All papers (Page 181 of 28375 results)
CoverUp: Privacy Through "Forced" Participation in Anonymous Communication Networks
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The privacy guarantees of anonymous communication networks (ACNs) are bounded by the number of participants. As a consequence, an ACN can only achieve strong privacy guarantees if it succeeds in attracting a large number of active users. Vice versa, weak privacy guarantees renders an ACN unattractive, leading to a low number of users. In this work, we show how to break this vicious circle. We develop CoverUp, a system that "forces" visitors of highly accessed websites to become involuntary participants of an ACN. CoverUp leverages basic browser functionality to execute server-served JavaScript code and to open remote connections to connect all website visitors to an ACN (which we instantiate by a mix server). We build two applications on top of CoverUp: an anonymous feed and a chat. We show that both achieve practical performance and strong privacy guarantees. Towards a network-level attacker, CoverUp makes voluntary and involuntary participants indistinguishable, thereby providing an anonymity set that includes all voluntary and involuntary participants (i.e., all website visitors). Given this, CoverUp provides even more than mere anonymity: the voluntary participants can hide the very intention to use the ACN. As the concept of forced participation raises ethical and legal concerns, we discuss these concerns and describe how these can be addressed.
The first collision for full SHA-1
SHA-1 is a widely used 1995 NIST cryptographic hash function standard that was officially deprecated by NIST in 2011 due to fundamental security weaknesses demonstrated in various analyses and theoretical attacks. Despite its deprecation, SHA-1 remains widely used in 2017 for document and TLS certificate signatures, and also in many software such as the GIT versioning system for integrity and backup purposes.
A key reason behind the reluctance of many industry players to replace SHA-1 with a safer alternative is the fact that finding an actual collision has seemed to be impractical for the past eleven years due to the high complexity and computational cost of the attack.
In this paper, we demonstrate that SHA-1 collision attacks have finally become practical by providing the first known instance of a collision.
Furthermore, the prefix of the colliding messages was carefully chosen so that they allow an attacker to forge two distinct PDF documents with the same SHA-1 hash that display different arbitrarily-chosen visual contents.
We were able to find this collision by combining many special cryptanalytic techniques in complex ways and improving upon previous work. In total the computational effort spent is equivalent to $2^{63.1}$ calls to SHA-1's compression function, and took approximately 6,500 CPU years and 100 GPU years. While the computational power spent on this collision is larger than other public cryptanalytic computations, it is still more than 100,000 times faster than a brute force search.
Global-Scale Secure Multiparty Computation
We propose a new, constant-round protocol for multi-party computation of boolean circuits that is secure against an arbitrary number of malicious corruptions. At a high level, we extend and generalize recent work of Wang et al. in the two-party setting and design an efficient preprocessing phase that allows the parties to generate authenticated information; we then show how to use this information to distributively construct a single ``authenticated'' garbled circuit that is evaluated by one party.
Our resulting protocol improves upon the state-of-the-art both asymptotically and concretely. We validate these claims via several experiments demonstrating both the efficiency and scalability of our protocol:
- Efficiency: For three-party computation over a LAN, our protocol requires only 95 ms to evaluate AES. This is roughly a 700$\times$ improvement over the best prior work, and only 2.5$\times$ slower than the best known result in the two-party setting. In general, for $n$ parties our protocol improves upon prior work (which was never implemented) by a factor of more than $230n$, e.g., an improvement of 3 orders of magnitude for 5-party computation.
- Scalability: We successfully executed our protocol with a large number of parties located all over the world, computing (for example) AES with 128 parties across 5 continents in under 3 minutes. Our work represents the largest-scale demonstration of secure computation to date.
Division Cryptanalysis of Block Ciphers with a Binary Diffusion Layer
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In this paper, we propose an accurate security evaluation methodology for block ciphers with a binary diffusion layers against division cryptanalysis. We illustrate the division property by the independence of variables, and exploit a one-to-one mapping between division trails and invertible sub-matrices. We give a new way to model the propagation of division property of linear diffusion layers by the smallest amount of inequalities which are generated from linear combinations of row vectors of the diffusion matrix. The solutions of these inequalities are exactly the division trails of linear transformation. Hence the description is compact and optimal.
As applications of our methodology, we first present a 10-round integral distinguisher for Skinny, proposed at CRYPTO 2016 which is of one round more than that found by using the previous method. For Midori, proposed at ASIACRYPT 2015, the designers have obtained a 3.5-round integral characteristic. Surprisingly, we find 7-round integral distinguishers both for Midori64 and Midori128.
Most importantly, we obtain the longest integral distinguishers for block ciphers with a binary diffusion layer. It seems that any more improvement of this kind of integral distinguishers using the division property is impossible. Therefore, the technique can be used to prove security against division cryptanalysis, and we can hopefully expect it to become a useful technique for designers.
The discrete logarithm problem over prime fields: the safe prime case. The Smart attack, non-canonical lifts and logarithmic derivatives
In this brief note we connect the discrete logarithm problem over prime fields in the safe prime case to the logarithmic derivative.
A Post-Quantum Digital Signature Scheme Based on Supersingular Isogenies
We present the first general-purpose digital signature scheme based on supersingular elliptic curve isogenies secure against quantum adversaries in the quantum random oracle model with small key sizes. This scheme is an application of Unruh’s construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to an interactive zero-knowledge proof proposed by De Feo, Jao, and Plût. We implement our proposed scheme on an x86-64 PC platform as well as an ARM-powered device. We exploit the state-of-the-art techniques to speed up the computations for general C and assembly. Finally, we provide timing results for real world applications.
A Virtual Wiretap Channel for Secure MessageTransmission
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In the Wyner wiretap channel, a sender is connected to a receiver and an eavesdropper through two noisy channels. It has been shown that if the noise in the eavesdropper channel is higher than the receiver's channel, information theoretically secure communication from Alice to Bob, without requiring a shared key, is possible. The approach is particularly attractive noting the rise of quantum computers and possibility of the complete collapse of today's’ cryptographic infrastructure. If the eavesdropper’s channel is noise free, however, no secrecy can be obtained. The iJam protocol, proposed by Gollakota and Katabi, is an interactive protocol over noise free channels that uses friendly jamming the receiver to establish an information theoretically secure shared key between the sender and the receiver. The protocol relies on the Basic iJam Transmission Protocol (BiT protocol) that uses properties of OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) to create uncertainty for Eve (hence noisy view) in receiving the sent information, and use this uncertainty to construct a secure key agreement protocol. The protocol has been implemented and evaluated using extensive experiments that examine the best eavesdropper’s reception strategy. In this paper, we develop an abstract model for BiT protocol as a wiretap channel and refer to it as a virtual wiretap channel. We estimate parameters of this virtual wiretap channel, derive the secrecy capacity of this channel and design a secure message transmission protocol with provable semantic security using the channel. Our analysis and protocol give a physical layer security protocol, with provable security, that is implementable in practice (BiT protocol has already been implemented).
Linking Online Misuse-Resistant Authenticated Encryption and Blockwise Attack Models
Real-world applications of authenticated encryption often require the encryption to be computable {online}, e.g. to compute the $i^{\textrm{th}}$ block of ciphertext after having processed the first $i$ blocks of plaintext. A significant line of research was dedicated to identifying security notions for online authenticated encryption schemes, that capture various security goals related to real-life scenarios. Fouque, Joux, Martinet and Valette proposed definitions of privacy and integrity against adversaries that can query their oracles in a blockwise-adaptive manner, to model memory-constrained applications. A decade later, Fleischmann, Forler and Lucks proposed the notion of online nonce misuse-resistant authenticated encryption (OAE) to capture the security of online authenticated encryption under nonce-reuse.
In this work we investigate the relation between these notions. We first recast the blockwise notions of Fouque et al. to make them compatible with online authenticated encryption schemes that support headers. We then show that OAE and the conjunction of the blockwise notions are "almost" equivalent. We identify the missing property on the side of blockwise notions, and formalize it under the name PRTAG. With PRTAG being just an auxiliary definition, the equivalence we finally show suggests that OAE and the blockwise model for online authenticated encryption capture essentially the same notion of security.
Analysis of Software Countermeasures for Whitebox Encryption
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Whitebox cryptography aims to ensure the security of cryptographic algorithms in the whitebox model where the adversary has full access to the execution environment. To attain security in this setting is a challenging problem: Indeed, all published whitebox implementations of standard symmetric-key algorithms such as AES to date have been practically broken. However, as far as we know, no whitebox implementation in real-world products has suffered from a key recovery attack. This is due to the fact that commercial products deploy additional software protection mechanisms on top of the whitebox implementation. This makes practical attacks much less feasible in real-world applications.
There are numerous software protection mechanisms which protect against standard whitebox attacks. One such technique is control flow obfuscation which randomizes the order of table lookups for each execution of the whitebox encryption module. Another technique is randomizing the locations of the various Look up tables (LUTs) in the memory address space. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of these countermeasures against two attack paradigms. The first known as Differential Computational Analysis (DCA) attack was developed by Bos, Hubain, Michiels and Teuwen in CHES 2016. The attack passively collects software execution traces for several plaintext encryptions and uses the collected data to perform an analysis similar to the well known differential power attacks (DPA) to recover the secret key. Since the software execution traces contain time demarcated physical addresses of memory locations being read/written into, they essentially leak the values of the inputs to the various LUTs accessed during the whitebox encryption operation, which as it turns out leaks sufficient information to perform the power attack. We found that if in addition to control flow obfuscation, one were to randomize the locations of the LUTs in the memory, then it is very difficult to perform the DCA on the resultant system using such table inputs and extract the secret key in reasonable time. As an alternative, we investigate the version of the DCA attack which uses the outputs of the tables instead of the inputs to mount the power analysis attack. This modified DCA is able to extract the secret key from the flow obfuscated and location randomized versions of several whitebox binaries available in crypto literature.
We develop another attack called the Zero Difference Enumeration (ZDE) attack. The attack records software traces for several pairs of strategically selected plaintexts and performs a simple statistical test on the effective difference of the traces to extract the secret key. We show that ZDE is able to recover the keys of whitebox systems. Finally we propose a new countermeasure for protecting whitebox binaries based on insertion of random delays which aims to make both the ZDE and DCA attacks practically difficult by adding random noise in the information leaked to the attacker.
The Approximate $k$-List Problem
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We study a generalization of the $k$-list problem, also known as the Generalized Birthday problem. In the $k$-list problem, one starts with $k$ lists of binary vectors and has to find a set of vectors -- one from each list -- that sum to the all-zero target vector. In our generalized {\em Approximate $k$-list problem}, one has to find a set of vectors that sum to a vector of small Hamming weight $\omega$. Thus, we relax the condition on the target vector and allow for some error positions.
This in turn helps us to significantly reduce the size of the starting lists, which determines the memory consumption, and the running time as a function of $\omega$. For $\omega = 0$, our algorithm achieves the original $k$-list run-time/memory consumption, whereas for $\omega = \frac n 2 $ it has polynomial complexity.
As in the $k$-list case, our Approximate $k$-list algorithm is defined for all $k=2^m, m>1$. Surprisingly, we also find an Approximate 3-list algorithm that improves in the run-time exponent compared to its 2-list counterpart for all $0< \omega < \frac n 2$. To the best of our knowledge this is the first such improvement of some variant of the notoriously hard 3-list problem.
As an application of our algorithm we compute small weight multiples of a given polynomial with more flexible degree than with Wagner's algorithm from Crypto 2002 and with smaller memory consumption than with Minder and Sinclair's algorithm from SODA 2009.
New techniques for trail bounds and application to differential trails in Keccak
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We present new techniques to efficiently scan the space of high-probability
differential trails in bit-oriented ciphers. Differential trails consist in sequences of state patterns that we represent as ordered lists of basic components in order to arrange them in a tree. The task of generating trails with probability above some threshold starts with the traversal of the tree. Our choice of basic components allows us to efficiently prune the tree based on the fact that we can tightly bound the probability of all descendants for any node. Then we extend the state patterns resulting from the tree traversal into longer trails using similar bounding techniques.
We apply these techniques to the 4 largest Keccak-f permutations, for which we
are able to scan the space of trails with weight per round of 15. This space is orders of magnitude larger than previously best result published on Keccak-f[1600] that reached 12, which in turn is orders of magnitude larger than any published results achieved with standard tools, that reached at most 9. As a result we provide new and improved bounds for the minimum weight of differential trails on 3, 4, 5 and 6 rounds. We also report on new trails that are, to the best of our knowledge, the ones with the highest known probability.
Robust P2P Primitives Using SGX Enclaves
Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems such as BitTorrent and Bitcoin are susceptible to serious attacks from byzantine nodes that join as peers. Research has explored many adversarial models with additional assumptions, ranging from mild (such as pre-established PKI) to strong (such as the existence of common random coins). One such widely-studied model is the general-omission model, which yields simple protocols with good efficiency, but has been considered impractical or unrealizable since it artificially limits the adversary only to omitting messages.
In this work, we study the setting of a synchronous network wherein peer nodes have CPUs equipped with a recent trusted computing mechanism called Intel SGX. In this model, we observe that the byzantine adversary reduces to the adversary in the general-omission model. As a first result, we show that by leveraging SGX features, we eliminate any source of advantage for a byzantine adversary beyond that gained by omitting messages, making the general-omission model realizable. Second, we present new protocols that improve the communication complexity of two fundamental primitives
— reliable broadcast and common random coins (or beacons) — in the synchronous setting, by utilizing SGX features. Our evaluation of 1000 nodes running on 40 DeterLab machines
confirms theoretical efficiency claim.
REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains
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Blockchains show promise as potential infrastructure for financial transaction systems. The security of blockchains today, however, relies critically
on Proof-of-Work (PoW), which forces participants to waste computational resources.
We present REM (Resource-Efficient Mining), a new blockchain mining framework that uses trusted hardware (Intel SGX).
REM achieves security guarantees similar to PoW, but leverages the partially decentralized trust model inherent in SGX to achieve a fraction of the waste of PoW. Its key idea, Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW), involves miners providing trustworthy reporting on CPU cycles they devote to inherently useful workloads. REM flexibly allows any entity to create a useful workload. REM ensures the trustworthiness of these workloads by means of a novel scheme of hierarchical attestations that may be of independent interest.
To address the risk of compromised SGX CPUs, we develop a statistics-based formal security framework, also relevant to other trusted-hardware-based approaches such as Intel's Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET).
We show through economic analysis that REM achieves less waste than PoET and variant schemes.
We implement REM and, as an example application, swap it into the consensus layer of Bitcoin core.
The result is the first full implementation of an SGX-based blockchain.
We experiment with four example applications as useful workloads for our implementation of REM, and report a computational overhead of $5-15\%$.
Optimal Differential Trails in SIMON-like Ciphers
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In the present paper, we propose an automatic search algorithm for optimal differential trails in SIMON-like ciphers. First, we give a more accurate upper bound on the differential probability of SIMON-like round function. It is shown that when the Hamming weight of the input difference $\alpha$, which is denoted by $wt(\alpha)$, is less than one half of the input size, the corresponding maximum differential probability of SIMON-like round function is less than or equal to $2^{-wt(\alpha)-1}$. Based on this, we adapt Matsui's algorithm and propose an efficient algorithm for searching for optimal differential trails. With the proposed algorithm, we find the provably optimal differential trails for $12$, $16$, $19$, $28$ and $37$ rounds of SIMON$32/48/64/96/128$. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that the provably optimal differential trails for SIMON$64$, SIMON$96$ and SIMON$128$ are reported. The provably optimal differential trails for $13$, $19$ and $25$ rounds of SIMECK$32/48/64$ are also found respectively, which confirm the results given by K$\ddot{o}$lbl et al. \cite{KolblR15}. Besides the optimal differential trails, we also find the $14$, $17$, $23$, $31$ and $41$-round differentials for SIMON$32/48/64/96/128$, and $14$, $21$ and $27$-round differentials for SIMECK$32/48/64$, respectively. As far as we know, these are the best differential distinguishers for SIMON and SIMECK so far. Compared with the approach based on SAT/SMT solvers used by K$\ddot{o}$lbl et al., our algorithm is more efficient and more practical to evaluate the security against differential cryptanalysis in the design of SIMON-like ciphers.
Some results on the existence of $t$-all-or-nothing transforms over arbitrary alphabets
A $(t, s, v)$-all-or-nothing transform is a bijective mapping defined on $s$-tuples over an alphabet of size $v$, which satisfies the condition that the values of any $t$ input co-ordinates are completely undetermined, given only the values of any $s-t$ output co-ordinates. The main question we address in this paper is: for which choices of parameters does a $(t, s, v)$-all-or-nothing transform (AONT) exist? More specifically, if we fix $t$ and $v$, we want to determine the maximum integer $s$ such that a $(t, s, v)$-AONT exists. We mainly concentrate on the case $t=2$ for arbitrary values of $v$, where we obtain various necessary as well as sufficient conditions for existence of these objects. We consider both linear and general (linear or nonlinear) AONT. We also show some connections between AONT, orthogonal arrays and resilient functions.
Probabilistically Checkable Proofs of Proximity with Zero-Knowledge
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A probabilistically Checkable Proof (PCP) allows a randomized verifier, with oracle access to a purported proof, to probabilistically verify an input statement of the form "$x\in L$" by querying only few bits of the proof. A PCP of proximity (PCPP) has the additional feature of allowing the verifier to query only few bits of the input $x$, where if the input is accepted then the verifier is guaranteed that (with high probability) the input is close to some $x'\in L$.
Motivated by their usefulness for sublinear-communication cryptography, we initiate the study of a natural zero-knowledge variant of PCPP (ZKPCPP), where the view of any verifier making a bounded number of queries can be efficiently simulated by making the same number of queries to the input oracle alone. This new notion provides a useful extension of the standard notion of zero-knowledge PCPs. We obtain two types of results.
1. Constructions. We obtain the first constructions of query-efficient ZKPCPPs via a general transformation which combines standard query-efficient PCPPs with protocols for secure multiparty computation. As a byproduct, our construction provides a conceptually simpler alternative to a previous construction of honest-verifier zero-knowledge PCPs due to Dwork et al. (Crypto '92).
2. Applications. We motivate the notion of ZKPCPPs by applying it towards sublinear-communication implementations of commit-and-prove functionalities. Concretely, we present the first sublinear-communication commit-and-prove protocols which make a black-box use of a collision-resistant hash function, and the first such multiparty protocols which offer information-theoretic security in the presence of an honest majority.
Analysis of Burn-in period for RC4 State Transition
The internal state of RC4 stream cipher is a permutation over ${\mathbb Z}_N$ and its state transition is effectively a transposition or swapping of two elements. How the randomness of RC4 state evolves due to its state transitions has been studied for many years. As the number of swaps increases, the state comes closer to a uniform random permutation. We call the burn-in period of RC4 state transition as the number of swaps required to make the state very close to uniform random permutation under some suitably defined distance measure. Earlier, Mantin in his Master's thesis (2001) has performed an approximate analysis of the burn-in period. In this paper, we perform a rigorous analysis of the burn-in period and in the process derive the exact distribution of the RC4 state elements at any stage.
Cost-Aware Cut-and-Choose Games with Applications in Cryptography and Prefix-Free Codes
Cost-aware cut-and-choose game is a fundamental technique that has many cryptographic applications. Best existing solutions of this game assumed for simplicity that the number of challenges is publicly known. This paper considers an extension of this game where the number of challenges can be picked probabilistically and hidden to the adversary. Although this small change leads to a linear program with infinitely many variables and constraints, we discover a surprising efficiency solver — using only O(n2) space and O(n2) time where n is the upper-bound on the number of challenges allowed in the strategy space. We then prove that n is bounded for any fixed cost ratio, implying the optimality of our solution extends to the strategy space that allow any number of challenges. As two interesting applications of our game solver, we demonstrate its value in constructing an actively secure two-party computation protocol and an optimal prefix-free code for encryptions.
Speeding up detection of SHA-1 collision attacks using unavoidable attack conditions
Counter-cryptanalysis, the concept of using cryptanalytic techniques to detect cryptanalytic attacks, was first introduced by Stevens at CRYPTO 2013 with a hash collision detection algorithm. That is, an algorithm that detects whether a given single message is part of a colliding message pair constructed using a cryptanalytic collision attack on MD5 or SHA-1. The concept's utility was proven when it was used to expose the then-unknown cryptanalytic collision attack exploited by the Flame espionage supermalware.
So far there is a significant cost: to detect collision attacks against SHA-1 (respectively MD5) costs the equivalent of hashing the message 15 (respectively 224) times. In this paper we present a significant performance improvement for collision detection based on the new concept of unavoidable conditions. Unavoidable conditions are conditions that are necessary for all feasible attacks in a certain attack class. As such they can be used to quickly dismiss particular attack classes that may have been used in the construction of the message. To determine an unavoidable condition one must rule out any feasible variant attack where this condition might not be necessary, otherwise adversaries aware of counter-cryptanalysis could easily bypass this improved collision detection with a carefully chosen variant attack. We provide a formal model for unavoidable conditions for collision attacks on MD5-like compression functions.
Furthermore, based on a conjecture solidly supported by the current state of the art, we show how we can determine such unavoidable conditions for SHA-1. We have implemented the improved SHA-1 collision detection using such unavoidable conditions and which is about 16 times faster than without our unavoidable condition improvements. We have measured that overall our implemented SHA-1 with collision detection is only a factor 1.96 slower, on average, than SHA-1. Our work is very timely given the recently announced first SHA-1 collision proving that SHA-1 is now practically broken.
On The Exact Security of Message Authentication Using Pseudorandom Functions
Traditionally, modes of Message Authentication Codes(MAC) such as Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) are instantiated using block ciphers or keyed Pseudo Random Permutations(PRP). However, one can also use domain preserving keyed Pseudo Random Functions(PRF) to instantiate MAC modes. The very first security proof of CBC-MAC, essentially modeled the PRP as a PRF. Until now very little work has been done to investigate the difference between PRP vs PRF instantiations. Only known result is the rather loose folklore PRP-PRF transition of any PRP based security proof, which looses a factor of $O(\frac{\sigma^2}{2^n})$ (domain of PRF/PRP is $\{0,1\}^n$ and adversary makes $\sigma$ many PRP/PRF calls in total). This loss is significant, considering the fact tight $\Theta(\frac{q^2}{2^n})$ security bounds have been known for PRP based EMAC and ECBC constructions (where $q$ is the total number of adversary queries).
In this work, we show for many variations of encrypted CBC MACs (i.e. EMAC, ECBC, FCBC, XCBC and TCBC), random function based instantiation has a security bound $O(\frac{q\sigma}{2^n})$. This is a significant improvement over the folklore PRP/PRF transition. We also show this bound is optimal by providing an attack against the underlying PRF based CBC construction. This shows for EMAC, ECBC and FCBC, PRP instantiations are substantially more secure than PRF instantiations. Where as, for XCBC and TMAC, PRP instantiations are at least as secure as PRF instantiations.
Quantum Key Search with Side Channel Advice
Recently, a number of results have been published that show how to combine classical cryptanalysis with quantum algorithms, thereby (potentially) achieving considerable speed-ups. We follow this trend but add a novel twist by considering how to utilise side channel leakage in a quantum setting.
We show how to `rewrite' an existing algorithm for computing the rank of a key after a side channel attack, such that it results in an enumeration algorithm that produces batches of keys that can be tested using Grover's algorithm. This results in the first quantum key search that benefits from side channel information.
Error-free protection of EC point multiplication by modular extension
An implementation of a point multiplication function in an
elliptic-curve cryptosystem can be attacked by fault injections
in order to reveal the secret multiplier.
A special kind of such an attack is the sign-change fault attack.
Here the result of a point multiplication is changed in such a way
that it is still a point on the curve. A well-known countermeasure
against this kind of attack is
to perform the point multiplication on a modular extension of the
main curve by a small curve. Then the result is checked against the
result of the same point multiplication recalculated on the small curve.
The problem with this countermeasure is that the point at infinity
on the small curve may be reached as an intermediate result with a
non-negligible probability. In this case the comparison with
the result on the small curve is either faulty or meaningless.
We propose a variant of the
modular extension countermeasure where the point at infinity is
never reached as an intermediate result on the main or on
the small curve.
UFace: Your Universal Password That No One Can See
With the advantage of not having to memorize long passwords, people are more interested in adopting face authentication for use with mobile devices. However, since facial images are widely shared in social networking sites, it becomes a challenging task to securely employ face authentication for web services to prevent attackers from impersonating the legal users by using the users’ online face photos. Moreover, existing face authentication protocols either require users to disclose their unencrypted facial images to the authentication server or require users to execute computationally expensive secure multiparty computation protocols. For mobile devices with limited
computational power, this presents a problem that cannot be overlooked. In this paper, we present a novel privacy preserving
face authentication system, called UFace, which has users take
close-up facial images for authentication to prevent against impersonation attacks of users’ online facial images. UFace also
guarantees that the facial images are only seen by the users
and not by any other party (e.g., web service providers and authentication servers). UFace was implemented through two
facets: an Android client application to obtain and encrypt the
feature vector of the user’s facial image, and server code to
securely authenticate a feature vector across multiple servers.
The experimental results demonstrate that UFace not only can
correctly authenticate a user, but also can be done within seconds
which is significantly faster than any existing privacy preserving
authentication protocol.
AES-GCM-SIV: Specification and Analysis
In this paper, we describe and analyze the security of the AES-GCM-SIV mode of operation, as defined in the CFRG specification \cite{CFRG}. This mode differs from the original GCM-SIV mode that was designed in \cite{GL2015} in two main aspects. First, the CTR encryption uses a 127-bit pseudo-random counter instead of a 95-bit pseudo-random value concatenated with a 32-bit counter. This construction leads to improved security bounds when encrypting short messages. In addition, a new key derivation function is used for deriving a fresh set of keys for each nonce. This addition allows for encrypting up to $2^{50}$ messages with the same key, compared to the significant limitation of only $2^{32}$ messages that were allowed with GCM-SIV (which inherited this same limit from AES-GCM). As a result, the new construction is well suited for real world applications that need a nonce-misuse resistant Authenticated Encryption scheme. We explain the limitations of GCM-SIV, which motivate the new construction, prove the security properties of AES-GCM-SIV, and show how these properties support real usages. Implementations are publicly available in \cite{ShayGit}. We remark that AES-GCM-SIV is already integrated into Google's BoringSSL library \cite{BoringSSL}, and its deployment for ticket encryption in QUIC \cite{QUIC} is underway.
Cloud Storage File Recoverability
Data loss is perceived as one of the major threats for cloud storage. Consequently, the security community developed several challenge-response protocols that allow a user to remotely verify whether an outsourced file is still intact. However, two important practical problems have not yet been considered. First, clients commonly outsource multiple files of different sizes, raising the question how to formalize such a scheme and in particular ensuring that all files can be simultaneously audited. Second, in case auditing of the files fails, existing schemes do not provide a client with any method to prove if the original files are still recoverable.
