorphic computations and the one of BKZ reduction cost model to grasp the gap from concrete security, nowadays. It makes use of the LWE-Estimator to obtain up-to-date security estimations. CinguParam permits to select automatically a suitable parameter set with Cingulata and it can be used to generate code snippets to set parameters with FV-NFLlib and Microsoft SEAL.

Metering is a critical process in large-scale distributed industrial plants, which enables multiple plants to collaborate to offer mutual services without outside interference. When distributed plants measure the data from a shared common source, e.g., flow metering in an oil pipeline, trustworthiness and immutability must be guaranteed among them. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical and scalable blockchain-based secure metering system, \textit{SMChain}, to provide strong security, trustworthy guarantee, and immutable services. {\em SMChain} adopts a two-layer blockchain structure, consisting of independent local blockchains stored at individual plants and one state blockchain stored in the cloud. To deal with the scalability issues within each plant, we propose a novel scalable Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocol based on \textit{(k, n)}-threshold signature scheme to deal with the Byzantine faults and reduce the intra-plant communication complexity from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. For the state blockchain, we use a cloud-based service to synchronize and integrate the local blockchains into one state blockchain, which can further be distributed back to each plant.

We introduce an efficient transformation from univariate polynomial commitment based zk-SNARKs to their transparent counterparts. The transformation is achieved with the help of a new IOP primitive which we call a list polynomial commitment. This primitive is applicable for preprocessing zk-SNARKs over both prime and binary fields. We present the primitive itself along with a soundness analysis of the transformation and instantiate it with an existing universal proof system. We also present benchmarks for a proof of concept implementation alongside a comparison with the current non-transparent state-of-the-art. Our results show competitive efficiency both in terms of proof size and generation times. At the 80-bit security level, our benchmarks provide proof generation times of about a minute and proof sizes of around 515 KB for a circuit with one million gates.

Lattice-based encryption schemes are often subject to the possibility of decryption failures, in which valid encryptions are decrypted incorrectly. Such failures, in large number, leak information about the secret key, enabling an attack strategy alternative to pure lattice reduction. Extending the "failure boosting'' technique of D'Anvers et al. in PKC 2019, we propose an approach that we call "directional failure boosting'' that uses previously found "failing ciphertexts'' to accelerate the search for new ones. We analyse in detail the case where the lattice is defined over polynomial ring modules quotiented by <X^N + 1> and demonstrate it on a simple Mod-LWE-based scheme parametrized à la Kyber768/Saber. We show that, using our technique, for a given secret key (single-target setting), the cost of searching for additional failing ciphertexts after one or more have already been found, can be sped up dramatically. We thus demonstrate that, in this single-target model, these schemes should be designed so that it is hard to even obtain one decryption failure. Besides, in a wider security model where there are many target secret keys (multi-target setting), our attack greatly improves over the state of the art.

The inconsistency of Nash equilibrium of rational delegated computation scheme in the UC framework will lead to the lack of strict security proof of the protocols fundamentally. The consistency proof of Nash equilibrium between the ideal world and the real world has always been a challenge in the research field. In this paper, we analyze the Nash equilibrium according to the game model of rational delegated computation, and the ideal functionality for rational delegation of computation based on incentive-driven adversary is proposed, then we construct a rational delegated computation protocol for UC-realizing the ideal functionality. In a word, the proposed rational delegated computing protocol based on incentive-driven adversary has been proven to be secure in the universally composable framework, furthermore, we effectively solve the inconsistency problem of Nash equilibrium between the real world and the ideal world.

Secret sharing splits a secret $s$ into $\ell$ shares in such a way that $k\leq \ell$ shares suffice to reconstruct $s$. Let $\rho_{i,j}$ be the probability that shareholder $i$ disclose their share to shareholder $j$, with $0 \leq i,j < n$. Given $k \leq \ell \leq n$, to whom $\ell$ individuals should we hand shares, if we wish to minimize the probability that one of them reconstitutes $s$?

A new multivariate cryptosystem based on a linear code was proposed by Smith-Tone and Tone quite recently. This short note points out that it is a variant of UOV.

