## Papers updated in last 365 days (2295 results)

Last updated:  2022-07-02
Simple Three-Round Multiparty Schnorr Signing with Full Simulatability
Yehuda Lindell
In a multiparty signing protocol, also known as a threshold signature scheme, the private signing key is shared amongst a set of parties and only a quorum of those parties can generate a signature. Research on multiparty signing has been growing in popularity recently due to its application to cryptocurrencies. Most work has focused on reducing the number of rounds to two, and as a result: (a) are not fully simulatable in the sense of MPC real/ideal security definitions, and/or (b) are not secure under concurrent composition, and/or (c) utilize non-standard assumptions of different types in their proofs of security. In this paper, we describe a simple three-round multiparty protocol for Schnorr signatures and prove its security. The protocol is fully simulatable, secure under concurrent composition, and proven secure in the standard model or random-oracle model (depending on the instantiations of the commitment and zero-knowledge primitives). The protocol realizes an ideal Schnorr signing functionality with perfect security in the ideal commitment and zero-knowledge hybrid model (and thus the only assumptions needed are for realizing these functionalities). We also show how to achieve proactive security and identifiable abort. In our presentation, we do not assume that all parties begin with the message to be signed, the identities of the participating parties and a unique common session identifier, since this is often not the case in practice. Rather, the parties achieve consensus on these parameters as the protocol progresses.
Last updated:  2022-07-02
The most efficient indifferentiable hashing to elliptic curves of $j$-invariant $1728$
Dmitrii Koshelev
This article makes an important contribution to solving the long-standing problem of whether all elliptic curves can be equipped with a hash function (indifferentiable from a random oracle) whose running time amounts to one exponentiation in the basic finite field $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. More precisely, we construct a new indifferentiable hash function to any ordinary elliptic $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$-curve $E_a$ of $j$-invariant $1728$ with the cost of extracting one quartic root in $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. As is known, the latter operation is equivalent to one exponentiation in finite fields with which we deal in practice. In comparison, the previous fastest random oracles to $E_a$ require to perform two exponentiations in $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. Since it is highly unlikely that there is a hash function to an elliptic curve without exponentiations at all (even if it is supersingular), the new result seems to be unimprovable.
Last updated:  2022-07-02
Practical Side-Channel Attack on Masked Message Encoding in Latticed-Based KEM
Jian Wang, Weiqiong Cao, Hua Chen, and Haoyuan Li
To defend against the rising threat of quantum computers, NIST initiated their Post-Quantum Cryptography(PQC) standardization process in 2016. During the PQC process, the security against side-channel attacks has received much attention. Lattice-based schemes are considered to be the most promising group to be standardized. Message encoding in lattice-based schemes has been proven to be vulnerable to side-channel attacks, and a first-order masked message encoder has been presented. However, there is still a lack of security evaluation for the first-order masked message encoder under different implementations. In this paper, we analyzed the security of the first-order masked message encoder of Kyber. We found although masked Kyber certainly is able to defend against the previous side-channel attacks, there still exist some exploitable leakages. With the help of the leakages, we proposed a deep learning-based key recovery attack on message encoding of masked Kyber. Our method can recover the original message from masked message encoding and then enable a chosen-ciphertext attack to recover the secret key. In our experiments, the whole secret key of masked Kyber768 was recovered with only 9 traces and the success rate of attack was close to 100%.
Last updated:  2022-07-02
Survey of Approaches and Techniques for Security Verification of Computer Systems
Ferhat Erata, Shuwen Deng, Faisal Zaghloul, Wenjie Xiong, Onur Demir, and Jakub Szefer
This paper surveys the landscape of security verification approaches and techniques for computer systems at various levels: from a software-application level all the way to the physical hardware level. Different existing projects are compared, based on the tools used and security aspects being examined. Since many systems require both hardware and software components to work together to provide the system's promised security protections, it is not sufficient to verify just the software levels or just the hardware levels in a mutually exclusive fashion. This survey especially highlights system levels that are verified by the different existing projects and presents to the readers the state of the art in hardware and software system security verification. Few approaches come close to providing full-system verification, and there is still much room for improvement.
Last updated:  2022-07-02
Efficient Homomorphic Evaluation on Large Intervals
Jung Hee Cheon, Wootae Kim, and Jai Hyun Park
Homomorphic encryption (HE) is being widely used for privacy-preserving computation. Since HE schemes only support polynomial operations, it is prevalent to use polynomial approximations of non-polynomial functions. We cannot monitor the intermediate values during the homomorphic evaluation; as a consequence, we should utilize polynomial approximations with sufficiently large approximation intervals to prevent the failure of the evaluation. However, the large approximation interval potentially accompanies computational overheads, and it is a serious bottleneck of HE application on real-world data. In this work, we introduce domain extension polynomials (DEPs) that extend the domain interval of functions by a factor of $k$ while preserving the feature of the original function on its original domain interval. By repeatedly iterating the domain-extension process with DEPs, we can extend with $O(\log{K})$ operations the domain of a given function by a factor of $K$ while the feature of the original function is preserved in its original domain interval. By using DEPs, we can efficiently evaluate in an encrypted state a function that converges at infinities, i.e., $\lim_{x\to\infty}f(x)$ and $\lim_{x\to-\infty}f(x)$ exist in $\mathbb{R}$. To uniformly approximate the function on $[-R,R]$, our method exploits $O(\log{R})$ operations and $O(1)$ memory. This is more efficient than the previous approach, the minimax approximation and Paterson-Stockmeyer algorithm, which uses $\Omega(\sqrt{R})$ multiplications and $\Omega(\sqrt{R})$ memory for the evaluation. As another application of DEPs, we also suggest a method to manage the risky outliers from a large interval $[-R,R]$ by using $O(\log{R})$ additional multiplications. As a real-world application, we trained the logistic regression classifier on large public datasets in an encrypted state by using our method. We exploit our method to the evaluation of the logistic function on large intervals, e.g., $[-7683,7683]$.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Dew: Transparent Constant-sized zkSNARKs
Arasu Arun, Chaya Ganesh, Satya Lokam, Tushar Mopuri, and Sriram Sridhar
We construct polynomial commitment schemes with constant sized evaluation proofs and logarithmic verification time in the transparent setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result achieving this combination of properties. Our starting point is a transparent inner product commitment scheme with constant-sized proofs and linear verification. We build on this to construct a polynomial commitment scheme with constant size evaluation proofs and logarithmic (in the degree of the polynomial) verification time. Our constructions make use of groups of unknown order instantiated by class groups. We prove security of our construction in the Generic Group Model (GGM). Using our polynomial commitment scheme to compile an information-theoretic proof system yields Dew -- a transparent and constant-sized zkSNARK (Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge) with logarithmic verification. Finally, we show how to recover the result of DARK (Bünz et al., Eurocrypt 2020). DARK presented a succinct transparent polynomial commitment scheme with logarithmic proof size and verification. However, it was recently discovered to have a gap in its security proof (Block et al, CRYPTO 2021). We recover its extractability based on our polynomial commitment construction, thus obtaining a transparent polynomial commitment scheme with logarithmic proof size and verification under the same assumptions as DARK, but with a prover time that is quadratic.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
BalanceProofs: Maintainable Vector Commitments with Fast Aggregation
Weijie Wang, Annie Ulichney, and Charalampos Papamanthou
We present BalanceProofs, the first vector commitment scheme that is maintainable (i.e., supporting sublinear updates) while also supporting fast proof aggregation and verification. The basic version of BalanceProofs has $O(\sqrt{n}\log n)$ update time and $O(\sqrt{n})$ query time and its constant-size aggregated proofs can be produced and verified in milliseconds. In particular, BalanceProofs improves the aggregation time and aggregation verification time of the only known maintainable and aggregatable vector commitment scheme, HyperProofs (USENIX SECURITY 2022), by up to 1000$\times$. Fast verification of aggregated proofs is particularly useful for applications such as stateless cryptocurrencies (and was a major bottleneck for Hyperproofs), where an aggregated proof of balances is produced once but must be verified multiple times and by a large number of nodes. As a limitation, BalanceProofs' update time compared to Hyperproofs roughly doubles, but always stays in the range from 2 to 3 seconds. BalanceProofs can be viewed as a compiler that transforms any non-maintainable vector commitment with fast aggregation to a maintainable one with the aforementioned complexities. We finally study useful tradeoffs in BalanceProofs between (aggregate) proof size, update time and (aggregate) proof computation and verification, by introducing a bucketing technique, and present an extensive evaluation, including a comparison to Hyperproofs as well as applications of BalanceProofs to Verkle trees.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Effective and Efficient Masking with Low Noise using Small-Mersenne-Prime Ciphers
Loïc Masure, Pierrick Méaux, Thorben Moos, and François-Xavier Standaert
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Scooby: Improved Multi-Party Homomorphic Secret Sharing Based on FHE
Ilaria Chillotti, Emmanuela Orsini, Peter Scholl, Nigel Paul Smart, and Barry Van Leeuwen
