We define and propose an efficient and provably secure construction of blind signatures with attributes. Prior notions of blind signatures did not yield themselves to the construction of anonymous credential systems, not even if we drop the unlinkability requirement of anonymous credentials. Our new notion in contrast is a convenient building block for anonymous credential systems. The construction we propose is efficient: it requires just a few exponentiations in a prime-order group in which the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem is hard. Thus, for the first time, we give a provably secure construction of anonymous credentials that can work in the elliptic group setting without bilinear pairings. In contrast, prior provably secure constructions were based on the RSA group or on groups with pairings, which made them prohibitively inefficient for mobile devices, RFIDs and smartcards. The only prior efficient construction that could work in such elliptic curve groups, due to Brands, does not have a proof of security.

It is notoriously difficult to create hardware that is immune from side channel and tampering attacks. A lot of recent literature, therefore, has instead considered \emph{algorithmic} defenses from such attacks. In this paper, we show how to algorithmically secure any cryptographic functionality from continual split-state leakage and tampering attacks. A split-state attack on cryptographic hardware is one that targets separate parts of the hardware separately. Our construction does not require the hardware to have access to randomness. In contrast, prior work on protecting from continual combined leakage and tampering required true randomness for each update. Our construction is in the common reference string (CRS) model; the CRS must be hard-wired into the device. We note that prior negative results show that it is impossible to algorithmically secure a cryptographic functionality against a combination of arbitrary continual leakage and tampering attacks without true randomness; therefore restricting our attention to the split-state model is justified. Our construction is simple and modular, and relies on a new construction, in the CRS model, of non-malleable codes with respect to split-state tampering functions, which may be of independent interest.

This paper is a short summary of a real world AES key extraction performed on a military grade FPGA marketed as 'virtually unbreakable' and 'highly secure'. We demonstrated that it is possible to extract the AES key from the Actel/Microsemi ProASIC3 chip in a time of 0.01 seconds using a new side-channel analysis technique called Pipeline Emission Analysis (PEA). This new technique does not introduce a new form of side-channel attacks (SCA), it introduces a substantially improved method of waveform analysis over conventional attack technology. It could be used to improve upon the speed at which all SCA can be performed, on any device and especially against devices previously thought to be unfeasible to break because of the time and equipment cost. Possessing the AES key for the ProASIC3 would allow an attacker to decrypt the bitstream or authenticate himself as a legitimate user and extract the bitstream from the device where no read back facility exists. This means the device is wide open to intellectual property theft, fraud and reverse engineering of the design to allow the introduction of a backdoor or Trojan. We show that with a very low cost hardware setup made with parts obtained from a local electronics distributor you can improve upon existing SCA up to a factor of x1,000,000 in time and at a fraction of the cost of existing SCA equipment.

We present a formalisation of a category of schemes which we call Broadcast-enhanced Key Predistribution Schemes (BEKPSs). These schemes are suitable for networks with access to a trusted base station and an authenticated broadcast channel. We demonstrate that the access to these extra resources allows for the creation of BEKPSs with advantages over key predistribution schemes such as flexibility and more efficient revocation. There are many possible ways to implement BEKPSs, and we propose a framework for describing and analysing them. In their paper `From key predistribution to key redistribution', Cichoń, Go{\l}ȩbiewski and Kuty{\l}owski propose a scheme for `redistributing' keys to a wireless sensor network using a broadcast channel after an initial key predistribution. We classify this as a BEKPS and analyse it in that context. We provide simpler proofs of some results from their paper, give a precise analysis of the resilience of their scheme, and discuss possible modifications. We then study two scenarios where BEKPSs may be particularly desirable and propose a suitable family of BEKPSs for each case. We demonstrate that they are practical and efficient to implement, and our analysis shows their effectiveness in achieving suitable trade-offs between the conflicting priorities in resource-constrained networks.

Pollard's rho algorithm, along with parallelized, vectorized, and negating variants, is the standard method to compute discrete logarithms in generic prime-order groups. This paper presents two reasons that Pollard's rho algorithm is farther from optimality than generally believed. First, ``higher-degree local anti-collisions'' make the rho walk less random than the predictions made by the conventional Brent--Pollard heuristic. Second, even a truly random walk is suboptimal, because it suffers from ``global anti-collisions'' that can at least partially be avoided. For example, after (1.5+o(1))\sqrt(l) additions in a group of order l (without fast negation), the baby-step-giant-step method has probability 0.5625+o(1) of finding a uniform random discrete logarithm; a truly random walk would have probability 0.6753\ldots+o(1); and this paper's new two-grumpy-giants-and-a-baby method has probability 0.71875+o(1).

We prove three optimal transference theorems on lattices possessing $n^{\epsilon}$-unique shortest vectors which relate to the successive minima, the covering radius and the minimal length of generating vectors respectively. The theorems result in reductions between GapSVP$_{\gamma'}$ and GapSIVP$_\gamma$ for this class of lattices. Furthermore, we prove a new transference theorem giving an optimal lower bound relating the successive minima of a lattice with its dual. As an application, we compare the respective advantages of current upper bounds on the smoothing parameter of discrete Gaussian measures over lattices and show a more appropriate bound for lattices whose duals possess $\sqrt{n}$-unique shortest vectors.

Certain block cipher confidentiality modes are susceptible to an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack against the underlying format of the plaintext. When the application decrypts altered ciphertext and attempts to process the manipulated plaintext, it may disclose information about intermediate values resulting in an oracle. In this paper we describe how to recognize and exploit such an oracle to decrypt ciphertext and control the decryption to result in arbitrary plaintext. We also discuss ways to mitigate and remedy the issue.

The emergence and wide availability of remote storage service providers prompted work in the security community that allows a client to verify integrity and availability of the data that she outsourced to an untrusted remove storage server at a relatively low cost. Most recent solutions to this problem allow the client to read and update (i.e., insert, modify, or delete) stored data blocks while trying to lower the overhead associated with verifying the integrity of the stored data. In this work we develop a novel scheme, performance of which favorably compares with the existing solutions. Our solution enjoys a number of new features such as a natural support for operations on ranges of blocks, revision control, and support for multiple user access to shared content. The performance guarantees that we achieve stem from a novel data structure termed a balanced update tree and removing the need to verify update operations.

We define and construct fully homomorphic message authenticators. In such a scheme, anybody can perform arbitrary computations over authenticated data and produce a short tag that authenticates the result of the computation. The user verifies this tag with her private key to ensure that the claimed result is indeed the correct output of the specified computation over previously authenticated data, without needing to know the underlying data itself. For example, a user can outsource the storage of large amounts of authenticated data to a remote server, and the server can later non-interactively certify the outputs of various computations over this data with only a short tag. Our construction uses fully homomorphic encryption in a novel way.

In many applications of group signatures, not only a signer's identity but also which group the signer belongs to is sensitive information regarding signer privacy. In this paper, we study these applications and combine a group signature with a ring signature to create a ring group signature, which specifies a set of possible groups without revealing which member of which group produced the signature. The main contributions of this paper are a formal definition of a ring group signature scheme and its security model, a generic construction and a concrete example of such a scheme. Both the construction and concrete scheme are provably secure if the underlying group signature and ring signature schemes are secure.

We propose a protocol to exchange Boneh-Boyen short signatures in a fair way, without relying on a trusted third party. Our protocol is quite practical and is the first of the sort to the best of our knowledge. Our construction uses a new non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) argument to prove that a commitment is the encryption of a bit vector. We also design a NIZK argument to prove that a commitment toa bit vector $v=(b_1,b_2,...,b_\secparam)$ is such that $\sum_{i \in [\secparam]}b_i2^{i-1}=\Blinding$ where $\Blinding$ is the discrete logarithm of some public value $D=g^\Blinding$. These arguments may be of independent interest.

In this work, we re-examine some fundamental group key-exchange and identity-based key-exchange protocols, specifically the Burmester-Desmedet group key-exchange protocol [7] (re-ferred to as the BD-protocol) and the Chen-Kudla identity-based key-exchange protocol [9] (referred to as the CK-protocol). We identify some new attacks on these protocols, showing in particular that these protocols are not computationally fair. Specifically, with our attacks, an adversary can do the following damages: (1) It can compute the session-key output with much lesser computational complexity than that of the victim honest player, and can maliciously nullify the contributions from the victim honest players. (2) It can set the session-key output to be some pre-determined value, which can be efficiently and publicly computed without knowing any secrecy supposed to be held by the attacker. We remark these attacks are beyond the traditional security models for group key-exchange and identity-based key-exchange. Then, based on the computationally fair Diffie-Hellman key- exchange in [21], we present some fixing approaches, and prove that the fixed protocols are computationally fair.

In this paper we propose a new differential fault analysis (DFA) on CLEFIA of 128-bit key. The proposed attack requires to induce byte faults at the fourteenth round of CLEFIA encryption. The attack uses only two pairs of fault-free and faulty ciphertexts and uniquely determines the 128-bit secret key. The attacker does not need to know the plaintext. The most efficient reported fault attack on CLEFIA, needs fault induction at the fifteenth round of encryption and can be performed with two pairs of fault-free and faulty ciphertexts and brute-force search of around 20 bits. Therefore, the proposed attack can evade the countermeasures against the existing DFAs which only protect the last four rounds of encryption. Extensive simulation results have been presented to validate the proposed attack. The simulation results show that the attack can retrieve the 128-bit secret key in around one minute of execution time. To the best of authors’ knowledge the proposed attack is the most efficient attack in terms of both the input requirements as well as the complexity.

This paper presents efficient structure-preserving signature schemes based on assumptions as simple as Decision-Linear. We first give two general frameworks for constructing fully secure signature schemes from weaker building blocks such as two-tier signatures and random-message secure signatures. They can be seen as refinements of the Even-Goldreich-Micali framework, and preserve many desirable properties of the underlying schemes such as constant signature size and structure preservation. We then instantiate them based on simple (i.e., not q-type) assumptions over symmetric and asymmetric bilinear groups. The resulting schemes are structure-preserving and yield constant-size signatures consisting of 11 to 17 group elements, which compares favorably to existing schemes relying on q-type assumptions for their security.

