We introduce BICYCL an Open Source C++ library that implements arithmetic in the ideal class groups of imaginary quadratic fields, together with a set of cryptographic primitives based on class groups. It is available at https://gite.lirmm.fr/crypto/bicycl under GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version. BICYCL provides significant speed-ups on the implementation of the arithmetic of class groups. Concerning cryptographic applications, BICYCL is orders of magnitude faster than any previous pilot implementation of the CL linearly encryption scheme, making it faster than Paillier’s encryption scheme at any security level. Linearly homomorphic encryption is the core of many multi-party computation protocols, sometimes involving a huge number of encryptions and homomorphic evaluations: class group-based protocols become the best solution in terms of bandwidth and computational efficiency to rely upon.

Biometric databases collect people’s information and allow users to perform proximity searches (finding all records within a bounded distance of the query point) with few cryptographic protections. This work studies proximity searchable encryption applied to the iris biometric. Prior work proposed inner product functional encryption as a technique to build proximity biometric databases (Kim et al., SCN 2018). This is because binary Hamming distance is computable using an inner product. This work identifies and closes two gaps in using inner product encryption for biometric search: 1. Biometrics naturally use long vectors often with thousands of bits. Many inner product encryption schemes generate a random matrix whose dimension scales with vector size and have to invert this matrix. As a result, setup is not feasible on commodity hardware unless we reduce the dimension of the vectors. We explore state-of-the-art techniques to reduce the dimension of the iris biometric and show that all known techniques harm the accuracy of the resulting system. That is, for small vector sizes multiple unrelated biometrics are returned in the search. For length 64 vectors, at a 90% probability of the searched biometric being returned, 10% of stored records are erroneously returned on average. Rather than changing the feature extractor, we introduce a new cryptographic technique that allows one to generate several smaller matrices. For vectors of length 1024 this reduces the time to run setup from 23 days to 4 minutes. At this vector length, for the same 90% probability of the searched biometric being returned, .02% of stored records are erroneously returned on average. 2. Prior inner product approaches leak distance between the query and all stored records. We refer to these as distance-revealing. We show a natural construction from function hiding, secret-key, predicate, inner product encryption (Shen, Shi, and Waters, TCC 2009). Our construction only leaks access patterns and which returned records are the same distance from the query. We refer to this scheme as distance-hiding. We implement and benchmark one distance-revealing and one distance-hiding scheme. The distance-revealing scheme can search a small (hundreds) database in 4 minutes while the distance-hiding scheme is not yet practical, requiring 3.5 hours. As a technical contribution of independent interest, we show that our scheme can be instantiated using symmetric pairing groups reducing the cost of search by roughly a factor of three. We believe this analysis extends to other schemes based on projections to a random linear map and its inverse analyzed in the generic group model.

DMTF is a standards organization by major industry players in IT infrastructure including AMD, Alibaba, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, and NVIDIA, which aims to enable interoperability, e.g., including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. It is currently standardizing a security protocol called SPDM, which aims to secure communication over the wire and to enable device attestation, notably also explicitly catering for communicating hardware components. The SPDM protocol inherits requirements and design ideas from IETF’s TLS 1.3. However, its state machines and transcript handling are substantially different and more complex. While architecture, specification, and open-source libraries of the current versions of SPDM are publicly available, these include no significant security analysis of any kind. In this work we develop the first formal models of the three modes of the SPDM protocol version 1.2.1, and formally analyze their main security properties.

Differential obliviousness (DO) access pattern privacy is a privacy notion which guarantees that the access patterns of a program satisfy differential privacy. Differential obliviousness was studied in a sequence of recent works as a relaxation of full obliviousness. Earlier works showed that DO not only allows us to circumvent the logarithmic-overhead barrier of fully oblivious algorithms, in many cases, it also allows us to achieve polynomial speedup over full obliviousness, since it avoids "padding to the worst-case" behavior of fully oblivious algorithms. Despite the promises of differential obliviousness (DO), a significant barrier that hinders its broad application is the lack of composability. In particular, when we apply one DO algorithm to the output of another DO algorithm, the composed algorithm may no longer be DO (with reasonable parameters). More specifically, the outputs of the first DO algorithm on two neighboring inputs may no longer be neighboring, and thus we cannot directly benefit from the DO guarantee of the second algorithm. In this work, we are the first to explore a theory of composition for differentially oblivious algorithms. We propose a refinement of the DO notion called $(\epsilon, \delta)$-neighbor-preserving-DO, or $(\epsilon, \delta)$-NPDO for short, and we prove that our new notion indeed provides nice compositional guarantees. In this way, the algorithm designer can easily track the privacy loss when composing multiple DO algorithms. We give several example applications to showcase the power and expressiveness of our new NPDO notion. One of these examples is a result of independent interest: we use the compositional framework to prove an optimal privacy amplification theorem for the differentially oblivious shuffle model. In other words, we show that for a class of distributed differentially private mechanisms in the shuffle-model, one can replace the perfectly secure shuffler with a DO shuffler, and nonetheless enjoy almost the same privacy amplification enabled by a shuffler.

In this paper, we perform a systematic study of functions $f: \mathbb{Z}_{p^e} \to \mathbb{Z}_{p^e}$ and categorize those functions that can be represented by a polynomial with integer coefficients. More specifically, we cover the following properties: necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of an integer polynomial representation; computation of such a representation; and the complete set of equivalent polynomials that represent a given function. As an application, we use the newly developed theory to speed up bootstrapping for the BGV and BFV homomorphic encryption schemes. The crucial ingredient underlying our improvements is the existence of null polynomials, i.e. non-zero polynomials that evaluate to zero in every point. We exploit the rich algebraic structure of these null polynomials to find better representations of the digit extraction function, which is the main bottleneck in bootstrapping. As such, we obtain sparse polynomials that have 50% fewer coefficients than the original ones. In addition, we propose a new method to decompose digit extraction as a series of polynomial evaluations. This lowers the time complexity from $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{pe})$ to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{p}\sqrt[^4]{e})$ for digit extraction modulo $p^e$, at the cost of a slight increase in multiplicative depth. Overall, our implementation in HElib shows a significant speedup of a factor up to 2.6 over the state-of-the-art.

We unify the state-of-the-art bootstrapping algorithms for BGV and BFV in a single framework, and show that both schemes can be bootstrapped with identical complexity. This result corrects a claim by Chen and Han (Eurocrypt 2018) that BFV is more efficient to bootstrap than BGV. We also fix an error in their optimized procedure for power-of-two cyclotomics, which occurs for some parameter sets. Our analysis is simpler, yet more general than earlier work, in that it simultaneously covers both BGV and BFV. Furthermore, we also design and implement a high-level open source software library for bootstrapping in the Magma Computer Algebra System. It is the first library to support both BGV and BFV bootstrapping in full generality, with all recent techniques (including the above fixes) and trade-offs.

We introduce a new class of efficient transparent interactive zero knowledge argument system based on the input transformation concept. The idea of the input transformation concept is converting circuit inputs in Pedersen commitment form to linear polynomials in integer form so that verifiers can use standard integer operations to compute and verify the circuit output. While the verifier runtime of our protocol is linear to the size of the circuit, its practical performance compares favorably against state-of-the-art transparent zero-knowledge protocols with sub-linear verifier work. We therefore claim that our protocol achieves practical succinctness. The input transformation concept replaces the constraint system often required in zero knowledge protocols. Once inputs are transformed, they can be used as inputs to a circuit that computes the output directly from inputs. This direct computation mechanism eliminates the need of a front end encoder to translate NP relation $R$ to some zero-knowledge friendly representation $\hat{R}$ (such as R1CS constraint system) before the relation can be converted to a proof system, making our protocol relatively easy to implement and likely easier to use compared to constraint system based protocols. The asymptotic cost of our protocol is $O (m_p \text{ log } m_p)$ for prover work, $O (n)$ for verifier work, and $ O({m_p}^{1/2})$ for communication cost, where $n$ stands for the total number of all operations in a circuit and $m_p$ stands for the total number of multiplications performed on the path that leads to the circuit output (e.g. for a circuit with $n=2^{20}$ sequential multiplications and one output, $m_p = n$). Specifically, when running a circuit with $2^{20}$ sequential multiplication gates with 640 input bits on a single thread, the prover runtime of our protocol is $6$ seconds, the verifier runtime is $23$ ms and the communication cost is approximately $59$ kbs, which shows significant improvement over the current approaches in verifier runtime while keeping the prover runtime and communication cost competitive with current state of art. In this paper, we will first introduce a base version of our protocol in which the prover work is dominated by $O ({m_p}^2)$ field operations. Although field operations are significantly faster than group operations, they become increasingly expensive as $m_p$ value gets large. So in the follow up sections, we will introduce a mechanism to apply number theoretic transformation (NTT) to bring down the prover runtime to $O (m_p \text{ log } m_p)$.

In this paper, we design secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols in the asynchronous communication setting with optimal resilience. Our protocols are secure against a computationally-unbounded malicious adversary, characterized by an adversary structure $\mathcal{Z}$, which enumerates all possible subsets of potentially corrupt parties. Our protocols incur a communication of $\mathcal{O}(|\mathcal{Z}|^2)$ and $\mathcal{O}(|\mathcal{Z}|)$ bits per multiplication for perfect and statistical security respectively. These are the first protocols with this communication complexity, as such protocols were known only in the synchronous communication setting (Hirt and Tschudi, ASIACRYPT 2013).

Mass surveillance can be more easily achieved leveraging fear and desire of the population to feel protected while affected by devastating events. Indeed, in such scenarios, governments can adopt exceptional measures that limit civil rights, usually receiving large support from citizens. The COVID-19 pandemic is currently affecting daily life of many citizens in the world. People are forced to stay home for several weeks, unemployment rates quickly increase, uncertainty and sadness generate an impelling desire to join any government effort in order to stop as soon as possible the spread of the virus. Following recommendations of epidemiologists, governments are proposing the use of smartphone applications to allow automatic contact tracing of citizens.Such systems can be an effective way to defeat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus since they allow to gain time in identifying potentially new infected persons that should therefore be in quarantine. This raises the natural question of whether this form of automatic contact tracing can be a subtle weapon for governments to violate privacy inside new and more sophisticated mass surveillance programs. In order to preserve privacy and at the same time to contribute to the containment of the pandemic, several research partnerships are proposing privacy-preserving contact tracing systems where pseudonyms are updated periodically to avoid linkability attacks. A core component of such systems is Bluetooth low energy (BLE, for short) a technology that allows two smartphones to detect that they are in close proximity. Among such systems there are some proposals like DP-3T, MIT-PACT, UW-PACT and the Apple&Google exposure notification system that through a decentralized approach claim to guarantee better privacy properties compared to other centralized approaches (e.g., PEPP-PT-NTK, PEPP-PT-ROBERT). On the other hand, advocates of centralized approaches claim that centralization gives to epidemiologists more useful data, therefore allowing to take more effective actions to defeat the virus. Motivated by Snowden's revelations about previous attempts of governments to realize mass surveillance programs, in this paper we first analyze mass surveillance attacks that leverage weaknesses of automatic contact tracing systems. We focus in particular on the DP-3T system (still our analysis is significant also for MIT-PACT and Apple&Google systems). Based on recent literature and new findings, we discuss how a government can exploit the use of the DP-3T system to successfully mount privacy attacks as part of a mass surveillance program. Interestingly, we show that privacy issues in the DP-3T system are not inherent in BLE-based contact tracing systems. Indeed, we propose two systems named and $\textsf{Pronto-C2}$ that, in our view, enjoy a much better resilience with respect to mass surveillance attacks still relying on BLE. Both systems are based on a paradigm shift: instead of asking smartphones to send keys to the Big Brother (this corresponds to the approach of the DP-3T system), we construct a decentralized BLE-based ACT system where smartphones anonymously and confidentially talk to each other in the presence of the Big Brother. Unlike $\textsf{Pronto-B2}$, $\textsf{Pronto-C2}$ relies on Diffie-Hellman key exchange providing better privacy but also requiring a bulletin board to translate a BLE beacon identifier into a group element. Both systems can optionally be implemented using Blockchain technology, offering complete transparency and resilience through full decentralization, therefore being more appealing for citizens. Only through a large participation of citizens contact tracing systems can be really useful to defeat COVID-19, and our proposal goes straight in this direction.

In this paper we revise the ideas of our previous work `Lin2-Xor lemma and Log-size Linkable Threshold Ring Signature' and introduce another lemma called Lin2-Choice, which extends the Lin2-Xor lemma. Using the Lin2-Choice lemma we create a compact general-purpose trusted-setup-free log-size linkable threshold ring signature with strong security model. The signature size is 2log(n+1)+3l+1, where n is the ring size and l is the threshold. It is composed of several public coin arguments that are special honest verifier zero-knowledge and have computational witness-extended emulation. We use an arbitrary vector commitment argument as the base building block, providing the possibility to use any of its specific implementations that have the above properties. Also, we present an extended version of our signature of size 2log(n+l+1)+7l+4, which simultaneously proves balance and allows for easy multipary signing. All this is constructed in a prime order group without bilinear parings under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model.