We address both problems and describe appropriate solutions. The first problem is tackled by providing a new type of "Proofs of Retrievability" scheme, enabling a client to check all files simultaneously in a compact way. The second problem is solved by defining a novel procedure called "Proofs of Recoverability", enabling a client to obtain an assurance whether a file is recoverable or irreparably damaged. Finally, we present a combination of both schemes allowing the client to check the recoverability of all her original files, thus ensuring cloud storage file recoverability.
A roadmap to fully homomorphic elections: Stronger security, better verifiability
After the trials of remote internet voting for local elections in 2011 and parliamentary elections in 2013, a number of local referendums has renewed interest in internet voting in Norway.
The voting scheme used in Norway is not quantum-safe and it has limited voter verifiability. In this case study, we consider how we can use fully homomorphic encryption to construct a quantum-safe voting scheme with better voter verifiability.
While fully homomorphic cryptosystems are not efficient enough for the the system we sketch to be implemented and run today, we expect future improvements in fully homomorphic encryption which may eventually make these techniques practical.
SymSum: Symmetric-Sum Distinguishers Against Round Reduced SHA3
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In this work we show the existence of special sets of inputs for which the sum
of the images under SHA3 exhibits a symmetric property. We develop an
analytical framework which accounts for the existence of these sets. The
framework constitutes identification of a generic property of iterated SPN
based functions pertaining to the round-constant addition and combining it with the notion of $m-$fold vectorial derivatives for differentiation over specially selected subspaces. Based on this we propose a new distinguisher called SymSum for the SHA3 family which penetrates up to 9 rounds and outperforms the ZeroSum distinguisher by a factor of four. Interestingly, the current work is the first analysis of SHA3/Keccak that relies on round-constants but is independent of their Hamming-weights.
Conditional Disclosure of Secrets: Amplification, Closure, Amortization, Lower-bounds, and Separations
In the \emph{conditional disclosure of secrets} problem (Gertner et al., J. Comput. Syst. Sci., 2000) Alice and Bob, who hold inputs $x$ and $y$ respectively, wish to release a common secret $s$ to Carol (who knows both $x$ and $y$) if only if the input $(x,y)$ satisfies some predefined predicate $f$. Alice and Bob are allowed to send a single message to Carol which may depend on their inputs and some joint randomness and the goal is to minimize the communication complexity while providing information-theoretic security.
Following Gay, Kerenidis, and Wee (Crypto 2015), we study the communication complexity of CDS protocols and derive the following positive and negative results.
1. *Closure* A CDS for $f$ can be turned into a CDS for its complement $\bar{f}$ with only a minor blow-up in complexity. More generally, for a (possibly non-monotone) predicate $h$, we obtain a CDS for $h(f_1,\ldots,f_m)$ whose cost is essentially linear in the formula size of $h$ and polynomial in the CDS complexity of $f_i$.
2. *Amplification* It is possible to reduce the privacy and correctness error of a CDS from constant to $2^{-k}$ with a multiplicative overhead of $O(k)$. Moreover, this overhead can be amortized over $k$-bit secrets.
3. *Amortization* Every predicate $f$ over $n$-bit inputs admits a CDS for multi-bit secrets whose amortized communication complexity per secret bit grows linearly with the input length $n$ for sufficiently long secrets. In contrast, the best known upper-bound for single-bit secrets is exponential in $n$.
4. *Lower-bounds* There exists a (non-explicit) predicate $f$ over $n$-bit inputs for which any perfect (single-bit) CDS requires communication of at least $\Omega(n)$. This is an exponential improvement over the previously known $\Omega(\log n)$ lower-bound.
5. *Separations* There exists an (explicit) predicate whose CDS complexity is exponentially smaller than its randomized communication complexity. This matches a lower-bound of Gay et. al., and, combined with another result of theirs, yields an exponential separation between the communication complexity of linear CDS and non-linear CDS. This is the first provable gap between the communication complexity of linear CDS (which captures most known protocols) and non-linear CDS.
Homomorphic Encryption without Gaussian Noise
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We propose a Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE) scheme based on the Learning With Rounding (LWR) problem. The LWR problem is somewhat similar to the more classical Learning With Errors (LWE) and was proposed as a deterministic variant of it and setting up an LWR instance does not require the generation of gaussian noise. Thus our SHE scheme can be instantiated without the need for expensive Gaussian noise sampling. Our initial scheme provides lower ciphertext sizes for small plaintext spaces than existing leading schemes such as BGV.
Analysis of AES, SKINNY, and Others with Constraint Programming
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Search for different types of distinguishers are common tasks in symmetric-key cryptanalysis. In this work, we employ the constraint programming (CP) technique to tackle such problems. First, we show that a simple application of the CP approach proposed by Gerault \Dengdeng~leads to the solution of the open problem of determining the exact lower bound of the number of active S-boxes for 6-round AES-128 in the related-key model. Subsequently, we show that the same approach can be applied in searching for integral distinguishers, impossible differentials, zero-correlation linear approximations, in both the single-key and related-(twea)key model. We implement the method using the open source constraint solver Choco and apply it to the block ciphers PRESENT, SKINNY, and HIGHT (ARX construction). As a result, we find 16 related-tweakey impossible differentials for 12-round SKINNY-64-128 based on which we construct an 18-round attack on SKINNY-64-128 (one target version for the crypto competition \url{https://sites.google.com/site/skinnycipher} announced at ASK 2016). Moreover, we show that in some cases, when equipped with proper strategies (ordering heuristic, restart and dynamic branching strategy), the CP approach can be very efficient. Therefore, we suggest that the constraint programming technique should become a convenient tool at hand of the symmetric-key cryptanalysts
Security Notions for Bidirectional Channels
This paper closes a definitional gap in the context of modeling cryptographic two-party channels. We note that, while most security models for channels consider exclusively unidirectional communication, real-world protocols like TLS and SSH are rather used for bidirectional interaction. The motivational question behind this paper is: Can analyses conducted with the unidirectional setting in mind--including the current ones for TLS and SSH--also vouch for security in the case of bidirectional channel usage? And, in the first place, what does security in the bidirectional setting actually mean?
After developing confidentiality and integrity notions for bidirectional channels, we analyze a standard way of combining two unidirectional channels to realize one bidirectional channel. Although it turns out that this construction is, in general, not as secure as commonly believed, we confirm that for many practical schemes security is provided also in the bidirectional sense.
Conditional Cube Attack on Round-Reduced ASCON
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This paper evaluates the secure level of authenticated encryption Ascon against cube-like method. Ascon submitted by Dobraunig et al. is one of 16 survivors of the 3rd round CAESAR competition. The cube-like method is first used by Dinur et al. to analyze Keccak keyed modes. At CT-RSA 2015, Dobraunig et al. applied this method to 5/6-round reduced Ascon, whose structure is similar to Keccak keyed modes. However, for Ascon the non-linear layer
is more complex and state is much smaller, which make it hard for the attackers to select enough cube variables that do not multiply with each other after the first round. This seems to be the reason why the best previous key-recovery attack is on 6-round Ascon, while for Keccak keyed modes (Keccak-MAC and Keyak) the attacked round is no less than 7-round.
In this paper, we generalize the conditional cube attack proposed by Huang et al., and find new cubes depending on some key bit conditions for 5/6-round reduced Ascon, and translate the previous theoretic 6-round attack with $2^{66}$ time complexity to a practical one with $2^{40}$ time complexity. Moreover, we propose the first 7-round key-recovery attack on Ascon. By introducing the cube-like key-subset technique, we divide the full key space into many subsets according to different key conditions. For each key subset, we launch the cube tester to determine if the key falls into it. Finally, we recover the full key space by testing all the key subsets. The total time complexity is about $2^{103.9}$. In addition, for a weak-key subset, whose size is $2^{117}$, the attack is more efficient and costs only $2^{77}$ time complexity. Those attacks do not threaten the full round (12 rounds) Ascon.
Cube-like Attack on Round-Reduced Initialization of Ketje Sr
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This paper studies the Keccak-based authenticated encryption (AE) scheme Ketje Sr against cube-like attacks. Ketje is one of the remaining 16 candidates of third round CAESAR competition, whose primary recommendation is Ketje Sr. Although the cube-like method has been successfully applied to Ketje's sister ciphers, including Keccak-MAC and Keyak -- another Keccak-based AE scheme, similar attacks are missing for Ketje. For Ketje Sr, the state (400-bit) is much smaller than Keccak-MAC and Keyak (1600-bit), thus the 128-bit key and cubes with the same dimension would occupy more lanes in Ketje Sr. Hence, the number of key bits independent of the cube sum is very small, which makes the divide-and-conquer method (it has been applied to 7-round attack on Keccak-MAC by Dinur et al.)~can not be translated to Ketje Sr trivially. This property seems to be the barrier for the translation of the previous cube-like attacks to Ketje Sr.
In this paper, we evaluate Ketje Sr against the divide-and-conquer method.
Firstly, by applying the linear structure technique, we find some 32/64-dimension cubes of Ketje Sr that do not multiply with each other as well as some bits of the key in the first round. In addition, we introduce the new dynamic variable instead of the auxiliary variable (it was used in Dinur et al.'s divide-and-conquer attack to reduce the diffusion of the key) to reduce the diffusion of the key as well as the cube variables. Finally, we successfully launch a 6/7-round key recovery attack on Ketje Sr v1 and v2 (v2 is presented for the 3rd round CAESAR competition.). In 7-round attack, the complexity of online phase for Ketje Sr v1 is $2^{113}$, while for Ketje Sr v2, it is $2^{97}$ (the preprocessing complexity is the same). We claim 7-round reduced Ketje Sr v2 is weaker than v1 against our attacks. In addition, some results on other Ketje instances and Ketje Sr with smaller nonce are given. Those are the first results on Ketje and bridge the gaps of cryptanalysis between its sister ciphers -- Keyak and the Keccak keyed modes.
Passphone: Outsourcing Phone-based Web Authentication while Protecting User Privacy
This work introduces PassPhone, a new smartphone-based authentication scheme that outsources user verification to a trusted third party without sacrificing privacy: neither can the trusted third party learn the relation between users and service providers, nor can service providers learn those of their users to others. When employed as a second factor in conjunction with, for instance, passwords as a first factor, our scheme maximizes the deployability of two-factor authentication for service providers while maintaining user privacy.
We conduct a twofold formal analysis of our scheme, the first regarding its general security, and the second regarding anonymity and unlinkability of its users. Moreover, we provide an automatic analysis using AVISPA, a comparative evaluation to existing schemes under Bonneau et al.'s framework, and an evaluation of a prototypical implementation.
Detecting General Algebraic Manipulation Attacks
Algebraic manipulation detection codes are a class of error detecting codes which have found numerous applications in cryptography. In this paper we extend these codes to defeat general algebraic attacks - we call such codes general algebraic manipulation detection (GAMD) codes. Positive results are shown for the existence of GAMDs for the families of tampering functions corresponding to point additions and polynomial functions over a finite field. Compared to non-malleable codes, we demonstrate both positive and negative results regarding the existence of GAMDs for arbitrary families of tampering functions.
Trust Is Risk: A Decentralized Financial Trust Platform
Centralized reputation systems use stars and reviews and thus require algorithm secrecy to avoid manipulation. In autonomous open source decentralized systems this luxury is not available. We create a reputation network for decentralized marketplaces where the trust each user gives to the other users is quantifiable and expressed in monetary terms. We introduce a new model for bitcoin wallets in which user coins are split among trusted associates. Direct trust is defined using shared bitcoin accounts via bitcoin's 1-of-2 multisig. Indirect trust is subsequently defined transitively. This enables formal game theoretic arguments pertaining to risk analysis. We prove that risk and maximum flows are equivalent in our model and that our system is Sybil-resilient. Our system allows for concrete financial decisions on the subjective monetary amount a pseudonymous party can be trusted with. Risk remains invariant under a direct trust redistribution operation followed by a purchase.
Random Sampling Revisited: Lattice Enumeration with Discrete Pruning
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In 2003, Schnorr introduced Random sampling to find very short lattice vectors, as an alternative to enumeration. An improved variant has been used
in the past few years by Kashiwabara et al. to solve the largest Darmstadt SVP challenges.
However, the behaviour of random sampling and its variants is not well-understood:
all analyses so far rely on a questionable heuristic assumption,
namely that the lattice vectors produced by some algorithm are uniformly distributed over certain parallelepipeds.
In this paper, we introduce lattice enumeration with discrete pruning,
which generalizes random sampling and its variants,
and provides a novel geometric description based on partitions of the n-dimensional space.
We obtain what is arguably the first sound analysis of random sampling,
by showing how discrete pruning can be rigorously analyzed under the well-known Gaussian heuristic,
in the same model as the Gama-Nguyen-Regev analysis of pruned enumeration from EUROCRYPT '10,
albeit using different tools: we show how to efficiently compute the volume of the intersection of a ball with a box,
and to efficiently approximate a large sum of many such volumes, based on statistical inference.
Furthermore, we show how to select good parameters for discrete pruning by enumerating integer points in an ellipsoid.
Our analysis is backed up by experiments and allows for the first time
to reasonably estimate the success probability of random sampling and its variants,
and to make comparisons with previous forms of pruned enumeration.
Our work unifies random sampling and pruned enumeration
and show that they are complementary of each other:
both have different characteristics and offer different trade-offs to speed up enumeration.
Linear Cryptanalysis: Key Schedules and Tweakable Block Ciphers
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This paper serves as a systematization of knowledge of linear cryptanalysis and provides novel insights in the areas of key schedule design and tweakable block ciphers.