\emph{Authenticated Key Exchange} (AKE) protocols enable two parties to establish a shared, cryptographically strong key over an insecure network using various authentication means, such as cryptographic keys, short (\emph{i.e.}, low-entropy) secret keys or \emph{credentials}. In this paper, we provide a general framework, that encompasses several previous AKE primitives such as \emph{(Verifier-based) Password-Authenticated Key Exchange} or \emph{Secret Handshakes}, we call \emph{LAKE} for \emph{Language-Authenticated Key Exchange}. We first model this general primitive in the \emph{Universal Composability} (UC) setting. Thereafter, we show that the Gennaro-Lindell approach can efficiently address this goal. But we need \emph{smooth projective hash functions} on new languages, whose efficient implementations are of independent interest. We indeed provide such hash functions for languages defined by combinations of linear pairing product equations. Combined with an efficient commitment scheme, that is derived from the highly-efficient UC-secure Lindell's commitment, we obtain a very practical realization of Secret Handshakes, but also \emph{Credential-Authenticated Key Exchange protocols}. All the protocols are UC-secure, in the standard model with a common reference string, under the classical Decisional Linear assumption.

In this paper, we generalize some existing results on Boolean functions to the $q$-ary functions defined over $\BBZ_q$, where $q\geq 2$ is an integer, and obtain some new characterization of $q$-ary functions based on spectral analysis. We provide a relationship between Walsh-Hadamard spectra of two $p$-ary functions $f$ and $g$ (for $p$ a prime) and their derivative $D_{f, g}$. We provide a relationship between the Walsh-Hadamard spectra and the decompositions of any two $p$-ary functions. Further, we investigate a relationship between the Walsh-Hadamard spectra and the autocorrelation of any two $q$-ary functions.

Recently proposed algebraic attack has been shown to be very effective on several stream ciphers. In this paper, we have investigated the resistance of PingPong family of stream ciphers against algebraic attacks. This stream cipher was proposed in 2008 to enhance the security of the improved summation generator against the algebraic attack. In particular, we focus on the PingPong-128 stream cipher’s resistance against algebraic attack in this paper. In our analysis, it is found that an algebraic attack on PingPong family of stream ciphers require much more operations compare to the exhaustive key search on the internal state of the LFSRs. It will be shown that due to the irregular and mutual clock controlling in PingPong stream cipher the degree of the generated equation tends to grow up with each successive clock which in turn increases the overall complexity of an algebraic attack. Along with the PingPong 128 stream cipher the other instances of PingPong family stream ciphers are also investigated against the algebraic attack. Our analysis shows that, PingPong family stream ciphers are highly resistant against the algebraic attack due to their mutual and irregular clocking function.

Outsourced computations (where a client requests a server to perform some computation on its behalf) are becoming increasingly important due to the rise of Cloud Computing and the proliferation of mobile devices. Since cloud providers may not be trusted, a crucial problem is the verification of the integrity and correctness of such computation, possibly in a {\em public} way, i.e., the result of a computation can be verified by any third party, and requires no secret key -- akin to a digital signature on a message. We present new protocols for publicly verifiable secure outsourcing of {\em Evaluation of High Degree Polynomials} and {\em Matrix Multiplication}. Compared to previously proposed solutions, ours improve in efficiency and offer security in a stronger model. The paper also discusses several practical applications of our protocols.

The Square attack as a means of attacking reduced round variants of AES was described in the initial description of the Rijndael block cipher. This attack can be applied to AES, with a relatively small number of chosen plaintext-ciphertext pairs, reduced to less than six rounds in the case of AES-128 and seven rounds otherwise and several extensions to this attack have been described in the literature. In this paper we describe new variants of these attacks that have a smaller time complexity than those present in the literature. Specifically, we demonstrate that the quantity of chosen plaintext-ciphertext pairs can be halved producing the same reduction in the time complexity. We also demonstrate that the time complexity can be halved again for attacks applied to AES-128 and reduced by a smaller factor for attacks applied to AES-192. This is achieved by eliminating hypotheses on-the-fly when bytes in consecutive subkeys are related because of the key schedule.

In this paper, we put forward the Bounded Player Model for secure computation. In this new model, the number of players that will ever be involved in secure computations is bounded, but the number of computations has no a priori bound. Indeed, while the number of devices and people on this planet can be realistically estimated and bounded, the number of computations these devices will run can not be realistically bounded. We stress that in the Bounded Player model}, in addition to no a priori bound on the number of sessions, there is no synchronization barrier, no trusted party, and simulation must be performed in polynomial time. In this setting, we achieve concurrent Zero Knowledge (cZK) with sub-logarithmic round complexity. Our security proof is (necessarily) non-black-box, our simulator is "straight-line" and works as long as the number of rounds is \omega(1). We further show that unlike previously studied relaxations of the standard model (e.g., bounded number of sessions, timing assumptions, super-polynomial simulation), concurrent-secure computation is still impossible to achieve in the Bounded Player model. This gives evidence that our model is "closer" to the standard model than previously studied models, and study of this model might shed light on constructing round efficient concurrent zero-knowledge in the standard model as well.

Indifferentiability security of a hash mode of operation guarantees the mode's resistance against all (meaningful) generic attacks. It is also useful to establish the security of protocols that use hash functions as random functions. The JH hash function is one of the five finalists in the ongoing NIST SHA-3 hash function competition. Despite several years of analysis, the indifferentiability security of the JH mode (with n-bit digest and 2n-bit permutation) has remained remarkably low, only at n/3 bits (FSE 2010), while the other four finalist modes -- with comparable parameter values -- offer a security guarantee of n/2 bits. In this paper, we improve the indifferentiability security bound for the JH mode to n/2 bits (e.g. from 171 to 256 bits when n=512). To put this into perspective, our result guarantees the absence of attacks on both JH-256 and JH-512 hash functions with time less than approximately 2^{256} computations of the underlying 1024-bit permutation, under the assumption that the basic permutation is structurally strong. Our bounds are optimal for JH-256, and the best, so far, for JH-512. We obtain this improved bound by establishing an isomorphism of certain query-response graphs through a careful design of the simulators and the bad events. Our experimental data strongly supports the theoretically obtained results.

This work fall within the cadre of Cryptanalysis. Because, under certain condition, we would give a fairly simple method to solve the CDHP (the Problem Computational of Diffie and Hellman) and others problems associated to it. Since, solving this problem, will help us to provide a solution to the BDH (Problem Bilinear of Diffie and Hellman). The CDHP and BDHP are the heart of many cryptosystems in the point of view security, so solving it may be a threat to this cryptosystem’s. To elucidate this, we use a concept of geometry algebraic named Tate Pairing. This work is purely theoretical, we give firstly an overview on the idea and we illustrate it by an examples to see its efficiency.

Static and dynamic proof of storage schemes have been proposed for use in secure cloud storage scenarios. In this setting, a client outsources storage of her data to a server, who may, willingly or not, corrupt the data (e.g., due to hardware or software failures), or delete infrequently accessed parts to save space. Most of the existing schemes only solve part of this problem: The client may ask for a cryptographic proof of integrity from the server. But what happens if this proof fails to verify? We argue that in such a case, both the client and the server should be able to contact an official court, providing cryptographic proofs, so that the Judge can resolve this dispute. We show that this property is stronger than what has been known as public verifiability in the sense that official arbitration should handle a malicious client as well. We clearly show this formalization difference, and then present multiple schemes that work for various static and dynamic storage solutions in a generic way. We implement our schemes and show that they are very efficient, diminishing the validity of arguments against their use, where the overhead for adding the ability to resolve such disputes at a court is only 2 ms and 80 bytes for each update on the stored data, using standard desktop hardware. Finally, we note that disputes may arise in many other situations, such as when two parties exchange items (e.g., e-commerce) or agree on something (e.g., contract-signing). We show that it is easy to extend our official arbitration protocols for a general case, including dynamic authenticated data structures.

In 2013 Intel will release the AVX2 instructions, which introduce 256-bit single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) integer arithmetic. This will enable desktop and server processors from this vendor to support 4-way SIMD computation of 64-bit add-rotate-xor algorithms, as well as 8-way 32-bit SIMD computations. AVX2 also includes interesting instructions for cryptographic functions, like any-to-any permute and vectorized table-lookup. In this paper, we explore the potential of AVX2 to speed-up the SHA-3 finalist BLAKE, and present the first working assembly implementations of BLAKE-256 and BLAKE-512 with AVX2. We then investigate the potential of the recent AVX and XOP instructions to accelerate BLAKE, and report new speed records on Sandy Bridge and Bulldozer microarchitectures (7.47 and 11.64 cycles per byte for BLAKE-256, 5.71 and 6.95 for BLAKE-512).

SM3 is a hash function designed by Xiaoyun Wang et al., and published by the Chinese Commercial Cryptography Administration Office for the use of electronic authentication service system. The design of SM3 builds upon the design of the SHA-2 hash function, but introduces additional strengthening features. In this paper, using a higher order differential cryptanalysis approach, we present a practical 4-sum distinguisher against the compression function of SM3 reduced to 32 rounds. In addition, we point out a slide-rotational property of SM3-XOR, which exists due to the fact that constants used in the rounds are not independent.

In this work, we study a new multivariate quadratic (MQ) assumption that can be used to construct public-key encryption schemes. In particular, we research in the following two directions: We establish a precise \emph{asymptotic} formulation of a family of hard MQ problems, and provide empirical evidence to confirm the hardness. %Since there are many practical solvers studied and implemented during the studies of algebraic attacks, we use We construct public-key encryption schemes, and prove their security under the hardness assumption of this family. Also, we provide a new \emph{perspective} to look at MQ systems that plays a key role to our design and proof of security. As a consequence, we construct the \emph{first} public-key encryption scheme that is \emph{provably secure} under the MQ assumption. Moreover, our public-key encryption scheme is efficient in the sense that it only needs a ciphertext length $L + \poly(k)$ to encrypt a message $M\in \{0, 1 \}^{L}$ for any un-prespecified polynomial $L$, where $k$ is the security parameter. This is essentially \emph{optimal} since an additive overhead is the best we can hope for.

The goal of Multi-Party Computation (MPC) is to perform an arbitrary computation in a distributed, private, and fault-tolerant way. For this purpose, a fixed set of n parties runs a protocol that tolerates an adversary corrupting a subset of the parties, preserving certain security guarantees like correctness, secrecy, robustness, and fairness. Corruptions can be either passive or active: A passively corrupted party follows the protocol correctly, but the adversary learns the entire internal state of this party. An actively corrupted party is completely controlled by the adversary, and may deviate arbitrarily from the protocol. A mixed adversary may at the same time corrupt some parties actively and some additional parties passively. In this work, we consider the statistical setting with mixed adversaries and study the exact consequences of active and passive corruptions on secrecy, correctness, robustness, and fairness separately (i.e., hybrid security). Clearly, the number of passive corruptions affects the thresholds for secrecy, while the number of active corruptions affects all thresholds. It turns out that in the statistical setting, the number of passive corruptions in particular also affects the threshold for correctness, i.e., in all protocols there are (tolerated) adversaries for which a single additional passive corruption is sufficient to break correctness. This is in contrast to both the perfect and the computational setting, where such an influence cannot be observed. Apparently, this effect arises from the use of information-theoretic signatures, which are part of most (if not all) statistical protocols.