Secret sharing is an essential tool for many distributed applications, including distributed key generation and multiparty computation. For many practical applications, we would like to tolerate network churn, meaning participants can dynamically enter and leave the pool of protocol participants as they please. Such protocols, called Dynamic-committee Proactive Secret Sharing (DPSS), have recently been studied; however, existing DPSS protocols do not gracefully handle faults: the presence of even one unexpectedly slow node can often slow down the whole protocol by a factor of $O(n)$. In this work, we explore optimally fault-tolerant asynchronous DPSS that is not slowed down by crash faults and even handles byzantine faults while maintaining the same performance. We first introduce the first high-threshold DPSS, which offers favorable characteristics relative to prior non-synchronous works in the presence of faults while simultaneously supporting higher privacy thresholds. We then batch-amortize this scheme along with a parallel non-high-threshold scheme which achieves optimal bandwidth characteristics. We implement our schemes and demonstrate that they can compete with prior work in best-case performance while outperforming it in non-optimal settings.

The FX construction provides a way to increase the effective key length of a block cipher E. We prove security of a tweakable version of the FX construction in the post-quantum setting, i.e., against a quantum attacker given only classical access to the secretly keyed construction while retaining quantum access to E, a setting that seems to be the most relevant one for real-world applications. We then use our results to prove post-quantum security—in the same model—of the (plain) FX construction, Elephant (a finalist of NIST's lightweight cryptography standardization effort), and Chaskey (an ISO-standardized lightweight MAC).

In recent years, lattice-based secure multi-party computation (MPC) has seen a rise in popularity and is used more and more in large scale applications like privacy-preserving cloud computing, electronic voting, or auctions. Many of these applications come with the following high security requirements: a computation result should be publicly verifiable, with everyone being able to identify a malicious party and hold it accountable, and a malicious party should not be able to corrupt the computation, force a protocol restart, or block honest parties or an honest third-party (client) that provided private inputs from receiving a correct result. The protocol should guarantee verifiability and accountability even if all protocol parties are malicious. While some protocols address one or two of these often essential security features, we present the first publicly verifiable and accountable, and (up to a threshold) robust SPDZ-like MPC protocol without restart. We propose protocols for accountable and robust online, offline, and setup computations. We adapt and partly extend the lattice-based commitment scheme by Baum et al. (SCN 2018) as well as other primitives like ZKPs. For the underlying commitment scheme and the underlying BGV encryption scheme we determine ideal parameters. We give a performance evaluation of our protocols and compare them to state-of-the-art protocols both with and without our target security features: public accountability, public verifiability and robustness.

Typical lattice-based cryptosystems are commonly believed to resist multi-target attacks. For example, the New Hope proposal stated that it avoids "all-for-the-price-of-one attacks". An ACM CCS 2021 paper from Duman–Hövelmanns–Kiltz–Lyubashevsky–Seiler stated that "we can show that Adv_{PKE}^{IND-CPA} ≈ Adv_{PKE}^{(n,q_C)-IND-CPA} for "lattice-based schemes" such as Kyber, i.e. that one-out-of-many-target IND-CPA is as difficult to break as single-target IND-CPA, assuming "the hardness of MLWE as originally defined for the purpose of worst-case to average-case reductions". Meanwhile NIST expressed concern regarding multi-target attacks against non-lattice cryptosystems. This paper quantifies the asymptotic impact of multiple ciphertexts per public key upon standard analyses of known primal lattice attacks, assuming existing heuristics. The qualitative conclusions are that typical lattice PKEs asymptotically degrade in heuristic multi-ciphertext IND-CPA security as the number of ciphertexts increases. These PKE attacks also imply multi-ciphertext IND-CCA2 attacks against typical constructions of lattice KEMs. Quantitatively, the asymptotic heuristic security degradation is exponential in Θ(n) for decrypting many ciphertexts, cutting a constant fraction out of the total number of bits of security, and exponential in Θ(n/log n) for decrypting one out of many ciphertexts, for conservative cryptosystem parameters. This shows a contradiction between the existing heuristics and the idea that multi-target security matches single-target security. Also, whether or not the existing heuristics are correct, (1) there are flaws in the claim of an MLWE-based proof of tight multi-target security, and (2) there is a 2^{88}-guess attack breaking one out of 2^{40} ciphertexts for a FrodoKEM-640 public key, disproving FrodoKEM's claim that "the FrodoKEM parameter sets comfortably match their target security levels with a large margin".

Handwritten assembly is a widely used tool in the development of high-performance cryptography: By providing full control over instruction selection, instruction scheduling, and register allocation, highest performance can be unlocked. On the flip side, developing handwritten assembly is not only time-consuming, but the artifacts produced also tend to be difficult to review and maintain – threatening their suitability for use in practice. In this work, we present SLOTHY (Super (Lazy) Optimization of Tricky Handwritten assemblY), a framework for the automated super optimization of assembly with respect to instruction scheduling, register allocation, and loop optimization (software pipelining): With SLOTHY, the developer controls and focuses on algorithm and instruction selection, providing a readable “base” implementation in assembly, while SLOTHY automatically finds optimal and traceable instruction scheduling and register allocation strategies with respect to a model of the target (micro)architecture. We demonstrate the flexibility of SLOTHY by instantiating it with models of the Cortex-M55, Cortex-M85, Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A72 microarchitectures, implementing the Armv8.1-M+Helium and AArch64+Neon architectures. We use the resulting tools to optimize three workloads: First, for Cortex-M55 and Cortex-M85, a radix-4 complex Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) in fixed-point and floating-point arithmetic, fundamental in Digital Signal Processing. Second, on Cortex-M55, Cortex-M85, Cortex-A55 and Cortex-A72, the instances of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT) underlying CRYSTALS-Kyber and CRYSTALS-Dilithium, two recently announced winners of the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography standardization project. Third, for Cortex-A55, the scalar multiplication for the elliptic curve key exchange X25519. The SLOTHY-optimized code matches or beats the performance of prior art in all cases, while maintaining compactness and readability.

Private Information Retrieval (PIR) addresses the cryptographic problem of hiding sensitive database queries from database operators. In practice, PIR schemes face the challenges of either high computational costs or restrictive security assumptions, resulting in a barrier to deployment. In this work, we introduce Assisted Private Information Retrieval (APIR), a new PIR framework for keyword-value databases generalizing multi-server PIR and relaxing its database consistency assumption. We propose the construction of Synchronized APIR, an efficient hybrid APIR scheme combining black-box single-server PIR and non-black-box multi-server PIR. To evaluate the scheme, we apply it to a proof-of-concept privacy-preserving DNS application. The experiment results demonstrate that Synchronized APIR outperforms the baseline single-server PIR protocol in communication and computational cost after the initial one-time cost.

We propose Flashproofs, a new type of efficient special honest verifier zero-knowledge arguments with a transparent setup in the discrete logarithm (DL) setting. First, we put forth gas-efficient range arguments that achieve $O(N^{\frac{2}{3}})$ communication cost, and involve $O(N^{\frac{2}{3}})$ group exponentiations for verification and a slightly sub-linear number of group exponentiations for proving with respect to the range $[0, 2^N-1]$, where $N$ is the bit length of the range. For typical confidential transactions on blockchain platforms supporting smart contracts, verifying our range arguments consumes only 234K and 315K gas for 32-bit and 64-bit ranges, which are comparable to 220K gas incurred by verifying the most efficient zkSNARK with a trusted setup (EUROCRYPT 16) at present. Besides, the aggregation of multiple arguments can yield further efficiency improvement. Second, we present polynomial evaluation arguments based on the techniques of Bayer & Groth (EUROCRYPT 13). We provide two zero-knowledge arguments, which are optimised for lower-degree ($D \in [3, 2^9]$) and higher-degree ($D > 2^9$) polynomials, where $D$ is the polynomial degree. Our arguments yield a non-trivial improvement in the overall efficiency. Notably, the number of group exponentiations for proving drops from $8\log D$ to $3(\log D+\sqrt{\log D})$. The communication cost and the number of group exponentiations for verification decrease from $7\log D$ to $(\log D + 3\sqrt{\log D})$. To the best of our knowledge, our arguments instantiate the most communication-efficient arguments of membership and non-membership in the DL setting among those not requiring trusted setups. More importantly, our techniques enable a significantly asymptotic improvement in the efficiency of communication and verification (group exponentiations) from $O(\log D)$ to $O(\sqrt{\log D})$ when multiple arguments satisfying different polynomials with the same degree and inputs are aggregated.

Sharding is a promising approach to scale permissionless blockchains. In a sharded blockchain, participants are split into groups, called shards, and each shard only executes part of the workloads. Despite its wide adoption in permissioned systems, transferring such success to permissionless blockchains is still an open problem. In permissionless networks, participants may join and leave the system at any time, making load balancing challenging. In addition, the adversary in such networks can launch the single-shard takeover attack by compromising a single shard’s consensus. To address these issues, participants should be securely and dynamically allocated into different shards. However, the protocol capturing such functionality – which we call shard allocation – is overlooked. In this paper, we study shard allocation protocols for permissionless blockchains. We formally define the shard allocation protocol and propose an evaluation framework. We apply the framework to evaluate the shard allocation subprotocols of seven state-of-the-art sharded blockchains, and show that none of them is fully correct or achieves satisfactory performance. We attribute these deficiencies to their extreme choices between two performance metrics: self-balance and operability. We observe and prove the fundamental trade-off between these two metrics, and identify a new property memory-dependency that enables parameterisation over this trade-off. Based on these insights, we propose Wormhole, a correct and efficient shard allocation protocol with minimal security assumptions and parameterisable self-balance and operability. We implement Wormhole and evaluate its overhead and performance metrics in a network with 128 shards and 32768 nodes. The results show that Wormhole introduces little overhead, achieves consistent self-balance and operability with our theoretical analysis, and allows the system to recover quickly from load imbalance.

The discrete logarithm problem forms the basis of security of many practical schemes. When the number of bases is more than one, the problem of finding out the exponents is known as the multi- dimensional discrete logarithm problem. We focus on solving this problem in groups modulo some prime p. Gaudry and Schost proposed a low-memory algorithm for this problem which performs a pseudo-random walk in the group. We have proposed an improvement to the Gaudry-Schost algorithm. Our modification is valid for any dimension and does not put any additional restrictions. To the best of our knowledge, experimentation of such a technique was not done before for dimension D > 1. We implemented the new algorithm in subgroups of Z ∗ p , relevant in the context of electronic voting and cash schemes. Our algorithm showed a substantial decrease in run-time. For example, on a single core of Intel Xeon E7-8890 @ 2.50 GHz our algorithm required 12 times less time than the Gaudry-Schost algorithm when implemented on 2076 bit-sized groups. Moreover, experiments indicate that the factor by which the time requirement reduces when compared with the Gaudry- Schost algorithm is directly proportional to the size of the group. This leads to better practical behavior of the algorithm over such cryptographically important groups. We also point out a few more optimizations that can be adopted along with future applications for other scenarios. One of the main aspects of our work is the listing of the improvements in multi-dimensional log computation that may happen in such prime-ordered groups.

Given a network of nodes with certain communication and computation capacities, what is the maximum rate at which a blockchain can run securely? We study this question for proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) longest chain protocols under a ‘bounded bandwidth’ model which captures queuing and processing delays due to high block rate relative to capacity, bursty release of adversarial blocks, and in PoS, spamming due to equivocations. We demonstrate that security of both PoW and PoS longest chain, when operating at capacity, requires carefully designed scheduling policies that correctly prioritize which blocks are processed first, as we show attack strategies tailored to such policies. In PoS, we show an attack exploiting equivocations, which highlights that the throughput of the PoS longest chain protocol with a broad class of scheduling policies must decrease as the desired security error probability decreases. At the same time, through an improved analysis method, our work is the first to identify block production rates under which PoW longest chain is secure in the bounded bandwidth setting. We also present the first PoS longest chain protocol, SaPoS, which is secure with a block production rate independent of the security error probability, by using an ‘equivocation removal’ policy to prevent equivocation spamming.

In this paper, we present an AES-based authenticated-encryption with associated-data scheme called Rocca, with the purpose to reach the requirements on the speed and security in 6G systems. To achieve ultrafast software implementations, the basic design strategy is to take full advantage of the AES-NI and SIMD instructions as that of the AEGIS family and Tiaoxin-346. Although Jean and Nikolić have generalized the way to construct efficient round functions using only one round of AES (aesenc) and 128-bit XOR operation and have found several efficient candidates, there still seems to exist potential to further improve it regarding speed and state size. In order to minimize the critical path of one round, we remove the case of applying both aesenc and XOR in a cascade way for one round. By introducing a cost-free block permutation in the round function, we are able to search for candidates in a larger space without sacrificing the performance. Consequently, we obtain more efficient constructions with a smaller state size than candidates by Jean and Nikolić. Based on the newly-discovered round function, we carefully design the corresponding AEAD scheme with 256-bit security by taking several reported attacks on the AEGIS family and Tiaxion-346 into account. Our AEAD scheme can reach 178 Gbps which is almost 5 times faster than the AEAD scheme of SNOW-V. Rocca is also much faster than other efficient schemes with 256-bit key length, e.g. AEGIS-256 and AES-256-GCM. As far as we know, Rocca is the first dedicated cryptographic algorithm targeting 6G systems, i.e., 256-bit key length and the speed of more than 100 Gbps.

Digital signatures are fundamental components of public key cryptography. They allow a signer to generate verifiable and unforgeable proofs---signatures---over arbitrary messages with a private key, and allow recipients to verify the proofs against the corresponding and expected public key. These properties are used in practice for a variety of use cases, ranging from identity or data authenticity to non-repudiation. Unsurprisingly, signature schemes are widely used in security protocols deployed on the Internet today. In recent years, some protocols have extended the basic syntax of signature schemes to support key blinding, a.k.a., key randomization. Roughly speaking, key blinding is the process by which a private signing key or public verification key is blinded (randomized) to hide information about the key pair. This is generally done for privacy reasons and has found applications in Tor and Privacy Pass. Recently, Denis, Eaton, Lepoint, and Wood proposed a technical specification for signature schemes with key blinding in an IETF draft. In this work, we analyze the constructions in this emerging specification. We demonstrate that the constructions provided satisfy the desired security properties for signature schemes with key blinding. We experimentally evaluate the constructions and find that they introduce a very reasonable 2-3x performance overhead compared to the base signature scheme. Our results complement the ongoing standardization efforts for this primitive.