We examine in a step by step manner the linear hull theorem in a general and consistent setting.
Based on this, we study the influence of the choice of the key scheduling on linear cryptanalysis, a -- notoriously difficult -- but important subject.
Moreover, we investigate how tweakable block ciphers can be analyzed with respect to linear cryptanalysis, a topic that surprisingly has not been scrutinized until now.
Storage Efficient Substring Searchable Symmetric Encryption
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We address the problem of substring searchable encryption. A single user produces a big stream of data and later
on wants to learn the positions in the string that some patterns occur. Although current techniques exploit auxiliary data structures
to achieve efficient substring search on the server side, the cost at the user side may be prohibitive. We revisit the work of substring
searchable encryption in order to reduce the storage cost of auxiliary data structures. Our solution entails a suffix array based index design, which allows optimal storage cost $O(n)$ with small hidden factor at the size of the string $n$. We analyze the security of the protocol in the real ideal framework. Moreover, we implemented our scheme and the state of the art protocol \cite{Chase} to demonstrate the performance advantage of our solution with precise benchmark results. We improved the storage overhead of the encrypted index by a factor of $\mathbf{1.7}$ and the computation time thereof $\mathbf{4x}$ on $10^6$ character data stream.
Encryptor Combiners: A Unified Approach to Multiparty NIKE, (H)IBE, and Broadcast Encryption
We define the concept of an encryptor combiner. Roughly, such a combiner takes as input n public keys for a public key encryption scheme, and produces a new combined public key. Anyone knowing a secret key for one of the input public keys can learn the secret key for the combined public key, but an outsider who just knows the input public keys (who can therefore compute the combined public key for himself) cannot decrypt ciphertexts from the combined public key. We actually think of public keys more generally as encryption procedures, which can correspond to, say, encrypting to a particular identity under an IBE scheme or encrypting to a set of attributes under an ABE scheme.
We show that encryptor combiners satisfying certain natural properties can give natural constructions of multi-party non-interactive key exchange, low-overhead broadcast encryption, and hierarchical identity-based encryption. We then show how to construct two different encryptor combiners. Our first is built from universal samplers (which can in turn be built from indistinguishability obfuscation) and is sufficient for each application above, in some cases improving on existing obfuscation-based constructions. Our second is built from lattices, and is sufficient for hierarchical identity-based encryption. Thus, encryptor combiners serve as a new abstraction that (1) is a useful tool for designing cryptosystems, (2) unifies constructing hierarchical IBE from vastly different assumptions, and (3) provides a target for instantiating obfuscation applications from better tools.
Practical Functional Encryption for Quadratic Functions with Applications to Predicate Encryption
We present two practically efficient functional encryption schemes for a large class of
quadratic functionalities. Specifically, our constructions enable the computation of so-called bilinear
maps on encrypted vectors. This represents a practically relevant class of functions that includes, for
instance, multivariate quadratic polynomials (over the integers). Our realizations work over asymmetric
bilinear groups and are surprisingly efficient and easy to implement. For instance, in our most efficient
scheme the public key and each ciphertext consist of \(2n + 1\) and \(4n + 2\) group elements respectively,
where n is the dimension of the encrypted vectors, while secret keys are only two group elements. Our
two schemes build on similar ideas, but develop them in a different way in order to achieve distinct
goals. Our first scheme is proved (selectively) secure under standard assumptions, while our second
construction is concretely more efficient and is proved (adaptively) secure in the generic group model.
As a byproduct of our functional encryption schemes, we show new predicate encryption schemes for
degree-two polynomial evaluation, where ciphertexts consist of only \(O(n)\) group elements. This significantly improves the \(O(n^2)\) bound one would get from inner product encryption-based constructions.
Group-Based Secure Computation: Optimizing Rounds, Communication, and Computation
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A recent work of Boyle et al. (Crypto 2016) suggests that ``group-based'' cryptographic protocols, namely ones that only rely on a cryptographically hard (Abelian) group, can be surprisingly powerful. In particular, they present succinct two-party protocols for securely computing branching programs and NC1 circuits under the DDH assumption, providing the first alternative to fully homomorphic encryption.
In this work we further explore the power of group-based secure computation protocols, improving both their asymptotic and concrete efficiency. We obtain the following results.
- Black-box use of group. We modify the succinct protocols of Boyle et al. so that they only make a black-box use of the underlying group, eliminating an expensive non-black-box setup phase.
- Round complexity. For any constant number of parties, we obtain 2-round MPC protocols based on a PKI setup under the DDH assumption. Prior to our work, such protocols were only known using fully homomorphic encryption or indistinguishability obfuscation.
- Communication complexity. Under DDH, we present a secure 2-party protocol for any NC1 or log-space computation with n input bits and m output bits using n+(1+o(1)) m+\poly(\lambda) bits of communication, where \lambda is a security parameter. In particular, our protocol can generate n instances of bit-oblivious-transfer using (4+o(1))\cdot n bits of communication. This gives the first constant-rate OT protocol under DDH.
- Computation complexity. We present several techniques for improving the computational cost of the share conversion procedure of Boyle et al., improving the concrete efficiency of group-based protocols by several orders of magnitude.
Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment
Bitcoin is one of the most prominent examples of a distributed cryptographic protocol that is extensively used in reality. Nonetheless, existing security proofs are property-based, and as such they do not support composition. In this work, we put forth a universally composable treatment of the Bitcoin protocol. We specify the goal that Bitcoin aims to achieve as an instance of a parameterizable ledger functionality and present a UC abstraction of the Bitcoin blockchain protocol. Our ideal functionality is weaker than the first proposed candidate by Kiayias, Zhou, and Zikas [EUROCRYPT’16], but unlike the latter suggestion, which is arguably not implementable by the UC Bitcoin protocol, we prove that the one proposed here is securely UC-realized by the protocol assuming access to a global clock, to model time-based executions, a random oracle, to model hash functions, and an idealized network, to model message dissemination. We further show how known property-based approaches can be cast as special instances of our treatment and how their underlying assumptions can be cast in UC as part of the setup functionalities and without restricting the environment or the adversary.
Pattern Matching on Encrypted Streams
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Pattern matching is essential in applications such as deep-packet inspection (DPI), searching on genomic data, or analyzing medical data. A simple task to do on plaintext data, pattern matching is much harder to do when the privacy of the data must be preserved. Existent solutions involve searchable encryption mechanisms with at least one of these three drawbacks: requiring an exhaustive (and static) list of keywords to be prepared before the data is encrypted (like in symmetric searchable encryption); requiring tokenization, i.e., breaking up the data to search into substrings and encrypting them separately (e.g., like BlindBox); relying on symmetric-key cryptography, thus implying a token-regeneration step for each encrypted-data source (e.g., user). Such approaches are ill-suited for pattern-matching with evolving patterns (e.g., updating virus signatures), variable searchword lengths, or when a single entity must filter ciphertexts from multiple parties.
In this work, we introduce Searchable Encryption with Shiftable Trapdoors (SEST): a new primitive that allows for pattern matching with universal tokens (usable by all entities), in which keywords of arbitrary lengths can be matched to arbitrary ciphertexts. Our solution uses public-key encryption and bilinear pairings. It consists of projecting keywords on polynomials of degree equal to the length of the keyword and using a sliding-window-like technique to match the trapdoor to successive fragments of the encrypted data. In addition, very minor modifications to our solution enable it to take into account regular expressions, such as fully- or partly-unknown characters in a keyword (wildcards and interval/subset searches). Our trapdoor size is at most linear in the keyword length (and independent of the plaintext size), and we prove that the leakage to the searcher is only the trivial one: since the searcher learns whether the pattern occurs and where, it can distinguish based on different search results of a single trapdoor on two different plaintexts.
To better show the usability of our scheme, we implemented it to run DPI on all the SNORT rules. We show that even for very large plaintexts, our encryption algorithm scales well. The pattern-matching algorithm is slightly slower, but extremely parallelizable, and it can thus be run even on very large data. Although our proofs use a (marginally) interactive assumption, we argue that this is a relatively small price to pay for the flexibility and privacy that we are able to attain.
Ad Hoc PSM Protocols: Secure Computation Without Coordination
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We study the notion of {\em ad hoc secure computation}, recently introduced by Beimel et al. (ITCS 2016),
in the context of the {\em Private Simultaneous Messages} (PSM) model of Feige et al.\ (STOC 2004).
In ad hoc secure computation we have $n$ parties that may potentially participate in a protocol but, at the actual time of execution, only $k$ of them, whose identity is {\em not} known in advance, actually participate. This situation is particularly challenging in the PSM setting, where protocols are non-interactive (a single message from each participating party to a special output party) and where the parties rely on pre-distributed, correlated randomness (that in the ad-hoc setting will have to take into account all possible sets of participants).
We present several different constructions of \apsm\ protocols from standard PSM protocols. These constructions imply, in particular, that efficient information-theoretic \apsm\ protocols exist for NC1 and different classes of log-space computation, and efficient computationally-secure \apsm\ protocols for polynomial-time computable functions can be based on a one-way function. As an application, we obtain an information-theoretic implementation of {\em order-revealing encryption} whose security holds for two messages.
We also consider the case where the actual number of participating parties $t$ may be larger than the minimal $k$ for which the protocol is designed to work. In this case, it is unavoidable that the output party learns the output corresponding to each subset of $k$ out of the $t$ participants. Therefore, a ``best possible security'' notion, requiring that this will be the {\em only} information that the output party learns, is needed. We present connections between this notion and the previously studied notion of {\em $t$-robust PSM} (also known as ``non-interactive MPC'').
We show that constructions in this setting for even simple functions (like AND or threshold) can be translated into non-trivial instances of program obfuscation (such as {\em point function obfuscation} and {\em fuzzy point function obfuscation}, respectively). We view these results as a negative indication that protocols with ``best possible security'' are impossible to realize efficiently in the information-theoretic setting or require strong assumptions in the computational setting.
Toward Fine-Grained Blackbox Separations Between Semantic and Circular-Security Notions
We address the problems of whether t-circular-secure encryption can be based on (t-1)-circular-secure encryption or on semantic (CPA) security, if t = 1. While for t = 1 a folklore construction, based on CPA-secure encryption, can be used to build a 1-circular-secure encryption with the same secret-key and message space, no such constructions are known for the bit-encryption case, which is of particular importance in fully-homomorphic encryption. Also, for $t \geq 2$, all constructions of t-circular-secure encryption (bitwise or otherwise) are based on specific assumptions.
We make progress toward these problems by ruling out all fully-blackbox constructions of
-- 1-seed circular-secure public-key bit encryption from CPA-secure public-key encryption;
-- t-seed circular-secure public-key encryption from (t-1)-seed circular-secure public-key encryption, for any $t \geq 2$.
Informally, seed-circular security is a variant of the circular security notion in which the seed of the key-generation algorithm, instead of the secret key, is encrypted. We also show how to extend our first result to rule out a large and non-trivial class of constructions of 1-circular-secure bit encryption, which we dub key-isolating constructions.
Our separation model follows that of Gertner, Malkin and Reingold (FOCS’01), which is a weaker separation model than that of Impagliazzo and Rudich.
The Multi-User Security of Double Encryption
It is widely known that double encryption does not substantially
increase the security of a block cipher. Indeed, the classical
meet-in-the middle attack recovers the $2k$-bit secret key at the cost
of roughly $2^k$ off-line enciphering operations, in addition to very
few known plaintext-ciphertext pairs. Thus, essentially as efficiently
as for the underlying cipher with a $k$-bit key.
This paper revisits double encryption under the lens of multi-user
security.
We prove that its security degrades only very mildly with an
increasing number of users, as opposed to single encryption, where
security drops linearly. More concretely, we give a tight bound for
the multi-user security of double encryption as a pseudorandom
permutation in the ideal-cipher model, and describe matching attacks.
Our contribution is also conceptual: To prove our result, we enhance
and generalize the generic technique recently proposed by Hoang and
Tessaro for lifting single-user to multi-user security. We believe
this technique to be broadly applicable.
Privacy-Preserving Search of Similar Patients in Genomic Data
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The growing availability of genomic data holds great promise for advancing
medicine and research, but unlocking its full potential requires adequate
methods for protecting the privacy of individuals whose genome data we use. One
example of this tension is running Similar Patient Query on remote genomic data:
In this setting a doctor that holds the genome of his/her patient may try to
find other individuals with ``close" genomic data, and use the data of these
individuals to help diagnose and find effective treatment for that patient's
conditions. This is clearly a desirable mode of operation. However, the privacy
exposure implications are considerable, and so we would like to carry out the above
``closeness'' computation in a privacy preserving manner.
In this work we put forward a new approach for highly efficient secure
computation for computing an approximation of the Similar Patient Query problem.
We present contributions on two fronts.
First, an approximation method that is designed with the goal of achieving efficient private computation. Second, further optimizations of the two-party
protocol. Our tests indicate that the approximation method works well, it returns the exact closest records in 98% of the queries and very good approximation otherwise.
As for speed, our protocol
implementation takes just a few seconds to run on databases with thousands of
records, each of length thousands of alleles, and it scales almost linearly with
both the database size and the length of the sequences in it. As an example, in
the datasets of the recent iDASH competition, after a one-time preprocessing of around 12 seconds, it takes around a second to
find the nearest five records to a query, in a size-500 dataset of length-3500
sequences. This is 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than using state-of-the-art
secure protocols with existing edit distance algorithms.