In this paper, we introduce a new kind of homomorphic signature, which is suitable for identity authentication in cloud computing. User firstly gives his full signature (involves all his identity attributes) to the identity authentication server. During the valid period of his full signature, if the user wants to require a cloud service on a special identity (only involves part of identity attributes), he only needs to secretly send a $\{0,1\}^n$ vector to the identity authentication server. The identity authentication server who doesn't know the secret key can compute the partial signature on the special identity, and then signs it to the cloud server. We give a formal secure definition of this homomorphic signature, and construct a scheme from GHR signature. We prove that our scheme is secure under strong RSA assumption.

The Rainbow Signature Scheme is a non-trivial generalization of the well known Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar Signature Scheme (Eurocrypt '99) minimizing the length of the signatures. Recently a new variant based on non-commutative rings, called NC-Rainbow, was introduced at CT-RSA 2012 to further minimize the secret key size. We disprove the claim that NC-Rainbow is as secure as Rainbow in general and show how to reduce the complexity of MinRank attacks from 2^288 to 2^112 and of HighRank attacks from 2^128 to 2^96 for the proposed instantiation over the ring of Quaternions. We further reveal some facts about Quaternions that increase the complexity of the signing algorithm. We show that NC-Rainbow is just a special case of introducing further structure to the secret key in order to decrease the key size. As the results are comparable with the ones achieved by equivalent keys, which provably do not decrease security, and far worse than just using a PRNG, we recommend not to use NC-Rainbow.

Recent research has shown that many popular web applications are vulnerable to side-channel attacks on encrypted streams of network data produced by the interaction of a user with an application. As a result, private user data is susceptible to being recovered by a side-channel adversary. A recent focus has been on the development of tools for the detection and quantification of side-channel information leaks from such web applications. In this work we describe a model for these web applications, analyse the effectiveness of previous approaches for the quantification of information leaks, and describe a robust, effective and generically applicable metric based on a statistical estimation of the mutual information between the user inputs made in the application and subsequent observable side-channel information. We use our proposed metric to construct a test capable of analysing sampled traces of packets to detect information leaks, and demonstrate the application of our test on a real-world web application.

In this paper we study public-key encryption schemes based on error-correcting codes that are IND-CCA2 secure in the standard model. In particular, we analyze a protocol due to Dowsley, Muller-Quade and Nascimento, based on a work of Rosen and Segev. The original formulation of the protocol contained some ambiguities and incongruences, which we point out and correct; moreover, the protocol deviates substantially from the work it is based on. We then present a construction which resembles more closely the original Rosen-Segev framework, and show how this can be instantiated with the McEliece scheme.

A self-pairing is a pairing computation where both inputs are the same group element. Self-pairings are used in some cryptographic schemes and protocols. In this paper, we show how to compute the Tate-Lichtenbaum pairing (D,\phi(D)) on a curve more efficiently than the general case. The speedup is obtained by requiring a simpler final exponentiation. We also discuss how to use this pairing in cryptographic applications.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) techniques are capable of performing encrypted computation on Boolean circuits, i.e., the user specifies encrypted inputs to the program, and the server computes on the encrypted inputs. Applying these techniques to general programs with recursive procedures and data-dependent loops has not been a focus of attention. In this paper, we take a first step toward building a compiler that, given programs with complex control flow, generates efficient code suitable for the application of FHE schemes. We first describe how programs written in a small Turing-complete instruction set can be executed with encrypted data and point out inefficiencies in this methodology. We then provide examples of transforming (a) the greatest common divisor (GCD) problem using Euclid’s algorithm and (b) the 3-Satisfiability (3SAT) problem using a recursive backtracking algorithm into a path-levelized form to which FHE can be applied. We describe how path levelization reduces control flow ambiguity and improves encrypted computation efficiency. Using these techniques and data-dependent loops as a starting point, we then build support for hierarchical programs made up of phases, where each phase corresponds to a fixed point computation that can be used to further improve the efficiency of encrypted computation. In our setting, the adversary learns an estimate of the number of steps required to complete the computation, which we show is the least amount of leakage possible.

Garbled circuits, a classical idea rooted in the work of Andrew Yao, have long been understood as a cryptographic technique, not a cryptographic goal. Here we cull out a primitive corresponding to this technique. We call it a garbling scheme. We provide a provable-security treatment for garbling schemes, endowing them with a versatile syntax and multiple security definitions. The most basic of these, privacy, suffices for two-party secure function evaluation (SFE) and private function evaluation (PFE). Starting from a PRF, we provide an efficient garbling scheme achieving privacy and we analyze its concrete security. We next consider obliviousness and authenticity, properties needed for private and verifiable outsourcing of computation. We extend our scheme to achieve these ends. We provide highly efficient blockcipher-based instantiations of both schemes. Our treatment of garbling schemes presages more efficient garbling, more rigorous analyses, and more modularly designed higher-level protocols.

In this article, we study the security of the IDEA block cipher when it is used in various simple-length or double-length hashing modes. Even though this cipher is still considered as secure, we show that one should avoid its use as internal primitive for block cipher based hashing. In particular, we are able to generate instantaneously free-start collisions for most modes, and even semi-free-start collisions, pseudo-preimages or hash collisions in practical complexity. This work shows a practical example of the gap that exists between secret-key and known or chosen-key security for block ciphers. Moreover, we also settle the 20-year-old standing open question concerning the security of the Abreast-DM and Tandem-DM double-length compression functions, originally invented to be instantiated with IDEA. Our attacks have been verified experimentally and work even for strengthened versions of IDEA with any number of rounds.

In the past twenty years, the study of the conjunction of chaos and cryptography has attracted much interest but also met with many problems. Today the security of chaos-based encryptions is usually not considered comparable to those based on number theoretic functions. In this paper, instead of making an encryption system, we focus on the more fundamental notion of one-way function, which is a well-defined function that is easy to evaluate but hard to invert. We see that it is more natural to compare chaotic systems with one-way functions, and such a study could possibly give new insights for chaos-based cryptosystems. We propose a function based on Chebyshev polynomials, and we argue it is likely a one-way function.

We describe an implementation of the protocol of Damgard, Pastro, Smart and Zakarias (SPDZ/Speedz) for multi-party computation in the presence of a dishonest majority of active adversaries. We present a number of modifications to the protocol; the first reduces the security to covert security, but produces significant performance enhancements; the second enables us to perform bit-wise operations in characteristic two fields. As a bench mark application we present the evaluation of the AES cipher, a now standard bench marking example for multi-party computation. We need examine two different implementation techniques, which are distinct from prior MPC work in this area due to the use of MACs within the SPDZ protocol. We then examine two implementation choices for the finite fields; one based on finite fields of size $2^8$ and one based on embedding the AES field into a larger finite field of size $2^{40}$.

In this paper, we introduce the abstraction of Dual Form Signatures as a useful framework for proving security (existential unforgeability) from static assumptions for schemes with special structure that are used as a basis of other cryptographic protocols and applications. We demonstrate the power of this framework by proving security under static assumptions for close variants of pre-existing schemes: \begin{itemize} \item the LRSW-based Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signature scheme \item the identity-based sequential aggregate signatures of Boldyreva, Gentry, O'Neill, and Yum. \end{itemize} The Camenisch-Lysyanskaya signature scheme was previously proven only under the interactive LRSW assumption, and our result can be viewed as a static replacement for the LRSW assumption. The scheme of Boldyreva, Gentry, O'Neill, and Yum was also previously proven only under an interactive assumption that was shown to hold in the generic group model. The structure of the public key signature scheme underlying the BGOY aggregate signatures is quite distinctive, and our work presents the first security analysis of this kind of structure under static assumptions. We view our work as enhancing our understanding of the security of these signatures, and also as an important step towards obtaining proofs under the weakest possible assumptions. Finally, we believe our work also provides a new path for proving security of signatures with embedded structure. Examples of these include: attribute-based signatures, quoteable signatures, and signing group elements.

In this paper, we point out a new weakness of the AES key schedule by revisiting an old observation exploited by many known attacks. We also discover a major cause for this weakness is that the column-by-column word-wise property in the key schedule matches nicely with the MixColumns operation in the cipher's diffusion layer. Then we propose a new key schedule by minor modification to increase the security level for AES. First, it reduces the number of rounds that some attacks are effective, such as SQUARE attacks and meet-in-the-middle attacks; Second, it is interesting that our new key schedule also protects AES from the most devastating related-key differential type attacks, which work against AES-192 and AES-256 with the full number of rounds. Compared with the original key schedule, ours just does a transposition on the output matrix of the subkeys. Compared with other proposed modifications of AES key schedule, our modification adds no non-linear operations, no need to complicate the diffusion method, or complicate the iteration process of generating subkeys. Finally, our results suggest that the route of diffusion propagation should get more attention in the design of key schedules.

In this study, a novel pairing based strong designated verifier signature scheme based on non-interactive zero knowledge proofs is proposed. The security of the proposal is presented by sequences of games without random oracles; furthermore, this scheme has a security proof for the property of privacy of the signer’s identity in comparison with the scheme proposed by Zhang et al. in 2007. In addition, this proposal compared to the scheme presented by Huang et al. in 2011 supports non-delegatability. The non-delegatability of our proposal is achieved since we do not use the common secret key shared between the signer and the designated verifier in our construction. Furthermore, if a signer delegates her signing capability which is derived from her secret key on a specific message to a third party, then, the third party cannot generate a valid designated verifier signature due to the relaxed special soundness of the non-interactive zero knowledge proof. To the best of our knowledge, this construction is the first attempt to generate a designated verifier signature scheme with non-delegatability in the standard model, while satisfying of non-delegatability property is loose.