We present new constructions of multi-party homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) based on a new primitive that we call homomorphic encryption with decryption to shares (HEDS). Our first construction, which we call Scooby, is based on many popular fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes with a linear decryption property. Scooby achieves an $n$-party HSS for general circuits with complexity $O(|F| + \log n)$, as opposed to $O(n^2 \cdot |F|)$ for the prior best construction based on multi-key FHE. Scooby can be based on (ring)-LWE with a super-polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio. In our second construction, Scrappy, assuming any generic FHE plus HSS for NC1-circuits, we obtain a HEDS scheme which does not require a super-polynomial modulus. While these schemes all require FHE, in another instantiation, Shaggy, we show how in some cases it is possible to obtain multi-party HSS without FHE, for a small number of parties and constant-degree polynomials. Finally, we show that our Scooby scheme can be adapted to use multi-key fully homomorphic encryption, giving more efficient spooky encryption and setup-free HSS. This latter scheme, Casper, if concretely instantiated with a B/FV-style multi-key FHE scheme, for functions $F$ which do not require bootstrapping, gives an HSS complexity of $O(n \cdot |F| + n^2 \cdot \log n)$.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
A Central Limit Framework for Ring-LWE Decryption
Sean Murphy and Rachel Player
Uncategorized
This paper develops Central Limit arguments for analysing the noise in ciphertexts in two homomorphic encryption schemes that are based on Ring-LWE. The first main contribution of this paper is to present an average-case noise analysis for the BGV scheme. Our approach builds upon the recent work of Costache et al. that gives the approximation of a polynomial product as a multivariate Normal distribution. We show how this result can be applied in the BGV context and experimentally verify its improvement over prior, worst-case, approaches. Our second main contribution is to develop a Central Limit framework to analyse the noise growth in the homomorphic Ring-LWE cryptosystem of Lyubashevsky, Peikert and Regev (Eurocrypt 2013, full version). Our approach is very general: apart from finite variance, no assumption on the distribution of the noise is required (in particular, the noise need not be subgaussian). We show that our approach leads to tighter bounds for the probability of decryption failure than have been obtained in prior work.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
A note on key control in CSIDH
Antonio Sanso
In this short note we explore a particular behaviour of the CSIDH key exchange that leads to a very special form of (shared) key control via the use of the quadratic twists. This peculiarity contained in CSIDH with regard to quadratic twists was already noted in the original CSDIH work and used in several subsequent papers but we believe spelling out this in the form of an attack might be useful to the wider community.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Genus Distribution of Random q-ary Lattices
Peter J. Bruin, Léo Ducas, and Shane Gibbons
The genus is an efficiently computable arithmetic invariant for lattices up to isomorphism. Given the recent proposals of basing cryptography on the lattice isomorphism problem, it is of cryptographic interest to classify relevant families of lattices according to their genus. We propose such a classification for q-ary lattices, and also study their distribution. In particular, for an odd prime q, we show that random q-ary lattices are mostly concentrated on two genera. Because the genus is local, this also provides information on the distribution for general odd q. The case of q a power of 2 is also studied, although we only achieve a partial classification.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
SoK: Design Tools for Side-Channel-Aware Implementations
IR Buhan, Lejla Batina, Yuval Yarom, and Patrick Schaumont
Side-channel attacks that leak sensitive information through a computing device’s interaction with its physical environment have proven to be a severe threat to devices’ security, particularly when adversaries have unfettered physical access to the device. Traditional approaches for leakage detection measure the physical properties of the device. Hence, they cannot be used during the design process and fail to provide root cause analysis. An alternative approach that is gaining traction is to automate leakage detection by modeling the device. The demand to understand the scope, benefits, and limitations of the proposed tools intensifies with the increase in the number of proposals. In this SoK, we classify approaches to automated leakage detection based on the model’s source of truth. We classify the existing tools on two main parameters: whether the model includes measurements from a concrete device and the abstraction level of the device specification used for constructing the model. We survey the proposed tools to determine the current knowledge level across the domain and identify open problems. In particular, we highlight the absence of evaluation methodologies and metrics that would compare proposals’ effectiveness from across the domain. We believe that our results help practitioners who want to use automated leakage detection and researchers interested in advancing the knowledge and improving automated leakage detection.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
A Tale of Two Boards: On the Influence of Microarchitecture on Side-Channel Leakage
Vipul Arora, Ileana Buhan, Guilherme Perin, and Stjepan Picek
Advances in cryptography have enabled the features of confidentiality, security, and integrity on small embedded devices such as IoT devices. While mathematically strong, the platform on which an algorithm is implemented plays a significant role in the security of the final product. Side-channel attacks exploit the variations in the system’s physical characteristics to obtain information about the sensitive data. In our scenario, a software implementation of a cryptographic algorithm is flashed on devices from different manufactures with the same instruction set configured for identical execution. To analyze the influence of the microarchitecture on side-channel leakage, we acquire thirty-two sets of power traces from four physical devices. While we notice minor differences in the leakage behaviour for different physical boards from the same manufacturer, our results confirm that the difference in microarchitecture implementations will leak different side-channel information. We also show that TVLA leakage prediction should be treated with caution as it is sensitive to both false positives and negatives.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Dynamic Searchable Encryption with Optimal Search in the Presence of Deletions
We focus on the problem of Dynamic Searchable Encryption (DSE) with efficient (optimal/quasi-optimal) search in the presence of deletions. Towards that end, we first propose $\mathsf{OSSE}$, the first DSE scheme that can achieve asymptotically optimal search time, linear to the result size and independent of any prior deletions, improving the previous state of the art by a multiplicative logarithmic factor. We then propose our second scheme $\mathsf{LLSE}$, that achieves a sublogarithmic search overhead ($\log\log i_w$, where $i_w$ is the number or prior insertions for a keyword) compared to the optimal achieved by $\mathsf{OSSE}$. While this is slightly worse than our first scheme, it still outperforms prior works, while also achieving faster deletions and asymptotically smaller server storage. Both schemes have standard leakage profiles and are forward-and-backward private. Our experimental evaluation is very encouraging as it shows our schemes consistently outperform the prior state-of-the-art DSE by 1.2-6.6$\times$ in search computation time, while also requiring just a single roundtrip to receive the search result. Even compared with prior simpler and very efficient constructions in which all deleted records are returned as part of the result, our $\mathsf{OSSE}$ achieves better performance for deletion rates ranging from 45-55%, while the previous state-of-the-art quasi-optimal scheme achieves this for 65-75% deletion rates.
Last updated:  2022-07-01
Chunya Hu, Yongbo Hu, Wenfeng Zhu, Zixin Tan, Qi Zhang, Zichao Gong, Yanhao Gong, Luyao Jin, and Pengwei Feng
Statistical Ineffective Fault Attack (SIFA) has been a threat for implementa-tions of symmetric cryptographic primitives. Unlike Differential Fault At-tacks (DFA) which takes both correct and faulty ciphertexts, SIFA can re-cover the secret key with only correct ciphertexts. The classic SIFA is only effective on fault models with non-uniform distribution of intermediate val-ue. In this paper, we present a new fault model named adjacent-byte model, which describes a non-uniform distribution of relationship between two bytes (i.e. exclusive-or). To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that this fault model has been proposed. We also show that the adjacent-byte faults can be induced by different fault sources and easy to reproduce. Then a new SIFA attack method called AB-SIFA on symmetric cryptography is proposed. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this new attack by simulating the attack. Finally, our attacks are applied to a software implementations of AES-128 with redundant countermeasure and a hardware AES co-processor, utilizing voltage glitches and clock glitches.
Last updated:  2022-06-30
Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes
Abhiram Kothapalli, Srinath Setty, and Ioanna Tzialla
We introduce a new approach to realize incrementally verifiable computation (IVC), in which the prover recursively proves the correct execution of incremental computations of the form $y=F^{(\ell)}(x)$, where $F$ is a (potentially non-deterministic) computation, $x$ is the input, $y$ is the output, and $\ell > 0$. Unlike prior approaches to realize IVC, our approach avoids succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) entirely and arguments of knowledge in general. Instead, we introduce and employ folding schemes, a weaker, simpler, and more efficiently-realizable primitive, which reduces the task of checking two instances in some relation to the task of checking a single instance. We construct a folding scheme for a characterization of $\mathsf{NP}$ and show that it implies an IVC scheme with improved efficiency characteristics: (1) the "recursion overhead" (i.e., the number of steps that the prover proves in addition to proving the execution of $F$) is a constant and it is dominated by two group scalar multiplications expressed as a circuit (this is the smallest recursion overhead in the literature), and (2) the prover's work at each step is dominated by two multiexponentiations of size $O(|F|)$, providing the fastest prover in the literature. The size of a proof is $O(|F|)$ group elements, but we show that using a variant of an existing zkSNARK, the prover can prove the knowledge of a valid proof succinctly and in zero-knowledge with $O(\log{|F|})$ group elements. Finally, our approach neither requires a trusted setup nor FFTs, so it can be instantiated efficiently with any cycles of elliptic curves where DLOG is hard.
Last updated:  2022-06-30
Suparna Kundu, Jan-Pieter D’Anvers, Michiel Van Beirendonck, Angshuman Karmakar, and Ingrid Verbauwhede
Last updated:  2022-06-30
Decoding McEliece with a Hint - Secret Goppa Key Parts Reveal Everything
Elena Kirshanova and Alexander May
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.