Secure multi-party computation (SMPC) protocols allow several parties that distrust each other to collectively compute a function on their inputs. In this paper, we introduce a protocol that lifts classical SMPC to quantum SMPC in a composably and statistically secure way, even for a single honest party. Unlike previous quantum SMPC protocols, our proposal only requires very limited quantum resources from all but one party; it suffices that the weak parties, i.e. the clients, are able to prepare single-qubit states in the X-Y plane. The novel quantum SMPC protocol is constructed in a naturally modular way, and relies on a new technique for quantum verification that is of independent interest. This verification technique requires the remote preparation of states only in a single plane of the Bloch sphere. In the course of proving the security of the new verification protocol, we also uncover a fundamental invariance that is inherent to measurement-based quantum computing.

TEE-based smart contracts are an emerging blockchain architecture, offering fully programmable privacy with better performance than alternatives like secure multiparty computation. They can also support compatibility with existing smart contract languages, such that existing (plaintext) applications can be readily ported, picking up privacy enhancements automatically. While previous analysis of TEE-based smart contracts have focused on failures of TEE itself, we asked whether other aspects might be understudied. We focused on state consistency, a concern area highlighted by Li et al., as well as new concerns including access pattern leakage and software upgrade mechanisms. We carried out a code review of a cohort of four TEE-based smart contract platforms. These include Secret Network, the first to market with in-use applications, as well as Oasis, Phala, and Obscuro, which have at least released public test networks. The first and most broadly applicable result is that access pattern leakage occurs when handling persistent contract storage. On Secret Network, its fine-grained access pattern is catastrophic for the transaction privacy of SNIP-20 tokens. If ERC-20 tokens were naively ported to Oasis they would be similarly vulnerable; the others in the cohort leak coarse-grained information at approximately the page level (4 kilobytes). Improving and characterizing this will require adopting techniques from ORAMs or encrypted databases. Second, the importance of state consistency has been underappreciated, in part because exploiting such vulnerabilities is thought to be impractical. We show they are fully practical by building a proof-of-concept tool that breaks all advertised privacy properties of SNIP-20 tokens, able to query the balance of individual accounts and the token amount of each transfer. We additionally demonstrate MEV attacks against the Sienna Swap application. As a final consequence of lacking state consistency, the developers have inadvertently introduced a decryption backdoor through their software upgrade process. We have helped the Secret developers mitigate this through a coordinated vulnerability disclosure, after which their transaction replay defense is roughly on par with the rest.

In this work we introduce a new code-based signature scheme, called FuLeeca, based on the NP-hard problem of finding low Lee-weight codewords. The scheme follows the Hash-and-Sign approach applied to quasi-cyclic codes of small Lee-weight density. Similar approaches in the Hamming metric have suffered statistical attacks, which reveal the small support of the secret basis. Using the Lee metric we are able to thwart such attacks. We use existing hardness results on the underlying problem and study adapted statistical attacks. We propose parameters for FuLeeca and compare them to the best known post-quantum signature schemes. This comparison reveals that FuLeeca is extremely competitive. For example, for NIST category I, i.e., 160 bit of classical security, we obtain an average signature size of 276 bytes and public key sizes of 389 bytes. This not only outperforms all known code-based signature schemes, but also the signature schemes Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+ selected by NIST for standardization.

The goal of this research is to raise technical doubts regarding the usefulness of the repeated attempts by governments to curb Cryptography (aka the ``Crypto Wars''), and argue that they, in fact, cause more damage than adding effective control. The notion of {\em Anamorphic Encryption} was presented in Eurocrypt'22 for a similar aim. There, despite the presence of a Dictator who possesses all keys and knows all messages, parties can arrange a hidden ``{\it anamorphic}'' message in an otherwise indistinguishable from regular ciphertexts (wrt the Dictator). In this work, we postulate a stronger cryptographic control setting where encryption does not exist (or is neutralized) since all communication is passed through the Dictator in, essentially, cleartext mode (or otherwise, when secure channels to and from the Dictator are the only confidentiality mechanism). Messages are only authenticated to assure recipients of the identity of the sender. We ask whether security against the Dictator still exists, even under such a~strict regime which allows only authentication (i.e., authenticated/ signed messages) to pass end-to-end, and where received messages are determined by/ known to the Dictator, and the Dictator also eventually gets all keys to verify compliance of past signing. To frustrate the Dictator, this authenticated message setting gives rise to the possible notion of anamorphic channels inside signature and authentication schemes, where parties attempt to send undetectable secure messages (or other values) using signature tags which are indistinguishable from regular tags. We define and present implementation of schemes for anamorphic signature and authentication; these are applicable to existing and standardized signature and authentication schemes which were designed independently of the notion of anamorphic messages. Further, some cornerstone constructions of the foundations of signatures, in fact, introduce anamorphism.

Encryption alone is not enough for secure end-to-end encrypted messaging: a server must also honestly serve public keys to users. Key transparency has been presented as an efficient solution for detecting (and hence deterring) a server that attempts to dishonestly serve keys. Key transparency involves two major components: (1) a username to public key mapping, stored and cryptographically committed to by the server, and, (2) an out-of-band consistency protocol for serving short commitments to users. In the setting of real-world deployments and supporting production scale, new challenges must be considered for both of these components. We enumerate these challenges and provide solutions to address them. In particular, we design and implement a memory-optimized and privacy-preserving verifiable data structure for committing to the username to public key store. To make this implementation viable for production, we also integrate support for persistent and distributed storage. We also propose a future-facing solution, termed ''compaction'', as a mechanism for mitigating practical issues that arise from dealing with infinitely growing server data structures. Finally, we implement a consensusless solution that achieves the minimum requirements for a service that consistently distributes commitments for a transparency application, providing a much more efficient protocol for distributing small and consistent commitments to users. This culminates in our production-grade implementation of a key transparency system (Parakeet) which we have open-sourced, along with a demonstration of feasibility through our benchmarks.

We investigate a new class of fault-injection attacks against the CSIDH family of cryptographic group actions. Our disorientation attacks effectively flip the direction of some isogeny steps. We achieve this by faulting a specific subroutine, connected to the Legendre symbol or Elligator computations performed during the evaluation of the group action. These subroutines are present in almost all known CSIDH implementations. Post-processing a set of faulty samples allows us to infer constraints on the secret key. The details are implementation specific, but we show that in many cases, it is possible to recover the full secret key with only a modest number of successful fault injections and modest computational resources. We provide full details for attacking the original CSIDH proof-of-concept software as well as the CTIDH constant-time implementation. Finally, we present a set of lightweight countermeasures against the attack and discuss their security.

The parametrization of $(3,3)$-isogenies by Bruin, Flynn and Testa requires over 37.500 multiplications if one wants to evaluate a single isogeny in a point. We simplify their formulae and reduce the amount of required multiplications by 94%. Further we deduce explicit formulae for evaluating $(3,3)$-splitting and gluing maps in the framework of the parametrization by Bröker, Howe, Lauter and Stevenhagen. We provide implementations to compute $(3^n,3^n)$-isogenies between principally polarized abelian surfaces with a focus on cryptographic application. Our implementation can retrieve Alice's secret isogeny in 11 seconds for the SIKEp751 parameters, which were aimed at NIST level 5 security.

Finite field multiplication is widely used for masking countermeasures against side-channel attacks. The execution time of finite field multiplication implementation is critical as it greatly impacts the overhead of the countermeasure. In this context, the use of exp-log tables is popular for the implementation of finite field multiplication. Yet, its performance is affected by the need for particular code to handle the case where one of the operands equals zero, as log is undefined for zero. As noticed by two recent papers, the zero case can be managed without any extra code by extending the exp table and setting $log[0]$ to a large-enough value. The multiplication of $a$ and $b$ then becomes as simple as: $exp[log[a]+log[b]]$. In this paper, we compare this approach with other implementations of finite field multiplication and show that it provides a good trade-off between memory use and execution time.

The block cipher GOST 28147-89 was the Russian Federation encryption standard for over 20 years, and is still one of its two standard block ciphers. GOST is a 32-round Feistel construction, whose security benefits from the fact that the S-boxes used in the design are kept secret. In the last 10 years, several attacks on the full 32-round GOST were presented. However, they all assume that the S-boxes are known. When the S-boxes are secret, all published attacks either target a small number of rounds, or apply for small sets of weak keys. In this paper we present the first practical-time attack on GOST with secret S-boxes. The attack works in the related-key model and is faster than all previous attacks in this model which assume that the S-boxes are known. The complexity of the attack is less than $2^{27}$ encryptions. It was fully verified, and runs in a few seconds on a PC. The attack is based on a novel type of related-key differentials of GOST, inspired by local collisions. Our new technique may be applicable to certain GOST-based hash functions as well. To demonstrate this, we show how to find a collision on a Davies-Meyer construction based on GOST with an arbitrary initial value, in less than $2^{10}$ hash function evaluations.

Blockchain consensus algorithms for cryptocurrency consist of the proof of work and proof of stake. However, current algorithms have problems, such as huge power consumption and equality issues. We propose a new consensus algorithm that uses transaction history. This algorithm ensures equality by randomly assigning approval votes based on past transaction records. We also incorporate a mechanism for adjusting issuance volume to measure the stability of the currency's value.

Public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) does not provide trapdoor privacy, i.e., keyword information is leaked through trapdoors. To prevent this information leakage, public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) has been proposed, where a sender's secret key is required for encryption, and a trapdoor is associated with not only a keyword but also the sender. Liu et al. (ASIACCS 2022) proposed a generic construction of PAEKS based on word-independent smooth projective hash functions (SPHFs) and PEKS. In this paper, we propose a new generic construction of PAEKS. The basic construction methodology is the same as that of the Liu et al. construction, where each keyword is converted into an extended keyword using SPHFs, and PEKS is used for extended keywords. Nevertheless, our construction is more efficient than Liu et al.'s in the sense that we only use one SPHF, but Liu et al. used two SPHFs. In addition, for consistency we considered a security model that is stronger than Liu et al.'s. Briefly, Liu et al. considered only keywords even though a trapdoor is associated with not only a keyword but also a sender. Thus, a trapdoor associated with a sender should not work against ciphertexts generated by the secret key of another sender, even if the same keyword is associated. Our consistency definition considers a multi-sender setting and captures this case. In addition, for indistinguishability against chosen keyword attack (IND-CKA) and indistinguishability against inside keyword guessing attack (IND-IKGA), we use a stronger security model defined by Qin et al. (ProvSec 2021), where an adversary is allowed to query challenge keywords to the encryption and trapdoor oracles. We also highlight several issues associated with the Liu et al. construction in terms of hash functions, e.g., their construction does not satisfy the consistency that they claimed to hold.

We conduct a systematic study of solving the learning parity with noise problem (LPN) using neural networks. Our main contribution is designing families of two-layer neural networks that practically outperform classical algorithms in high-noise, low-dimension regimes. We consider three settings where the numbers of LPN samples are abundant, very limited, and in between. In each setting we provide neural network models that solve LPN as fast as possible. For some settings we are also able to provide theories that explain the rationale of the design of our models. Comparing with the previous experiments of Esser, Kübler, and May (CRYPTO 2017), for dimension $n=26$, noise rate $\tau = 0.498$, the "Guess-then-Gaussian-elimination'' algorithm takes 3.12 days on 64 CPU cores, whereas our neural network algorithm takes 66 minutes on 8 GPUs. Our algorithm can also be plugged into the hybrid algorithms for solving middle or large dimension LPN instances.

It has been a long-standing viewpoint that doubling the length of key seeds in symmetric cipher can resist the quantum search attacks. This paper establishes a quantum key search model to deal with the post-quantum security of symmetric ciphers. The quantum search is performed in the punctured keystream/ciphertext space instead of the key space. On inputting the punctured keystreams/ciphertexts, we rule out the fake keys and find out the real key via the iterative use of the quantum singular value search algorithm. We find out several parameters, such as the length and min-entropy of the punctured keystream, the iterations, and the error in the search algorithm, and all of them can influence the resulting complexity. When these parameters are chosen properly, a better complexity can be obtained than Grover algorithm. Our search model can apply to any typical symmetric cipher. To demonstrate the power, we apply our model to analyze block cipher AES family, stream ciphers Grain-128 and ZUC-like. The resulting complexity of AES-128 is $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{30.8})$, $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{32.0})$ of AES-192, $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{32.7})$ of AES-256, $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{27.5})$ of Grain-128, $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{39.8})$ of ZUC-128, and $\tilde{\mathcal O}(2^{44.6})$ of ZUC-256. Our results show that increasing the length of key seeds is not an effective way anymore to resist the quantum search attacks, and it is necessary to propose new measures to ensure the post-quantum security of symmetric ciphers.