Developers building cryptography into security-sensitive applications face a daunting task. Not only must they understand the security guarantees delivered by the constructions they choose, they must also implement and combine them correctly and efficiently. Cryptographic compilers free developers from having to implement cryptography on their own by turning high-level specifications of security goals into efficient implementations. Yet, trusting such tools is risky as they rely on complex mathematical machinery and claim security properties that are subtle and difficult to verify. In this paper, we present ZKCrypt, an optimizing cryptographic compiler that achieves an unprecedented level of assurance without sacrificing practicality for a comprehensive class of cryptographic protocols, known as Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge. The pipeline of ZKCrypt tightly integrates purpose-built verified compilers and verifying compilers producing formal proofs in the CertiCrypt framework. By combining the guarantees delivered by each stage in the pipeline, ZKCrypt provides assurance that the implementation it outputs securely realizes the high-level proof goal given as input. We report on the main characteristics of ZKCrypt, highlight new definitions and concepts at its foundations, and illustrate its applicability through a representative example of an anonymous credential system.

The Galois configuration of Nonlinear Feedback Shift Registers (NLFSRs) is attractive for stream ciphers for which high throughput is very important. In this paper, we prove that any Galois NLFSR can be transformed into an equivalent NLFSR in the Fibonacci configuration, which is the conventional conguration of NLFSRs. The transformation is mentioned in the proof. The mapping between the initial states of the Galois NLFSR and its equivalent Fibonacci configuration is also derived. Moreover, some properties of Galois NLFSRs are presented.

A generic DPA strategy is one which is able to recover secret information from physically observable device leakage without any a priori knowledge about the device's leakage characteristics. Here we provide much-needed clarification on results emerging from the existing literature, demonstrating precisely that such methods (strictly defined) are inherently restricted to a very limited selection of target functions. Continuing to search related techniques for a `silver bullet' generic attack appears a bootless errand. However, we find that a minor relaxation of the strict definition---the incorporation of some minimal non-device-specific intuition---produces scope for generic-emulating strategies, able to succeed against a far wider range of targets. We present stepwise regression as an example of such, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a variety of scenarios. We also give some evidence that its practical performance matches that of `best bit' DoM attacks which we take as further indication for the necessity of performing profiled attacks in the context of device evaluations.

Yao's garbled circuit construction transforms a boolean circuit $C:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^m$ into a ``garbled circuit'' $\hat{C}$ along with $n$ pairs of $k$-bit keys, one for each input bit, such that $\hat{C}$ together with the $n$ keys corresponding to an input $x$ reveal $C(x)$ and no additional information about $x$. The garbled circuit construction is a central tool for constant-round secure computation and has several other applications. Motivated by these applications, we suggest an efficient arithmetic variant of Yao's original construction. Our construction transforms an arithmetic circuit $C : \mathbb{Z}^n\to\mathbb{Z}^m$ over integers from a bounded (but possibly exponential) range into a garbled circuit $\hat{C}$ along with $n$ affine functions $L_i : \mathbb{Z}\to \mathbb{Z}^k$ such that $\hat{C}$ together with the $n$ integer vectors $L_i(x_i)$ reveal $C(x)$ and no additional information about $x$. The security of our construction relies on the intractability of the learning with errors (LWE) problem.

We propose a novel small-domain pseudo-random permutation, also referred to as a small-domain cipher or small-domain (deterministic) encryption. We prove that our construction achieves "strong security", i.e., is indistinguishable from a random permutation even when an adversary has observed all possible input-output pairs. More importantly, our construction is 1,000 to 8,000 times faster in most realistic scenarios, in comparison with the best known construction (also achieving strong security). Our implementation leverages the extended instruction sets of modern processors, and we also introduce a smart caching strategy to freely tune the tradeoff between time and space.

Recently, He et al. [D. He, J. Chen, J. Hu, A pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol, International Journal of Communication Systems, 25(2), pp. 221-230, 2012] proposed a pairing-free certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol and demonstrated that their protocol is provable security in the random oracle model. However, in this paper, we show that t He et al. protocol is completely broken.

A private set intersection (PSI) protocol allows two parties to compute the intersection of their input sets privately. Most of the previous PSI protocols only output the result to one party and the other party gets nothing from running the protocols. However, a mutual PSI protocol in which both parties can get the output is highly desirable in many applications. A major obstacle in designing a mutual PSI protocol is how to ensure fairness. In this paper we present the first fair mutual PSI protocol which is efficient and secure. Fairness of the protocol is obtained in an optimistic fashion, i.e. by using an offline third party arbiter. In contrast to many optimistic protocols which require a fully trusted arbiter, in our protocol the arbiter is only required to be semi-trusted, in the sense that we consider it to be a potential threat to both parties’ privacy but believe it will follow the protocol. The arbiter can resolve disputes without knowing any private information belongs to the two parties. This feature is appealing for a PSI protocol in which privacy may be of ultimate importance.

The Linux pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) is a PRNG with entropy inputs which is widely used in many security related applications and protocols. This PRNG is written as an open source code which is subject to regular changes. It was last analyzed in the work of Gutterman et al. in 2006 [GPR06] but since then no new analysis has been made available, while in the meantime several changes have been applied to the code, among others, to counter the attacks presented [GPR06]. Our work describes the Linux PRNG of kernel versions 2.6.30.7 and upwards. We detail the PRNG architecture in the Linux system and provide its first accurate mathematical description and a precise analysis of the building blocks, including entropy estimation and extraction. Subsequently, we give a security analysis including the feasibility of cryptographic attacks and an empirical test of the entropy estimator.. Finally, we underline some important changes to the previous versions and their consequences.

Identity based encryption (IBE) has received great attention since Boneh and Franklin's breakthrough work on bilinear group based IBE [4]. Till now, many IBE schemes relying on bilinear groups with diff erent properties have been proposed [5, 25, 29, 14]. However, one part of the user's private key in all these IBE schemes is constructed as y = f(msk), where msk is the master key and y is an element in the underlying bilinear group G. In this paper, we propose a new IBE: one part of the private key is y = f(msk), where msk is the master key and y is an element in Z_p . Here p is the underlying bilinear group's prime order. By using some novel techniques, we prove this new IBE is semantic secure under the selective identity chosen plaintext attacks (IND-sID-CPA) in the standard model. Based on this IBE scheme, we construct an IND-ID-CCA secure identity based proxy re-encryption (IBPRE) scheme which is master secret secure and efficient for the proxy compared with other IND-ID-CCA (IBPRE) schemes.

The Tardos code is a much studied collusion-resistant fingerprinting code, with the special property that it has asymptotically optimal length $m\propto c_0^2$, where $c_0$ is the number of colluders. In this paper we give alternative security proofs for the Tardos code, working with the assumption that the strongest coalition strategy is position-independent. We employ the Bernstein inequality and Bennett inequality instead of the typically used Markov inequality. This proof technique requires fewer steps and slightly improves the tightness of the bound on the false negative error probability. We present new results on code length optimization, for both small and asymptotically large coalition sizes.

Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system that is based on Proof-of-Work. Bitcoin is currently gaining popularity as a digital currency; several businesses are starting to accept Bitcoin transactions. An example case of the growing use of Bitcoin was recently reported in the media; here, Bitcoins were used as a form of fast payment in a local fast-food restaurant. In this paper, we analyze the security of using Bitcoin for fast payments, where the time between the exchange of currency and goods is short (i.e., in the order of few seconds). We focus on double- spending attacks on fast payments and demonstrate that these attacks can be mounted at low cost on currently deployed versions of Bitcoin. We further show that the measures recommended by Bitcoin developers for the use of Bitcoin in fast transactions are not always effective in resisting double-spending; we show that if those recommendations are integrated in future Bitcoin implementations, double-spending attacks on Bitcoin will still be possible. Finally, we leverage on our findings and propose a lightweight countermeasure that enables the detection of double-spending attacks in fast transactions.

In implementation of elliptic curve cryptography, three kinds of finite fields have been widely studied, i.e. prime field, binary field and optimal extension field. In pairing-based cryptography, however, pairing-friendly curves are usually chosen among ordinary curves over prime fields and supersingular curves over extension fields with small characteristics. In this paper, we study pairings on elliptic curves over extension fields from the point of view of accelerating the Miller's algorithm to present further advantage of pairing-friendly curves over extension fields, not relying on the much faster field arithmetic. We propose new pairings on elliptic curves over extension fields can make better use of the multi-pairing technique for the efficient implementation. By using some implementation skills, our new pairings could be implemented much more efficiently than the optimal ate pairing and the optimal twisted ate pairing on elliptic curves over extension fields. At last, we use the similar method to give more efficient pairings on Estibals's supersingular curves over composite extension fields in parallel implementation.

A $(t,n)$-threshold secret sharing scheme is a method to distribute a secret among $n$ participants in such a way that any $t$ participants can recover the secret, but no $t-1$ participants can. In this paper, we propose two secret sharing schemes using non-abelian groups. One scheme is the special case where all the participants must get together to recover the secret. The other one is a $(t,n)$-threshold scheme that is a combination of Shamir's scheme and the group-theoretic scheme proposed in this paper.

A cumulative assignment scheme (CAS for short) is a special type of secret sharing schemes. For any given access structure (AS), a CAS which minimizes the cardinality of the primitive share set (the average information rate, or the worst information rate) is called an optimal CAS and can be constructed via solving some binary integer programming (BIP). The problem of finding optimal CAS's for complete AS's is solved. We consider in this paper the problem of finding optimal CAS's for incomplete AS's. The paper introduces some notions including the connected-super-forbidden-family and the lower-forbidden-family for AS's. We show that an optimal CAS can be derived from some smaller sized BIP whose variables (constraints, resp.) are based on the connected-super-forbidden-family (lower-forbidden-family, resp.) of the given AS. The paper further builds the close relationship between the problem of finding optimal CAS's and the set covering problem (SCP). We prove that the problem of finding a CAS with minimum cardinality of the primitive share set (or minimum average information rate) is equivalent to the SCP, and thus is NP-hard. Other contributions of the paper include: 1) two types of AS's are recognized so that we can construct the corresponding optimal CAS's directly; and 2) a greedy algorithm is proposed to find CAS's with smaller worst information rate.

This manuscript describes a proposal for a new trap-door one-way function of the multivariate-quadratic type. It was first posted to the IACR preprint server in May 2012. Subsequently, Enrico Thomae and Christopher Wolf were able to to determine that a small-minors MinRank attack works against this scheme. I would like to thank them for their close study of the proposal. The manuscript follows as originally posted, with the addition of a few references and a brief description of the successful attack (end of Section 4.1).