Constraint-hiding Constrained PRFs for NC1 from LWE
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Constraint-hiding constrained PRFs (CHCPRFs), initially studied by Boneh, Lewi, and Wu [PKC 2017], are constrained PRFs where the constrained key hides the description of the constraint. Envisioned with powerful applications such as searchable encryption, private-detectable watermarking, and symmetric deniable encryption, the only known candidates of CHCPRFs are based on indistinguishability obfuscation or multilinear maps with strong security properties.
In this paper, we construct CHCPRFs for all NC1 circuits from the Learning with Errors assumption. The construction draws heavily from the graph-induced multilinear maps by Gentry, Gorbunov, and Halevi [TCC 2015], as well as the existing lattice-based PRFs. Our construction gives an instance of the GGH15 applications with a security reduction from LWE.
We also show how to build from CHCPRFs reusable garbled circuits (RGC), or equivalently private-key function-hiding functional encryptions with 1-key security. This provides a different approach to constructing RGC from that of Goldwasser et al. [STOC 2013].
Computing generator in cyclotomic integer rings, A subfield algorithm for the Principal Ideal Problem in L(1/2) and application to cryptanalysis of a FHE scheme
The Principal Ideal Problem (resp. Short Principal Ideal Problem),
shorten as PIP (resp. SPIP), consists in finding a generator
(resp. short generator) of a principal ideal in the ring of integers
of a number field. Several lattice-based cryptosystems rely on the
presumed hardness of these two problems. In practice, most of them do
not use an arbitrary number field but a power-of-two cyclotomic
field. The Smart and Vercauteren fully homomorphic encryption scheme
and the multilinear map of Garg, Gentry, and Halevi epitomize this
common restriction. Recently, Cramer, Ducas, Peikert, and Regev
showed that solving the SPIP in such cyclotomic rings boiled down to
solving the PIP. In this paper, we present a heuristic algorithm that
solves the PIP in prime-power cyclotomic fields in subexponential time
L(1/2) in the discriminant of the number field. This is achieved by
descending to its totally real subfield. The implementation of our
algorithm allows to recover in practice the secret key of the Smart
and Vercauteren scheme, for the smallest proposed parameters (in
dimension 256).
Partitioned Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange
Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange (GPAKE) allows a group of users to establish a secret key, as long as all of them share the same password. However, in existing GPAKE protocols as soon as one user runs the protocol with a non-matching password, all the others abort and no key is established.
In this paper we seek for a more flexible, yet secure, GPAKE and put forward the notion of partitioned GPAKE.
Partitioned GPAKE tolerates users that run the protocol on different passwords. Through a protocol run, any subgroup of users that indeed share a password, establish a session key, factoring out the ``noise'' of inputs by users holding different passwords. At the same time any two keys, each established by a different subgroup of users, are pair-wise independent if the corresponding subgroups hold different passwords.
We also introduce the notion of password-privacy for partitioned GPAKE, which is a kind of affiliation hiding property, ensuring that an adversary should not be able to tell whether any given set of users share a password. Finally, we propose an efficient instantiation of partitioned GPAKE building on an unforgeable symmetric encryption scheme and a PAKE by Bellare et al. Our proposal is proven secure in the random oracle/ideal cipher model, and requires only two communication rounds.
Estimation of the Hardness of the Learning with Errors Problem with a Restricted Number of Samples
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The Learning with Errors problem (LWE) is one of the most important hardness assumptions lattice-based constructions base their security on. Recently, Albrecht et al. (Journal of Mathematical Cryptology,
2015) presented the software tool LWE-Estimator to estimate the hardness of concrete LWE instances, making the choice of parameters for lattice-based primitives easier and better comparable. To give lower bounds on the hardness it is assumed that each algorithm has given the corresponding optimal number of samples. However, this is not the case for many cryptographic applications.
In this work we first analyze the hardness of LWE instances given a restricted number of samples. For this, we describe LWE solvers from the literature and estimate their runtime considering a limited number of samples. Based on our theoretical results we extend the LWE-Estimator. Furthermore, we evaluate LWE instances proposed for cryptographic schemes and show the impact of restricting the number of available samples.
Revisiting AES Related-Key Differential Attacks with Constraint Programming
The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) is one of the
most studied symmetric encryption schemes. During the last years,
several attacks have been discovered in different adversary models. In
this paper, we focus on related-key differential attacks, where the
adversary may introduce differences in plaintext pairs and also in
keys. We show that Constraint Programming (CP) can be used to model
these attacks, and that it allows us to efficiently find all optimal
related-key differential characteristics for AES-128, AES-192 and
AES-256. In particular, we improve the best related-key differential for the whole AES-256 and give the best related-key differential on 10 rounds of AES-192, which is the differential trail with the longest path. Those results allow us to improve existing related-key distinguishers, basic related-key attacks and $q$-multicollisions on AES-256.
How (not) to Use Welch's T-test in Side-Channel Security Evaluations
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The Test Vector Leakage Assessment (TVLA) methodology is a qualitative tool relying on Welch's T-test to assess the security of cryptographic implementations against side-channel attacks. Despite known limitations (e.g., risks of false negatives and positives), it is sometimes considered as a pass-fail test to determine whether such implementations are "safe" or not (without clear definition of what is "safe"). In this note, we clarify the limited quantitative meaning of this test when used as a standalone tool. For this purpose, we first show that the straightforward application of this approach to assess the security of a masked implementation is not sufficient. More precisely, we show that even in a simple (more precisely, univariate) case study that seems best suited for the TVLA methodology, detection (or lack thereof) with Welch's T-test can be totally disconnected from the actual security level of an implementation. For this purpose, we put forward the case of a realistic masking scheme that looks very safe from the TVLA point-of-view and is nevertheless easy to break. We then discuss this result in more general terms and argue that this limitation is shared by all "moment-based" security evaluations. We conclude the note positively, by describing how to use moment-based analyzes as a useful ingredient of side-channel security evaluations, to determine a "security order".
Modifying an Enciphering Scheme after Deployment
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Assume that a symmetric encryption scheme has been deployed and used with a secret key. We later must change the encryption scheme in a way that preserves the ability to decrypt (a subset of) previously encrypted plaintexts. Frequent real-world examples are migrating from a token-based encryption system for
credit-card numbers to a format-preserving encryption (FPE) scheme, or extending the message space of an already deployed FPE. The ciphertexts may be stored in systems for which it is not easy or not efficient to retrieve them (to re-encrypt the plaintext under the new scheme). We introduce methods for functionality-preserving modifications to encryption, focusing particularly on deterministic, length-preserving ciphers such as those used to perform format-preserving encryption. We provide a new technique, that we refer to as the Zig-Zag construction, that allows one to combine two ciphers using different domains in a way that results in a secure cipher on one domain. We explore its use in the two settings above, replacing token-based systems and extending message spaces. We develop appropriate security goals and prove security relative to them assuming the underlying ciphers are themselves secure as strong pseudorandom permutations.
Dispersed Cryptography and the Quotient Ring Transform
This paper describes a radically different privacy, security
and integrity solution.
Dispersed Cryptography converts the cloud from a security threat into a security asset
by combining a standard stream cipher and the Quotient Ring Transform (QRT).
The result is an integrated error correction/encryption algorithm.
This encoding disperses data, breaking it into many smaller pieces and scattering them to different sites.
No single site is critical; any can be lost without losing data.
No single site can access data, even if the cryptovariable (secret key) is compromised.
The resulting system is more flexible and seamlessly adds both data integrity and security.
The underlying codes are linear, and therefore have homomorphic properties and may be used in coding based quantum resistant cryptography.
Hashing Garbled Circuits for Free
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We introduce {\em Free Hash}, a new approach to generating Garbled Circuit (GC) hash at no extra cost during GC generation. This is in contrast with state-of-the-art approaches, which hash GCs at computational cost of up to $6\times$ of GC generation. GC hashing is at the core of the cut-and-choose technique of GC-based secure function evaluation (SFE).
Our main idea is to intertwine hash generation/verification with GC generation and evaluation. While we {\em allow} an adversary to generate a GC $\widehat{\GC}$ whose hash collides with an honestly generated $\GC$, such a $\widehat{\GC}$ w.h.p. will fail evaluation and cheating will be discovered. Our GC hash is simply a (slightly modified) XOR of all the gate table rows of GC. It is compatible with Free XOR and half-gates garbling, and can be made to work with many cut-and-choose SFE protocols.
With today's network speeds being not far behind hardware-assisted fixed-key garbling throughput, eliminating the GC hashing cost will significantly improve SFE performance. Our estimates show substantial cost reduction in typical settings, and up to factor $6$ in specialized applications relying on GC hashes.
We implemented GC hashing algorithm and report on its performance.
A Provably Secure PKCS\#11 Configuration Without Authenticated Attributes
Cryptographic APIs like PKCS#11 are interfaces to trusted hardware where keys are stored; the secret keys should never leave the trusted hardware in plaintext. In PKCS#11 it is possible to give keys conflicting roles, leading to a number of key-recovery attacks. To prevent these attacks, one can authenticate the attributes of keys when wrapping, but this is not standard in PKCS#11. Alternatively, one can configure PKCS#11 to place additional restrictions on the commands permitted by the API.
Bortolozzo et al. proposed a configuration of PKCS#11, called the Secure Templates Patch (STP), supporting symmetric encryption and key wrapping. However, the security guarantees for STP given by Bortolozzo et al. are with respect to a weak attacker model. STP has been implemented as a set of filtering rules in Caml Crush, a software filter for PKCS#11 that rejects certain API calls. The filtering rules in Caml Crush extend STP by allowing users to compute and verify MACs and so the previous analysis of STP does not apply to this configuration.
We give a rigorous analysis of STP, including the extension used in Caml Crush. Our contribution is as follows:
(i) We show that the extension of STP used in Caml Crush is insecure.
(ii) We propose a strong, computational security model for configurations of PKCS#11 where the adversary can adaptively corrupt keys and prove that STP is secure in this model.
(iii) We prove the security of an extension of STP that adds support for public-key encryption and digital signatures.
Composable and Robust Outsourced Storage
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The security of data outsourcing mechanisms has become a crucial aspect of today's IT infrastructures and are the cryptographic foundations of real-world applications. The very fundamental goals are ensuring storage integrity and auditability, confidentiality, and access pattern hiding, as well as combinations of all of them. Despite sharing a common setting, security analyses of these tasks are often performed in a stand-alone fashion expressed in different models, which makes it hard to assess the overall security of a protocol or application involving several security schemes at once. In this work, we fill this gap and propose a composable framework suitable to capture various aspects of outsourced storage security and its applications.
We instantiate the basic client-server setting in this model, where the goal of the honest client is to retain security in the presence of a malicious server. Three specific contributions of this paper are:
1.) We present a novel definition for secure and robust outsourcing schemes and underline why this is needed in practice. Our definition is stronger than previous definitions for oblivious RAM or software protection in that it assures strong security guarantees against active attacks. Schemes meeting the definition not only assure that an attacker cannot learn the access pattern, but guarantee resilience to errors and the prevention of targeted attacks to specific locations. Unfortunately, several existing schemes cannot achieve this high level of security. For completeness, we provide a protocol based on Path ORAM that showcases that stronger security is actually achievable.
2.) We present a novel definition for auditable storage, capturing the guarantee that a successful audit implies that the current server state allows the client to retrieve his data. We develop an audit mechanism, based on secure and robust outsourcing schemes, that is similar to the construction by Cash et al. (Eurocrpyt 2013), but is universally composable and fault-tolerant.
3.) We revisit the security claim of a widely-used challenge-response audit mechanism, in which the server has to compute a hash $H(F||c)$ on the file $F$ concatenated with a uniformly random challenge $c$ chosen by the client. Being concerned with composable security, we prove that this audit mechanism is not secure, even in the random oracle model, without additional assumptions. The composable security of this basic audit scheme was implicitly assumed in Ristenpart et al. (Eurocrypt 2011). To complete the picture, we state the additional assumptions for this audit mechanism to be provably secure and investigate the (in)applicability of hash-function constructions in this setting.
Attacks on Karlsson and Mitrokotsa's Grouping-Proof-Distance-Bounding Protocol
In the recent IEEE communication letter ``Grouping-Proof-Distance-Bounding Protocols: Keep All Your Friends Close" by Karlsson and Mitrokotsa, a protocol for grouping-proof distance-bounding (GPDB) is proposed. In this letter, we show that the proof that is generated by the proposed GBDP protocol does not actually prove anything. Furthermore, we provide a construction towards a distance-bounding grouping-proof, however it remains unclear if one can ever truly combine (privacy-preserving) distance-bounding and a grouping-proof.
A Practical Multivariate Blind Signature Scheme
Multivariate Cryptography is one of the main candidates for creating post-quantum cryptosystems. Especially in the area of digital signatures, there exist many practical and secure multivariate schemes. However, there is a lack of multivariate signature schemes with special properties such as blind, ring and group signatures. In this paper, we propose a generic technique to transform multivariate signature schemes into blind signature schemes and show the practicality of the construction on the example of Rainbow. The resulting scheme satisfies the usual blindness criterion and a one-more-unforgeability criterion adapted to MQ signatures, produces short blind signatures and is very efficient.
Topology-Hiding Computation Beyond Logarithmic Diameter
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A distributed computation in which nodes are connected by a partial communication graph is called \emph{topology-hiding} if it does not reveal information about the graph (beyond what is revealed by the output of the function). Previous results [Moran, Orlov, Richelson; TCC'15] have shown
that topology-hiding computation protocols exist for graphs of logarithmic diameter (in the number of nodes), but the feasibility question for
graphs of larger diameter was open even for very simple graphs such as chains, cycles and trees.