To be useful and widely accepted, automated contact tracing / expo- sure notification schemes need to solve two problems at the same time: they need to protect the privacy of users while also protecting the users’ from the behavior of a malicious adversary who may potentially cause a false alarm. In this paper, we provide, for the first time, an exposure notification construction that guarantees the same levels of privacy as ex- isting schemes (notably, the same as CleverParrot of [CKL+20]), which also provides the following integrity guarantees: no malicious user can cause exposure warnings in two locations at the same time; and any up- loaded exposure notifications must be recent, and not previously used. We provide these integrity guarantees while staying efficient by only re- quiring a single broadcast message to complete multiple contacts. Also, a user’s upload remains linear in the number of contacts, similar to other schemes. Linear upload complexity is achieved with a new primitive: zero knowledge subset proofs over commitments. Our integrity guarantees are achieved with a new primitive as well: set commitments on equivalence classes. Both of which are of independent interest.

We build quantum cryptosystems that support publicly-verifiable deletion from standard cryptographic assumptions. We introduce target-collapsing as a weakening of collapsing for hash functions, analogous to how second preimage resistance weakens collision resistance; that is, target-collapsing requires indistinguishability between superpositions and mixtures of preimages of an honestly sampled image. We show that target-collapsing hashes enable publicly-verifiable deletion (PVD), proving conjectures from [Poremba, ITCS'23] and demonstrating that the Dual-Regev encryption (and corresponding fully homomorphic encryption) schemes support PVD under the LWE assumption. We further build on this framework to obtain a variety of primitives supporting publicly-verifiable deletion from weak cryptographic assumptions, including: - Commitments with PVD assuming the existence of injective one-way functions, or more generally, almost-regular one-way functions. Along the way, we demonstrate that (variants of) target-collapsing hashes can be built from almost-regular one-way functions. - Public-key encryption with PVD assuming trapdoored variants of injective (or almost-regular) one-way functions. We also demonstrate that the encryption scheme of [Hhan, Morimae, and Yamakawa, Eurocrypt'23] based on pseudorandom group actions has PVD. - $X$ with PVD for $X \in \{$attribute-based encryption, quantum fully-homomorphic encryption, witness encryption, time-revocable encryption$\}$, assuming $X$ and trapdoored variants of injective (or almost-regular) one-way functions.

We introduce Lurk, a new LISP-based programming language for zk-SNARKs. Traditional approaches to programming over zero-knowledge proofs require compiling the desired computation into a flat circuit, imposing serious constraints on the size and complexity of computations that can be achieved in practice. Lurk programs are instead provided as data to the universal Lurk interpreter circuit, allowing the resulting language to be Turing-complete without compromising the size of the resulting proof artifacts. Our work describes the design and theory behind Lurk, along with detailing how its implementation of content addressing can be used to sidestep many of the usual concerns of programming zero-knowledge proofs.

During the last decade, there has been a stunning progress in the domain of AI with adoption in both safety-critical and security-critical applications. A key requirement for this is highly trained Machine Learning (ML) models, which are valuable Intellectual Property (IP) of the respective organizations. Naturally, these models have become targets for model recovery attacks through side-channel leakage. However, majority of the attacks reported in literature are either on simple embedded devices or assume a custom Vivado HLS based FPGA accelerator. On the other hand, for commercial neural network accelerators, such as Google TPU, Intel Compute Stick and NVDLA, there are relatively fewer successful attacks. Focussing on that direction, in this work, we study the vulnerabilities of commercial open-source accelerator NVDLA and present the first successful model recovery attack. For this purpose, we use power and timing side-channel leakage information from Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models to train CNN based attack models. Utilizing these attack models, we demonstrate that even with a highly pipelined architecture, multiple parallel execution in the accelerator along with Linux OS running tasks in the background, recovery of number of layers, kernel sizes, output neurons and distinguishing different layers, is possible with very high accuracy. Our solution is fully automated, and portable to other hardware neural networks, thus presenting a greater threat towards IP protection.

We tackle a challenging problem at the intersection of two emerging technologies: post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication with its strict requirements. We are the first to devise and evaluate a practical, provably secure design for integrating PQ authentication into the IEEE 1609.2 V2V security ecosystem. By theoretically and empirically analyzing the three PQ signature algorithms selected for standardization by NIST, as well as XMSS (RFC 8391), we propose a Partially Hybrid design—a tailored fusion of classical cryptography and PQC—for use during the nascent transition period to PQC. As opposed to a direct substitution of PQC for classical cryptography, our design meets the unique constraints of standardized V2V protocols.

As a typical representative of the public key cryptosystem, RSA has attracted a great deal of cryptanalysis since its invention, among which a famous attack is the small private exponent attack. It is well-known that the best theoretical upper bound for the private exponent d that can be attacked is d ≤ N^0.292 , where N is a RSA modulus. However, this bound may not be achieved in practical attacks since the lattice constructed by Coppersmith method may have a large enough dimension and the lattice-based reduction algorithms cannot work so well in both efficiency and quality. In this paper, we propose a new practical attack based on the binary search for the most significant bits (MSBs) of prime divisors of N and the Herrmann-May’s attack in 2010. The idea of binary search is inspired by the discovery of phenomena called “multivalued-continuous phenomena”, which can significantly accelerate our attack. Together with several carefully selected parameters according to our exact and effective numerical estimations, we can improve the upper bound of d that can be practically achieved. We believe our method can provide some inspiration to practical attacks on RSA with mainstream-size moduli.

We propose SOTERIA, a system for distributed privacy-preserving Machine Learning (ML) that leverages Trusted Execution Environments (e.g. Intel SGX) to run code in isolated containers (enclaves). Unlike previous work, where all ML-related computation is performed at trusted enclaves, we introduce a hybrid scheme, combining computation done inside and outside these enclaves. The conducted experimental evaluation validates that our approach reduces the runtime of ML algorithms by up to 41%, when compared to previous related work. Our protocol is accompanied by a security proof, as well as a discussion regarding resilience against a wide spectrum of ML attacks.

We propose how to homomorphically evaluate arbitrary univariate and bivariate integer functions such as division. A prior work proposed by Okada et al. (WISTP'18) uses polynomial evaluations such that the scheme is still compatible with the SIMD operations in BFV and BGV, and is implemented with the input domain size $\mathbb{Z}_{257}$. However, the scheme of Okada et al. requires the quadratic number of plaintext-ciphertext multiplications and ciphertext-ciphertext additions in the input domain size, and although these operations are more lightweight than the ciphertext-ciphertext multiplication, the quadratic complexity makes handling larger inputs quite inefficient. In this work, first we improve the prior work and also propose a new approach that exploits the packing method to handle the larger input domain size instead of enabling the SIMD operation, thus making it possible to work with the larger input domain size, e.g., $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{15}}$ in a reasonably efficient way. In addition, we show how to slightly extend the input domain size to $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{16}}$ with a relatively moderate overhead. Further we show another approach to handling the larger input domain size by using two ciphertexts to encrypt one integer plaintext and applying our techniques for uni/bivariate function evaluation. We implement the prior work of Okada et al., our improved scheme of Okada et al., and our new scheme in PALISADE with the input domain size $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{15}}$, and confirm that the estimated run-times of the prior work and our improved scheme of the prior work are still about 117 days and 59 days respectively while our new scheme can be computed in 307 seconds.

The celebrated result by Gentry and Wichs established a theoretical barrier for succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), showing that for (expressive enough) hard-on-average languages, we must assume non-falsifiable assumptions. We further investigate those barriers by showing new negative and positive results related to the proof size. 1. We start by formalizing a folklore lower bound for the proof size of black-box extractable arguments based on the hardness of the language. This separates knowledge-sound SNARGs (SNARKs) in the random oracle model (that can have black-box extraction) and those in the standard model. 2. We find a positive result in the non-adaptive setting. Under the existence of non-adaptively sound SNARGs (without extractability) and from standard assumptions, it is possible to build SNARKs with black-box extractability for a non-trivial subset of NP. 3. On the other hand, we show that (under some mild assumptions) all NP languages cannot have SNARKs with black-box extractability even in the non-adaptive setting. 4. The Gentry-Wichs result does not account for the preprocessing model, under which fall several efficient constructions. We show that also, in the preprocessing model, it is impossible to construct SNARGs that rely on falsifiable assumptions in a black-box way. Along the way, we identify a class of non-trivial languages, which we dub “trapdoor languages”, that bypass some of these impossibility results.

Privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) have been proposed as a way to protect the privacy of data while still allowing for data analysis. In this work, we focus on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), a powerful tool that allows for arbitrary computations to be performed on encrypted data. FHE has received lots of attention in the past few years and has reached realistic execution times and correctness. More precisely, we explain in this paper how we apply FHE to tree-based models and get state-of-the-art solutions over encrypted tabular data. We show that our method is applicable to a wide range of tree-based models, including decision trees, random forests, and gradient boosted trees, and has been implemented within the Concrete-ML library, which is open-source at https://github.com/zama-ai/concrete-ml. With a selected set of use-cases, we demonstrate that our FHE version is very close to the unprotected version in terms of accuracy.

The hash function Romulus-H is a finalist in the NIST Lightweight Cryptography competition. It is based on the Hirose double block-length (DBL) construction which is provably secure when used with an ideal block cipher. However, in practice, ideal block ciphers can only be approximated. Therefore, the security of concrete instantiations must be cryptanalyzed carefully; the security margin may be higher or lower than in the secret-key setting. So far, the Hirose DBL construction has been studied with only a few other block ciphers, like IDEA and AES. However, Romulus-H uses Hirose DBL with the SKINNY block cipher where only very little analysis has been published so far. In this work, we present the first practical analysis of Romulus-H. We propose a new framework for finding collisions in hash functions based on the Hirose DBL construction. This is in contrast to previous work that only focused on free-start collisions. Our framework is based on the idea of joint differential characteristics which capture the relationship between the two block cipher calls in the Hirose DBL construction. To identify good joint differential characteristics, we propose a combination of MILP and CP models. Then, we use these characteristics in another CP model to find collisions. Finally, we apply this framework to Romulus-H and find practical collisions of the hash function for 10 out of 40 rounds and practical semi-free-start collisions for up to 14 rounds.

This paper introduces a new type of public-key encryption scheme, called Multi-Designated Receiver Signed Public Key Encryption (MDRS-PKE), which allows a sender to select a set of designated receivers and both encrypt and sign a message that only these receivers will be able to read and authenticate (confidentiality and authenticity). An MDRS-PKE scheme provides several additional security properties which allow for a fundamentally new type of communication not considered before. Namely, it satisfies consistency---a dishonest sender cannot make different receivers receive different messages---off-the-record---a dishonest receiver cannot convince a third party of what message was sent (e.g., by selling their secret key), because dishonest receivers have the ability to forge signatures---and anonymity---parties that are not in the set of designated receivers cannot identify who the sender and designated receivers are. We give a construction of an MDRS-PKE scheme from standard assumptions. At the core of our construction lies yet another new type of public-key encryption scheme, which is of independent interest: Public Key Encryption for Broadcast (PKEBC) which provides all the security guarantees of MDRS-PKE schemes, except authenticity. We note that MDRS-PKE schemes give strictly more guarantees than Multi-Designated Verifier Signatures (MDVS) schemes with privacy of identities. This in particular means that our MDRS-PKE construction yields the first MDVS scheme with privacy of identities from standard assumptions. The only prior construction of such schemes was based on Verifiable Functional Encryption for general circuits (Damgård et al., TCC '20).

In previous years there has been an increased interest in designing threshold signature schemes. Most of the recent works focus on constructing threshold versions of ECDSA or Schnorr signature schemes due to their appealing usage in blockchain technologies. Additionally, a lot of research is being done on cryptographic schemes that are resistant to quantum computer attacks. In this work, we propose a new version of the two-party Dilithium signature scheme. The security of our scheme is based on the hardness of Module-LWE and Module-SIS problems. In our construction, we follow a similar logic as Damgård et al. (PKC 2021) and use an additively homomorphic commitment scheme. However, compared to them, our protocol uses signature compression techniques from the original Dilithium signature scheme which makes it closer to the version submitted to the NIST PQC competition. We focus on two-party signature schemes in the context of user authentication.

This article presents the application of homomorphic authenticators, replication encodings to be precise, to multigroup fully homomorphic encryption schemes. Following the works of Gennaro and Wichs on homomorphic authenticators in combination with the work of multigroup schemes by Kwak et al. we present a verifiable solution for a fully homomorphic primitive that includes the multikey, multiparty and single user cases. Furthermore, we propose a line of research for the future with constrained-resource scenarios.

This work investigates zero-knowledge protocols in subverted RSA groups where the prover can choose the modulus and where the verifier does not know the group order. We introduce a novel technique for extracting the witness from a general homomorphism over a group of unknown order that does not require parallel repetitions. We present a NIZK range proof for general homomorphisms such as Paillier encryptions in the designated verifier model that works under a subverted setup. The key ingredient of our proof is a constant sized NIZK proof of knowledge for a plaintext. Security is proven in the ROM assuming an IND-CPA additively homomorphic encryption scheme. The verifier's public key is reusable, can be maliciously generated and is linear in the number of proofs to be verified.