Last updated:  2022-06-30
Reliable Password Hardening Service with Opt-Out
Chunfu Jia, Shaoqiang Wu, and Ding Wang
Last updated:  2022-06-29
Transparent SNARKs from DARK Compilers
Benedikt Bünz, Ben Fisch, and Alan Szepieniec
We construct a new polynomial commitment scheme for univariate and multivariate polynomials over finite fields, with logarithmic size evaluation proofs and verification time, measured in the number of coefficients of the polynomial. The underlying technique is a Diophantine Argument of Knowledge (DARK), leveraging integer representations of polynomials and groups of unknown order. Security is shown from the strong RSA and the adaptive root assumptions. Moreover, the scheme does not require a trusted setup if instantiated with class groups. We apply this new cryptographic compiler to a restricted class of algebraic linear IOPs, which we call Polynomial IOPs, to obtain doubly-efficient public-coin interactive arguments of knowledge for any NP relation with succinct communication. With linear preprocessing, the online verifier's work is logarithmic in the circuit complexity of the relation. There are many existing examples of Polynomial IOPs (PIOPs) dating back to the first PCP (BFLS, STOC'91). We present a generic compilation of any PIOP using our DARK polynomial commitment scheme. In particular, compiling the PIOP from PLONK (GWC, ePrint'19), an improvement on Sonic (MBKM, CCS'19), yields a public-coin interactive argument with quasi-linear preprocessing, quasi-linear (online) prover time, logarithmic communication, and logarithmic (online) verification time in the circuit size. Applying Fiat-Shamir results in a SNARK, which we call *Supersonic*. Supersonic is also concretely efficient with 10KB proofs and under 100ms verification time for circuits with 1 million gates (estimated for 120-bit security). Most importantly, this SNARK is transparent: it does not require a trusted setup. We obtain zk-SNARKs by applying a hiding variant of our polynomial commitment scheme with zero-knowledge evaluations. Supersonic is the first complete zk-SNARK system that has both a practical prover time as well as asymptotically logarithmic proof size and verification time. The original proof had a significant gap that was discovered by Block et al. (CRYPTO 2021). The new security proof closes the gap and shows that the original protocol with a slightly adjusted parameter is still secure. Towards this goal, we introduce the notion of almost-special-sound protocols which likely has broader applications.
Last updated:  2022-06-29
Snapshot-Oblivious RAMs: Sub-Logarithmic Efficiency for Short Transcripts
Yang Du, Daniel Genkin, and Paul Grubbs
ObliviousRAM(ORAM)isapowerfultechniquetopreventharmful data breaches. Despite tremendous progress in improving the concrete perfor- mance of ORAM, it remains too slow for use in many practical settings; recent breakthroughs in lower bounds indicate this inefficiency is inherent for ORAM and even some natural relaxations. This work introduces snapshot-oblivious RAMs, a new secure memory access primitive. Snapshot-oblivious RAMs bypass lower bounds by providing security only for transcripts whose length (call it c) is fixed and known ahead of time. Intuitively, snapshot-oblivious RAMs provide strong security for attacks of short duration, such as the snapshot attacks targeted by many encrypted databases. We give an ORAM-style definition of this new primitive, and present several constructions. The underlying design principle of our constructions is to store the history of recent operations in a data structure that can be accessed obliviously. We instantiate this paradigm with data structures that remain on the client, giving a snapshot-oblivious RAM with constant bandwidth overhead. We also show how these data structures can be stored on the server and accessed using oblivious memory primitives. Our most efficient instantiation achieves O(log c) bandwidth overhead. By extending recent ORAM lower bounds, we show this performance is asymptotically optimal. Along the way, we define a new hash queue data structure—essentially, a dictionary whose elements can be modified in a first-in- first-out fashion—which may be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2022-06-29
PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge
Ariel Gabizon, Zachary J. Williamson, and Oana Ciobotaru
Uncategorized
zk-SNARK constructions that utilize an updatable universal structured reference string remove one of the main obstacles in deploying zk-SNARKs [GKMMM, Crypto 2018]. The important work of Maller et al. [MBKM, CCS 2019] presented $\mathsf{Sonic}$ - the first potentially practical zk-SNARK with fully succinct verification for general arithmetic circuits with such an SRS. However, the version of $\mathsf{Sonic}$ enabling fully succinct verification still requires relatively high proof construction overheads. We present a universal SNARK construction with fully succinct verification, and significantly lower prover running time (roughly 7.5-20 less group exponentiations than [MBKM] in the fully succinct verifier mode depending on circuit structure). Similarly to [MBKM], we rely on a permutation argument based on Bayer and Groth [Eurocrypt 2012]. However, we focus on Evaluations on a subgroup rather than coefficients of monomials''; which enables simplifying both the permutation argument and the artihmetization step.
Last updated:  2022-06-29
SIDH Proof of Knowledge
Luca De Feo, Samuel Dobson, Steven D. Galbraith, and Lukas Zobernig
We show that the soundness proof for the De Feo-Jao-Plut identification scheme (the basis for supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman (SIDH) signatures) contains an invalid assumption, and we provide a counterexample for this assumption---thus showing the proof of soundness is invalid. As this proof was repeated in a number of works by various authors, multiple pieces of literature are affected by this result. Due to the importance of being able to prove knowledge of an SIDH key (for example, to prevent adaptive attacks), soundness is a vital property. Surprisingly, the problem of proving correctness of an isogeny turns out to be considerably more difficult than was perhaps anticipated. The main result of this paper is a sigma protocol to prove that an SIDH public key (including the torsion points in the public key) is correctly formed. Our scheme also avoids the SIDH identification scheme soundness issue raised by Ghantous, Pintore and Veroni. In particular, our protocol provides a non-interactive way of verifying that SIDH public keys are well-formed as protection against adaptive attacks, leading to an SIDH-based non-interactive key exchange (NIKE).
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Succinct Classical Verification of Quantum Computation
James Bartusek, Yael Tauman Kalai, Alex Lombardi, Fermi Ma, Giulio Malavolta, Vinod Vaikuntanathan, Thomas Vidick, and Lisa Yang
We construct a classically verifiable succinct interactive argument for quantum computation (BQP) with communication complexity and verifier runtime that are poly-logarithmic in the runtime of the BQP computation (and polynomial in the security parameter). Our protocol is secure assuming the post-quantum security of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and Learning with Errors (LWE). This is the first succinct argument for quantum computation in the plain model; prior work (Chia-Chung-Yamakawa, TCC '20) requires both a long common reference string and non-black-box use of a hash function modeled as a random oracle. At a technical level, we revisit the framework for constructing classically verifiable quantum computation (Mahadev, FOCS '18). We give a self-contained, modular proof of security for Mahadev's protocol, which we believe is of independent interest. Our proof readily generalizes to a setting in which the verifier's first message (which consists of many public keys) is compressed. Next, we formalize this notion of compressed public keys; we view the object as a generalization of constrained/programmable PRFs and instantiate it based on indistinguishability obfuscation. Finally, we compile the above protocol into a fully succinct argument using a (sufficiently composable) succinct argument of knowledge for NP. Using our framework, we achieve several additional results, including - Succinct arguments for QMA (given multiple copies of the witness), - Succinct non-interactive arguments for BQP (or QMA) in the quantum random oracle model, and - Succinct batch arguments for BQP (or QMA) assuming post-quantum LWE (without iO).