In this work, we take a step towards topology-hiding computation protocols for arbitrary graphs by constructing protocols that can be used in a large class of {\em large-diameter networks}, including cycles, trees and graphs with logarithmic \emph{circumference}. Our results use very different methods from [MOR15] and can be based on a standard assumption (such as DDH).
Sublinear Zero-Knowledge Arguments for RAM Programs
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We describe a new succinct zero-knowledge argument protocol with the following properties. The prover commits to a large data-set $M$, and can thereafter prove many statements of the form $\exists w : \mathcal{R}_i(M,w)=1$, where $\mathcal{R}_i$ is a public function. The protocol is {\em succinct} in the sense that the cost for the verifier (in computation \& communication) does not depend on $|M|$, not even in any initialization phase. In each proof, the computation/communication cost for {\em both} the prover and the verifier is proportional only to the running time of an oblivious RAM program implementing $\mathcal{R}_i$ (in particular, this can be sublinear in $|M|$). The only costs that scale with $|M|$ are the computational costs of the prover in a one-time initial commitment to $M$.
Known sublinear zero-knowledge proofs either require an initialization phase where the work of the verifier is proportional to $|M|$ and are therefore sublinear only in an amortized sense, or require that the computational cost for the prover is proportional to $|M|$ upon {\em each proof}.
Our protocol uses efficient crypto primitives in a black-box way and is UC-secure in the {\em global}, non-programmable random oracle, hence it does not rely on any trusted setup assumption.
New Collision Attacks on Round-Reduced Keccak
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In this paper, we focus on collision attacks against Keccak hash function family and some of its variants. Following the framework developed by Dinur et al. at FSE~2012 where 4-round collisions were found by combining 3-round differential trails and 1-round connectors, we extend the connectors one round further hence achieve collision attacks for up to 5 rounds.
The extension is possible thanks to the large degree of freedom of the wide internal state. By linearization of all S-boxes of the first round, the problem of finding solutions of 2-round connectors are converted to that of solving a system of linear equations.
However, due to the quick freedom reduction from the linearization, the system has solution only when the 3-round differential trails satisfy some additional conditions. We develop a dedicated differential trail search strategy and find such special differentials indeed exist. As a result, the first practical collision attack against 5-round SHAKE128 and two 5-round instances of the Keccak collision challenges are found with real examples. We also give the first results against 5-round Keccak224 and 6-round Keccak collision challenges. It is remarked that the work here is still far from threatening the security of the full 24-round Keccak family.
Robust Transforming Combiners from Indistinguishability Obfuscation to Functional Encryption
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Indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO) has enabled an incredible number of new and exciting applications.
However, our understanding of how to actually build secure iO remains in its infancy. While many candidate
constructions have been published, some have been broken, and it is unclear which of the remaining candidates
are secure.
This work deals with the following basic question: \emph{Can we hedge our bets when it comes to iO candidates?}
In other words, if we have a collection of iO candidates, and we only know that at least one of them is secure,
can we still make use of these candidates?
This topic was recently studied by Ananth, Jain, Naor, Sahai, and Yogev [CRYPTO 2016], who showed how to construct
a robust iO combiner: Specifically, they showed that given the situation above, we can construct a single iO scheme that is secure
as long as (A) at least one candidate iO scheme is a subexponentially secure iO, and (B) either the subexponential DDH or LWE assumptions hold.
In this work, we make three contributions:
\begin{itemize}
\item (\textbf{Better robust iO combiners.}) First, we work to improve the assumptions needed to obtain the same result as Ananth et al.: namely we show how to replace the DDH/LWE assumption with the assumption that subexponentially secure one-way functions exist.
\item (\textbf{FE and NIKE from iO candidates and minimal assumptions.}) Second, we consider a broader question: what if we start with several iO candidates where only one works, but we don't care about achieving iO itself, rather we want to achieve concrete applications of iO? In this case, we are able to work with the \emph{minimal}
assumption of just polynomially secure one-way functions, and where the working iO candidate only achieves polynomial security. Under these circumstances, we show how to achieve both \emph{functional encryption} and \emph{non-interactive multiparty key exchance (NIKE)}.
\item (\textbf{Correctness Amplification for iO from polynomial security and one-way functions.}) Finally, along the way, we obtain a result of independent interest: Recently, Bitansky and Vaikuntanathan [TCC 2016] showed how to amplify the correctness of an iO scheme,
but they needed subexponential security for the iO scheme and also require subexponentially secure DDH or LWE.
We show how to achieve the same correctness amplification result, but requiring only polynomial security from the iO scheme,
and assuming only polynomially secure one-way functions.
\end{itemize}
Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption with Worst-Case Sub-Linear Complexity
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Recent work on searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) has focused on increasing its expressiveness. A notable example is the OXT construction (Cash et al., CRYPTO '13 ) which is the first SSE scheme to support conjunctive keyword queries with sub-linear search complexity. While OXT efficiently supports disjunctive and boolean queries that can be expressed in searchable normal form, it can only handle arbitrary disjunctive and boolean queries in linear time. This motivates the problem of designing expressive SSE schemes with worst-case sub-linear search; that is, schemes that remain highly efficient for any keyword query.
In this work, we address this problem and propose non-interactive highly efficient SSE schemes that handle arbitrary disjunctive and boolean queries with worst-case sub-linear search and optimal communication complexity. Our main construction, called IEX, makes black-box use of an underlying single keyword SSE scheme which we can instantiate in various ways. Our first instantiation, IEX-2Lev, makes use of the recent 2Lev construction (Cash et al., NDSS '14 ) and is optimized for search at the expense of storage overhead. Our second instantiation, IEX-ZMF, relies on a new single keyword SSE scheme we introduce called ZMF and is optimized for storage overhead at the expense of efficiency (while still achieving asymptotically sub-linear search). Our ZMF construction is the first adaptively-secure highly compact SSE scheme and may be of independent interest. At a very high level, it can be viewed as an encrypted version of a new Bloom filter variant we refer to as a Matryoshka filter. In addition, we show how to extend IEX to be dynamic and forward-secure.
To evaluate the practicality of our schemes, we designed and implemented a new encrypted search framework called Clusion. Our experimental results demonstrate the practicality of IEX and of its instantiations with respect to either search (for IEX-2Lev) and storage overhead (for IEX-ZMF).
Non-Interactive Secure 2PC in the Offline/Online and Batch Settings
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In cut-and-choose protocols for two-party secure computation (2PC) the main overhead is the number of garbled circuits that must be sent. Recent work (Lindell, Riva; Huang et al., Crypto 2014) has shown that in a batched setting, when the parties plan to evaluate the same function $N$ times, the number of garbled circuits per execution can be reduced by a $O(\log N)$ factor compared to the single-execution setting.
This improvement is significant in practice: an order of magnitude for $N$ as low as one thousand.
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Besides the number of garbled circuits, communication round trips are another significant performance bottleneck. Afshar et al. (Eurocrypt 2014) proposed an efficient cut-and-choose 2PC that is round-optimal (one message from each party), but in the single-execution setting.
In this work we present new malicious-secure 2PC protocols that are round-optimal and also take advantage of batching to reduce cost. Our contributions include:
\begin{itemize}
\item A 2-message protocol for batch secure computation ($N$ instances of the same function). The number of garbled circuits is reduced by a $O(\log N)$ factor over the single-execution case. However, other aspects of the protocol that depend on the input/output size of the function do not benefit from the same $O(\log N)$-factor savings.
\item A 2-message protocol for batch secure computation, in the random oracle model. All aspects of this protocol benefit from the $O(\log N)$-factor improvement, except for small terms that do not depend on the function being evaluated.
\item A protocol in the offline/online setting. After an offline preprocessing phase that depends only on the function $f$ and $N$, the parties can securely evaluate $f$, $N$ times (not necessarily all at once). Our protocol's online phase is only 2 messages, and the total online communication is only $\ell + O(\kappa)$ bits, where $\ell$ is the input length of $f$ and $\kappa$ is a computational security parameter. This is only $O(\kappa)$ bits more than the information-theoretic lower bound for malicious 2PC.
On the Exact Round Complexity of Self-Composable Two-Party Computation
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The round complexity of secure computation has been a fundamental problem in cryptography. Katz and Ostrovsky proved that 5 rounds are both necessary and sufficient for secure computation in the stand alone setting, thus resolving the exact round complexity of standalone secure computation.
In contrast, round complexity of secure computation in the concurrent setting, where several protocols may run simultaneously, is poorly understood. Since standard polynomial time simulation is impossible in the concurrent setting, alternative security notions have been proposed, e.g., super-polynomial simulation (SPS). While SPS security can be achieved in constant rounds, the actual constant (> 20) is far from optimal.
In this work, we take the first steps towards studying the exact round complexity of concurrent secure computation. We focus on the two party case and present a new secure computation protocol that achieves SPS security under concurrent self-composition. Our protocol has 5 rounds assuming quasi-polynomially-hard injective one-way functions (or 7 rounds assuming standard polynomially-hard collision-resistant hash functions). We also require other standard assumptions, specifically trapdoor OWPs and lossy TDFs. This matches the rounds for standalone secure computation.
More specifically, our security proof presents a polynomial time reduction from SPS security to 3-round public-coin non-malleable commitments with appropriate extractability properties. Such commitments are known based on quasi-polynomially-hard injective OWFs. (The reduction also works with a special 6-round non-malleable commitment to yield the 7-round result under CRHFs.)
Separating IND-CPA and Circular Security for Unbounded Length Key Cycles
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A public key encryption scheme is said to be n-circular secure if no PPT adversary can distinguish between encryptions of an n length key cycle and n encryptions of zero.
One interesting question is whether circular security comes for free from IND-CPA security. Recent works have addressed this question, showing that for all integers n, there exists an IND-CPA scheme that is not n-circular secure. However, this leaves open the possibility that for every IND-CPA cryptosystem, there exists a cycle length l, dependent on the cryptosystem (and the security parameter) such that the scheme is l-circular secure. If this is true, then this would directly lead to many applications, in particular, it would give us a fully homomorphic encryption scheme via Gentry’s bootstrapping.
In this work, we show that is not true. Assuming indistinguishability obfuscation and leveled homomorphic encryption, we construct an IND-CPA scheme such that for all cycle lengths l, the scheme is not l-circular secure.
One-Shot Verifiable Encryption from Lattices
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Verifiable encryption allows one to prove properties about encrypted data and is an important building block in the design of cryptographic protocols, e.g., group signatures, key escrow, fair exchange protocols, etc. Existing lattice-based verifiable encryption schemes, and even just proofs of knowledge of the encrypted data, require parallel composition of proofs to reduce the soundness error, resulting in proof sizes that are only truly practical when amortized over a large number of ciphertexts.
In this paper, we present a new construction of a verifiable encryption scheme, based on the hardness of the Ring-LWE problem in the random-oracle model, for short solutions to linear equations over polynomial rings. Our scheme is "one-shot", in the sense that a single instance of the proof already has negligible soundness error, yielding compact proofs even for individual ciphertexts. Whereas verifiable encryption usually guarantees that decryption can recover a witness for the original language, we relax this requirement to decrypt a witness of a related but extended language. This relaxation is sufficient for many applications and we illustrate this with example usages of our scheme in key escrow and verifiably encrypted signatures.
One of the interesting aspects of our construction is that the decryption algorithm is probabilistic and uses the proof as input (rather than using only the ciphertext). The decryption time for honestly-generated ciphertexts only depends on the security parameter, while the expected running time for decrypting an adversarially-generated ciphertext is directly related to the number of random-oracle queries of the adversary who created it. This property suffices in most practical scenarios, especially in situations where the ciphertext proof is part of an interactive protocol, where the decryptor is substantially more powerful than the adversary, or where adversaries can be otherwise discouraged to submit malformed ciphertexts.
Twisted $\mu_4$-normal form for elliptic curves
We introduce the twisted $\mu_4$-normal form for elliptic curves,
deriving in particular addition algorithms with complexity $9M + 2S$
and doubling algorithms with complexity $2M + 5S + 2m$ over a binary field.
Every ordinary elliptic curve over a finite field of characteristic 2
is isomorphic to one in this family.
This improvement to the addition algorithm is comparable to the
$7M + 2S$ achieved for the $\mu_4$-normal form,
and replaces the previously best known complexity of $13M + 3S$
on López-Dahab models applicable to these twisted curves.
The derived doubling algorithm is essentially optimal, without any
assumption of special cases. We show moreover that the Montgomery
scalar multiplication with point recovery carries over to the twisted
models, giving symmetric scalar multiplication adapted to protect
against side channel attacks, with a cost of $4M + 4S + 1m_t + 2m_c$ per bit.
In characteristic different from 2, we establish a linear isomorphism
with the twisted Edwards model.
This work, in complement to the introduction of $\mu_4$-normal form,
fills the lacuna in the body of work on efficient arithmetic on elliptic
curves over binary fields, explained by this common framework for
elliptic curves if $\mu_4$-normal form in any characteristic.
The improvements are analogous to those which the Edwards and twisted
Edwards models achieved for elliptic curves over finite fields of odd
characteristic and extend $\mu_4$-normal form to cover the binary NIST curves.
Separating Semantic and Circular Security for Symmetric-Key Bit Encryption from the Learning with Errors Assumption
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In this work we separate private-key semantic security from circular security using the Learning with Error assumption. Prior works used the less standard assumptions of multilinear maps or indistinguishability obfuscation. To achieve our results we develop new techniques for obliviously evaluating branching programs.