Long-term security, a variant of Universally Composable (UC) security introduced by Müller-Quade and Unruh (JoC ’10), allows to analyze the security of protocols in a setting where all hardness assumptions no longer hold after the protocol execution has finished. Such a strict notion is highly desirable when properties such as input privacy need to be guaranteed for a long time, e.g. zero-knowledge proofs for secure electronic voting. Strong impossibility results rule out so-called long-term-revealing setups, e.g. a common reference string (CRS), to achieve long-term security, with known constructions for long-term security requiring hardware assumptions, e.g. signature cards. We circumvent these impossibility results by making use of new techniques, allowing rewinding-based simulation in a way that universal composability is possible. The new techniques allow us to construct a long-term-secure composable commitment scheme in the CRS-hybrid model, which is provably impossible in the notion of Müller-Quade and Unruh. We base our construction on a statistically hiding commitment scheme in the CRS-hybrid model with CCA-like properties. To provide a CCA oracle, we cannot rely on superpolynomial extraction techniques, as statistically hiding commitments do not define a unique value. Thus, we extract the value committed to via rewinding. However, even a CCA “rewinding oracle” without additional properties may be useless, as extracting a malicious committer could require to rewind other protocols the committer participates in. If this is e.g. a reduction, this clearly is forbidden. Fortunately, we can establish the well-known and important property of k-robust extractability, which guarantees that extraction is possible without rewinding k-round protocols the malicious committer participates in. While establishing this property for statistically binding commitment schemes is already non-trivial, it is even more complicated for statistically hiding ones. We then incorporate rewinding-based commitment extraction into the UC framework via a helper in analogy to Canetti, Lin and Pass (FOCS 2010), allowing both adversary and environment to extract statistically hiding commitments. Despite the rewinding, our variant of long-term security is universally composable. Our new framework provides the first setting in which a commitment scheme that is both statistically hiding and composable can be constructed from standard polynomial-time hardness assumptions and a CRS only. Unfortunately, we can prove that our setting does not admit long-term-secure oblivious transfer (and thus general two-party computations). Still, our long-term-secure commitment scheme suffices for natural applications, such as long-term secure and composable (commit-and-prove) zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge.

Garbling schemes, a formalization of Yao's garbled circuit protocol, are useful cryptographic primitives both in privacy-preserving protocols and for secure two-party computation. In projective garbling schemes, $n$ values are assigned to each wire in the circuit. Current state-of-the-art schemes project two values. More concretely, we present a projective garbling scheme that assigns $2^n$ values to wires in a circuit comprising XOR and unary projection gates. A generalization of FreeXOR allows the XOR of wires with $2^n$ values to be very efficient. We then analyze the performance of our scheme by evaluating substitution-permutation ciphers. Using our proposal, we measure high-speed evaluation of the ciphers with a moderate increased cost in garbling and bandwidth. Theoretical analysis suggests that for evaluating the nine examined ciphers, one can expect a 4- to 70-fold increase in evaluation with at most a 4-fold increase in garbling cost and, at most, an 8-fold increase in communication cost when compared to state-of-the-art garbling schemes. In an offline/online setting, such as secure function evaluation as a service, the circuit garbling and communication to the evaluator can proceed before the input phase. Thus our scheme offers a fast online phase. Furthermore, we present efficient computation formulas for the S-boxes of TWINE and Midori64 in Boolean circuits. To our knowledge, our formulas give the smallest number of AND gates for the S-boxes of these two ciphers.

In this paper, we consider the new version of tropical cryptography protocol, i.e the tropical version of ElGamal encryption. We follow the ideas and modify the classical El Gamal encryption using tropical matrices and matrix power in tropical algebra. Then we also provide a toy example for the reader’s understanding.

A good differential is a start for a successful differential attack. However, a differential might be invalid, i.e., there is no right pair following the differential, due to some contradictions in the conditions imposed by the differential. This paper presents a novel and handy method for searching and verifying differential trails from an algebraic perspective. From this algebraic perspective, exact Boolean expressions of differentials over a cryptographic primitive can be conveniently established, which allows for the convenient verification of a given differential trail. This verification process can be naturally formulated as a Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT). To demonstrate the power of our new tool, we apply it to Gimli, Ascon, and Xoodoo. For Gimli, we improve the efficiency of searching for a valid 8-round colliding differential trail compared to the previous MILP model (CRYPTO 2020). Based on this differential trail, a practical semi-free-start collision attack on the intermediate 8-round Gimli-Hash is thus successfully mounted. For Ascon, we check several differential trails reported at FSE 2021. Specifically, we find that a 4-round differential used in the forgery attack on Ascon-128’s iteration phase has been proven invalid. As a consequence, the corresponding forgery attack is also invalid. For Xoodoo, as an independent interest, we develop a SAT-based automatic search toolkit called XoodooSat to search for 3- and 4-round differential trail cores of Xoodoo. Our toolkit finds two more 3-round differential trail cores of weight 48 that were missed by the designers which enhance the security analysis of Xoodoo. Then, we verify tens of thousands of 3-round differential trails and two 4-round differential trails extended from the so-called differential trail cores. We find that all these differential trails are valid, which effectively demonstrates that there are no contradictions in the conditions imposed by the round differentials of the DTs in the trail core.

Current solutions to quantum vulnerabilities of widely used cryptographic schemes involve migrating users to post-quantum schemes before quantum attacks become feasible. This work deals with protecting quantum procrastinators: users that failed to migrate to post-quantum cryptography in time. To address this problem in the context of digital signatures, we introduce a technique called signature lifting, that allows us to lift a deployed pre-quantum signature scheme satisfying a certain property to a post-quantum signature scheme that uses the same keys. Informally, the said property is that a post-quantum one-way function is used "somewhere along the way" to derive the public-key from the secret-key. Our constructions of signature lifting relies heavily on the post-quantum digital signature scheme Picnic (Chase et al., CCS'17). Our main case-study is cryptocurrencies, where this property holds in two scenarios: when the public-key is generated via a key-derivation function or when the public-key hash is posted instead of the public-key itself. We propose a modification, based on signature lifting, that can be applied in many cryptocurrencies for securely spending pre-quantum coins in presence of quantum adversaries. Our construction improves upon existing constructions in two major ways: it is not limited to pre-quantum coins whose ECDSA public-key has been kept secret (and in particular, it handles all coins that are stored in addresses generated by HD wallets), and it does not require access to post-quantum coins or using side payments to pay for posting the transaction.

We study authenticated encryption (AE) modes dedicated to very short messages, which are crucial for Internet-of-things applications. Since the existing general-purpose AE modes need at least three block cipher calls for non-empty messages, we explore the design space for AE modes that use at most two calls. We proposed a family of AE modes, dubbed Manx, that work when the total input length is less than $2n$ bits, using an $n$-bit block cipher. Notably, the second construction of Manx can encrypt almost n-bit plaintext and saves one or two block cipher calls from the standard modes, such as GCM or OCB, keeping the comparable provable security. We also present benchmarks on popular 8/32-bit microprocessors using AES. Our results show the clear advantage of Manx over the previous modes for such short messages.

Traitor tracing schemes [Chor–Fiat–Naor, Crypto ’94] help content distributors fight against piracy and are defined with the content distributor as a trusted authority having access to the secret keys of all users. While the traditional model caters well to its original motivation, its centralized nature makes it unsuitable for many scenarios. For usage among mutually untrusted parties, a notion of *ad hoc* traitor tracing (naturally with the capability of broadcast and revocation) is proposed and studied in this work. Such a scheme allows users in the system to generate their own public/secret key pairs, without trusting any other entity. To encrypt, a list of public keys is used to identify the set of recipients, and decryption is possible with a secret key for any of the public keys in the list. In addition, there is a tracing algorithm that given a list of recipients’ public keys and a pirate decoder capable of decrypting ciphertexts encrypted to them, identifies at least one recipient whose secret key must have been used to construct the said decoder. Two constructions are presented. The first is based on obfuscation and has constant-size ciphertext, yet its decryption time is linear in the number of recipients. The second is a generic transformation that reduces decryption time at the cost of increased ciphertext size. A lower bound on the trade-off between ciphertext size and decryption time is shown, indicating that the two constructions achieve all possible optimal trade-offs, i.e., they fully demonstrate the Pareto front of efficiency. The lower bound also applies to broadcast encryption and is of independent interest.

Digital signatures ensure legitimate access through identity authentication. It is also used to build blocks in blockchains and to authenticate transactions. The Courtois-Finiasz-Sendrier (CFS) digital signature is a well-known code-based digital signature scheme based on the Niederreiter cryptosystem. The CFS signature, however, is not widely used due to the long processing time required by its signing algorithm. Most code-based digital signature schemes are based on Niederreiter. The present paper proposes a new code-based digital signature based on the McEliece cryptosystem. The proposed McEliece code-based scheme also gives less complexity and a higher success rate. The scheme provides an efficient code-based algorithm to sign a document in a shorter processing time. The scheme is also secure against public key structural attacks. Key generation, signing, and verification algorithms are presented. The key generation algorithm constructs three-tuple public keys using a dual inverse matrix. The proposed signing scheme is the first code-based digital signature based on McEliece with the lower processing time required to construct a valid digital signature. The proposed signing algorithm also constructs smaller signatures. In addition, the verification algorithm checks the integrity value to avoid any forgery before final verification.

OpenPubkey makes a client-side modification to OpenID Connect so that an ID Token issued by an OpenID Provider commits to a user held public key. This transforms an ID Token into a certificate that cryptographically binds an OpenID Connect identity to a public key. We call such an ID Token, a PK Token. The user can then sign messages with their signing key and these signatures can be authenticated and attributed to the user’s OpenID Connect identity. This allows OpenPubkey to upgrade OpenID Connect from Bearer Authentication to Proof-of-Possession, eliminating trust assumptions in OpenID Connect and defeating entire categories of attacks present in OpenID Connect. OpenPubkey was designed to satisfy a decade-long need for this functionality. Prior to OpenPubkey, OpenID Connect did not have a secure way for users to sign statements under their OpenID identities. OpenPubkey is transparent to users and OpenID Providers. An OpenID Provider can not even determine that OpenPubkey is being used. This makes OpenPubkey fully compatible with existing OpenID Providers. In fact a variant of OpenPubkey is currently deployed and used to authenticate signed messages and identities for users with accounts on Google, Microsoft, Okta, and Onelogin. OpenPubkey does not add new trusted parties to OpenID Connect and reduces preexisting trust assumptions. If used in tandem with our MFA-cosigner, OpenPubkey can maintain security even against a malicious OpenID Provider (the most trusted party in OpenID Connect).

Machine learning (ML) has seen a strong rise in popularity in recent years and has become an essential tool for research and industrial applications. Given the large amount of high quality data needed and the often sensitive nature of ML data, privacy-preserving collaborative ML is of increasing importance. In this paper, we introduce new actively secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols which are specially optimized for privacy-preserving machine learning applications. We concentrate on the optimization of (tensor) convolutions which belong to the most commonly used components in ML architectures, especially in convolutional neural networks but also in recurrent neural networks or transformers, and therefore have a major impact on the overall performance. Our approach is based on a generalized form of structured randomness that speeds up convolutions in a fast online phase. The structured randomness is generated with homomorphic encryption using adapted and newly constructed packing methods for convolutions, which might be of independent interest. Overall our protocols extend the state-of-the-art Overdrive family of protocols (Keller et al., EUROCRYPT 2018). We implemented our protocols on-top of MP-SPDZ (Keller, CCS 2020) resulting in a full-featured implementation with support for faster convolutions. Our evaluation shows that our protocols outperform state-of-the-art actively secure MPC protocols on ML tasks like evaluating ResNet50 by a factor of 3 or more. Benchmarks for depthwise convolutions show order-of-magnitude speed-ups compared to existing approaches.

The notion of Endemic Oblivious Transfer (EOT) was introduced by Masny and Rindal (CCS'19). EOT offers a weaker security guarantee than the conventional random OT; namely, the malicious parties can fix their outputs arbitrarily. The authors presented a 1-round UC-secure EOT protocol under a tailor-made and non-standard assumption, Choose-and-Open DDH, in the RO model. In this work, we systematically study EOT in the UC/GUC framework. We present a new 1-round UC-secure EOT construction in the RO model under the DDH assumption. Under the GUC framework, we propose the first 1-round EOT construction under the CDH assumption in the Global Restricted Observable RO (GroRO) model proposed by Canetti et al. (CCS'14). We also provide an impossibility result, showing there exist no 1-round GUC-secure EOT protocols in the Global Restricted Programmable RO (GrpRO) model proposed by Camenisch et al. (Eurocrypt'18). Subsequently, we provide the first round-optimal (2-round) EOT protocol with adaptive security under the DDH assumption in the GrpRO model. Finally, we investigate the relations between EOT and other cryptographic primitives. As side products, we present the first 2-round GUC-secure commitment in the GroRO model as well as a separation between the GroRO and the GrpRO models, which may be of independent interest.

The security of cryptographic primitives is an important issue. The Shor algorithm illustrates how quantum attacks threaten the security of these widely used primitives. Code-based cryptography is one of several approaches resistant to quantum attacks. To date, no attack has been able to break a code-based cryptosystem in polynomial time. Despite this level of security, these cryptosystems have not been considered for practical applications such as e-commerce, medical and industrial IoT, finance, blockchain, mobile services, and online banking. The main reason is the large public and private key sizes. This paper presents a new code-based cryptosystem based on inverse parity check matrices. The dual matrix provides both a parity check matrix transpose and a parity check matrix inverse. These are employed in the key generation, encryption, and decryption algorithms. The proposed scheme provides public and private key sizes smaller than the McEliece cryptosystem and has a higher level of security.

Fully homomorphic encryption FHE has been one of the most promising cryptographic tools for secure two-party computation and secure outsourcing computation in recent years. However, the complex bootstrapping procedure in FHE schemes is the main bottleneck of it practical usage, and the TFHE scheme is the state-of-the-art for efficient bootstrapping. To further improve the efficiency of bootstrapping in TFHE, the number of fast Fourier transforms (FFT) should be reduced since bootstrapping in TFHE is mainly composed of vast FFTs. In this paper, we focus on a novel method of decomposing-in-Fourier (DIF) to reduce the number of FFTs in bootstrapping of TFHE, from $2(\ell+1)n$ to $4n$. As a result, our method would reduce the number of FFTs required by each external product in bootstrapping to a constant number rather than varying with decomposing parameters, which leads to a scale-invariant bootstrapping structure.