Recent results have shown that some post-quantum cryptographic systems have encryption and decryption performance comparable to fast elliptic-curve cryptography (ECC) or even better. However, this performance metric is considering only CPU time and ignoring bandwidth and storage. High-confidence post-quantum encryption systems have much larger keys than ECC. For example, the code-based cryptosystem recommended by the PQCRYPTO project uses public keys of 1MB. Fast key erasure (to provide ``forward secrecy'') requires new public keys to be constantly transmitted. Either the server needs to constantly generate, store, and transmit large keys, or it needs to receive, store, and use large keys from the clients. This is not necessarily a problem for overall bandwidth, but it is a problem for storage and computation time on tiny network servers. All straightforward approaches allow easy denial-of-service attacks. This paper describes a protocol, suitable for today's networks and tiny servers, in which clients transmit their code-based one-time public keys to servers. Servers never store full client public keys but work on parts provided by the clients, without having to maintain any per-client state. Intermediate results are stored on the client side in the form of encrypted cookies and are eventually combined by the server to obtain the ciphertext. Requirements on the server side are very small: storage of one long-term private key, which is much smaller than a public key, and a few small symmetric cookie keys, which are updated regularly and erased after use. The protocol is highly parallel, requiring only a few round trips, and involves total bandwidth not much larger than a single public key. The total number of packets sent by each side is 971, each fitting into one IPv6 packet of less than 1280 bytes. The protocol makes use of the structure of encryption in code-based cryptography and benefits from small ciphertexts in code-based cryptography.

FPGAs are increasingly used in cloud applications and being integrated into Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). For these systems, various side-channel attacks on cryptographic implementations have been reported, motivating to apply proper countermeasures. Beyond cryptographic implementations, maliciously introduced covert channel receivers and transmitters can allow to exfiltrate other secret information from the FPGA. In this paper, we present a fast covert channel on FPGAs, which exploits the on-chip power distribution network. This can be achieved without any logical connection between the transmitter and receiver blocks. Compared to a recently published covert channel with an estimated 4.8 Mbit/s transmission speed, we show 8 Mbit/s transmission and reduced errors from around 3% to less than 0.003%. Furthermore, we demonstrate proper transmissions of word-size messages and test the channel in the presence of noise generated from other residing tenants' modules in the FPGA. When we place and operate other co-tenant modules that require 85% of the total FPGA area, the error rate increases to 0.02%, depending on the platform and setup. This error rate is still reasonably low for a covert channel. Overall, the transmitter and receiver work with less than 3-5% FPGA LUT resources together. We also show the feasibility of other types of covert channel transmitters, in the form of synchronous circuits within the FPGA.

Computer-aided cryptography is an active area of research that develops and applies formal, machine-checkable approaches to the design, analysis, and implementation of cryptography. We present a cross-cutting systematization of the computer-aided cryptography literature, focusing on three main areas: (i) design-level security (both symbolic security and computational security), (ii) functional correctness and efficiency, and (iii) implementation-level security (with a focus on digital side-channel resistance). In each area, we first clarify the role of computer-aided cryptography---how it can help and what the caveats are---in addressing current challenges. We next present a taxonomy of state-of-the-art tools, comparing their accuracy, scope, trustworthiness, and usability. Then, we highlight their main achievements, trade-offs, and research challenges. After covering the three main areas, we present two case studies. First, we study efforts in combining tools focused on different areas to consolidate the guarantees they can provide. Second, we distill the lessons learned from the computer-aided cryptography community's involvement in the TLS 1.3 standardization effort. Finally, we conclude with recommendations to paper authors, tool developers, and standardization bodies moving forward.

The user of an imperfectly correct lattice-based public-key encryption scheme leaks information about their secret key with each decryption query that they answer---even if they answer all queries successfully. Through a refinement of the D'Anvers--Guo--Johansson--Nilsson--Vercauteren--Verbauwhede failure boosting attack, we show that an adversary can use this information to improve his odds of finding a decryption failure. We also propose a new definition of $\delta$-correctness, and we re-assess the correctness of several submissions to NIST's post-quantum standardization effort.