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Mix-Nets from Re-Randomizable and Replayable CCA-secure Public-Key Encryption
Antonio Faonio and Luigi Russo
Mix-nets are protocols that allow a set of senders to send messages anonymously. Faonio et al. (ASIACRYPT’19) showed how to instantiate mix-net protocols based on Public-Verifiable Re-randomizable Replayable CCA-secure (Rand-RCCA) PKE schemes. The bottleneck of their approach is that public-verifiable Rand-RCCA PKEs are less efficient than typical CPA-secure re-randomizable PKEs. In this paper, we revisit their mix-net protocol, showing how to get rid of the cumbersome public-verifiability property, and we give a more efficient instantiation for the mix-net protocol based on a (non publicly-verifiable) Rand-RCCA scheme. Additionally, we give a more careful security analysis of their mix-net protocol.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Tightness Subtleties for Multi-user PKE Notions
Hans Heum and Martijn Stam
Public key encryption schemes are increasingly being studied concretely, with an emphasis on tight bounds even in a multi-user setting. Here, two types of formalization have emerged, one with a single challenge bit and one with multiple challenge bits. Another modelling choice is whether to allow key corruptions or not. How tightly the various notions relate to each other has hitherto not been studied in detail. We show that in the absence of corruptions, single-bit left-or-right indistinguishability is the preferred notion, as it tightly implies the other (corruption-less) notions. However, in the presence of corruptions, this implication no longer holds; we suggest the use of a more general notion that tightly implies both existing options. Furthermore, for completeness we study how the relationship between left-or-right versus real-or-random evolves in the multi-user PKE setting.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
On Access Control Encryption without Sanitization
Cecilia Boschini, Ivan Damgård, and Claudio Orlandi
Access Control Encryption (ACE) allows to control information flow between parties by enforcing a policy that specifies which user can send messages to whom. The core of the scheme is a sanitizer, i.e., an entity that ''sanitizes'' all messages by essentially re-encrypting the ciphertexts under its key. In this work we investigate the natural question of whether it is still possible to achieve some meaningful security properties in scenarios when such a sanitization step is not possible. We answer positively by showing that it is possible to limit corrupted users to communicate only through insecure subliminal channels, under the necessary assumption that parties do not have pre-shared randomness. Moreover, we show that the bandwidth of such channels can be limited to be O(log(n)) by adding public ciphertext verifiability to the scheme under computational assumptions. In particular, we rely on a new security definition for obfuscation, Game Specific Obfuscation (GSO), which is a weaker definition than VBB, as it only requires the obfuscator to obfuscate programs in a specific family of programs, and limited to a fixed security game.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Hashing to Prime in Zero-Knowledge
Thomas Groß
We establish a set of zero-knowledge arguments that allow for the hashing of a committed secret $a$-bit input $x$ to a committed secret $(k+1)$-bit prime number $p_x$. The zero-knowledge arguments can convince a verifier that a commitment indeed is the correctly generated prime number derived from $x$ with a soundness error probability of at most $2^{-k}+ 2^{-t}$ dependent on the number of zero-knowledge argument rounds $k$ and the number of primality bases $t$ to establish primality. Our constructions offer a range of contributions including enabling dynamic encodings for prime-based accumulator, signature and attribute-based credential schemes allowing to reduce these schemes' public key size and setup requirements considerably and rendering them extensible. While our new primality zero-knowledge arguments are of independent interest, we also show improvements on proving that a secret number is the product of two secret safe primes significantly more efficient than previously known results, with applications to setting up secure special RSA moduli.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Making Biased DL Models Work: Message and Key Recovery Attacks on Saber Using Amplitude-Modulated EM Emanations
Ruize Wang, Kalle Ngo, and Elena Dubrova
Creating a good deep learning (DL) model is an art which requires expertise in DL and a large set of labeled data for training neural networks. Neither is readily available. In this paper, we introduce a method which enables us to achieve good results with bad DL models. We use simple multilayer perceptron (MLP) networks, trained on a small dataset, which make strongly biased predictions if used without the proposed method. The core idea is to extend the attack dataset so that at least one of its traces has the ground truth label to which the models are biased towards. The effectiveness of the presented method is demonstrated by attacking an ARM Cortex-M4 CPU implementation of Saber KEM, a finalist of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization project, on a nRF52832 system-on-chip supporting Bluetooth 5, using amplitude-modulated EM emanations. Previous amplitude-modulated EM emanation-based attacks on Saber KEM could not recover its messages with a sufficiently high probability. We recover messages with the probability 1 from the profiling device and with the probability 0.74 from a different device. Using messages recovered from chosen ciphertexts, we extract the secret key of Saber KEM.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Chaghri --- an FHE-friendly Block Cipher
Tomer Ashur, Mohammad Mahzoun, and Dilara Toprakhisar
The Recent progress in practical applications of secure computation protocols has also attracted attention to the symmetric-key primitives underlying them. Whereas traditional ciphers have evolved to be efficient with respect to certain performance metrics, advanced cryptographic protocols call for a different focus. The so called arithmetic complexity is viewed through the number and layout of non-linear operations in the circuit implemented by the protocol. Symmetric-key algorithms that are optimized with respect to this metric are said to be algebraic ciphers. Previous work targeting ZK and MPC protocols delivered great improvement in the performance of these applications both in lab and in practical use. Interestingly, despite its apparent benefits to privacy-aware cloud computing, algebraic ciphers targeting FHE did not attract similar attention. In this paper we present Chaghri, an FHE-friendly block cipher enabling efficient transciphering in BGV-like schemes. A complete Chaghri circuit can be implemented using only 16 multiplications, 32 Frobenius automorphisms and 32 rotations, all arranged in a depth-32 circuit. Our HElib implemention achieves a throughput of 0.26 seconds-per-bit which is 65% faster than AES in the same setting.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
NIWI and New Notions of Extraction for Algebraic Languages
Chaya Ganesh, Hamidreza Khoshakhlagh, and Roberto Parisella
We give an efficient construction of a computational non-interactive witness indistinguishable (NIWI) proof in the plain model, and investigate notions of extraction for NIZKs for algebraic languages. Our starting point is the recent work of Couteau and Hartmann (CRYPTO 2020) who developed a new framework (CH framework) for constructing non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and arguments under falsifiable assumptions for a large class of languages called algebraic languages. In this paper, we construct an efficient NIWI proof in the plain model for algebraic languages based on the CH framework. In the plain model, our NIWI construction is more efficient for algebraic languages than state-of-the-art Groth-Ostrovsky-Sahai (GOS) NIWI (JACM 2012). Next, we explore knowledge soundness of NIZK systems in the CH framework. We define a notion of strong f-extractability, and show that the CH proof system satisfies this notion. We then put forth a new definition of knowledge soundness called semantic extraction. We explore the relationship of semantic extraction with existing knowledge soundness definitions and show that it is a general definition that recovers black-box and non-black-box definitions as special cases. Finally, we show that NIZKs for algebraic languages in the CH framework cannot satisfy semantic extraction. We extend this impossibility to a class of NIZK arguments over algebraic languages, namely quasi-adaptive NIZK arguments that are constructed from smooth projective hash functions.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
A More Accurate Automatic Search Model for Characterizing Division Property
Huawei Liu, Zilong Wang, and Liu Zhang
Division property is a generalized integral property proposed by Todo at EUROCRYPT 2015. Subsequently, Todo and Morii extended division property to the bit level and proposed conventional bit-based division property (CBDP) and bit-based division property using three subsets (BDPT). At ASIACRYPT 2016, Xiang et al. applied MILP technique to model the CBDP propagation for the first time. To construct an automatic search model for BDPT propagation, Hu et al. characterized a variant BDPT based on SMT/SAT. Later at ASIACRYPT 2019, Wang et al. characterized the BDPT based MILP. However, the above two automatic search models have some limitations. In this paper, we focus on constructing an automatic search model that can more accurately characterize the BDPT propagation. Firstly, we define a new notion named BDPT Trail, which divides the BDPT propagation into three parts: the division trail K, division trail L, and Key-Xor operation. Secondly, we improve the insufficiency of the previous methods of calculating division trails and propose an effective algorithm that can obtain more valid division trails L of the S-box operation. Thirdly, we propose a new algorithm that models each Key-Xor operation based on MILP technique for the first time. Based on this, we can accurately characterize the Key-Xor operation by solving these MILP models. After that, by selecting appropriate initial BDPT and stopping rules, we construct an automatic search model that more accurately characterizes the BDPT propagation. As a result, our automatic search model is applied to search integral distinguishers for some block ciphers. For GIFT-64, we find a 11-round integral distinguisher which is one more round than the previous best results. For Rectangle, we find a better 10-round integral distinguisher with 9 balanced bits, which has eight more bits than the previous best results. For Simon64, we can find more balanced bits than the previous longest distinguishers. For Present, we find a better 9-round integral distinguisher with less active bits.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Privacy-aware Secure Region-based Handover for Small Cell Networks in 5G-enabled Mobile Communication
Rabiah Alnashwan, Prosanta Gope, and Benjamin Dowling
The 5G mobile communication network provides seamless communications between users and service providers and promises to achieve several stringent requirements, such as seamless mobility and massive connectivity. Although 5G can offer numerous benefits, security and privacy issues still need to be addressed. For example, the inclusion of small cell networks (SCN) into 5G brings the network closer to the connected users, providing a better quality of services (QoS), resulting in a significant increase in the number of Handover procedures (HO), which will affect the security, latency and efficiency of the network. It is then crucial to design a scheme that supports seamless handovers through secure authentication to avoid the consequences of SCN. To address this issue, this article proposes a secure region-based handover scheme with user anonymity and an efficient revocation mechanism that supports seamless connectivity for SCNs in 5G. In this context, we introduce three privacy-preserving authentication protocols, i.e., initial authentication protocol, intra-region handover protocol and inter-region handover protocol, for dealing with three communication scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to consider the privacy and security in both the intra-region and inter-region handover scenarios in 5G communication. Detailed security and performance analysis of our proposed scheme is presented to show that it is resilient against many security threats, is cost-effective in computation and provides an efficient solution for the 5G enabled mobile communication.