MIBS is a 32-round lightweight block cipher following a Feistel structure with the block length of 64-bit and the key length of 64 or 80 bits. In this paper, the properties of the key scheduling algorithm are investigated and lots of repeated bits among the different round keys are found. Moreover, the optimal guessing order of the unknown key bits is obtained by using the greedy algorithm. At last, combined with the early abort technique, the differential cryptanalyses are improved to 15 rounds both of MIBS-64 and MIBS-80. For MIBS-64, the data complexity is $2^{59}$, and the time complexity is $2^{46.2}$ encryptions. For MIBS-80, the data complexity is $2^{59}$, and the time complexity is $2^{51.7}$ encryptions. The key scheduling algorithm of MIBS is similar to some other lightweight block ciphers, and we hope further similarities will help build better attacks for them as well.

GIFT-64 is a block cipher that has received a lot of attention from the community since its proposal in 2017. The attack on the highest number of rounds is a differential related-key attack on 26 rounds~\cite{DBLP:journals/tosc/SunWW21}. We studied this attack, in particular with respect to the generic framework for improving key recovery from~\cite{DBLP:conf/asiacrypt/BrollCFLN21}, and we realised that this framework, combined with an efficient parallel key guessing of interesting subsets of the key and a consequent list merging applied to the partial solutions, can improve the complexity of the attack. We propose two different trade-offs, as a result of the improved key-recovery. We believe that the techniques are quite generic and that it is possible to apply them to improve other differential attacks.

In a blind signature scheme, a user can obtain a digital signature on a message of her choice without revealing anything about the message or the resulting signature to the signer. Blind signature schemes have recently found applications for privacy-preserving web browsing and ad ecosystems, and as such, are ripe for standardization. In this paper, we show that the recent proposed standard of Denis, Jacobs and Wood [18, 17] constitutes a strongly one-more-unforgeable blind signature scheme in the random-oracle model under the one-more-RSA assumption. Fur- ther, we show that the blind version of RSA-FDH proposed and analyzed by Bellare, Namprempre, Pointcheval and Semanko [6] does not satisfy blindness when the public key is chosen maliciously, but satisfies a weaker notion of a blind token.

Over the years, a large number of attacks have been proposed against substitution boxes used in symmetric ciphers such as differential attacks, linear attacks, algebraic attacks, etc. In the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) Block cipher, the substitution box is the only nonlinear component and thus it holds the weight of the cipher. This basically means that if an attacker is able to mount a successful attack on the substitution box of AES, the cipher is compromised. This research work aims to provide a solution for increasing cryptographic immunity of S-boxes against such attacks. A genetic algorithm based approach has been proposed to search for 8 × 8 balanced and bijective S-boxes that exhibit values of differential branch number, non-linearity, differential uniformity, count and length of cycles present and distance from strict avalanche criterion that are similar to or better than the AES S-box. An S-Box evaluation tool is also implemented to evaluate any S-boxes generated. S-box of AES is resistant to the crypt-analytic attacks. S-boxes constructed by the proposed algorithm have better cryptographic properties so they are also resistant to the crypt-analytic attacks. The strict avalanche criterion[11], which is based on completeness[22] and diffusion[5], is an essential property for any 8 × 8 S-box. Good diffusion means that a small change in the plaintext may influence the complete block after a small number of rounds. Therefore, a lower DSAC value is desirable to prevent vulnerabilities to attacks such as differential attacks. The DSAC is therefore used as the primary fitness criterion in this research work to search for S-boxes with better diffusion.

The Extended Access Control (EAC) protocol for authenticated key agreement is mainly used to secure connections between machine-readable travel documents (MRTDs) and inspection terminals, but it can also be adopted as a universal solution for attribute-based access control with smart cards. The security of EAC is currently based on the Diffie-Hellman problem, which may not be hard when considering quantum computers. In this work we present PQ-EAC, a quantum-resistant version of the EAC protocol. We show how to achieve post-quantum confidentiality and authentication without sacrificing real-world usability on smart cards. To ease adoption, we present two main versions of PQ-EAC: One that uses signatures for authentication and one where authentication is facilitated using long-term KEM keys. Both versions can be adapted to achieve forward secrecy and to reduce round complexity. To ensure backwards-compatibility, PQ-EAC can be implemented using only Application Protocol Data Units (APDUs) specified for EAC in standard BSI TR-03110. Merely the protocol messages needed to achieve forward secrecy require an additional APDU not specified in TR-03110. We prove security of all versions in the real-or-random model of Bellare and Rogaway. To show real-world practicality of PQ-EAC we have implemented a version using signatures on an ARM SC300 security controller, which is typically deployed in MRTDs. We also implemented PQ-EAC on a VISOCORE terminal for border control. We then conducted several experiments to evaluate the performance of PQ-EAC executed between chip and terminal under various real-world conditions. Our results strongly suggest that PQ-EAC is efficient enough for use in border control.

Herein, we propose an anonymous broadcast authentication (ABA) scheme to simultaneously control $10^9$ devices practically. We find a barrier to construct an ABA working with a larger number of devices.In a nutshell, there is a trilemma between (i) security, (ii) ciphertext length, and (iii) freedom in the target devices selection. For practical use, we propose ABAs with a ciphertext size of $O(\log N)$ where $N$ is the number of target devices while we impose a certain restriction on (iii). We provide an ABA template and instantiate it into specific schemes from the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) or the learning with errors (LWE) problem.

In general, digital signatures can be used to prove authenticity for as long as the signature scheme is not broken and the private key is kept secret. While this ``long-lived" authenticity might be useful in some scenarios, it is inherently undesirable for certain types of sensitive communication, for instance, whistleblowing. A particular concern in this case is that the communication could be leaked in the future, which might lead to potential retaliation and extortion. This calls for a scheme that lets signers prove authenticity for a limited period of time, while allowing them to deny having signed any messages afterwards. We argue that such a scheme could offer a desirable degree of protection to signers through deniability against future leaks, while reducing the incentives for criminals to obtain leaked communications for the sole purpose of blackmailing. This paper introduces the concept of DSKE, digital signatures with key extraction. In a DSKE scheme, the secret key can be extracted if more than a threshold of signatures on arbitrary messages are ever created. Hence, it provides signers with plausible deniability, by demonstrating a group of recipients that can collectively extract the private key, while, within the threshold, each signature still proves authenticity. We give a formal definition of DSKE, as well as two provably secure constructions, one from hash-based digital signatures and one from polynomial commitments. We show that, in applications where a signer is expected to create a number of signatures, DSKE offers deniability for free. Moreover, DSKE can be employed to disincentivize malicious behavior, such as equivocation and double-signing. Additionally, we present a forward-forgeable signature construction, GroupForge. To that end, we combine a DSKE scheme with a Merkle tree and timestamps, thereby obtaining a "short-lived" signature with extractable sets, which provide deniability under a fixed public key. Finally, we demonstrate that GroupForge can replace Keyforge in the non-attributable email protocol of Specter, Park, and Green (USENIX Sec '21), hence eliminating the need to continuously disclose outdated private keys.

Existing Oblivious RAM protocols do not support the storage of data items of variable size in a non-trivial way. While the study of ORAM for items of variable size is of interest in and of itself, it is also motivated by the need for more performant and more secure Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) schemes. In this article, we introduce the notion of weighted ORAM, which supports the storage of blocks of different sizes. In a standard ORAM scheme, each data block has a fixed size $B$. In weighted ORAM, the size (or weight) of a data block is an arbitrary integer $w_i \in [1,B]$. The parameters of the weighted ORAM are entirely determined by an upper bound $B$ on the block size, and an upper bound $N$ on the total weight $\sum w_i$ of all blocks\textemdash regardless of the distribution of individual weights $w_i$. During write queries, the client is allowed to arbitrarily change the size of the queried data block, as long as the previous upper bounds continue to hold. We introduce a framework to build efficient weighted ORAM schemes, based on an underlying standard ORAM satisfying a certain suitability criterion. This criterion is fulfilled by various Tree ORAM schemes, including Simple ORAM and Path ORAM. We deduce several instantiations of weighted ORAM, with very little overhead compared to standard ORAM. As a direct application, we obtain efficient SSE constructions with attractive security properties.

Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have been utilized in plentiful medical institutions due to their superior convenience and low storage overhead. Nevertheless, it is difficult for medical departments with disparate management regulations to share EMRs through secure communication channels since sensitive EMRs are prone to be tampered with. Therefore, the EMRs should be encrypted before being outsourced to the network servers. Public key Encryption with Keyword Search (PEKS) has the ability for doctors to search encrypted EMRs, but traditional PEKS algorithms are susceptible to quantum computing attacks and without considering access control. To address the aforementioned issues, we proposed AAQ-PEKS scheme, named an attribute-based anti-quantum public-key encryption scheme with keyword search. Initially, based on the LWE hardness, we first introduce the attribute-based PEKS that can resist quantum attacks in E-health scenarios. Secondly, we combine Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) into AAQ-PEKS to realize access control for sensitive EMRs. Thirdly, the computational security analysis illustrates that our scheme achieves correctness, Indistinguishability against Chosen Plaintext Attack (IND-CPA) and Indistinguishability against Chosen Keyword Attack (IND-CKA). Lastly, comprehensive performance evaluation in practice elaborates that our AAQ-PEKS is more efficient compared with other existing top-tier schemes. To conclude, our scheme has the characteristics of resisting quantum attacks and fine-grained access control for E-health scenarios.

Sponge hashing is a novel alternative to the popular Merkle-Damgård hashing design. The sponge construction has become increasingly popular in various applications, perhaps most notably, it underlies the SHA-3 hashing standard. Sponge hashing is parametrized by two numbers, $r$ and $c$ (bitrate and capacity, respectively), and by a fixed-size permutation on $r+c$ bits. In this work, we study the collision resistance of sponge hashing instantiated with a random permutation by adversaries with arbitrary $S$-bit auxiliary advice input about the random permutation that make $T$ online queries. Recent work by Coretti et al. (CRYPTO '18) showed that such adversaries can find collisions (with respect to a random $c$-bit initialization vector) with advantage $\Theta(ST^2/2^c + T^2/ 2^{r})$. Although the above attack formally breaks collision resistance in some range of parameters, its practical relevance is limited since the resulting collision is very long (on the order of $T$ blocks). Focusing on the task of finding short collisions, we study the complexity of finding a $B$-block collision for a given parameter $B\ge 1$. We give several new attacks and limitations. Most notably, we give a new attack that results in a single-block collision and has advantage $$ \Omega \left(\left(\frac{S^{2}T}{2^{2c}}\right)^{2/3} + \frac{T^2}{2^r}\right). $$ In certain range of parameters (e.g., $ST^2>2^c$), our attack outperforms the previously-known best attack. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first natural application for which sponge hashing is provably less secure than the corresponding instance of Merkle-Damgård hashing. Our attack relies on a novel connection between single-block collision finding in sponge hashing and the well-studied function inversion problem. We also give a general attack that works for any $B\ge 2$ and has advantage $\Omega({STB}/{2^{c}} + {T^2}/{2^{\min\{r,c\}}})$, adapting an idea of Akshima et al. (CRYPTO '20). We complement the above attacks with bounds on the best possible attacks. Specifically, we prove that there is a qualitative jump in the advantage of best possible attacks for finding unbounded-length collisions and those for finding very short collisions. Most notably, we prove (via a highly non-trivial compression argument) that the above attack is optimal for $B=2$ in some range of parameters.

Cryptographic hash functions map data of arbitrary size to a fixed size digest, and are one of the most commonly used cryptographic objects. As it is infeasible to design an individual hash function for every input size, variable-input length hash functions are built by designing and bootstrapping a single fixed-input length function that looks sufficiently random. To prevent trivial preprocessing attacks, applications often require not just a single hash function but rather a family of keyed hash functions. The most well-known methods for designing variable-input length hash function families from a fixed idealized function are the Merkle-Damgård and Sponge designs. The former underlies the SHA-1 and SHA-2 constructions and the latter underlies SHA-3. Unfortunately, recent works (Coretti et al. EUROCRYPT 2018, Coretti et al. CRYPTO 2018) show non-trivial time-space tradeoff attacks for finding collisions for both. Thus, this forces a parameter blowup (i.e., efficiency loss) for reaching a certain desired level of security. We ask whether it is possible to build families of keyed hash functions which are provably resistant to any non-trivial time-space tradeoff attacks for finding collisions, without incurring significant efficiency costs. We present several new constructions of keyed hash functions that are provably resistant to any non-trivial time-space tradeoff attacks for finding collisions. Our constructions provide various tradeoffs between their efficiency and the range of parameters where they achieve optimal security for collision resistance. Our main technical contribution is proving optimal security bounds for converting a hash function with a fixed-sized input to a keyed hash function with (potentially larger) fixed-size input. We then use this keyed function as the underlying primitive inside the standard MD and Merkle tree constructions. We strongly believe that this paradigm of using a keyed inner hash function in these constructions is the right one, for which non-uniform security has not been analyzed prior to this work.