Using a set of pairing product equations (PPEs) to verify the correctness of an untrusted set of pairing elements with respect to another set of trusted elements has numerous cryptographic applications. These include the design of basic and structure-preserving signature schemes, building oblivious transfer schemes from “blind” IBE, finding new verifiable random functions and keeping the IBE/ABE authority “accountable” to the user. A natural question to ask is: are all trusted-untrusted pairing element groups in the literature PPE testable? We provide original observations demonstrating that the answer is no, and moreover, it can be non-trivial to determine whether or not there exists a set of PPEs that can verify some pairing elements with respect to others. Many IBE schemes have PPE-testable private keys (with respect to the public parameters), while others, such as those based on dual-system encryption, provably do not. To aid those wishing to use PPE-based element verification in their cryptosystems, we devised rules to systematically search for a set of PPEs that can verify untrusted elements with respect to a set of trusted elements. We prove the correctness of each rule and combine them into a main searching algorithm for which we also prove correctness. We implemented this algorithm in a new software tool, called AutoPPE. Tested on over two dozen case studies, AutoPPE found a set of PPEs (on schemes where they exist) usually in just a matter of seconds. This work represents an important step towards the larger goal of improving the speed and accuracy of pairing-based cryptographic design via computer automation.

Secure multiparty computation enables a set of parties to securely carry out a joint computation on their private inputs without revealing anything but the output. A particularly motivated setting is that of three parties with a single corruption (hereafter denoted 3PC). This 3PC setting is particularly appealing for two main reasons: (1) it admits more efficient MPC protocols than in other standard settings; (2) it allows in principle to achieve full security (and fairness). Highly efficient protocols exist within this setting with security against a semi-honest adversary; however, a significant gap remains between these and protocols with stronger security against a malicious adversary. In this paper, we narrow this gap within concretely efficient protocols. More explicitly, we have the following contributions: * Concretely Efficient Malicious 3PC. We present an optimized 3PC protocol for arithmetic circuits over rings with (amortized) communication of 1 ring element per multiplication gate per party, matching the best semi-honest protocols. The protocol applies also to Boolean circuits, significantly improving over previous protocols even for small circuits. Our protocol builds on recent techniques of Boneh et al.\ (Crypto 2019) for sublinear zero-knowledge proofs on distributed data, together with an efficient semi-honest protocol based on replicated secret sharing (Araki et al., CCS 2016). We present a concrete analysis of communication and computation costs, including several optimizations. For example, for 40-bit statistical security, and Boolean circuit with a million (nonlinear) gates, the overhead on top of the semi-honest protocol can involve less than 0.5KB of communication {\em for the entire circuit}, while the computational overhead is dominated by roughly 30 multiplications per gate in the field $F_{2^{47}}$. In addition, we implemented and benchmarked the protocol for varied circuit sizes. * Full Security. We augment the 3PC protocol to further provide full security (with guaranteed output delivery) while maintaining amortized 1 ring element communication per party per multiplication gate, and with hardly any impact on concrete efficiency. This is contrasted with the best previous 3PC protocols from the literature, which allow a corrupt party to mount a denial-of-service attack without being detected.

Tweakable block ciphers are increasingly becoming a common primitive to build new resilient modes as well as a concept for multiple dedicated designs. While regular block ciphers define a family of permutations indexed by a secret key, tweakable ones define a family of permutations indexed by both a secret key and a public tweak. In this work we formalize and study a generic framework for building such a tweakable block cipher based on regular block ciphers, the iterated tweakable FX construction, which includes many such previous constructions of tweakable block ciphers. Then we describe a cryptanalysis from which we can derive a provable security upper-bound for all constructions following this tweakable iterated FX strategy. Concretely, the cryptanalysis of r rounds of our generic construction based on n-bit block ciphers with \kap-bit keys requires O(2^{r(n + \kap)/(r+1)}) online and offline queries. For r = 2 rounds this interestingly matches the proof of the particular case of XHX2 by Lee and Lee (ASIACRYPT 2018) thus proving for the first time its tightness. In turn, the XHX and XHX2 proofs show that our generic cryptanalysis is information theoretically optimal for 1 and 2 rounds.