In this work we deal with the problem of how to squeeze multiple ciphertexts without losing original message information. To do so, we formalize the notion of decompos- ability for public-key encryption and investigate why adding decomposability is challenging. We construct an ElGamal encryption scheme over extension fields, and show that it supports the efficient decomposition. We then analyze security of our scheme under the standard DDH assumption, and evaluate the performance of our construction.

Although they do not suffer from clear attacks, various key agreement protocols (for example that used within the TLS protocol) are deemed as insecure by existing security models for key exchange. The reason is that the derived keys are used within the key exchange step, violating the common key indistinguishability requirement. In this paper we propose a new security definition for key exchange protocols that offers two important benefits. Our notion is weaker than the more established ones and thus allows the analysis of a larger class of protocols. Furthermore, security in the sense that we define enjoys rather general composability properties. In addition our composability properties are derived within game based formalisms, and do not appeal to any simulation based paradigm. Specifically, for protocols whose security relies exclusively on some underlying symmetric primitive we show that they can be securely composed with key exchange protocols provided that two main requirements hold: 1) no adversary can break the underlying {\em primitive}, even when the primitive uses keys obtained from executions of the key exchange protocol in the presence of the adversary (this is essentially the security requirement that we introduce and formalize in this paper), and 2) the security of the protocol can be reduced to that of the primitive, no matter how the keys for the primitive are distributed. Proving that the two conditions are satisfied, and then applying our generic theorem, should be simpler than performing a monolithic analysis of the composed protocol. We exemplify our results in the case of a profile of the TLS protocol. Our definition and results are set entirely within the framework of cryptographic games (and thus avoid the use of simulation).

I propose the new key distribution system and attribute-based encryption scheme on non-commutative ring where the complexity required for enciphering and deciphering is small. As in this system encryption keys and decryption keys involve the attributes of each user, the system is adaptive for cloud computing systems. The security of this system is based on the complexity for solving the multivariate algebraic equations of high degree over finite field, that is, one of NP complete problems. So this system is immune from the Gröbner basis attacks. The key size of this system becomes to be small enough to handle.

The security of contemporary homomorphic encryption schemes over cyclotomic number field relies on fields of very large dimension. This large dimension is needed because of the large modulus-to-noise ratio in the key-switching matrices that are used for the top few levels of the evaluated circuit. However, a smaller modulus-to-noise ratio is used in lower levels of the circuit, so from a security standpoint it is permissible to switch to lower-dimension fields, thus speeding up the homomorphic operations for the lower levels of the circuit. However, implementing such field-switching is nontrivial, since these schemes rely on the field algebraic structure for their homomorphic properties. A basic ring-switching operation was used by Brakerski, Gentry and Vaikuntanathan, over rings of the form $\Z[X]/(X^{2^n}+1)$, in the context of bootstrapping. In this work we generalize and extend this technique to work over any cyclotomic number field, and show how it can be used not only for bootstrapping but also during the computation itself (in conjunction with the ``packed ciphertext'' techniques of Gentry, Halevi and Smart).

In~\cite{SSH} a Zero-Knowledge scheme $ZK(2)$ was designed from a solution of a set of multivariate quadratic equations over a finite field. In this paper we will give two methods to generalize this construction for polynomials of any degree $d$, i.e. we will design two Zero-Knowledge schemes $ZK(d)$ and $\tilde {ZK}(d)$ from a set of polynomial equations of degree $d$. We will show that $\tilde {ZK} (d)$ is optimal in term of the number of computations to be performed and that $ZK(d)$ is optimal in term of the number of bits to be send. Moreover this property is still true for all kinds of polynomials: for example if the polynomials are sparse or dense. Finally, we will present two examples of applications: with Brent equations, or with morphisms of polynomials.

The hash function Skein is one of the five finalists of the NIST SHA-3 competition;it is based on the block cipher Threefish which only uses three primitive operations: modular addition, rotation and bitwise XOR (ARX). This paper studies the boomerang attacks on Skein-512. Boomerang distinguishers on the compression function reduced to 32 and 36 rounds are proposed, with complexities 2^{104.5} and 2^{454} respectively. Examples of the distinguishers on 28-round and 31-round are also given. In addition, the boomerang distinguishers are applicable to the key-recovery attacks on reduced Threefish-512. The complexities for key-recovery attacks reduced to 32-/33-/34-round are about 2^{181}, 2^{305} and 2^{424}. Because Laurent et al. [14] pointed out that the previous boomerang distinguishers for Threefish-512 are in fact not compatible, our attacks are the first valid boomerang attacks for the final round Skein-512.

We present in these papers a scheme, which bypasses the weakness presented in the existed scheme of IBE with random oracle. We propose, a secure scheme which project into Zp contrary to elliptic curve as with Boneh and Franklin. More, our scheme is basing in its study of simulation in the problem 4-EBDHP which is more efficient than q-BDHIP used by Skai Kasarah. We provide the prove of security of our scheme and we show its efficiency by comparison with the scheme declared above. Even if it we have a little cost in complexity, but as in the field cryptography we are more interested to the security, this makes our proposition more efficient.

We exhibit the precise security guarantees that a public key encryption scheme needs to satisfy to guarantee ballot privacy when used in a large class of voting systems. We also identify new security notions for public key encryption that characterize the number of times that a public key can be used in different elections, and show that the most common ballot preparation approach that consists in encrypting the vote and adding a NIZK proof of its validity is sound, even without hardwiring the voter identity in the proof. Our results provide important steps towards proving the privacy of the ballot submission procedure in the widely deployed Helios voting system.

The Ring-LWE problem, introduced by Lyubashevsky, Peikert, and Regev (Eurocrypt 2010), has been steadily finding many uses in numerous cryptographic applications. Still, the Ring-LWE problem defined in [LPR10] involves the fractional ideal $R^\vee$, the dual of the ring $R$, which is the source of many theoretical and implementation technicalities. Until now, getting rid of $R^\vee$, required some relatively complex transformation that substantially increase the magnitude of the error polynomial and the practical complexity to sample it. It is only for rings $R=\Z[X]/(X^n+1)$ where $n$ a power of $2$, that this transformation is simple and benign. In this work we show that by applying a different, and much simpler transformation, one can transfer the results from [LPR10] into an ``easy-to-use'' Ring-LWE setting ({\em i.e.} without the dual ring $R^\vee$), with only a very slight increase in the magnitude of the noise coefficients. Additionally, we show that creating the correct noise distribution can also be simplified by generating a Gaussian distribution over a particular extension ring of $R$, and then performing a reduction modulo $f(X)$. In essence, our results show that one does not need to resort to using any algebraic structure that is more complicated than polynomial rings in order to fully utilize the hardness of the Ring-LWE problem as a building block for cryptographic applications.

Collision resistance is a fundamental property required for cryptographic hash functions. One way to ensure collision resistance is to use hash functions based on public key cryptography (PKC) which reduces collision resistance to a hard mathematical problem, but such primitives are usually slow. A more practical approach is to use symmetric-key design techniques which lead to faster schemes, but collision resistance can only be heuristically inferred from the best probability of a single differential characteristic path. We propose a new hash function design with variable hash output sizes of 128, 256, and 512 bits, that reduces this gap. Due to its inherent Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) structure and JH mode of operation, we are able to compute its differential collision probability using the concept of differentials. Namely, for each possible input differences, we take into account all the differential paths leading to a collision and this enables us to prove that our hash function is secure against a differential collision attack using a single input difference. None of the SHA-3 finalists could prove such a resistance. At the same time, our hash function design is secure against pre-image, second pre-image and rebound attacks, and is faster than PKC-based hashes. Part of our design includes a generalization of the optimal diffusion used in the classical wide-trail SPN construction from Daemen and Rijmen, which leads to near-optimal differential bounds when applied to non-square byte arrays. We also found a novel way to use parallel copies of a serial matrix over the finite field GF(2^4), so as to create lightweight and secure byte-based diffusion for our design. Overall, we obtain hash functions that are fast in software, very lightweight in hardware (about 4625 GE for the $256$-bit hash output) and that provide much stronger security proofs regarding collision resistance than any of the SHA-3 finalists.

Hummingbird-2 is one recent design of lightweight block ciphers targeting constraint devices, which not only enables a compact hardware implementation and ultra-low power consumption but also meets the stringent response time as specified in ISO18000-6C. In this paper, we present the first cryptanalytic result on the full version of this cipher using two pairs of related keys, i.e., four keys. We discover that the differential sequences for the last invocation of the round function can be computed by running the full cipher, due to which the search space for the key can be reduced. Base upon this observation, we propose a probabilistic attack encompassing two phases, preparation phase and key recovery phase. The preparation phase, requiring $2^{80}$ effort in time, aims to reach an internal state, with $0.5$ success probability, that satisfies particular conditions. In the key recovery phase, by attacking the last invocation of the round function of the encryption (decryption resp.) using the proposed differential sequence analysis (DSA), we are able to recover $36$ bits (another $44$ bits resp.) of the $128$-bit key. In addition, the remaining $48$ bits of the key can be exhaustively searched and the overall time complexity of the key recovery phase is $2^{48.14}$. Note that the proposed attack, though exhibiting an interesting tradeoff between the success probability and time complexity, is only of a theoretical interest at the moment and does not affect the security of the Hummingbird-2 in practice.

We implement asymmetric pairings derived from Kachisa-Schaefer-Scott (KSS), Barreto-Naehrig (BN), and Barreto-Lynn-Scott (BLS) elliptic curves at the 192-bit security level. Somewhat surprisingly, we find pairings derived from BLS curves with embedding degree 12 to be the fastest for our serial as well as our parallel implementations. Our serial implementations provide a factor-3 speedup over the previous state-of-the-art, demonstrating that pairing computation at the 192-bit security level is not as expensive as previously thought. We also present a general framework for deriving a Weil-type pairing that is well-suited for computing a single pairing on a multi-processor machine.