A typical approach for scaling blockchains is to create bilateral, off-chain channels, known as payment/state channels, that can protect parties against cheating via on-chain collateralization. While such channels have been studied extensively, not much attention has been given to off-chain programmability, where the parties can agree to enforce arbitrary conditions over their payments without going on-chain. Such ability is especially important for scaling off-chain channels via the hub-and-spoke model, where each party establishes a channel with a highly available (but untrusted) hub without a priori knowledge about the type and conditions of its off-chain transactions. We introduce the notion of a programmable payment channel (PPC) that allows two parties to agree on a smart contract off-chain specifying the conditions on which the transactions can happen. If either party violates any of the terms, the other party can later deploy the contract on-chain to receive a remedy as agreed upon in the contract. Specifically, our PPC supports programmable payments where only one party deposits to the agreed off-chain contract, enabling lightweight payments. We further show that any two-party contract (even ones with two party deposits) can be implemented with PPC, by a compiler and associated protocol, allowing the parties to use their pre-deposited on-chain collaterals for any off-chain interaction potentially not anticipated at the time of channel setup. We formalize and prove the security and correctness of our protocol under the UC framework. We implement our protocol on Ethereum using accumulators to achieve efficient concurrent programmable transactions and measure the gas overhead of a hash-time-lock PPC contract to be < 100K which can be amortized over many off-chain payments.

Due to the completeness, reliability and zero-knowledge nature, the zero-knowledge proof is widely used to designed various protocols, including zero-knowledge authentication protocols. However, the existing zero-knowledge proof scheme cannot realize bidirectional authentication. In this paper, we design a series of bidirectional zero-knowledge protocols based on two new flavors of operations applicable to multiplicative cyclic group. The two notions are formally defined in this paper. We also provide some formal definitions and properties for the two notions. According to our definitions, any bounded polynomial function defined on multiplicative cyclic group has duality and mirror. Based on the two operations, we introduce and formally define dual commitment scheme and mirror commitment scheme. Besides, we provide two efficient constructions for dual commitment and mirror commitment respectively based on CDH assumption and RSA assumption, and named DCCDH, DCRSA, MCCDH and MCRSA respectively. We also provide the extended version supporting multiple messages in the appendix. Then, we design some efficient non-interactive as well as interactive zero-knowledge authentication protocols based on these commitments. The protocols allow two participants to submit commitments to each other so that they can achieve mutual zero-knowledge authentication only a communication initialization needed. Moreovere , similar to other commitment schemes, our schemes also can be widely used to construction of other schemes for cryptography, such as, verifiable secret sharing, zero-knowledge sets, credentials and content extraction signatures.

It is an important question to find constructions of quantum cryptographic protocols which rely on weaker computational assumptions than classical protocols. Recently, it has been shown that oblivious transfer and multi-party computation can be constructed from one-way functions, whereas this is impossible in the classical setting in a black-box way. In this work, we study the question of building quantum public-key encryption schemes from one-way functions and even weaker assumptions. Firstly, we revisit the definition of IND-CPA security to this setting. Then, we propose three schemes for quantum public-key encryption from one-way functions, pseudorandom function-like states with proof of deletion and pseudorandom function-like states, respectively.

Cryptographic wallets have become an essential tool to secure users' secret keys and consequently their funds in Blockchain networks. The most prominent wallet standard that is widely adopted in practice is the BIP32 specification. This standard specifies so-called hierarchical deterministic wallets, which are organized in a tree-like structure such that each node in the tree represents a wallet instance and such that a parent node can derive a new child node in a deterministic fashion. BIP32 considers two types of child nodes, namely non-hardened and hardened nodes, which differ in the security guarantees they provide. While the corruption of a hardened wallet does not affect the security of any other wallet instance in the tree, the corruption of a non-hardened node leads to a breach of the entire scheme. In this work, we address this significant drawback of non-hardened nodes by laying out the design for the first hierarchical deterministic wallet scheme with thresholdized non-hardened nodes. We first provide a game-based notion of threshold signatures with rerandomizable keys and show an instantiation via the Gennaro and Goldfeder threshold ECDSA scheme (CCS'18). We further observe that the derivation of hardened child wallets according to the BIP32 specification does not translate easily to the threshold setting. Therefore, we devise a new and efficient derivation mechanism for hardened wallets in the threshold setting that satisfies the same properties as the original BIP32 derivation mechanism and therefore allows for efficient constructions of BIP32-compatible threshold wallets.

We consider the McEliece cryptosystem with a binary Goppa code $C \subset \mathbb{F}_2^n$ specified by an irreducible Goppa polynomial $g(x) \in \mathbb{F}_{2^m}[X]$ and Goppa points $(\alpha_1, \ldots, \alpha_n) \in \mathbb{F}_{2^m}^n$. Since $g(x)$ together with the Goppa points allow for efficient decoding, these parameters form McEliece secret keys. Such a Goppa code $C$ is an $(n-tm)$-dimensional subspace of $\mathbb{F}_2^n$, and therefore $C$ has co-dimension $tm$. For typical McEliece instantiations we have $tm \approx \frac n 4$. We show that given more than $tm$ entries of the Goppa point vector $(\alpha_1, \ldots, \alpha_n)$ allows to recover the Goppa polynomial $g(x)$ and the remaining entries in polynomial time. Hence, in case $tm \approx \frac n 4$ roughly a fourth of a McEliece secret key is sufficient to recover the full key efficiently. Let us give some illustrative numerical examples. For \textsc{ClassicMcEliece} with $(n,t,m)=(3488,64,12)$ on input $64\cdot 12+1=769$ Goppa points, we recover the remaining $3488-769=2719$ Goppa points in $\mathbb{F}_{2^{12}}$ and the degree-$64$ Goppa polynomial $g(x) \in \mathbb{F}_{2^{12}}[x]$ in $60$ secs. For \textsc{ClassicMcEliece} with $(n,t,m)=(8192,128,13)$ on input $128\cdot 13+1=1665$ Goppa points, we recover the remaining $8192-1665=6529$ Goppa points in $\mathbb{F}_{2^{13}}$ and the degree-$128$ Goppa polynomial $g(x) \in \mathbb{F}_{2^{13}}[x]$ in $288$ secs. Our results also extend to the case of erroneous Goppa points, but in this case our algorithms are no longer polynomial time.

The learning with errors (LWE) problem is one of the fundamental problems in cryptography and it has many applications in post-quantum cryptography. There are two variants of the problem, the decisional-LWE problem, and the search-LWE problem. LWE search-to-decision reduction shows that the hardness of the search-LWE problem can be reduced to the hardness of the decisional-LWE problem. We initiate a study of quantum search-to-decision reduction for the LWE problem and propose a reduction that satisfies sample-preserving. In sample-preserving reduction, it preserves all parameters even the number of instances. Especially, our quantum reduction invokes the distinguisher only $2$ times to solve the search-LWE problem, while classical reductions require a polynomial number of invocations. Furthermore, we give a way to amplify the success probability of the reduction algorithm. Our amplified reduction works with fewer LWE samples compared to the classical reduction that has a high success probability. Our reduction algorithm supports a wide class of error distributions and also provides a search-to-decision reduction for the learning parity with noise problem. In the process of constructing the search-to-decision reduction, we give a quantum Goldreich-Levin theorem over $\mathbb{Z}_q$ where $q$ is prime. In short, this theorem states that, if a hardcore predicate $a\cdot s \pmod q$ can be predicted with probability distinctly greater than $1/q$ with respect to a uniformly random $a\in\mathbb{Z}_q^n$, then it is possible to determine $s\in\mathbb{Z}_q^n$.

A \emph{witness map} deterministically maps a witness $w$ of some NP statement $x$ into computationally sound proof that $x$ is true, with respect to a public common reference string (CRS). In other words, it is a deterministic, non-interactive, computationally sound proof system in the CRS model. A \emph{unique witness map} (UWM) ensures that for any fixed statement $x$, the witness map should output the same \emph{unique} proof for $x$, no matter what witness $w$ it is applied to. More generally a \emph{compact witness map} (CWM) can only output one of at most $2^\alpha$ proofs for any given statement $x$, where $\alpha$ is some compactness parameter. Such compact/unique witness maps were proposed recently by Chakraborty, Prabhakaran and Wichs (PKC '20) as a tool for building tamper-resilient signatures, who showed how to construct UWMs from indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). In this work, we study CWMs and UWMs as primitives of independent interest and present a number of interesting connections to various notions in cryptography. \begin{itemize} \item First, we show that UWMs lie somewhere between witness PRFs (Zhandry; TCC '16) and iO -- they imply the former and are implied by the latter. In particular, we show that a relaxation of UWMs to the ``designated verifier (dv-UWM)'' setting is \emph{equivalent} to witness PRFs. Moreover, we consider two flavors of such dv-UWMs, which correspond to two flavors of witness PRFs previously considered in the literature, and show that they are all in fact equivalent to each other in terms of feasibility. \item Next, we consider CWMs that are extremely compact, with $\alpha = O(\log \kappa)$, where $\kappa$ is the security parameter. We show that such CWMs imply \emph{pseudo-UWMs} where the witness map is allowed to be \emph{pseudo-deterministic} -- i.e., for every true statement $x$, there is a unique proof such that, on any witness $w$, the witness map outputs this proof with $1-1/p(\lambda)$ probability, for a polynomial $p$ that we can set arbitrarily large. \item Lastly, we consider CWMs that are mildly compact, with $\alpha = p(\lambda)$ for some a-priori fixed polynomial $p$, independent of the length of the statement $x$ or witness $w$. Such CWMs are implied by succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs). We show that such CWMs imply NIZKs, and therefore lie somewhere between NIZKs and SNARGs. \end{itemize}

In a recent presentation, we promoted the use of 12-round instances of Keccak, collectively called “TurboSHAKE”, in post-quantum cryptographic schemes, but without defining them further. The goal of this note is to fill this gap: The definition of the TurboSHAKE family simply consists in exposing and generalizing the primitive already defined inside KangarooTwelve.

The sampling of polynomials with fixed weight is a procedure required by round-4 Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization (BIKE, HQC, McEliece) as well as NTRU, Streamlined NTRU Prime, and NTRU LPRrime. Recent attacks have shown in this context that side-channel leakage of sampling methods can be exploited for key recoveries. While countermeasures regarding such timing attacks have already been presented, still, there is no comprehensive work covering solutions that are also secure against power side channels. To close this gap, the contribution of this work is threefold: First, we analyze requirements for the different use cases of fixed weight sampling. Second, we demonstrate how all known sampling methods can be implemented securely against timing and power/EM side channels and propose performance-enhancing modifications. Furthermore, we propose a new, comparison-based methodology that outperforms existing methods in the masked setting for the three round-4 KEMs BIKE, HQC, and McEliece. Third, we present bitsliced and arbitrary-order masked soft- ware implementations and benchmarked them for all relevant cryptographic schemes to be able to infer recommendations for each use case. Additionally, we provide a hardware implementation of our new method as a case study and analyze the feasibility of implementing the other approaches in hardware.

Doubly-extendable cryptographic keyed functions (deck) generalize the concept of message authentication codes (MAC) and stream ciphers in that they support variable-length strings as input and return variable-length strings as output. A prominent example of building deck functions is Farfalle, which consists of a set of public permutations and rolling functions that are used in its compression and expansion layers. By generalizing the compression layer of Farfalle, we prove its universality in terms of the probability of differentials over the public permutation used in it. As the compression layer of Farfalle is inherently parallel, we compare it to a generalization of a serial compression function inspired by Pelican-MAC. The same public permutation may result in different universalities depending on whether the compression is done in parallel or serial. The parallel construction consistently performs better than the serial one, sometimes by a big factor. We demonstrate this effect using Xoodoo[3], which is a round-reduced variant of the public permutation used in the deck function Xoofff.

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) mixers are one of the most widely used blockchain privacy solutions, operating on top of smart contract-enabled blockchains. We find that ZKP mixers are tightly intertwined with the growing number of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) attacks and Blockchain Extractable Value (BEV) extractions. Through coin flow tracing, we discover that 205 blockchain attackers and 2,595 BEV extractors leverage mixers as their source of funds, while depositing a total attack revenue of 412.87M USD. Moreover, the US OFAC sanctions against the largest ZKP mixer, Tornado.Cash, have reduced the mixer’s daily deposits by more than 80%. Further, ZKP mixers advertise their level of privacy through a so-called anonymity set size, which similarly to $k$-anonymity allows a user to hide among a set of $k$ other users. Through empirical measurements, we, however, find that these anonymity set claims are mostly inaccurate. For the most popular mixers on Ethereum (ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (BSC), we show how to reduce the anonymity set size on average by 27.34% and 46.02% respectively. Our empirical evidence is also the first to suggest a differing privacy-predilection of users on ETH and BSC. State-of-the-art ZKP mixers are moreover interwoven with the DeFi ecosystem by offering anonymity mining (AM) incentives, i.e., users receive monetary rewards for mixing coins. However, contrary to the claims of related work, we find that AM does not necessarily improve the quality of a mixer’s anonymity set. Our findings indicate that AM attracts privacy-ignorant users, who then do not contribute to improving the privacy of other mixer users.

This paper provides improved preimage analysis on round-reduced Keccak-384/512. Unlike low-capacity versions, Keccak-384/512 outputs from two parts of its state: an entire 320-bit plane and a 64/192-bit truncation of a second plane. Due to lack of degrees of freedom, most existing preimage analysis can only control the first 320-bit plane and achieve limited results. By thoroughly analyzing the algebraic structure of Keccak, this paper proposes a technology named ``extra linear dependence'', which can construct linear relations between corresponding bits from two planes. To apply the technology, this paper inherits pioneers' attack thoughts that convert output bits to linear or quadratic equations of input variables. When solving the final equation system, those linear relations can lead to extra restricting equations of output, exceeding the limit of matrix rank. As a result, the complexity of preimage attacks on 2-round and 3-round Keccak-384/512 can be decreased to $2^{39}$/$2^{204}$ and $2^{270}$/$2^{424}$ Keccak calls respectively, which are all the best known results so far. To support the theoretical analysis, this paper provides the first preimage of all `0' digest for 2-round Keccak-384, which can be obtained in one day with single core on an ordinary PC.