Last updated:  2022-06-28
Formalizing Delayed Adaptive Corruptions and the Security of Flooding Networks
Christian Matt, Jesper Buus Nielsen, and Søren Eller Thomsen
Many decentralized systems rely on flooding protocols for message dissemination. In such a protocol, the sender of a message sends it to a randomly selected set of peers. These peers again send the message to their randomly selected peers, until every network participant has received the message. This type of protocols clearly fail in face of an adaptive adversary who can simply corrupt all peers of the sender and thereby prevent the message from being delivered. Nevertheless, flooding protocols are commonly used within protocols that aim to be cryptographically secure, most notably in blockchain protocols. While it is possible to revert to static corruptions, this gives unsatisfactory security guarantees, especially in the setting of a blockchain that is supposed to run for an extended period of time. To be able to provide meaningful security guarantees in such settings, we give precise semantics to what we call $\delta$-delayed adversaries in the Universal Composability (UC) framework. Such adversaries can adaptively corrupt parties, but there is a delay of time $\delta$ from when an adversary decides to corrupt a party until they succeed in overtaking control of the party. Within this model, we formally prove the intuitive result that flooding protocols are secure against $\delta$-delayed adversaries when $\delta$ is at least the time it takes to send a message from one peer to another plus the time it takes the recipient to resend the message. To this end, we show how to reduce the adaptive setting with a $\delta$-delayed adversary to a static experiment with an Erdős–Rényi graph. Using the established theory of Erdős–Rényi graphs, we provide upper bounds on the propagation time of the flooding functionality for different neighborhood sizes of the gossip network. More concretely, we show the following for security parameter $\kappa$, point-to-point channels with delay at most $\Delta$, and $n$ parties in total, with a sufficiently delayed adversary that can corrupt any constant fraction of the parties: If all parties send to $\Omega(\kappa)$ parties on average, then we can realize a flooding functionality with maximal delay $\mathcal{O}\bigl(\Delta \cdot \log (n) \bigr)$; and if all parties send to $\Omega\bigl( \sqrt{\kappa n \log (n)} \bigr)$ parties on average, we can realize a flooding functionality with maximal delay $\mathcal{O}(\Delta)$.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
More Efficient Algorithms for the NTRU Key Generation using the Field Norm
Thomas Pornin and Thomas Prest
NTRU lattices are a class of polynomial rings which allow for compact and efficient representations of the lattice basis, thereby offering very good performance characteristics for the asymmetric algorithms that use them. Signature algorithms based on NTRU lattices have fast signature generation and verification, and relatively small signatures, public keys and private keys. A few lattice-based cryptographic schemes entail, generally during the key generation, solving the NTRU equation: $$f G - g F = q \mod x^n + 1$$ Here $f$ and $g$ are fixed, the goal is to compute solutions $F$ and $G$ to the equation, and all the polynomials are in $\mathbb{Z}[x]/(x^n + 1)$. The existing methods for solving this equation are quite cumbersome: their time and space complexities are at least cubic and quadratic in the dimension $n$, and for typical parameters they therefore require several megabytes of RAM and take more than a second on a typical laptop, precluding onboard key generation in embedded systems such as smart cards. In this work, we present two new algorithms for solving the NTRU equation. Both algorithms make a repeated use of the field norm in tower of fields; it allows them to be faster and more compact than existing algorithms by factors $\tilde O(n)$. For lattice-based schemes considered in practice, this reduces both the computation time and RAM usage by factors at least 100, making key pair generation within range of smart card abilities.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Formal Verification of Arithmetic Masking in Hardware and Software
Barbara Gigerl, Robert Primas, and Stefan Mangard
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Security Analysis of a Recent Pairing-based Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Blockchain-based WBANs
Yong-Jin Kim, Dok-Jun An, Kum-Sok Sin, and Son-Gyong Kim
In this paper, we proposed some vulnerabilities of a recent pairing-based certificateless authenticated key agreement protocol for blockchain-based wireless body area networks (WBAN). According to our analysis, this protocol is insecure against key offset attack (KOA), basic impersonation attack (BIA), and man-in-the-middle attack (MMA) of the malicious key generation center (KGC) administrators. We also found and pointed out some errors in the description of the protocol.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Symmetrical Disguise: Realizing Homomorphic Encryption Services from Symmetric Primitives (extended version)
Alexandros Bakas, Eugene Frimpong, and Antonis Michalas
Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a modern cryptographic technique that allows direct computations on encrypted data. While relatively new to the mainstream debate, HE has been a solid topic in research for decades. However, despite the technological advances of the past years, HE’s inefficiencies render it impractical for deployment in realistic scenarios. Hence research in the field is still in its initial phase. To overcome certain challenges and bring HE closer to a realization phase, researchers recently introduced the promising concept of Hybrid Homomorphic Encryption (HHE) – a primitive that combines symmetric cryptography with HE. Using HHE, users perform local data encryptions using a symmetric encryption scheme and then outsource them to the cloud. Upon reception, the cloud can transform the symmetrically encrypted data into homomorphic ciphertexts without decrypting them. Such an approach can be seen as an opportunity to build new, privacy-respecting cloud services, as the most expensive operations of HE can be moved to the cloud. In this work, we undertake the task of designing a secure cryptographic protocol based on HHE. In particular, we show how HHE can be used as the main building block of a protocol that allows an analyst to collect data from multiple sources and compute specific functions over them, in a privacy-preserving way. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that aims at demonstrating how HHE can be utilized in realistic scenarios, through the design of a secure protocol.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Round Efficient Byzantine Agreement from VDFs
Poulami Das, Lisa Eckey, Sebastian Faust, Julian Loss, and Monosij Maitra
Byzantine agreement (BA) is a fundamental primitive in distributed systems and has received huge interest as an important building block for blockchain systems. Classical byzantine agreement considers a setting where $n$ parties with fixed, known identities want to agree on an output in the presence of an adversary. Motivated by blockchain systems, the assumption of fixed identities is weakened by using a \emph{resource-based model}. In such models, parties do not have fixed known identities but instead have to invest some expensive resources to participate in the protocol. Prominent examples for such resources are computation (measured by, e.g., proofs-of-work) or money (measured by proofs-of-stake). Unlike in the classical setting where BA without trusted setup (e.g., a PKI or an unpredictable beacon) is impossible for $t \geq n/3$ corruptions, in such resource-based models, BA can be constructed for the optimal threshold of $t <n/2$. In this work, we investigate BA without a PKI in the model where parties have restricted computational resources. Concretely, we consider sequential computation modeled via computing a verifiable delay function (VDF) and establish the following results: Positive Result: We present the first protocol for BA with expected constant round complexity and termination under adaptive corruption, honest majority and without a PKI. Earlier work achieved round complexity $O(n\kappa^2)$ (CRYPTO'15) or $O(\kappa)$ (PKC'18), where $\kappa$ is the security parameter. Negative Result: We give the first lower bound on the communication complexity of BA in a model where parties have restricted computational resources. Concretely, we show that a multicast complexity of $O(\sqrt{n})$ is necessary even if the parties have access to a VDF oracle.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Efficient Algorithms for Broadcast and Consensus Based on Proofs of Work
Lisa Eckey, Sebastian Faust, and Julian Loss
Inspired by the astonishing success of cryptocurrencies, most notably the Bitcoin system, several recent works have focused on the design of robust blockchain-style protocols that work in a peer-to-peer setting such as the Internet. In contrast to the setting traditionally considered in multiparty computation (MPC), in these systems, honesty is measured by computing power instead of requiring that only a certain fraction of parties is controlled by the adversary. This provides a potential countermeasure against the so-called Sybil attack, where an adversary creates fake identities, thereby easily taking over the majority of parties in the system. In this work we design protocols for Broadcast and Byzantine agreement that are secure under the assumption that the majority of computing power is controlled by the honest parties and for the first time have expected constant round complexity. This is in contrast to earlier works (Crypto'15, ePrint'14) which have round complexities that scale linearly with the number n of parties; an undesirable feature in a P2P environment with potentially thousands of users. In addition, our main protocol which runs in quasi-constant rounds, introduces novel ideas that significantly decrease communication complexity. Concretely, this is achieved by using an appropriate time-locked encryption scheme and by structuring the parties into a network of so-called cliques. Note: This article contains incorrect claims. Some of its contributions were subsumed by eprint article 2022/823
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Automatically Verified Mechanized Proof of One-Encryption Key Exchange
Bruno Blanchet
We present a mechanized proof of the password-based protocol One-Encryption Key Exchange (OEKE) using the computationally-sound protocol prover CryptoVerif. OEKE is a non-trivial protocol, and thus mechanizing its proof provides additional confidence that it is correct. This case study was also an opportunity to implement several important extensions of CryptoVerif, useful for proving many other protocols. We have indeed extended CryptoVerif to support the computational Diffie-Hellman assumption. We have also added support for proofs that rely on Shoup's lemma and additional game transformations. In particular, it is now possible to insert case distinctions manually and to merge cases that no longer need to be distinguished. Eventually, some improvements have been added on the computation of the probability bounds for attacks, providing better reductions. In particular, we improve over the standard computation of probabilities when Shoup's lemma is used, which allows us to improve the bound given in a previous manual proof of OEKE, and to show that the adversary can test at most one password per session of the protocol. In this paper, we present these extensions, with their application to the proof of OEKE. All steps of the proof are verified by CryptoVerif. This document is an updated version of a report from 2012. In the 10 years between 2012 and 2022, CryptoVerif has made a lot of progress. In particular, the probability bound obtained by CryptoVerif for OEKE has been improved, reaching an almost optimal probability: only statistical terms corresponding to collisions between group elements or between hashes are overestimated by a small constant factor.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
A Note on Key Ranking for Optimal Collision Side-Channel Attacks
Cezary Glowacz
In our paper "Optimal collision side-channel attacks" (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/828) we studied collision side-channel attacks, derived an optimal distinguisher for the key, and provided an optimal algorithm for maximizing the success rate of the attacks. In this note we show that the problem of key ranking using an optimal distinguisher for collision side-channel attacks is NP-hard and we provide lower bounds for key ranks in collision side-channel attacks.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
A Long Tweak Goes a Long Way: High Multi-user Security Authenticated Encryption from Tweakable Block Ciphers
Benoît Cogliati, Jérémy Jean, Thomas Peyrin, and Yannick Seurin
We analyze the multi-user (mu) security of a family of nonce-based authentication encryption (nAE) schemes based on a tweakable block cipher (TBC). The starting point of our work is an analysis of the mu security of the SCT-II mode which underlies the nAE scheme Deoxys-II, winner of the CAESAR competition for the defense-in-depth category. We extend this analysis in two directions, as we detail now. First, we investigate the mu security of several TBC-based variants of the counter encryption mode (including CTRT, the encryption mode used within SCT-II) that differ by the way a nonce, a random value, and a counter are combined as tweak and plaintext inputs to the TBC to produce the keystream blocks that will mask the plaintext blocks. Then, we consider the authentication part of SCT-II and study the mu security of the nonce-based MAC Nonce-as-Tweak (NaT) built from a TBC and an almost universal (AU) hash function. We also observe that the standard construction of an AU hash function from a (T)BC can be proven secure under the assumption that the underlying TBC is unpredictable rather than pseudorandom, allowing much better conjectures on the concrete AU advantage. This allows us to derive the mu security of the family of nAE modes obtained by combining these encryption/MAC building blocks through the NSIV composition method. Some of these modes require an underlying TBC with a larger tweak length than what is usually available for existing ones. We then show the practicality of our modes by instantiating them with two new TBC constructions, Deoxys-TBC-512 and Deoxys-TBC-640, which can be seen as natural extensions of the Deoxys-TBC family to larger tweak input sizes. Designing such TBCs with unusually large tweaks is prone to pitfalls: Indeed, we show that a large-tweak proposal for SKINNY published at EUROCRYPT 2020 presents an inherent construction flaw. We therefore provide a sound design strategy to construct large-tweak TBCs within the Superposition Tweakey (STK) framework, leading to new Deoxys-TBC and SKINNY variants. We provide software benchmarks indicating that while ensuring a very high security level, the performances of our proposals remain very competitive.