Code-based public key cryptosystems have been found to be an interesting option in the area of Post-Quantum Cryptography. In this work, we present a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) using a parity check matrix of the Generalized Srivastava code as the public key matrix. Generalized Srivastava codes are privileged with the decoding technique of Alternant codes as they belong to the family of Alternant codes. We exploit the dyadic structure of the parity check matrix to reduce the storage of the public key. Our encapsulation leads to a shorter ciphertext as compared to DAGS proposed by Banegas et al. in Journal of Mathematical Cryptology which also uses Generalized Srivastava code. Our KEM provides IND-CCA security in the random oracle model. Also, our scheme can be shown to achieve post-quantum security in the quantum random oracle model.

Let $A/\overline{\mathbb{F}}_p$ and $A'/\overline{\mathbb{F}}_p$ be supersingular principally polarized abelian varieties of dimension $g>1$. For any prime $\ell \ne p$, we give an algorithm that finds a path $\phi : A \rightarrow A'$ in the $(\ell, \dots , \ell)$-isogeny graph in $\widetilde{O}(p^{g-1})$ group operations on a classical computer, and $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{p^{g-1}})$ calls to the Grover oracle on a quantum computer. The idea is to find paths from $A$ and $A'$ to nodes that correspond to products of lower dimensional abelian varieties, and to recurse down in dimension until an elliptic path-finding algorithm (such as Delfs--Galbraith) can be invoked to connect the paths in dimension $g=1$. In the general case where $A$ and $A'$ are any two nodes in the graph, this algorithm presents an asymptotic improvement over all of the algorithms in the current literature. In the special case where $A$ and $A'$ are a known and relatively small number of steps away from each other (as is the case in higher dimensional analogues of SIDH), it gives an asymptotic improvement over the quantum claw finding algorithms and an asymptotic improvement over the classical van Oorschot--Wiener algorithm.

Three-party key exchange, where two clients aim to agree a session key with the help of a trusted server, is prevalent in present-day systems. In this paper, we present a practical and secure three-party password-based authenticated key exchange protocol over ideal lattices. Aside from hash functions our protocol does not rely on external primitives in the construction and the security of our protocol is directly relied on the Ring Learning with Errors (RLWE) assumption. Our protocol attains provable security. A proof-of-concept implementation shows our protocol is indeed practical.

The Lighting Network (LN) is a network of micropayment channels that runs on top of Bitcoin. The balances of payment channels are not broadcasted to the LN network to preserve the privacy of the nodes participating in the network. A balance disclosure attack (BDA) has been proven to be successful in determining the balance of large amount of channels in the network. In this paper we propose an improved algorithm for the BDA as well as a new type of attack that leverages the differences between LN client software implementations. Our improved algorithm extends the original BDA by performing payments from both sides of the channel. The new attack uses malformed payments to shutdown payment channels an adversary isn't part of.

The key escrow problem is one of the main barriers to the widespread real-world use of identity-based encryption (IBE). Specifically, a key generation center (KGC), which generates secret keys for a given identity, has the power to decrypt all ciphertexts. At PKC 2009, Chow defined a notion of security against the KGC, that relies on assuming that it cannot discover the underlying identities behind ciphertexts. However, this is not a realistic assumption since, in practice, the KGC manages an identity list, and hence it can easily guess the identities corresponding to given ciphertexts. Chow later amended this issue by introducing a new entity called an identity-certifying authority (ICA) and proposed an anonymous key-issuing protocol. Essentially, this allows the users, KGC, and ICA to interactively generate secret keys without users ever having to reveal their identities to the KGC. Unfortunately, since Chow separately defined the security of IBE and that of the anonymous key-issuing protocol, his IBE definition did not provide any formal treatment when the ICA is used to authenticate the users. Effectively, all of the subsequent works following Chow lack the formal proofs needed to determine whether or not it delivers a secure solution to the key escrow problem. In this paper, based on Chow's work, we formally define an IBE scheme that resolves the key escrow problem and provide formal definitions of security against corrupted users, KGC, and ICA. Along the way, we observe that if we are allowed to assume a fully trusted ICA, as in Chow's work, then we can construct a trivial (and meaningless) IBE scheme that is secure against the KGC. Finally, we present two instantiations in our new security model: a lattice-based construction based on the Gentry--Peikert--Vaikuntanathan IBE scheme (STOC 2008) and R{ü}ckert's lattice-based blind signature scheme (ASIACRYPT 2010), and a pairing-based construction based on the Boneh--Franklin IBE scheme (CRYPTO 2001) and Boldyreva's blind signature scheme (PKC 2003).