Quantum Authentication with Key Recycling
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We show that a family of quantum authentication protocols introduced in [Barnum et al., FOCS 2002] can be used to construct a secure quantum channel and additionally recycle all of the secret key if the message is successfully authenticated, and recycle part of the key if tampering is detected. We give a full security proof that constructs the secure channel given only insecure noisy channels and a shared secret key. We also prove that the number of recycled key bits is optimal for this family of protocols, i.e., there exists an adversarial strategy to obtain all non-recycled bits. Previous works recycled less key and only gave partial security proofs, since they did not consider all possible distinguishers (environments) that may be used to distinguish the real setting from the ideal secure quantum channel and secret key resource.
A New Structural-Differential Property of 5-Round AES
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AES is probably the most widely studied and used block cipher. Also versions with a reduced number of rounds are used as a building block in many cryptographic schemes, e.g. several candidates of the CAESAR competition are based on it.
So far, non-random properties which are independent of the secret key are known for up to 4 rounds of AES. These include differential, impossible differential, and integral properties.
In this paper we describe a new structural property for up to 5 rounds of AES, differential in nature and which is independent of the secret key, of the details of the MixColumns matrix (with the exception that the branch number must be maximal) and of the SubBytes operation. It is very simple: By appropriate choices of difference for a number of input pairs it is possible to make sure that the number of times that the difference of the resulting output pairs lie in a particular subspace is always a multiple of 8.
We not only observe this property experimentally (using a small-scale version of AES), we also give a detailed proof as to why it has to exist. As a first application of this property, we describe a way to distinguish the 5-round AES permutation (or its inverse) from a random permutation with only $2^{32}$ chosen texts that has a computational cost of $2^{35.6}$ look-ups into memory of size $2^{36}$ bytes which has a success probability greater than 99%.
The SM9 Cryptographic Schemes
SM9 is a Chinese official cryptography standard which defines a set of identity-based cryptographic schemes from pairings. This report describes the technical specification of SM9. The security of schemes is also analyzed.
Masking Proofs are Tight (and How to Exploit it in Security Evaluations)
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Evaluating the security level of a leaking implementation against side-channel attacks is a challenging task. This is especially true when countermeasures such as masking are implemented since in this case: (i) the amount of measurements to perform a key recovery may become prohibitive for certification laboratories, and (ii) applying optimal (multivariate) attacks may be computationally intensive and technically challenging. In this paper, we show that by taking advantage of the tightness of masking security proofs, we can significantly simplify this evaluation task in a very general manner. More precisely, we show that the evaluation of a masked implementation can essentially be reduced to the one of an unprotected implementation. In addition, we show that despite optimal attacks against masking schemes are computationally intensive for large number of shares, heuristic (soft analytical side-channel) attacks can approach optimality very efficiently. As part of this second contribution, we also improve over the recent multivariate (aka horizontal) side-channel attacks proposed at CHES 2016 by Battistello et al.
An efficient self-blindable attribute-based credential scheme
An attribute-based credential scheme allows a user, given a set of attributes, to prove ownership of these attributes to a verifier, voluntarily disclosing some of them while keeping the others secret. A number of such schemes exist, of which some additionally provide unlinkability: that is, when the same attributes were disclosed in two transactions, it is not possible to tell if one and the same or two different credentials were involved. Recently full-fledged implementations of such schemes on smart cards have emerged; however, these need to compromise the security level to achieve reasonable transaction speeds. In this paper we present a new unlinkable attribute-based credential scheme with a full security proof, using a known hardness assumption in the standard model. Defined on elliptic curves, the scheme involves bilinear pairings but only on the verifier's side, making it very efficient both in terms of speed and size on the user's side.
Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Proximity
Interactive proofs of proximity (Ergun, Kumar and Rubinfeld, Information & Computation, 2004 and Rothblum, Vadhan and Wigderson, STOC 2013), or IPPs, are interactive proofs in which the verifier runs in time sub-linear in the input's length. Since the verifier cannot even read the entire input, following the property testing literature, the requirement is that she accepts inputs that are in the language and rejects ones that are far from the language. However, these proofs could (and in many cases, do) betray considerable global information about the input to the verifier.
In this work, we initiate the study of zero-knowledge proofs of proximity (ZKPP). A ZKPP convinces a sub-linear time verifier while ensuring that she learns nothing more than a few locations of the input (and the fact that the input is ``close'' to the language).
Our main focus is the setting of statistical zero-knowledge where we show that the following hold unconditionally (where $N$ denotes the input size):
* Statistical ZKPPs can be sub-exponentially more efficient than property testers (or even non-interactive IPPs): We show a natural property which has a statistical ZKPP with a polylog(N) time verifier, but requires $\Omega(\sqrt{N})$ queries (and hence also runtime) for every property tester.
* Statistical ZKPPs can be sub-exponentially less efficient than IPPs: We show a property which has an IPP with a polylog(N) time verifier, but cannot have a statistical ZKPP with even an $N^{o(1)}$ time verifier.
* Statistical ZKPPs for some graph-based properties such as promise versions of expansion and bipartiteness.
Lastly, we also consider the computational setting where we show that:
1. Assuming the existence of one-way functions, every language computable either in (logspace uniform) NC or in SC, has a computational ZKPP with a (roughly) $\sqrt{N}$ time verifier.
2. Assuming the existence of collision-resistant hash functions, every language in NP has a statistical zero-knowledge argument of proximity with a polylog(N) verifier.
Algebraic Fault Analysis of SHA-3
This paper presents an efficient algebraic fault analysis on all four modes of SHA-3 under relaxed fault models. This is the first work to apply algebraic techniques on fault analysis of SHA-3. Results show that algebraic fault analysis on SHA-3 is very efficient and effective due to the clear algebraic properties of Keccak operations. Comparing with previous work on differential fault analysis of SHA-3, algebraic fault analysis can identify the injected faults with much higher rates, and recover an entire internal state of the penultimate round with much fewer fault injections.
Zero-Knowledge Proxy Re-Identification Revisited
Zero-knowledge proxy re-identification (ZK-PRI) has been introduced by Blaze et al. in 1998 together with two other well known primitives of recryptography, namely proxy re-encryption (PRE) and proxy re-signature (PRS). A ZK-PRI allows a proxy to transform an identification protocol for Alice into an identification protocol for Bob using a re-proof key. PRE and PRS have been largely studied in the last decade, but surprisingly, no results about ZK-PRI have been published since the pioneer paper of Blaze et al.. We first show the insecurity of this scheme: just by observing the communications Alice can deduce Bob’s secret key. Then we give (i) definitions of the different families of ZK-PRI(bidirectional/unidirectional and interactive/non-interactive)(ii) a formal security model for these primitives and (iii) a concrete construction for each family. Moreover, we show that ZK-PRI can be used to manage the acces policy to several services that require a public key authentication.
EC-OPRF: Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions using Elliptic Curves
We introduce a secure elliptic curve oblivious pseudorandom function (EC-OPRF) which operates by hashing strings onto an elliptic curve to provide a simple and efficient mechanism for computing an oblivious pseudorandom function (OPRF).
The EC-OPRF protocol enables a semi-trusted server to receive a set of cryptographically masked elliptic curve points from a client, secure those points with a private key, and return the resulting set to the client for unmasking.
We also introduce extensions and generalizations to this scheme, including a novel mechanism that provides forward secrecy, and discuss the security and computation complexity for each variant.
Benchmark tests for the implementations of the EC-OPRF protocol and one of its variants are provided, along with test vectors for the original protocol.
A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy
We present the first implementation of a decentralised and self-tallying internet voting protocol with maximum voter privacy using the Blockchain. The Open Vote Network is suitable for boardroom elec- tions and is written as a smart contract for Ethereum. Unlike previously proposed Blockchain e-voting protocols, this is the first implementation that does not rely on any trusted authority to compute the tally or to protect the voter’s privacy. Instead, the Open Vote Network is a self- tallying protocol, and each voter is in control of the privacy of their own vote such that it can only be breached by a full collusion involving all other voters. The execution of the protocol is enforced using the consensus mechanism that also secures the Ethereum blockchain. We tested the implementation on Ethereum’s official test network to demonstrate its feasibility. Also, we provide a financial and computational breakdown of its execution cost.
Unilaterally-Authenticated Key Exchange
Key Exchange (KE), which enables two parties (e.g., a client and a server) to securely establish a common private key while communicating over an insecure channel, is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives. In this work, we address the setting of unilaterally-authenticated key exchange (UAKE), where an unauthenticated (unkeyed) client establishes a key with an authenticated (keyed) server. This setting is highly motivated by many practical uses of KE on the Internet, but received relatively little attention so far.
Unlike the prior work, defining UAKE by downgrading a relatively complex definition of mutually authenticated key exchange (MAKE), our definition follows the opposite approach of upgrading existing definitions of public key encryption (PKE) and signatures towards UAKE. As a result, our new definition is short and easy to understand. Nevertheless, we show that it is equivalent to the UAKE definition of Bellare-Rogaway (when downgraded from MAKE), and thus captures a very strong and widely adopted security notion, while looking very similar to the simple ``one-oracle'' definition of traditional PKE/signature schemes. As a benefit of our intuitive framework, we show two exactly-as-you-expect (i.e., having no caveats so abundant in the KE literature!) UAKE protocols from (possibly interactive) signature and encryption. By plugging various one- or two-round signature and encryption schemes, we derive provably-secure variants of various well-known UAKE protocols (such as a unilateral variant of SKEME with and without perfect forward secrecy, and Shoup's A-DHKE-1), as well as new protocols, such as the first $2$-round UAKE protocol which is both (passively) forward deniable and forward-secure.
To further clarify the intuitive connections between PKE/Signatures and UAKE, we define and construct stronger forms of (necessarily interactive) PKE/Signature schemes, called confirmed encryption and confidential authentication, which, respectively, allow the sender to obtain confirmation that the (keyed) receiver output the correct message, or to hide the content of the message being authenticated from anybody but the participating (unkeyed) receiver. Using confirmed PKE/confidential authentication, we obtain two concise UAKE protocols of the form: ``send confirmed encryption/confidential authentication of a random key $K$.''
Photonic Side Channel Attacks Against RSA
This paper describes the first attack utilizing the photonic side channel against a public-key crypto-system. We evaluated three common implementations of RSA modular exponentiation, all using the Karatsuba multiplication method. We discovered that the key length had marginal impact on resilience to the attack: attacking a 2048-bit key required only 9\% more decryption attempts than a 1024-bit key. We found that the most dominant parameter impacting the attacker's effort is the minimal block size at which the Karatsuba method reverts to naive multiplication: even for parameter values as low as 32 or 64 bits our attacks achieve 100\% success rate with under 10,000 decryption operations. Somewhat surprisingly, we discovered that Montgomery's Ladder---commonly perceived as the most resilient of the three implementations to side-channel attacks---was actually the most susceptible: for 2048-bit keys, our attack reveals 100\% of the secret key bits with as few as 4000 decryptions.
Secure Logging with Crash Tolerance
Forward-secure logging protects old log entries in a log file against an adversary compromising the log device. However, we show that previous work on forward-secure logging is prone to crash-attacks where the adversary removes log entries and then crashes the log device. As the state of the log after a crash-attack is indistinguishable from the state after a real crash, e.g., power failure, the adversary can hide attack traces. We present SLiC, a new logging protocol that achieves forward-security against crash-attacks. Our main idea is to decouple the time of a log event with the position of its resulting log entry in the log file. Each event is encrypted and written to a pseudo-random position in the log file. Consequently, the adversary can only remove random log events, but not specific ones. Yet, during forensic analysis, the verifier can replay pseudo-random positions. This allows to distinguish a real crash (last events missing) from a crash-attack (random events missing). Besides a formal analysis, we also present an evaluation of SLiC as a syslog server to indicate its practicality.
$\mu$chain: How to Forget without Hard Forks
In this paper, we explore an idea of making (proof-of-work) blockchains mutable. We propose and implement $\mu$chain, a mutable blockchain, that enables modifications of blockchain history.
Blockchains are, by common definition, distributed and immutable data structures that store a history of events, such as transactions in a digital currency system. While the very idea of mutable event history may seem controversial at a first glance, we show that $\mu$chain does not undermine security guarantees provided by immutable blockchains. In particular,
all mutations in our system are controlled by fiat, enforced by consensus and are verifiable in the same way as regular transactions. At the same time, $\mu$chain provides a solution to
a number of challenging problems, such as the patching of vulnerable smart contracts and removal of abusive content from blockchain history. It also gives rise to new blockchain applications that were not possible with immutable blockchains. For instance, governments and companies could now maintain registers of citizens and customers, while preserving their legislated rights to be forgotten.
Banks could consider consolidation of cryptocurrency with traditional payments, which is hard to achieve without the
ability to revert transactions. To further illustrate the power of $\mu$chain on more concrete examples, we present two new applications, the collaborative recommendation system with the ability to censor inappropriate content, and a time-lock encryption mechanism that provides a method to decrypt messages
after a certain deadline has passed.
A Secure and Fast Dispersal Storage Scheme Based on the Learning with Errors Problem
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Data confidentiality and availability are of primary concern in data storage. Dispersal storage schemes achieve these two security properties by transforming the data into multiple codewords and dispersing them across multiple storage servers. Existing schemes achieve confidentiality and availability by various cryptographic and coding algorithms, but only under the assumption that an adversary cannot obtain more than a certain number of codewords. Meanwhile existing schemes are designed for storing archives. In this paper, we propose a novel dispersal storage scheme based on the learning with errors problem, known as storage with errors (SWE). SWE can resist even more powerful adversaries. Besides, SWE favorably supports dynamic data operations that are both efficient and secure, which is more practical for cloud storage. Furthermore, SWE achieves security at relatively low computational overhead, but the same storage cost compared with the state of the art. We also develop a prototype to validate and evaluate SWE. Analysis and experiments show that with proper configurations, SWE outperforms existing schemes in encoding/decoding speed.