Last updated:  2022-06-27
Key Structures: Improved Related-Key Boomerang Attack against the Full AES-256
Jian Guo, Ling Song, and Haoyang Wang
This paper introduces structure to key, in the related-key attack settings. While the idea of structure has been long used in keyrecovery attacks against block ciphers to enjoy the birthday effect, the same had not been applied to key materials due to the fact that key structure results in uncontrolled differences in key and hence affects the validity or probabilities of the differential trails. We apply this simple idea to improve the related-key boomerang attack against AES-256 by Biryukov and Khovratovich in 2009. Surprisingly, it turns out to be effective, i.e., both data and time complexities are reduced by a factor of about 2^8, to 2^92 and 2^91 respectively, at the cost of the amount of required keys increased from 4 to 2^19. There exist some tradeoffs between the data/time complexity and the number of keys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first essential improvement of the attack against the full AES-256 since 2009. It will be interesting to see if the structure technique can be applied to other AES-like block ciphers, and to tweaks rather than keys of tweakable block ciphers so the amount of required keys of the attack will not be affected.
Last updated:  2022-06-26
Predicting BKZ Z-Shapes on q-ary Lattices
Martin R. Albrecht and Jianwei Li
Primal attacks against the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem rely on reducing $$q$$-ary lattices. These reduced bases have been observed to exhibit a so-called Z-shape'' on their Gram--Schmidt vectors. We propose an efficient simulator to accurately predict this Z-shape behaviour, which we back up with extensive simulations and experiments. We also formalise (under standard heuristics) the intuition that the presence of a Z-shape makes enumeration-based primal lattice attacks faster. Furthermore, we upgrade the LWE or lattice estimator with our simulator to assess and then rule out the impact of the $$q$$-ary Z-shape on solving LWE instances derived from parameter sets for NIST PQC candidates. We consider this improved estimator to be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2022-06-26
Batch point compression in the context of advanced pairing-based protocols
Dmitrii Koshelev
This paper continues author's previous ones about compression of points on elliptic curves $E_b\!: y^2 = x^3 + b$ (with $j$-invariant $0$) over a finite field $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. More precisely, we show in detail how any two (resp. three) points from $E_b(\mathbb{F}_{\!q})$ can be quickly compressed to two (resp. three) elements of $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$ (apart from a few auxiliary bits) in such a way that the corresponding decompression stage requires to extract only one cubic (resp. sextic) root in $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$ (with several multiplications and without inversions). As a result, for many $q$ occurring in practice the new compression-decompression methods are more efficient than the classical one with the two (resp. three) $x$ or $y$ coordinates of the points, which extracts two (resp. three) roots in $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. We explain why the new methods are useful in the context of modern real-world pairing-based protocols such as Groth16. As a by-product, when $q \equiv 2 \ (\mathrm{mod} \ 3)$ (in particular, $E_b$ is supersingular), we obtain a two-dimensional analogue of Boneh--Franklin's encoding, that is a way to sample two "independent'' $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$-points on $E_b$ at the cost of one cubic root in $\mathbb{F}_{\!q}$. Finally, we comment on the case of four and more points from $E_b(\mathbb{F}_{\!q})$.
Last updated:  2022-06-26
How to Base Security on the Perfect/Statistical Binding Property of Quantum Bit Commitment?
Junbin Fang, Dominique Unruh, Jun Yan, and Dehua Zhou
The concept of quantum bit commitment was introduced in the early 1980s for the purpose of basing bit commitments solely on principles of quantum theory. Unfortunately, such unconditional quantum bit commitments still turn out to be impossible. As a compromise like in classical cryptography, Dumais et al. [DMS00] introduce the conditional quantum bit commitments that additionally rely on complexity assumptions. However, in contrast to classical bit commitments which are widely used in classical cryptography, up until now there is relatively little work towards studying the application of quantum bit commitments in quantum cryptography. This may be partly due to the well-known weakness of the general quantum binding that comes from the possible superposition attack of the sender of quantum commitments, making it unclear whether quantum commitments could be useful in quantum cryptography. In this work, following Yan et al. [YWLQ15] we continue studying using (canonical non-interactive) perfectly/statistically-binding quantum bit commitments as the drop-in replacement of classical bit commitments in some well-known constructions. Specifically, we show that the (quantum) security can still be established for zero-knowledge proof, oblivious transfer, and proof-of-knowledge. In spite of this, we stress that the corresponding security analyses are by no means trivial extensions of their classical analyses; new techniques are needed to handle possible superposition attacks by the cheating sender of quantum bit commitments. Since (canonical non-interactive) statistically-binding quantum bit commitments can be constructed from quantum-secure one-way functions, we hope using them (as opposed to classical commitments) in cryptographic constructions can reduce the round complexity and weaken the complexity assumption simultaneously.
Last updated:  2022-06-26
Autoguess: A Tool for Finding Guess-and-Determine Attacks and Key Bridges
The guess-and-determine technique is one of the most widely used techniques in cryptanalysis to recover unknown variables in a given system of relations. In such attacks, a subset of the unknown variables is guessed such that the remaining unknowns can be deduced using the information from the guessed variables and the given relations. This idea can be applied in various areas of cryptanalysis such as finding the internal state of stream ciphers when a sufficient amount of output data is available, or recovering the internal state and the secret key of a block cipher from very few known plaintexts. Another important application is the key-bridging technique in key-recovery attacks on block ciphers, where the attacker aims to find the minimum number of required sub-key guesses to deduce all involved sub-keys via the key schedule. Since the complexity of the guess-and-determine technique directly depends on the number of guessed variables, it is essential to find the smallest possible guess basis, i.e., the subset of guessed variables from which the remaining variables can be deduced. In this paper, we present Autoguess, an easy-to-use general tool to search for a minimal guess basis. We propose several new modeling techniques to harness SAT/SMT, MILP, and Gröbner basis solvers. We demonstrate their usefulness in guess-and-determine attacks on stream ciphers and block ciphers, as well as finding key-bridges in key recovery attacks on block ciphers. Moreover, integrating our CP models for the key-bridging technique into the previous CP-based frameworks to search for distinguishers, we propose a unified and general CP model to search for key recovery friendly distinguishers which supports both linear and nonlinear key schedules.