In standard Secret Sharing (SS), a dealer shares a secret $s$ among $n$ parties such that an adversary corrupting no more than $t$ parties does not learn $s$, while any $t+1$ parties can efficiently recover $s$. Proactive Secret Sharing (PSS) retains confidentiality of $s$ even when a mobile adversary corrupts all parties over the lifetime of the secret, but no more than a threshold $t$ in each epoch (called a refresh period). Withstanding such adversaries has become of increasing importance with the emergence of settings where private keys are secret shared and used to sign cryptocurrency transactions, among other applications. Feasibility of single-secret PSS for static groups with dishonest majorities was demonstrated but with a protocol that requires inefficient communication of $O(n^4)$. In this work, we improve over prior work in three directions: batching without incurring a linear loss in corruption threshold, communication efficiency, and handling dynamic groups. While each of properties we improve upon appeared independently in the context of PSS and in other previous work, handling them simultaneously (and efficiently) in a single scheme faces non-trivial challenges. Some PSS protocols can handle batching of $\ell \sim n$ secrets, but all of them are for the honest majority setting. Techniques typically used to accomplish such batching decrease the tolerated corruption threshold bound by a linear factor in $\ell$, effectively limiting the number of elements that can be batched with dishonest majority. We solve this problem by reducing the threshold decrease to $\sqrt{\ell}$ instead, allowing us to deal with the dishonest majority setting when $\ell \sim n$. This is accomplished based on new bivariate-polynomials-based techniques for sharing, and refreshing and recovering of shares, that allow batching of up to $n-2$ secrets in our PSS. To tackle the efficiency bottleneck the constructed PSS protocol requires only $O(n^3/\ell)$ communication for $\ell$ secrets, i.e., an amortized communication complexity of $O(n^2)$ when the maximum batch size is used. To handle dynamic groups we develop three new sub-protocols to deal with parties joining and leaving the group.

An exciting new development in differential privacy is the shuffled model, in which an anonymous channel enables non-interactive, differentially private protocols with error much smaller than what is possible in the local model, while relying on weaker trust assumptions than in the central model. In this paper, we study basic counting problems in the shuffled model and establish separations between the error that can be achieved in the single-message shuffled model and in the shuffled model with multiple messages per user. For the problem of frequency estimation for $n$ users and a domain of size $B$, we obtain: - A nearly tight lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}( \min(\sqrt[4]{n}, \sqrt{B}))$ on the error in the single-message shuffled model. This implies that the protocols obtained from the amplification via shuffling work of Erlingsson et al.~(SODA 2019) and Balle et al.~(Crypto 2019) are essentially optimal for single-message protocols. A key ingredient in the proof is a lower bound on the error of locally-private frequency estimation in the low-privacy (aka high $\epsilon$) regime. For this we develop new techniques to extend the results of Duchi et al.~(FOCS 2013; JASA 2018) and Bassily \& Smith~(STOC 2015), whose techniques were restricted to the high-privacy case. - Protocols in the multi-message shuffled model with $\poly(\log{B}, \log{n})$ bits of communication per user and $\poly\log{B}$ error, which provide an exponential improvement on the error compared to what is possible with single-message algorithms. This implies protocols with similar error and communication guarantees for several well-studied problems such as heavy hitters, $d$-dimensional range counting, M-estimation of the median and quantiles, and more generally sparse non-adaptive statistical query algorithms. For the related selection problem on a domain of size $B$, we prove: - A nearly tight lower bound of $\Omega(B)$ on the number of users in the single-message shuffled model. This significantly improves on the $\Omega(B^{1/17})$ lower bound obtained by Cheu et al.~(Eurocrypt 2019), and when combined with their $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{B})$-error multi-message protocol, implies the first separation between single-message and multi-message protocols for this problem.