In Secure Message Transmission (SMT) problem, a sender $\cal S$ is connected to a receiver $\cal R$ through $N$ node disjoint bidirectional paths in the network, $t$ of which are controlled by an adversary with \textit{unlimited computational power}. $\cal{S}$ wants to send a message $m$ to $\cal{R}$ in a \textit{reliable} and \textit{private} way. It is proved that SMT is possible if and only if $N\ge2t+1$. In Reliable Message Transmission (RMT) problem, the network setting is the same and the goal is to provide reliability for communication, only. In this paper we focus on 1-round $\delta$-RMT and $(0,\delta)$-SMT where the chance of protocol failure (receiver cannot decode the sent message) is at most $\delta$, and in the case of SMT, privacy is perfect. We propose a new approach to the construction of 1-round $\delta$-RMT and (0, $\delta$)-SMT for all connectivities $N \ge 2t+1$, using list decodable codes and message authentication codes. Our concrete constructions use folded Reed-Solomon codes and multireceiver message authentication codes. The protocols have optimal transmission rates and provide the highest reliability among all known comparable protocols. Important advantages of these constructions are, (i) they can be adapted to all connectivities, and (ii) have simple and direct security (privacy and reliability) proofs using properties of the underlying codes, and $\delta$ can be calculated from parameters of the underlying codes. We discuss our results in relation to previous work in this area and propose directions for future research.

The ``learning with errors'' (LWE) problem is to distinguish random linear equations, which have been perturbed by a small amount of noise, from truly uniform ones. The problem has been shown to be as hard as worst-case lattice problems, and in recent years it has served as the foundation for a plethora of cryptographic applications. Unfortunately, these applications are rather inefficient due to an inherent quadratic overhead in the use of LWE. A main open question was whether LWE and its applications could be made truly efficient by exploiting extra algebraic structure, as was done for lattice-based hash functions (and related primitives). We resolve this question in the affirmative by introducing an algebraic variant of LWE called \emph{ring-LWE}, and proving that it too enjoys very strong hardness guarantees. Specifically, we show that the ring-LWE distribution is pseudorandom, assuming that worst-case problems on ideal lattices are hard for polynomial-time quantum algorithms. Applications include the first truly practical lattice-based public-key cryptosystem with an efficient security reduction; moreover, many of the other applications of LWE can be made much more efficient through the use of ring-LWE.

A \emph{Zero-Knowledge PCP} (ZK-PCP) is a randomized PCP such that the view of any (perhaps cheating) efficient verifier can be efficiently simulated up to small statistical distance. Kilian, Petrank, and Tardos (STOC '97) constructed ZK-PCPs for all languages in $\NEXP$. Ishai, Mahmoody, and Sahai (TCC '12), motivated by cryptographic applications, revisited the possibility of \emph{efficient} ZK-PCPs for all $L \in \NP$ where the PCP is encoded as a polynomial-size circuit that given a query $i$ returns the $i\th$ symbol of the PCP. Ishai \etal showed that there is no efficient ZK-PCP for $\NP$ with a \emph{non-adaptive} verifier, who prepares all of its PCP queries before seeing any answers, unless $\NP \se \coAM$ and polynomial-time hierarchy collapses. The question of whether \emph{adaptive} verification can lead to efficient ZK-PCPs for $\NP$ remained open. In this work, we resolve this question and show that any language or promise problem with efficient ZK-PCPs must be in $\SZK$ (the class of promise problems with a statistical zero-knowledge \emph{single prover} proof system). Therefore, no $\NP$-complete problem can have an efficient ZK-PCP unless $\NP \se \SZK$ (which also implies $\NP \se \coAM$ and the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses). We prove our result by reducing any promise problem with an efficient ZK-PCP to two instances of the $\CEA$ problem defined and studied by Vadhan (FOCS'04) which is known to be complete for the class $\SZK$.

We investigate the power of physical unclonable functions (PUFs) as a new primitive in cryptographic protocols. Our contributions split into three parts. Firstly, we focus on the realizability of PUF-protocols in a special type of stand-alone setting (the “stand-alone, good PUF setting”) under minimal assumptions. We provide new PUF definitions that require only weak average security properties of the PUF, and prove that these definitions suffice to realize secure PUF-based oblivious transfer (OT), bit commitment (BC) and key exchange (KE) in said setting. Our protocols for OT, BC and KE are partly new, and have certain practicality and security advantages compared to existing schemes. In the second part of the paper, we formally prove that there are very sharp limits on the usability of PUFs for OT and KE {\em beyond} the above stand-alone, good PUF scenario. We introduce two new and realistic attack models, the so-called posterior access model (PAM) and the bad PUF model, and prove several impossibility results in these models. First, OT and KE protocols whose security is solely based on PUFs are generally impossible in the PAM. More precisely, one-time access of an adversary to the PUF after the end of a single protocol (sub-)session makes all previous (sub-)sessions provably insecure. Second, OT whose security is solely based on PUFs is impossible in the bad PUF model, even if only a stand alone execution of the protocol is considered (i.e., even if no adversarial PUF access after the protocol is allowed). Our impossibility proofs do not only hold for the weak PUF definition of the first part of the paper, but even apply if ideal randomness and unpredictability is assumed in the PUF, i.e., if the PUF is modeled as a random permutation oracle. In the third part, we investigate the feasibility of PUF-based bit commitment beyond the stand-alone, good PUF setting. For a number of reasons, this case is more complicated than OT and KE. We first prove that BC is impossible in the bad PUF model if players have got access to the PUF between the commit and the reveal phase. Again, this result holds even if the PUF is “ideal” and modeled as a random permutation oracle. Secondly, we sketch (without proof) two new BC-protocols, which can deal with bad PUFs or with adversarial access between the commit and reveal phase, but not with both. We hope that our results can contribute to a clarification of the usability of PUFs in cryptographic protocols. They show that new hardware properties such as offline certifiability and the erasure of PUF responses would be required in order to make PUFs a broadly applicable cryptographic tool. These features have not yet been realized in practical PUF-implementations and generally seem hard to achieve at low costs. Our findings also show that the question how PUFs can be modeled comprehensively in a UC-setting must be considered at least partly open.

It is a challenge for password authentication protocols using non-tamper resistant smart cards to achieve user anonymity, forward secrecy, immunity to various attacks and high performance at the same time. In DBSec'11, Li et al. showed that Kim and Chung's password-based remote user authentication scheme is vulnerable to various attacks if the smart card is non-tamper resistant. Consequently, an improved version was proposed and claimed that it is secure against smart card security breach attacks. In this paper, however, we will show that Li et al.'s scheme still cannot withstand offline password guessing attack under the non-tamper resistance assumption of the smart card. In addition, their scheme is also vulnerable to denial of service attack and fails to provide user anonymity and forward secrecy. As our main contribution, a robust scheme is presented to cope with the aforementioned defects, while keeping the merits of different password authentication schemes using smart cards. The analysis demonstrates that our scheme meets all the proposed criteria and eliminates several hard security threats that are difficult to be tackled at the same time in previous scholarship.

In recent years, many advances have been made in cryptography, as well as in the performance of communication networks and processors. As a result, many advanced cryptographic protocols are now efficient enough to be considered practical, yet research in the area remains largely theoretical and little work has been done to use these protocols in practice, despite a wealth of potential applications. This paper introduces a simple description language, ZKPDL, and an interpreter for this language. ZKPDL implements non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge, a primitive which has received much attention in recent years. Using our language, a single program may specify the computation required by both the prover and verifier of a zero-knowledge protocol, while our interpreter performs a number of optimizations to lower both computational and space overhead. Our motivating application for ZKPDL has been the efficient implementation of electronic cash. As such, we have used our language to develop a cryptographic library, Cashlib, that provides an interface for using ecash and fair exchange protocols without requiring expert knowledge from the programmer.

We show that an encryption scheme cannot have a simple decryption function and be homomorphic at the same time, even with added noise. Specifically, if a scheme can homomorphically evaluate the majority function, then its decryption cannot be weakly-learnable (in particular, linear), even if large decryption error is allowed. (In contrast, without homomorphism, such schemes do exist and are presumed secure, e.g. based on LPN.) An immediate corollary is that known schemes that are based on the hardness of decoding in the presence of low hamming-weight noise cannot be fully homomorphic. This applies to known schemes such as LPN-based symmetric or public key encryption. Using these techniques, we show that the recent candidate fully homomorphic encryption, suggested by Bogdanov and Lee (ePrint '11, henceforth BL), is insecure. In fact, we show two attacks on the BL scheme: One that uses homomorphism, and another that directly attacks a component of the scheme.

We present efficient Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) and signature schemes under the Symmetric External Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumption in bilinear groups; our IBE scheme also achieves anonymity. In both the IBE and the signature schemes, all parameters have constant numbers of group elements, and are shorter than those of previous constructions based on Decisional Linear (DLIN) assumption. Our constructions use both dual system encryption (Waters, Crypto '09) and dual pairing vector spaces (Okamoto and Takashima, Pairing '08, Asiacrypt '09). Specifically, we show how to adapt the recent DLIN-based instantiations of Lewko (Eurocrypt '12) to the SXDH assumption. To our knowledge, this is the first work to instantiate either dual system encryption or dual pairing vector spaces under the SXDH assumption. Furthermore, our work could be extended to many other Functional Encryption. Particularly, we show how to instantiate our framework to Inner Product Encryption (IPE) and Key-Policy Functional Encryption (KP-FE). All parameters of our constructions are shorter than those of DLIN-based constructions.

The Rainbow Signature Scheme is a non-trivial generalization of the well known Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar (UOV) signature scheme (Eurocrypt '99) minimizing the length of the signatures. By now the Rainbow Band Separation attack is the best key recovery attack known. For some sets of parameters it is even faster than a direct attack on the public key. Unfortunately the available description of the attack is very ad hoc and does not provide deep insights. In this article we provide another view on the Rainbow Band Separation attack using the theory of equivalent keys and a new generalization called good keys. Thereby we generalize the attack into a framework that also includes Reconciliation attacks. We further formally prove the correctness of the attack and show that it does not only perform well on Rainbow, but on all multivariate quadratic (MQ) schemes that suffer from missing cross-terms. We apply our attack and break the Enhanced STS signature scheme and all its variants, as well as the MFE encryption scheme and its variant based on Diophantine equations. In the case of Rainbow and Enhanced TTS we show that parameters have to be chosen carefully and that the remaining efficiency gain over UOV is small. As there is still some room to improve the Band Separation attack, it is not clear whether layer-based MQ-schemes will eventually become superfluous or not.

Secret sharing schemes usually have perfect information theoretic security. This implies that each share must be as large as the secret. In this work we propose a scheme where the shares are smaller, while the security becomes computational. The computational security assumption is hardness of factorization, which is a simple and rather standard assumption in cryptography. In our scheme, the shared secret can only be a set of prime numbers.