The Learning With Errors (LWE) problem is one of the major hard problems in post-quantum cryptography. For example, 1) the only Key Exchange Mechanism KEM standardized by NIST [14] is based on LWE; and 2) current publicly available Homomorphic Encryption (HE) libraries are based on LWE. NIST KEM schemes use random secrets, but homomorphic encryption schemes use binary or ternary secrets, for efficiency reasons. In particular, sparse binary secrets have been proposed, but not standardized [2], for HE. Prior work SALSA [49] demonstrated a new machine learning attack on sparse binary secrets for the LWE problem in small dimensions (up to n = 128) and low Hamming weights (up to h = 4). However, this attack assumed access to millions of LWE samples, and was not scaled to higher Hamming weights or dimensions. Our attack, PICANTE, reduces the number of samples required to just m = 4n samples. Moreover, it can recover secrets with much larger dimensions (up to 350) and Hamming weights (roughly n/10, or h = 33 for n = 300). To achieve this, we introduce a preprocessing step which allows us to generate the training data from a linear number of samples and changes the distribution of the training data to improve transformer training. We also improve the distinguisher/secret recovery methods of SALSA and introduce a novel cross-attention recovery mechanism which allows us to read-off the secret directly from the trained models.

Grover’s algorithm is a quantum searching algorithm that poses a threat to symmetric cryptography. Due to their smaller key sizes, lightweight cryptographic algorithms such as Simplified-AES face a much more immediate threat from Grover’s algorithm than traditional cryptographic algorithms. By analyzing different S-boxes, it was discovered that the S-box 946C753AE8FBD012 may be more quantum resistant than the S-box that Simplified-AES uses, 94ABD1856203CEF7. In addition to this, 16x4 S-boxes (or 4 4x4 S-boxes) showed to be significantly more quantum secure than 4x4 S-boxes. This is because the number of gates needed to model a $2^n$x4 S-box increases at an exponential rate. It was also found that this property extends to $2^n$x8 S-boxes, implying the existence of a more quantum secure 8x8 S-box that AES could use. However, an increase in quantum security does not equate to an increase in classical security, as some of the least quantum secure S-boxes analyzed displayed some of the best classical security. Finally, an alteration of Simplified-AES that used a 16x4 S-box was found that displayed better classical and quantum security than Simplified-AES and did not require an increase in key size.

In recent years, several MILP models were introduced to search automatically for boomerang distinguishers and boomerang attacks on block ciphers. However, they can only be used when the key schedule is linear. Here, a new model is introduced to deal with nonlinear key schedules as it is the case for AES. This model is more complex and actually it is too slow for exhaustive search. However, when some hints are added to the solver, it found the current best related-key boomerang attack on AES-192 with $2^{124}$ time, $2^{124}$ data, and $2^{79.8}$ memory complexities, which is better than the one presented by Biryukov and Khovratovich at ASIACRYPT 2009 with complexities $2^{176}/2^{123}/2^{152}$ respectively. This represents a huge improvement for the time and memory complexity, illustrating the power of MILP in cryptanalysis.

The rising issues of harassment, exploitation, corruption, and other forms of abuse have led victims to seek comfort by acting in unison against common perpetrators (e.g., #MeToo movement). One way to curb these issues is to install allegation escrow systems that allow victims to report such incidents. The escrows are responsible for identifying victims of a common perpetrator and taking the necessary action to bring justice to them. However, users hesitate to participate in these systems due to the fear of such sensitive reports being leaked to perpetrators, who may further misuse them. Thus, to increase trust in the system, cryptographic solutions are being designed to realize secure allegation escrow (SAE) systems. In the work of Arun et al. (NDSS'20), which presents the state-of-the-art solution, we identify attacks that can leak sensitive information and compromise victim privacy. We also report issues present in prior works that were left unidentified. To arrest all these breaches, we put forth an SAE system that prevents the identified attacks and retains the salient features from all prior works. The cryptographic technique of secure multi-party computation (MPC) serves as the primary underlying tool in designing our system. At the heart of our system lies a new duplicity check protocol and an improved matching protocol. We also provide additional features such as allegation modification and deletion, which were absent in the state of the art. To demonstrate feasibility, we benchmark the proposed system with state-of-the-art MPC protocols and report the cost of processing an allegation. Different settings that affect system performance are analyzed, and the reported values showcase the practicality of our solution.

The MPC-in-the-Head paradigm is a popular framework to build zero-knowledge proof systems using techniques from secure multi-party computation (MPC). While this paradigm is not restricted to a particular secret sharing scheme, all the efficient instantiations for small circuits proposed so far rely on additive secret sharing. In this work, we show how applying a threshold linear secret sharing scheme (threshold LSSS) can be beneficial to the MPC-in-the-Head paradigm. For a general passively-secure MPC protocol model capturing most of the existing MPCitH schemes, we show that our approach improves the soundness of the underlying proof system from $1/N$ down to $1/\binom{N}{\ell}$, where $N$ is the number of parties and $\ell$ is the privacy threshold of the sharing scheme. While very general, our technique is limited to a number of parties $N \leq |\mathbb{F}|$, where $\mathbb{F}$ is the field underlying the statement, because of the MDS conjecture. Applying our approach with a low-threshold LSSS also boosts the performance of the proof system by making the MPC emulation cost independent of $N$ for both the prover and the verifier. The gain is particularly significant for the verification time which becomes logarithmic in $N$ (while the prover still has to generate and commit the $N$ input shares). We further generalize and improve our framework: we show how homomorphic commitments can get rid of the linear complexity of the prover, we generalize our result to any quasi-threshold LSSS, and we describe an efficient batching technique relying on Shamir's secret sharing. We finally apply our techniques to specific use-cases. We first propose a variant of the recent SDitH signature scheme achieving new interesting trade-offs. In particular, for a signature size of 10 KB, we obtain a verification time lower than $0.5$ ms, which is competitive with SPHINCS+, while achieving much faster signing. We further apply our batching technique to two different contexts: batched SDitH proofs and batched proofs for general arithmetic circuits based on the Limbo proof system. In both cases, we obtain an amortized proof size lower than $1/10$ of the baseline scheme when batching a few dozen statements, while the amortized performances are also significantly improved.

Security vulnerabilities in the symmetric-key primitives of a cipher can undermine the overall security claims of the cipher. With the rapid advancement of quantum computing in recent years, there is an increasing effort to evaluate the security of symmetric-key cryptography against potential quantum attacks. This paper focuses on analyzing the quantum attack resistance of AIM, a symmetric-key primitive used in the AIMer digital signature scheme. We presents the first quantum circuit implementation of AIM and estimates its complexity (such as qubit count, gate count, and circuit depth) with respect to Grover's search algorithm. For Grover's key search, the most important optimization metric is the depth, especially when considering parallel search. Our implementation gathers multiple methods for a low-depth quantum circuit of AIM in order to reduce the Toffoli depth and full depth.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) prevents online services from accessing user content. This important security property is also an obstacle for content moderation methods that involve content analysis. The tension between E2EE and efforts to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) has become a global flashpoint in encryption policy, because the predominant method of detecting harmful content---server-side perceptual hash matching on plaintext images---is unavailable. Recent applied cryptography advances enable private hash matching (PHM), where a service can match user content against a set of known CSAM images without revealing the hash set to users or nonmatching content to the service. These designs, especially a 2021 proposal for identifying CSAM in Apple's iCloud Photos service, have attracted widespread criticism for creating risks to security, privacy, and free expression. In this work, we aim to advance scholarship and dialogue about PHM by contributing new cryptographic methods for system verification by the general public. We begin with motivation, describing the rationale for PHM to detect CSAM and the serious societal and technical issues with its deployment. Verification could partially address shortcomings of PHM, and we systematize critiques into two areas for auditing: trust in the hash set and trust in the implementation. We explain how, while these two issues cannot be fully resolved by technology alone, there are possible cryptographic trust improvements. The central contributions of this paper are novel cryptographic protocols that enable three types of public verification for PHM systems: (1) certification that external groups approve the hash set, (2) proof that particular lawful content is not in the hash set, and (3) eventual notification to users of false positive matches. The protocols that we describe are practical, efficient, and compatible with existing PHM constructions.

In order to maintain a similar security level in a post-quantum setting, many symmetric primitives should have to double their keys and increase their state sizes. So far, no generic way for doing this is known that would provide convincing quantum security guarantees. In this paper we propose a new generic construction that allows to double the key and the state size of a block cipher. For this we have modified the ECB-Mix-ECB (EME) construction, as we have been able to mount a new type of superposition attack on EME, and we provide several classical and quantum security arguments and analyses for our new construction QuEME. We propose a concrete instantiation of this construction with variants of AES-128.

Electronic voting (e-voting) aims to provide a sustainable and accessible environment for voters while preserving anonymity and trust. In this paper, we present a novel e-voting scheme that combines Group Identity-based Identification (GIBI) scheme with Homomorphic Encryption (HE) based on the Distributed ElGamal (DE) cryptosystem. Our scheme allows for efficient voter authentication through the use of a Discrete Logarithm (DL)-based identification protocol and enables encrypted vote counting without the need for decryption. Additionally, our scheme allows for individual and universal verifiability through the use of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) proofs. We also propose some future work to enhance the scheme for more secure or practical use.

GGM tree is widely used in the design of correlated oblivious transfer (COT), subfield vector oblivious linear evaluation (sVOLE), distributed point function (DPF), and distributed comparison function (DCF). Often, the cost associated with GGM tree dominates the computation and communication of these protocols. In this paper, we propose a suite of optimizations that can reduce this cost by half. • Halving the cost of COT and sVOLE. Our COT protocol introduces extra correlation to each level of a GGM tree used by the state-of-the-art COT protocol. As a result, it reduces both the number of AES calls and the communication by half. Extending this idea to sVOLE, we are able to achieve similar improvement with either halved computation or halved communication. • Halving the cost of DPF and DCF. We propose improved two-party protocols for the distributed generation of DPF/DCF keys. Our tree structures behind these protocols lead to more efficient full-domain evaluation and halve the communication and the round complexity of the state-of-the-art DPF/DCF protocols. All protocols are provably secure in the random-permutation model and can be accelerated based on fixed-key AES-NI. We also improve the state-of-the-art schemes of puncturable pseudorandom function (PPRF), DPF, and DCF, which are of independent interest in dealer-available scenarios.

Due to recent cryptanalytical breakthroughs, the multivariate signature schemes that seemed to be most promising in the past years are no longer in the focus of the research community. Hence, the cryptographically mature UOV scheme is of great interest again. Since it has not been part of the NIST process for standardizing post-quantum cryptography so far, it has not been studied intensively for its physical security. In this work, we present a side-channel attack on the latest implementation of UOV. In the first part of the attack, a single side-channel trace of the signing process is used to learn all vinegar variables used in the computation. Then, we employ the reconciliation attack to reveal the complete secret key. Our attack, unlike previous work, targets the inversion of the central map and not the subsequent linear transformation. It further does not require the attacker to control the message to be signed. We have verified the practicality of our attack on a ChipWhisperer-Lite board with a 32-bit STM32F3 ARM Cortex-M4 target mounted on a CW308 UFO board. We publicly provide the code and both reference and target traces. Additionally, we discuss several countermeasures that can at least make our attack less efficient.

We present a new generic transform that takes a multi-round interactive proof for the membership of a language $\mathcal{L}$ and outputs a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (not of knowledge) in the common reference string model. Similar to the Fiat-Shamir transform, it requires a hash function $\mathsf{H}$. However, in our transform the zero-knowledge property is in the standard model, and the adaptive soundness is in the non-programmable random oracle model ($\mathsf{NPROM}$). Behind this new generic transform, we build a new generic OR-composition of two multi-round interactive proofs. Note that the two common techniques for building OR-proofs (parallel OR-proof and sequential OR-proof) cannot be naturally extended to the multi-round setting. We also give a proof of security for our OR-proof in the quantum oracle model ($\mathsf{QROM}$), surprisingly the security loss in $\\mathsf{QROM}$ is independent from the number of rounds.

In 1979, Shamir and Blakley introduced secret sharing schemes to provide both security and reliability. In this study, we construct two secret sharing schemes with perfect concealment. The first is an \((n,n)\)-threshold scheme by a group. Although the scheme itself is already known, we prove that its concealment is perfect. We propose the second as a new \((2,n)\)-threshold scheme by a quasigroup.

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have emerged as a viable and cost-effective method for device authentication and key generation. Recently, CMOS image sensors have been exploited as PUF for hardware fingerprinting in mobile devices. As CMOS image sensors are readily available in modern devices such as smartphones, laptops etc., it eliminates the need for additional hardware for implementing a PUF structure. In ISIC2014, an authentication protocol has been proposed to generate PUF signatures using a CMOS image sensor by leveraging the fixed pattern noise (FPN) of certain pixel values. This makes the PUF candidate an interesting target for adversarial attacks. In this work, we testify that a simple sorting attack and a win-rate (WR) based sorting attack can be launched in this architecture to predict the PUF response for given a challenge. We also propose a modified authentication protocol as a countermeasure to make it resilient against simple sorting and WR sorting attacks. The proposed work reduces the accuracy of prediction due to simple sorting attack and WR sorting attack by approximately 14% compared to the existing approach.