Last updated:  2022-06-26
Batched Differentially Private Information Retrieval
Kinan Dak Albab, Rawane Issa, Mayank Varia, and Kalman Graffi
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) allows several clients to query a database held by one or more servers, such that the contents of their queries remain private. Prior PIR schemes have achieved sublinear communication and computation by leveraging computational assumptions, federating trust among many servers, relaxing security to permit differentially private leakage, refactoring effort into an offline stage to reduce online costs, or amortizing costs over a large batch of queries. In this work, we present an efficient PIR protocol that combines all of the above techniques to achieve constant amortized communication and computation complexity in the size of the database and constant client work. We leverage differentially private leakage in order to provide better trade-offs between privacy and efficiency. Our protocol achieves speed-ups up to and exceeding $10$x in practical settings compared to state of the art PIR protocols, and can scale to batches with hundreds of millions of queries on cheap commodity AWS machines. Our protocol builds upon a new secret sharing scheme that is both incremental and non-malleable, which may be of interest to a wider audience. Our protocol provides security up to abort against malicious adversaries that can corrupt all but one party.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
On the Anonymity Guarantees of Anonymous Proof-of-Stake Protocols
Markulf Kohlweiss, Varun Madathil, Kartik Nayak, and Alessandra Scafuro
In proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchains, stakeholders that extend the chain are selected according to the amount of stake they own. In S\&P 2019 the Ouroboros Crypsinous'' system of Kerber et al.\ (and concurrently Ganesh et al.\ in EUROCRYPT 2019) presented a mechanism that hides the identity of the stakeholder when adding blocks, hence preserving anonymity of stakeholders both during payment and mining in the Ouroboros blockchain. They focus on anonymizing the messages of the blockchain protocol, but suggest that potential identity leaks from the network-layer can be removed as well by employing anonymous broadcast channels. In this work we show that this intuition is flawed. Even ideal anonymous broadcast channels do not suffice to protect the identity of the stakeholder who proposes a block. We make the following contributions. First, we show a formal network-attack against Ouroboros Crypsinous, where the adversary can leverage network delays to distinguish who is the stakeholder that added a block on the blockchain. Second, we abstract the above attack and show that whenever the adversary has control over the network delay -- within the synchrony bound -- loss of anonymity is inherent for any protocol that provides liveness guarantees. We do so, by first proving that it is impossible to devise a (deterministic) state-machine replication protocol that achieves basic liveness guarantees and better than $(1-2\f)$ anonymity at the same time (where $\f$ is the fraction of corrupted parties). We then connect this result to the PoS setting by presenting the tagging and reverse tagging attack that allows an adversary, across several executions of the PoS protocol, to learn the stake of a target node, by simply delaying messages for the target. We demonstrate that our assumption on the delaying power of the adversary is realistic by describing how our attack could be mounted over the Zcash blockchain network (even when Tor is used). We conclude by suggesting approaches that can mitigate such attacks.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
MPClan: Protocol Suite for Privacy-Conscious Computations
Nishat Koti, Shravani Patil, Arpita Patra, and Ajith Suresh
The growing volumes of data being collected and its analysis to provide better services are creating worries about digital privacy. To address privacy concerns and give practical solutions, the literature has relied on secure multiparty computation. However, recent research has mostly focused on the small-party honest-majority setting of up to four parties, noting efficiency concerns. In this work, we extend the strategies to support a larger number of participants in an honest-majority setting with efficiency at the center stage. Cast in the preprocessing paradigm, our semi-honest protocol improves the online complexity of the decade-old state-of-the-art protocol of Damgård and Nielson (CRYPTO'07). In addition to having an improved online communication cost, we can shut down almost half of the parties in the online phase, thereby saving up to 50$\%$ in the system's operational costs. Our maliciously secure protocol also enjoys similar benefits and requires only half of the parties, except for one-time verification, towards the end. To showcase the practicality of the designed protocols, we benchmark popular applications such as deep neural networks, graph neural networks, genome sequence matching, and biometric matching using prototype implementations. Our improved protocols aid in bringing up to 60-80$\%$ savings in monetary cost over prior work.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Rinocchio: SNARKs for Ring Arithmetic
Chaya Ganesh, Anca Nitulescu, and Eduardo Soria-Vazquez
Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) enable non-interactive efficient verification of NP computations and admit short proofs. However, all current SNARK constructions assume that the statements to be proven can be efficiently represented as either Boolean or arithmetic circuits over finite fields. For most constructions, the choice of the prime field $\mathbb{F}_p$ is limited by the existence of groups of matching order for which secure bilinear maps exist. In this work we overcome such restrictions and enable verifying computations over rings. We construct the first designated-verifier SNARK for statements which are represented as circuits over a broader kind of commutative rings, namely those containing big enough exceptional sets. Exceptional sets consist of elements such that their pairwise differences are invertible. Our contribution is threefold: We first introduce Quadratic Ring Programs (QRPs) as a characterization of NP where the arithmetic is over a ring. Second, inspired by the framework in Gennaro, Gentry, Parno and Raykova (EUROCRYPT 2013), we design SNARKs over rings in a modular way. We generalize pre-existent assumptions employed in field-restricted SNARKs to encoding schemes over rings. As our encoding notion is generic in the choice of the ring, it is amenable to different settings. Finally, we propose two applications for our SNARKs. Our first application is verifiable computation over encrypted data, specifically for evaluations of Ring- LWE-based homomorphic encryption schemes. In the second one, we use Rinocchio to naturally prove statements about circuits over e.g. $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{64}}$, which closely matches real-life computer architectures such as standard CPUs.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Nearly Optimal Property Preserving Hashing
Justin Holmgren, Minghao Liu, LaKyah Tyner, and Daniel Wichs
Property-preserving hashing (PPH) consists of a family of compressing hash functions $h$ such that, for any two inputs $x,y$, we can correctly identify whether some property $P(x,y)$ holds given only the digests $h(x),h(y)$. In a basic PPH, correctness should hold with overwhelming probability over the choice of $h$ when $x,y$ are worst-case values chosen a-priori and independently of $h$. In an adversarially robust PPH (RPPH), correctness must hold even when $x,y$ are chosen adversarially and adaptively depending on $h$. Here, we study (R)PPH for the property that the Hamming distance between $x$ and $y$ is at most $t$. The notion of (R)PPH was introduced by Boyle, LaVigne and Vaikuntanathan (ITCS '19), and further studied by Fleischhacker, Simkin (Eurocrypt '21) and Fleischhacker, Larsen, Simkin (Eurocrypt '22). In this work, we obtain improved constructions that are conceptually simpler, have nearly optimal parameters, and rely on more general assumptions than prior works. Our results are: * We construct information-theoretic non-robust PPH for Hamming distance via syndrome list-decoding of linear error-correcting codes. We provide a lower bound showing that this construction is essentially optimal. * We make the above construction robust with little additional overhead, by relying on homomorphic collision-resistant hash functions, which can be constructed from either the discrete-logarithm or the short-integer-solution assumptions. The resulting RPPH achieves improved compression compared to prior constructions, and is nearly optimal. * We also show an alternate construction of RPPH for Hamming distance under the minimal assumption that standard collision-resistant hash functions exist. The compression is slightly worse than our optimized construction using homomorphic collision-resistance, but essentially matches the prior state of the art constructions from specific algebraic assumptions. * Lastly, we study a new notion of randomized robust PPH (R2P2H) for Hamming distance, which relaxes RPPH by allowing the hashing algorithm itself to be randomized. We give an information-theoretic construction with optimal parameters.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Faster Yet Safer: Logging System Via Fixed-Key Blockcipher
Viet Tung Hoang, Cong Wu, and Xin Yuan
System logs are crucial for forensic analysis, but to be useful, they need to be tamper-proof. To protect the logs, a number of secure logging systems have been proposed from both academia and the industry. Unfortunately, except for the recent KennyLoggings construction, all other logging systems are broken by an attack of Paccagnella et al. (CCS 2020). In this work, we build a secure logging system that improves KennyLoggings in several fronts: adoptability, security, and performance. Our key insight for performance gain is to use AES on a fixed, known key. While this trick is widely used in secure distributed computing, this is the first time it has found an application in the area of symmetric-key cryptography.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Anemoi: Exploiting the Link between Arithmetization-Orientation and CCZ-Equivalence
Clémence Bouvier, Pierre Briaud, Pyrros Chaidos, Léo Perrin, and Vesselin Velichkov
Advanced cryptographic protocols such as Zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs of knowledge, widely used in cryptocurrency applications such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Zcash, demand new cryptographic hash functions that are efficient not only over the binary field $\mathbb{F}_2$, but also over large fields of prime characteristic $\mathbb{F}_p$. This need has been acknowledged by the wider community and new so-called Arithmetization-Oriented (AO) hash functions have been proposed in response, e.g. MiMC-Hash, Rescue and Poseidon to name a few. In this paper we propose Anemoi: a new family of ZK-friendly AO hash functions. The main features that set Anemoi apart from other such families are that 1) it is designed to be efficient within multiple proof systems (e.g. Groth16, Plonk, etc.), 2) it contains dedicated functions optimised for specific applications (namely Merkle tree hashing and general purpose hashing), 3) has competitive performance e.g. about a factor of 2 improvement over Poseidon and Rescue in terms of R1CS constraints, and a 10%-28% improvement over a highly optimized Poseidon implementation in Plonk constraints. On the theoretical side, Anemoi pushes further the frontier in understating the design principles that are truly entailed by arithmetization-orientation. In particular, we identify and exploit a previously unknown relationship between CCZ-equivalence and arithmetization-orientation. In addition, we propose two new standalone components that can be easily reused in new designs. One is a new S-box called Flystel, based on the well-studied butterfly structure, and the second is Jive -- a new mode of operation, inspired by the "Latin dance'' symmetric algorithms (Salsa, ChaCha and derivatives).