We consider secure multi-party computation (MPC) in a setting where the adversary can separately corrupt not only the parties (nodes) but also the communication channels (edges), and can furthermore choose selectively and adaptively which edges or nodes to corrupt. Note that if an adversary corrupts an edge, even if the two nodes that share that edge are honest, the adversary can control the link and thus deliver wrong messages to both players. We consider this question in the information-theoretic setting, and require security against a computationally unbounded adversary. In a fully connected network the above question is simple (and we also provide an answer that is optimal up to a constant factor). What makes the problem more challenging is to consider the case of sparse networks. Partially connected networks are far more realistic than fully connected networks, which led Garay and Ostrovsky [Eurocrypt'08] to formulate the notion of (unconditional) \emph{almost everywhere (a.e.) secure computation} in the node-corruption model, i.e., a model in which not all pairs of nodes are connected by secure channels and the adversary can corrupt some of the nodes (but not the edges). In such a setting, MPC amongst all honest nodes cannot be guaranteed due to the possible poor connectivity of some honest nodes with other honest nodes, and hence some of them must be ``given up'' and left out of the computation. The number of such nodes is a function of the underlying communication graph and the adversarial set of nodes. In this work we introduce the notion of \emph{almost-everywhere secure computation with edge corruptions}, which is exactly the same problem as described above, except that we additionally allow the adversary to completely control some of the communication channels between two correct nodes---i.e., to ``corrupt'' edges in the network. While it is easy to see that an a.e. secure computation protocol for the original node-corruption model is also an a.e. secure computation protocol tolerating edge corruptions (albeit for a reduced fraction of edge corruptions with respect to the bound for node corruptions), no polynomial-time protocol is known in the case where a {\bf constant fraction} of the edges can be corrupted (i.e., the maximum that can be tolerated) and the degree of the network is sub-linear. We make progress on this front, by constructing graphs of degree $O(n^\epsilon)$ (for arbitrary constant $0<\epsilon<1$) on which we can run a.e. secure computation protocols tolerating a constant fraction of adversarial edges. The number of given-up nodes in our construction is $\mu n$ (for some constant $0<\mu<1$ that depends on the fraction of corrupted edges), which is also asymptotically optimal.

Public-key encryption schemes rely for their IND-CPA security on per-message fresh randomness. In practice, randomness may be of poor quality for a variety of reasons, leading to failure of the schemes. Expecting the systems to improve is unrealistic. What we show in this paper is that we can, instead, improve the cryptography to offset the lack of possible randomness. We provide public-key encryption schemes that achieve IND-CPA security when the randomness they use is of high quality, but, when the latter is not the case, rather than breaking completely, they achieve a weaker but still useful notion of security that we call IND-CDA. This hedged public-key encryption provides the best possible security guarantees in the face of bad randomness. We provide simple RO-based ways to make in-practice IND-CPA schemes hedge secure with minimal software changes. We also provide non-RO model schemes relying on lossy trapdoor functions (LTDFs) and techniques from deterministic encryption. They achieve adaptive security by establishing and exploiting the anonymity of LTDFs which we believe is of independent interest.

We propose a fully private fingerprint matching protocol that compares two fingerprints based on the most widely-used minutia-based fingerprint matching algorithm. The protocol enables two parties, each holding a private fingerprint, to find out if their fingerprints belong to the same individual. Unlike previous works, we do not make any simplifying assumption on the matching algorithm or use generic multiparty computation protocols in our constructions. We employ a commonly-used algorithm that works by first comparing minutia pairs from the two fingerprints based on their types, locations, and orientations, and then checking if the number of matching minutia pairs is more than a threshold, and we propose a concrete, scalable, and modular protocol. We prove security against honest-but-curious adversaries and discuss how security against malicious adversaries can be achieved using standard cryptographic techniques. Our protocol is realized using common cryptographic primitives and do not require pairing- or lattice-based cryptography.

We consider applications scenarios where an untrusted aggregator wishes to continually monitor the heavy-hitters across a set of distributed streams. Since each stream can contain sensitive data, such as the purchase history of customers, we wish to guarantee the privacy of each stream, while allowing the untrusted aggregator to accurately detect the heavy hitters and their approximate frequencies. Our protocols are scalable in settings where the volume of streaming data is large, since we guarantee low memory usage and processing overhead by each data source, and low communication overhead between the data sources and the aggregator.

In this paper we show that a large class of diverse problems have a bicomposite structure which makes it possible to solve them with a new type of algorithm called {\it dissection}, which has much better time/memory tradeoffs than previously known algorithms. A typical example is the problem of finding the key of multiple encryption schemes with $r$ independent $n$-bit keys. All the previous error-free attacks required time $T$ and memory $M$ satisfying $TM = 2^{rn}$, and even if ``false negatives'' are allowed, no attack could achieve $TM<2^{3rn/4}$. Our new technique yields the first algorithm which never errs and finds all the possible keys with a smaller product of $TM$, such as $T=2^{4n}$ time and $M=2^{n}$ memory for breaking the sequential execution of r=7 block ciphers. The improvement ratio we obtain increases in an unbounded way as $r$ increases, and if we allow algorithms which can sometimes miss solutions, we can get even better tradeoffs by combining our dissection technique with parallel collision search. To demonstrate the generality of the new dissection technique, we show how to use it in a generic way in order to improve rebound attacks on hash functions and to solve with better time complexities (for small memory complexities) hard combinatorial search problems, such as the well known knapsack problem.

We consider designing broadcast encryption schemes with constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts, achieving chosen-ciphertext security. We first argue that known CPA-to-CCA transforms currently do not yield such schemes. We then propose a scheme, modifying a previous selective CPA secure proposal by Boneh, Gentry, and Waters. Our proposed scheme has constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts and we prove that it is selective chosen-ciphertext secure based on standard assumptions. Our scheme has ciphertexts that are shorter than those of the previous CCA secure proposals. Then we propose a second scheme that provides the functionality of both broadcast encryption and revocation schemes simultaneously using the same set of parameters. Finally we show that it is possible to prove our first scheme adaptive chosen-ciphertext secure under reasonable extensions of the bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent and the knowledge of exponent assumptions. We prove both of these extended assumptions in the generic group model. Hence, our scheme becomes the first to achieve constant-size secret keys and ciphertexts (both asymptotically optimal) and adaptive chosen-ciphertext security at the same time.

We introduce a new characterization of the NP complexity class, called Quadratic Span Programs (QSPs), which is a natural extension of span programs defined by Karchmer and Wigderson. Our main motivation is the construction of succinct arguments of NP-statements that are quick to construct and verify. QSPs seem well-suited for this task, perhaps even better than Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCPs). In 2010, Groth constructed a NIZK argument in the common reference string (CRS) model for Circuit-SAT consisting of only 42 elements in a bilinear group. Interestingly, his argument does not (explicitly) use PCPs. But his scheme has some disadvantages -- namely, the CRS size and prover computation are both quadratic in the circuit size. In 2011, Lipmaa reduced the CRS size to quasi-linear, but with prover computation still quadratic. Using QSPs we construct a NIZK argument in the CRS model for Circuit-SAT consisting of just 7 group elements. The CRS size is linear in the circuit size, and prover computation is quasi-linear, making our scheme seemingly quite practical. (The prover only needs to do a linear number of group operations; the quasi-linear computation is a multipoint evaluation and interpolation.) Our results are complementary to those of Valiant (TCC 2008) and Bitansky et al. (2012), who use "bootstrapping" (recursive composition) of arguments to reduce CRS size and prover and verifier computation. QSPs also provide a crisp mathematical abstraction of some of the techniques underlying Groth's and Lipmaa's constructions.

Impossible differential cryptanalysis is a powerful technique to recover the secret key of block ciphers by exploiting the fact that in block ciphers specific input and output differences are not compatible. This paper introduces a novel tool to search truncated impossible differentials for word-oriented block ciphers with bijective Sboxes. Our tool generalizes the earlier $\mathcal{U}$-method and the UID-method. It allows to reduce the gap between the best impossible differentials found by these methods and the best known differentials found by ad hoc methods that rely on cryptanalytic insights. The time and space complexities of our tool in judging an $r$-round truncated impossible differential are about $O(c\cdot l^4\cdot r^4)$ and $O(c'\cdot l^2\cdot r^2)$ respectively, where $l$ is the number of words in the plaintext and $c$, $c'$ are constants depending on the machine and the block cipher. In order to demonstrate the strength of our tool, we show that it does not only allow to automatically rediscover the longest truncated impossible differentials of many word-oriented block ciphers, but also finds new results. It independently rediscovers all 72 known truncated impossible differentials on 9-round CLEFIA. In addition, finds new truncated impossible differentials for AES, ARIA, Camellia without FL and FL$^{-1}$ layers, E2, LBlock, MIBS and Piccolo. Although our tool does not improve the lengths of impossible differentials for existing block ciphers, it helps to close the gap between the best known results of previous tools and those of manual cryptanalysis.

Verifiable random functions (VRF) and selectively-convertible undeniable signature (SCUS) schemes were proposed independently in the literature. In this paper, we observe that they are tightly related. This directly yields several deterministic SCUS schemes based on existing VRF constructions. In addition, we create a new probabilistic SCUS scheme, which is very compact. The confirmation and disavowal protocols of these SCUS are efficient, and can be run either sequentially, concurrently, or arbitrarily. These protocols are based on what we call zero-knowledge protocols for generalized DDH and non-DDH, which are of independent interest.

A perfect algebraic immune function is a Boolean function with perfect immunity against algebraic and fast algebraic attacks. The main results are that for a perfect algebraic immune balanced function the number of input variables is one more than a power of two; for a perfect algebraic immune unbalanced function the number of input variables is a power of two. Also the Carlet-Feng functions on $2^s+1$ variables and the modified Carlet-Feng functions on $2^s$ variables are shown to be perfect algebraic immune functions. Furthermore, it is shown that a perfect algebraic immune function behaves good against probabilistic algebraic attacks as well.

An unresolved problem in research on authenticated key exchange (AKE) is to construct a secure protocol against advanced attacks such as key compromise impersonation and maximal exposure attacks without relying on random oracles. HMQV, a state of the art AKE protocol, achieves both efficiency and the strong security proposed by Krawczyk (we call it the CK+ model), which includes resistance to advanced attacks. However, the security proof is given under the random oracle model. We propose a generic construction of AKE from a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). The construction is based on a chosen-ciphertext secure KEM, and the resultant AKE protocol is CK+ secure in the standard model. The construction gives the first CK+ secure AKE protocols based on the hardness of integer factorization problem, code-based problems, or learning problems with errors. In addition, instantiations under the Diffie-Hellman assumption or its variant can be proved to have strong security without non-standard assumptions such as $\pi$PRF and KEA1. Furthermore, we extend the CK+ model to identity-based (called the id-CK+ model), and propose a generic construction of identity-based AKE (ID-AKE) based on identity-based KEM, which satisfies id-CK+ security. The construction leads first strongly secure ID-AKE protocols under the hardness of integer factorization problem, or learning problems with errors.