Implementing BP-Obfuscation Using Graph-Induced Encoding
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We implemented (a simplified version of) the branching-program obfuscator due to Gentry et al. (GGH15), which is itself a variation of the first obfuscation candidate by Garg et al. (GGHRSW13). To keep within the realm of feasibility, we had to give up on some aspects of the construction, specifically the ``multiplicative bundling'' factors that protect against mixed-input attacks. Hence our implementation can only support read-once branching programs.
To be able to handle anything more than just toy problems, we developed a host of algorithmic and code-level optimizations. These include new variants of discrete Gaussian sampler and lattice trapdoor sampler, efficient matrix-manipulation routines, and many tradeoffs. We expect that these optimizations will find other uses in lattice-based cryptography beyond just obfuscation.
Our implementation is the first obfuscation attempt using the GGH15 graded encoding scheme, offering performance advantages over other graded encoding methods when obfuscating finite-state machines with many states.
In out most demanding setting, we were able to obfuscate programs with input length of 20 nibbles (80 bits) and over 100 states, which seems out of reach for prior implementations. Although further optimizations are surely possible, we do not expect any implementation of current schemes to be able to handle much larger parameters.
Reconciling d+1 Masking in Hardware and Software
The continually growing number of security-related autonomous devices require efficient mechanisms to counteract low-cost side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks like differential power analysis. Masking provides a high resistance against SCA at an adjustable level of security. A high level of security, however, goes hand in hand with an increasing demand for fresh randomness which also affects other implementation costs. Since software based masking has other security requirements than masked hardware implementations, the research in these fields have been quite separated from each other over the last ten years. One important practical difference is that recently published software based masking schemes show a lower randomness footprint than hardware masking schemes.
In this work we combine existing software and hardware based masking schemes into a unified masking approach (UMA). We demonstrate how UMA can be used to protect software and hardware implementations likewise, and for lower randomness costs especially for hardware implementations. Theoretical considerations as well as practical implementation results are then used to compare this unified masking approach to other schemes from different perspectives and at different levels of security.
Quantum Authentication and Encryption with Key Recycling
We propose an information-theoretically secure encryption scheme for classical messages with quantum ciphertexts that offers *detection* of eavesdropping attacks, and *re-usability of the key* in case no eavesdropping took place: the entire key can be securely re-used for encrypting new messages as long as no attack is detected. This is known to be impossible for fully classical schemes, where there is no way to detect plain eavesdropping attacks.
This particular application of quantum techniques to cryptography was originally proposed by Bennett, Brassard and Breidbart in 1982, even before proposing quantum-key-distribution, and a simple candidate scheme was suggested but no rigorous security analysis was given. The idea was picked up again in 2005, when Damgard, Pedersen and Salvail suggested a new scheme for the same task, but now with a rigorous security analysis. However, their scheme is much more demanding in terms of quantum capabilities: it requires the users to have a *quantum computer*.
In contrast, and like the original scheme by Bennett et al, our new scheme merely requires the preparation of BB84 qubits. As such, we not only show a provably-secure scheme that is within reach of current technology, but we also confirm Bennett et al's original intuition that a scheme in the spirit of their original construction is indeed secure.
Optimizing Implementations of Lightweight Building Blocks
We study the synthesis of small functions used as building blocks in lightweight cryptographic designs in terms of hardware implementations. This phase most notably appears during the ASIC implementation of cryptographic primitives. The quality of this step directly affects the output circuit, and while general tools exist to carry out this task, most of them belong to proprietary software suites and apply heuristics to any size of functions. In this work, we focus on small functions (4- and 8-bit mappings) and look for their optimal implementations on a specific weighted instructions set which allows fine tuning of the technology.
We propose a tool named LIGHTER, based on two related algorithms, that produce optimized implementations of small functions. To demonstrate the validity and usefulness of our tool, we applied it to two practical cases: first, linear permutations that define diffusion in most of SPN ciphers; second, non-linear 4-bit permutations that are used in nearly all modern lightweight block ciphers. For linear permutations, we exhibit several new MDS diffusion matrices lighter than the state-of-the-art, and we also decrease the implementation cost of several already known MDS matrices. As for non-linear permutations, LIGHTER outperforms the area-optimized synthesis of the state-of-the-art academic tool ABC. Smaller circuits can also be reached when ABC and LIGHTER are used jointly.
Private Puncturable PRFs From Standard Lattice Assumptions
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A puncturable pseudorandom function (PRF) has a master key $k$ that enables one
to evaluate the PRF at all points of the domain, and has a punctured key $k_x$
that enables one to evaluate the PRF at all points but one. The punctured key
$k_x$ reveals no information about the value of the PRF at the punctured point
$x$. Punctured PRFs play an important role in cryptography, especially in
applications of indistinguishability obfuscation. However, in previous
constructions, the punctured key $k_x$ completely reveals the punctured point
$x$: given $k_x$ it is easy to determine $x$. A {\em private} puncturable PRF
is one where $k_x$ reveals nothing about~$x$. This concept was defined by
Boneh, Lewi, and Wu, who showed the usefulness of private puncturing, and gave
constructions based on multilinear maps. The question is whether private
puncturing can be built from a standard (weaker) cryptographic assumption.
We construct the first privately puncturable PRF from standard lattice
assumptions, namely from the hardness of learning with errors (LWE) and 1
dimensional short integer solutions (1D-SIS), which have connections to
worst-case hardness of general lattice problems. Our starting point is the
(non-private) PRF of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan. We introduce a number of new
techniques to enhance this PRF, from which we obtain a privately puncturable
PRF. In addition, we also study the simulation based definition of private
constrained PRFs for general circuits, and show that the definition is not
satisfiable.
Making NSEC5 Practical for DNSSEC
NSEC5 is a proposed modification to DNSSEC that guarantees two security properties: (1) privacy against offline zone enumeration, and (2) integrity of zone contents, even if an adversary compromises the authoritative nameserver responsible for responding to DNS queries for the zone. In this work, we redesign NSEC5 in order to make it practical and performant. Our NSEC5 redesign features a new verifiable random function (VRF) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), along with a cryptographic proof of its security. This VRF is also of independent interest, as it is being standardized by the IETF and being used by several other projects. We show how to integrate NSEC5 using our ECC-based VRF into DNSSEC, leveraging precomputation to improve performance and DNS protocol-level optimizations to shorten responses. Next, we present the first full-fledged implementation of NSEC5 for both nameserver and recursive resolver, and evaluate performance under aggressive DNS query loads. We find that our redesigned NSEC5 can be viable even for high-throughput scenarios.
Designing Fully Secure Protocols for Secure Two-Party Computation of Constant-Domain Functions
In a sense, a two-party protocol achieves fairness if the output from the computation is obtained simultaneously by both parties. A seminal result by Cleve (STOC 1986) states that fairness is impossible, in general. Surprisingly, Gordon et al.~(JACM 2011) showed that there exist interesting functions that are computable with fairness. The two results give rise to a distinction between \emph{fair} functions and \emph{unfair} ones. The question of characterizing these functions has been studied in a sequence of works leading to the complete characterization of (symmetric) Boolean functions by Asharov et al.~(TCC 2015). In this paper, we propose a generic construction of a fully secure (fair) protocol, starting with a constant-round protocol satisfying limited security requirements. Our results introduce new conceptual tools for the analysis of fairness and they apply to arbitrary (constant-domain) functions. As a case study, we consider asymmetric Boolean functions. While the characterization remains open, we believe that our results lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of fairness.
Boolean functions with restricted input and their robustness; application to the FLIP cipher
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We study the main cryptographic features of Boolean functions (balancedness, nonlinearity, algebraic immunity) when, for a given number $n$ of variables, the input to these functions is restricted to some subset $E$ of $\mathbb{F}_2^n$. We study in particular the case when $E$ equals the set of vectors of fixed Hamming weight, which plays a role in the FLIP stream cipher and we study the robustness of the Boolean function in this cipher.
Asymptotically Compact Adaptively Secure Lattice IBEs and Verifiable Random Functions via Generalized Partitioning Techniques
In this paper, we focus on the constructions of adaptively secure identity-based encryption (IBE) from lattices and verifiable random function (VRF) with large input spaces. Existing constructions of these primitives suffer from low efficiency, whereas their counterparts with weaker guarantees (IBEs with selective security and VRFs with small input spaces) are reasonably efficient. We try to fill these gaps by developing new partitioning techniques that can be performed with compact parameters and proposing new schemes based on the idea.
- We propose new lattice IBEs with poly-logarithmic master public key sizes, where we count the number of the basic matrices to measure the size. Our constructions are proven secure under the LWE assumption with polynomial approximation factors. They achieve the best asymptotic space efficiency among existing schemes that depend on the same assumption and achieve the same level of security.
- We also propose several new VRFs on bilinear groups. In our first scheme, the size of the proofs is poly-logarithmic in the security parameter, which is the smallest among all the existing schemes with similar properties. On the other hand, the verification keys are long. In our second scheme, the size of the verification keys is poly-logarithmic, which is the smallest among all the existing schemes. The size of the proofs is sub-linear, which is larger than our first scheme, but still smaller than all the previous schemes.
Attacks on Secure Logging Schemes
We present four attacks on three cryptographic schemes intended for securing log files against illicit retroactive modification. Our first two attacks regard the LogFAS scheme by Yavuz et al. (Financial Cryptography 2012), whereas our third and fourth attacks break the BM- and AR-FssAgg schemes by Ma (AsiaCCS 2008).
All schemes have an accompanying security proof, seemingly contradicting the existence of attacks. We point out flaws in these proofs, resolving the contradiction.
Quantum Tokens for Digital Signatures
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The fisherman caught a quantum fish. "Fisherman, please let me go", begged the fish, "and I will grant you three wishes". The fisherman agreed. The fish gave the fisherman a quantum computer, three quantum signing tokens and his classical public key. The fish explained: "to sign your three wishes, use the tokenized signature scheme on this quantum computer, then show your valid signature to the king, who owes me a favor".
The fisherman used one of the signing tokens to sign the document "give me a castle!" and rushed to the palace. The king executed the classical verification algorithm using the fish's public key, and since it was valid, the king complied.
The fisherman's wife wanted to sign ten wishes using their two remaining signing tokens. The fisherman did not want to cheat, and secretly sailed to meet the fish. "Fish, my wife wants to sign ten more wishes". But the fish was not worried: "I have learned quantum cryptography following the previous story (The Fisherman and His Wife by the brothers Grimm). The quantum tokens are consumed during the signing. Your polynomial wife cannot even sign four wishes using the three signing tokens I gave you".
"How does it work?" wondered the fisherman. "Have you heard of quantum money? These are quantum states which can be easily verified but are hard to copy. This tokenized quantum signature scheme extends Aaronson and Christiano's quantum money scheme, which is why the signing tokens cannot be copied".
"Does your scheme have additional fancy properties?" the fisherman asked. "Yes, the scheme has other security guarantees: revocability, testability and everlasting security. Furthermore, if you're at sea and your quantum phone has only classical reception, you can use this scheme to transfer the value of the quantum money to shore", said the fish, and swam away.
On new multivariate cryptosystems based on hidden Eulerian equations over finite fields
We propose new multivariate cryptosystems over $n$-dimensional vector space over a finite field $F_q$ based on idea of hidden discrete logarithm problem for ${F^*}_q$. These cryptosystems are based on hidden eulerian equations $x^{\alpha}=a$, $(\alpha, q-1)=1$. The method is based on the idea of Eulerian transformations, which allow us to use asymmetric algorithms based on families of nonlinear multiplicatively injective maps of prescribed polynomial density and flexible degree.
Small CRT-Exponent RSA Revisited
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Since May (Crypto'02) revealed the vulnerability of the small CRT-exponent RSA using Coppersmith's lattice-based method, several papers have studied the problem and two major improvements have been made. (1) Bleichenbacher and May (PKC'06) proposed an attack for small $d_q$ when the prime factor $p$ is significantly smaller than the other prime factor $q$; the attack works for $p<N^{0.468}$. (2) Jochemsz and May (Crypto'07) proposed an attack for small $d_p$ and $d_q$ when the prime factors $p$ and $q$ are balanced; the attack works for $d_p, d_q<N^{0.073}$. Even a decade has passed since their proposals, the above two attacks are still considered as the state-of-the-art, and no improvements have been made thus far.
A novel technique seems to be required for further improvements since it seems that the attacks have been studied with all the applicable techniques for Coppersmith's methods proposed by Durfee-Nguyen (Asiacrypt'00), Jochemsz-May (Asiacrypt'06), and Herrmann-May (Asiacrypt'09, PKC'10). In this paper, we propose two improved attacks on the small CRT-exponent RSA: a small $d_q$ attack for $p<N^{0.5}$ (an improvement of Bleichenbacher-May's) and a small $d_p$ and $d_q$ attack for $d_p, d_q < N^{0.122}$ (an improvement of Jochemsz-May's).
The latter result is also an improvement of our result in the proceeding version (Eurocrypt '17); $d_p, d_q < N^{0.091}$. We use Coppersmith's lattice-based method to solve modular equations and obtain the improvements from a novel lattice construction by exploiting useful algebraic structures of the CRT-RSA key generation equation. We explicitly show proofs of our attacks and verify the validities by computer experiments. In addition to the two main attacks, we also propose small $d_q$ attacks on several variants of RSA.