It has been pointed out that an $n$-variable Boolean function $f$ has optimal resistance against fast algebraic attacks if and only if there does not exist a nonzero $n$-variable Boolean function $g$ of degree lower than $\frac{n}{2}$ such that $fg=h$ and $\mathrm{deg}(g)+\mathrm{deg}(h)<n$. In this corresponding, we show that there does not exist an $n$-variable Boolean function with optimal resistance against fast algebraic attacks for most values of $n$.

In the last few years, the need to design new cryptographic hash functions has led to the intense study of when desired hash multi-properties are preserved or assured under compositions and domain extensions. In this area, it is important to identify the exact notions and provide often complex proofs of the resulting properties. Getting this analysis right (as part of provable security studies) is, in fact, analogous to cryptanalysis. We note that it is important and quite subtle to get indeed the ``right'' notions and properties, and ``right'' proofs in this relatively young area. Specifically, the security notion we deal with is ``adaptive preimage resistance'' (apr) which was introduced by Lee and Park as an extension of ``preimage resistance'' (pr). In Eurocrypt 2010, in turn, Lee and Steinberger already used the apr security notion to prove ``preimage awareness'' and ``indifferentiable security'' of their new double-piped mode of operation. They claimed that if $H^P$ is collision-resistant (cr) and apr, then $F(M)=\mathcal{R}(H^P(M))$ is indifferentiable from a variable output length (VIL) random oracle $\mathcal{F}$, where $H^P$ is a function based on an ideal primitive $P$ and $\mathcal{R}$ is a fixed input length (FIL) random oracle. However, there are some limitations in their claim, because they considered only indifferentiability security notion in the information-theoretic adversarial model, not in the computation-theoretic adversarial model. As we show in the current work, the above statement is \textit{not} correct in the computation-theoretic adversarial model. First in our studies, we give a counterexample to the above. Secondly, we describe \textit{a new requirement} on $H^P$ (called ``admissibility'') so that the above statement is correct even in the computation-theoretic adversarial model. Thirdly, we show that apr is, in fact, not a strengthened notion of preimage resistance. Fourthly, we explain the relation between preimage awareness and cr+apr+(our new requirement) in the computation-theoretic adversarial model. Finally, we show that a polynomial-based mode of operation \cite{LeSt10} satisfies our new requirement; namely, the polynomial-based mode of operation with fixed-input-length random oracles is indifferentiable from a variable-input-length random oracle in the computation-theoretic adversarial model.

In Europe and North America, the most widely used stream cipher to ensure privacy and con&#64257;dentiality of conversations in GSM mobile phones is the A5/1. In this paper, we present a new attack on the A5/1 stream cipher with an average time complexity of $2^(48.5)$, which is much less than the brute-force attack with a complexity of $2^(64)$ . The attack has a $100\%$ success rate and requires about 5.65GB storage. We provide a detailed description of our new attack along with its implementation and results.

Hummingbird is a lightweight encryption and message authentication primitive published in RISC’09 and WLC’10. In FSE’11, Markku-Juhani O.Saarinen presented a differential divide-and-conquer method which has complexity upper bounded by 264 operations and requires processing of few megabytes of chosen messages under two related nonces (IVs). The improved version, Hummingbird-2, was presented in RFIDSec 2011. Based on the idea of differential collision, this paper discovers some weaknesses of the round function WD16 combining with key loading algorithm and we propose a related-key chosen-IV attack which can recover the full secret key. Under 24 pairs of related keys, the 128 bit initial key can be recovered, with the computational complexity of O(232.6) and data complexity of O(232.6). The result shows that the Hummingbird-2 cipher can’t resist related key attack.

The Grøstl hash function is one of the 5 final round candidates of the SHA-3 competition hosted by NIST. In this paper, we study the preimage resistance of the Grøstl hash function. We propose pseudo preimage attacks on Grøstl hash function for both 256-bit and 512-bit versions, i.e. we need to choose the initial value in order to invert the hash function. Pseudo preimage attack on 5(out of 10)-round Grøstl-256 has a complexity of $(2^{244.85},2^{230.13})$ (in time and memory) and pseudo preimage attack on 8(out of 14)-round Grøstl-512 has a complexity of $(2^{507.32},2^{507.00})$. To the best of our knowledge, our attacks are the first (pseudo) preimage attacks on round-reduced Grøstl hash function, including its compression function and output transformation. These results are obtained by a variant of meet-in-the-middle preimage attack framework by Aoki and Sasaki. We also improve the time complexities of the preimage attacks against 5-round Whirlpool and 7-round AES hashes by Sasaki in FSE~2011.

Using homomorphic encryption and secure multiparty computation, cloud servers may perform regularly structured computation on encrypted data, without access to decryption keys. However, prior approaches for programming on encrypted data involve restrictive models such as boolean circuits, or standard languages that do not guarantee secure execution of all expressible programs. We present an expressive core language for secure cloud computing, with primitive types, conditionals, standard functional features, mutable state, and a secrecy preserving form of general recursion. This language, which uses an augmented information-flow type system to prevent control-flow leakage, allows programs to be developed and tested using conventional means, then exported to a variety of secure cloud execution platforms, dramatically reducing the amount of specialized knowledge needed to write secure code. We present a Haskell-based implementation and prove that cloud implementations based on secret sharing, homomorphic encryption, or other alternatives satisfying our general definition meet precise security requirements.

We initiate the study of unique group signature such that signatures of the same message by the same user will always have a large common component (i.e., unique identifier). It enables an efficient detection algorithm, revealing the identities of illegal users, which is fundamentally different from previous primitives. We present a number of unique group signature schemes (without random oracles) under a variety of security models that extend the standard security models of ordinary group signatures. Our work is a beneficial step towards mitigating the well-known group signature paradox, and it also has many other interesting applications and efficiency implications.

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are applied widely a variety of areas such as real-time traffic monitoring, measurement of seismic activity, wildlife monitoring and so on. User authentication in WSNs is a critical security issue due to their unattended and hostile deployment in the field. In 2010, Yuan et al. proposed the first biometric-based user authentication scheme for WSNs. However, Yoon et al. pointed out that Yuan et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the insider attack, user impersonation attack, GW-node impersonation attack and sensor node impersonate attack. To improve security, Yoon et al.’s proposed an improved scheme and claimed their scheme could withstand various attacks. Unfortunately, we will show Yoon et al.’s scheme is vulnerable to the denial-of-service attack (DoS) and the sensor node impersonation attack. To overcome the weaknesses in Yoon et al.’s scheme, we propose a new biometric-based user authentication scheme for WSNs. The analysis shows our scheme is more suitable for practical applications.

Similarity coefficients play an important role in many application aspects. Recently, a privacy-preserving similarity coefficients protocol for binary data was proposed by Wong and Kim (Computers and Mathematics with Application 2012). In this paper, we show that their protocol is not secure, even in the semi-honest model, since the client can retrieve the input of the server without deviating from the protocol. Also we propose a secure similarity coefficients computation in the presence of malicious adversaries, and prove it using the standard simulation-based security definitions for secure two-party computation. We also discuss several extensions of our protocol for settling other problems. Technical tools in our protocol include zero-knowledge proofs and distributed ElGamal encryption.

Anonymous receiver encryption is an important cryptographic primitive. It can protect the privacy of the receiver. In 2010, Fan \emph{et al} proposed an anonymous multi-receiver ID-based encryption by using Lagrange interpolating polynomial. Recently, Wang \emph{et al} showed that Fan \emph{et al}'s scheme satisfied anonymity of the receivers. Then they provided an improved scheme to fix it and showed that the improved scheme was secure. Unfortunately, we pointed out that Wang \emph{et al}'s improved scheme did't satisfy the receiver's anonymity by analyzing the security of the scheme yet. After analyzing the reason to produce such flaw, we give an improved method to repair it and show that our improved scheme satisfies the receiver's anonymity, and the improved scheme has advantage over Wang \emph{et al}'s scheme in terms of computational cost.

Signcryption schemes provide an efficient messaging system for data that needs to be sent with data confidentiality, data integrity and data origin authentication. However, the bandwidth overhead for the use of signcryption in a network in which a large number of messages need to be sent may be high. Motivated by aggregate signature schemes, we propose the concept of an aggregate signcryption scheme. An aggregate signcryption scheme allows distinct signcryption ciphertexts intended for the same recipient to be merged into a single signcryption ciphertext of smaller size without losing any of their security guarantees. This has the potential to provide significant bandwidth savings. We propose security models for this scheme, analyse the trivial generic constructions, propose an efficient new scheme, and analyse the bandwidth requirements of these schemes for a practical distributed database application.

In 2004, an algorithm is introduced to solve the DLP for elliptic curves defined over a non prime finite field $\F_{q^n}$. One of the main steps of this algorithm requires decomposing points of the curve $E(\F_{q^n})$ with respect to a factor base, this problem is denoted PDP. In this paper, we will apply this algorithm to the case of Edwards curves, the well-known family of elliptic curves that allow faster arithmetic as shown by Bernstein and Lange. More precisely, we show how to take advantage of some symmetries of twisted Edwards and twisted Jacobi intersections curves to gain an exponential factor \(2^{\omega (n-1)}\) to solve the corresponding PDP where $\omega$ is the exponent in the complexity of multiplying two dense matrices. Practical experiments supporting the theoretical result are also given. For instance, the complexity of solving the ECDLP for twisted Edwards curves defined over $\F_{q^5}$, with \(q\approx2^{64}\), is supposed to be $\sim$ $2^{160}$ operations in $E(\F_{q^5})$ using generic algorithms compared to \(2^{130}\) operations (multiplication of two $32$-bits words) with our method. For these parameters the PDP is intractable with the original algorithm. The main tool to achieve these results relies on the use of the symmetries and the quasi-homogeneous structure induced by these symmetries during the polynomial system solving step. Also, we use a recent work on a new algorithm for the change of ordering of Gröbner basis which provides a better heuristic complexity of the total solving process.