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Structure-Preserving Threshold Signatures
Mahdi Sedaghat, Daniel Slamanig, Markulf Kohlweiss, and Bart Preneel
The by now broadly accepted reliance of society on online services, led to a push for decentralization to mitigate the societal and technical risks caused by single points of failure (PoF). One such PoF are cryptographic keys. Thus there is renewed interest in threshold cryptography to distribute the generation and use of such keys. Structure-preserving signatures (SPS) are an important building block for privacy-preserving cryptographic protocols such as electronic cash and (delegatable) anonymous credentials. However, to date, no structure-preserving threshold signatures (SPTS) are available. This is unfortunate, as another PoF is centralized identity management, which could be mitigated by anonymous credentials. In this work we aim to close this gap by introducing a notion and constructions of (non-) interactive SPTS. While it is relatively easy to devise interactive SPTS supporting static corruptions, e.g., based on the SPS of Ghadafi (CT-RSA'16), constructing non-interactive SPTS is a much more delicate task. Due to their structural properties, starting from existing SPS does not yield secure schemes. Thus, we take a different path and first introduce the notion of message-indexed SPS, a variant of SPS that is parameterized by a message indexing function. Inspired by Pointcheval-Sanders (PS) signatures (CT-RSA'16) and the SPS of Ghadafi, we then present a message-indexed SPS, which is non-interactive threshold-friendly. We prove its security in the random oracle model based on a variant of the generalized PS assumption. Based on our message-indexed SPS we then propose the first non-interactive message-indexed SPTS, which we prove to be secure under adaptive corruption. Finally, we discuss applications of SPTS to privacy-preserving primitives.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Syndrome Decoding Estimator
Andre Esser and Emanuele Bellini
The selection of secure parameter sets requires an estimation of the attack cost to break the respective cryptographic scheme instantiated under these parameters. The current NIST standardization process for post-quantum schemes makes this an urgent task, especially considering the announcement to select final candidates by the end of 2021. For code-based schemes, recent estimates seemed to contradict the claimed security of most proposals, leading to a certain doubt about the correctness of those estimates. Furthermore, none of the available estimates include most recent algorithmic improvements on decoding linear codes, which are based on information set decoding (ISD) in combination with nearest neighbor search. In this work we observe that all major ISD improvements are build on nearest neighbor search, explicitly or implicitly. This allows us to derive a framework from which we obtain practical variants of all relevant ISD algorithms including the most recent improvements. We derive formulas for the practical attack costs and make those online available in an easy to use estimator tool written in python and C. Eventually, we provide classical and quantum estimates for the bit security of all parameter sets of current code-based NIST proposals.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
An Efficient Query Recovery Attack Against a Graph Encryption Scheme
Francesca Falzon and Kenneth G. Paterson
Ghosh, Kamara and Tamassia (ASIA CCS 2021) presented a Graph Encryption Scheme supporting shortest path queries. We show how to perform a query recovery attack against this GKT scheme when the adversary is given the original graph together with the leakage of certain subsets of queries. Our attack falls within the security model used by Ghosh et al., and is the first targeting schemes supporting shortest path queries. Our attack uses classical graph algorithms to compute the canonical names of the single-destination shortest path spanning trees of the underlying graph and uses these canonical names to pre-compute the set of candidate queries that match each response. Then, when all shortest path queries to a single node have been observed, the canonical names for the corresponding query tree are computed and the responses are matched to the candidate queries from the offline phase. The output is guaranteed to contain the correct query. For a graph on $n$ vertices, our attack runs in time $O(n^3)$ and matches the time complexity of the GKT scheme's setup. We evaluate the attack's performance using the real world datasets used in the original paper and on random graphs, and show that for the real-world datasets as many as 21.9% of the queries can be uniquely recovered and as many as 50% of the queries result in sets of only three candidates.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Partial Key Exposure Attacks on BIKE, Rainbow and NTRU
Andre Esser, Alexander May, Javier Verbel, and Weiqiang Wen
In a so-called partial key exposure attack one obtains some information about the secret key, e.g. via some side-channel leakage. This information might be a certain fraction of the secret key bits (erasure model) or some erroneous version of the secret key (error model). The goal is to recover the secret key from the leaked information. There is a common belief that, as opposed to e.g. the RSA cryptosystem, most post-quantum cryptosystems are usually resistant against partial key exposure attacks. We strongly question this belief by constructing partial key exposure attacks on code-based, multivariate, and lattice-based schemes (BIKE, Rainbow and NTRU). Our attacks exploit the redundancy that modern PQ cryptosystems inherently use for efficiency reasons. The application and development of techniques from information set decoding plays a crucial role for achieving our results. On the theoretical side, we show non-trivial information leakage bounds that allow for a polynomial time key recovery attack. As an example, for all schemes the knowledge of a constant fraction of the secret key bits suffices to reconstruct the full key in polynomial time. Even if we no longer insist on polynomial time attacks, most of our attacks extend well and remain feasible up to large erasure and error rates. In the case of BIKE for example we obtain attack complexities around 60 bits when half of the secret key bits are erased, or a quarter of the secret key bits are faulty. Our results show that even highly error-prone key leakage of modern PQ cryptosystems may lead to full secret key recoveries.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Differential Cryptanalysis in the Fixed-Key Model
Tim Beyne and Vincent Rijmen
Uncategorized
A systematic approach to the fixed-key analysis of differential probabilities is proposed. It is based on the propagation of 'quasidifferential trails', which keep track of probabilistic linear relations on the values satisfying a differential characteristic in a theoretically sound way. It is shown that the fixed-key probability of a differential can be expressed as the sum of the correlations of its quasidifferential trails. The theoretical foundations of the method are based on an extension of the difference-distribution table, which we call the quasidifferential transition matrix. The role of these matrices is analogous to that of correlation matrices in linear cryptanalysis. This puts the theory of differential and linear cryptanalysis on an equal footing. The practical applicability of the proposed methodology is demonstrated by analyzing several differentials for RECTANGLE, KNOT, Speck and Simon. The analysis is automated and applicable to other SPN and ARX designs. Several attacks are shown to be invalid, most others turn out to work only for some keys but can be improved for weak-keys.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Block-Cipher-Based Tree Hashing
Aldo Gunsing
First of all we take a thorough look at an error in a paper by Daemen et al. (ToSC 2018) which looks at minimal requirements for tree-based hashing based on multiple primitives, including block ciphers. This reveals that the error is more fundamental than previously shown by Gunsing et al. (ToSC 2020), which is mainly interested in its effect on the security bounds. It turns out that the cause for the error is due to an essential oversight in the interaction between the different oracles used in the indifferentiability proofs. In essence, it reduces the claim from the normal indifferentiability setting to the weaker sequential indifferentiability one. As a matter of fact, this error appeared in multiple earlier indifferentiability papers, including the optimal indifferentiability of the sum of permutations (EUROCRYPT 2018) and the recent ABR+ construction (EUROCRYPT 2021). We discuss in detail how this oversight is caused and how it can be avoided. We next demonstrate how the negative effects on the security bound of the construction by Daemen et al. can be resolved. Instead of only allowing a truncated output, we generalize the construction to allow for any finalization function and investigate the security of this for five different types of finalization. Our findings, among others, show that the security of the SHA-2 mode does not degrade if the feed-forward is dropped and that the modern BLAKE3 construction is secure in principle but that its use of the extendable output requires its counter used for random access to be public. Finally, we introduce the tree sponge, a generalization of the sequential sponge construction with parallel absorbing and squeezing.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Public-Coin 3-Round Zero-Knowledge from Learning with Errors and Keyless Multi-Collision-Resistant Hash
Susumu Kiyoshima
We construct a public-coin 3-round zero-knowledge argument for NP assuming (i) the sub-exponential hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem and (ii) the existence of keyless multi-collision-resistant hash functions against slightly super-polynomial-time adversaries. These assumptions are almost identical to those that were used recently to obtain a private-coin 3-round zero-knowledge argument [Bitansky et al., STOC 2018]. (The difference is that we assume sub-exponential hardness instead of quasi-polynomial hardness for the LWE problem.)
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Authenticated Garbling from Simple Correlations
Samuel Dittmer, Yuval Ishai, Steve Lu, and Rafail Ostrovsky
We revisit the problem of constant-round malicious secure two-party computation by considering the use of simple correlations, namely sources of correlated randomness that can be securely generated with sublinear communication complexity and good concrete efficiency. The current state-of-the-art protocol of Katz et al. (Crypto 2018) achieves malicious security by realizing a variant of the authenticated garbling functionality of Wang et al. (CCS 2017). Given oblivious transfer correlations, the communication cost of this protocol (with 40 bits of statistical security) is comparable to roughly $10$ garbled circuits (GCs). This protocol inherently requires more than 2 rounds of interaction. In this work, we use other kinds of simple correlations to realize the authenticated garbling functionality with better efficiency. Concretely, we get the following reduced costs in the random oracle model: - Using variants of both vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) and multiplication triples (MT), we reduce the cost to $1.31$ GCs. - Using only variants of VOLE, we reduce the cost to $2.25$ GCs. - Using only variants of MT, we obtain a non-interactive (i.e., 2-message) protocol with cost comparable to $8$ GCs. Finally, we show that by using recent constructions of pseudorandom correlation generators (Boyle et al., CCS 2018, Crypto 2019, 2020), the simple correlations consumed by our protocols can be securely realized without forming an efficiency bottleneck.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Georgios Tsimos, Julian Loss, and Charalampos Papamanthou
Byzantine Broadcast is crucial for many cryptographic protocols such as secret sharing, multiparty computation and blockchain consensus. In this paper we apply gossiping (propagating a message by sending to a few random parties who in turn do the same, until the message is delivered) and propose new communication-efficient protocols, under dishonest majority, for Single-Sender Broadcast (BC) and Parallel Broadcast (PBC), improving the state-of-the-art in several ways. As our warm-up result, we present a randomized protocol for BC which achieves $O(n^2\kappa^2)$ communication complexity from plain public key setup assumptions. This is the first protocol with subcubic communication in this setting, but operates only against static adversaries. Using ideas from our BC protocol, we move to our central contribution and present two protocols for PBC that are secure against adaptive adversaries. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to study PBC specifically: All previous approaches for Parallel Broadcast naively run $n$ instances of single-sender Broadcast, increasing the communication complexity by an undesirable factor of $n$. Our insight of avoiding black-box invocations of BC is particularly crucial for achieving our asymptotic improvements. In particular: 1. Our first PBC protocol achieves $\tilde{O}(n^3\kappa^2)$ communication complexity and relies only on plain public key setup assumptions. 2. Our second PBC protocol uses trusted setup and achieves nearly optimal communication complexity $\tilde{O}(n^2\kappa^4)$. Both PBC protocols yield an almost linear improvement over the best known solutions involving $n$ parallel invocations of the respective BC protocols such as those of Dolev and Strong (SIAM Journal on Computing, 1983) and Chan et al. (Public Key Cryptography, 2020). Central to our PBC protocols is a new problem that we define and solve, which we name "Converge". In Converge, parties must run an adaptively-secure and efficient protocol such that by the end of the protocol, all honest parties that remain possess a superset of the union of the initial honest parties' inputs.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
Covert Authentication from Lattices
Rajendra Kumar and Khoa Nguyen
Introduced by von Ahn et al. (STOC’05), covert two-party computation is an appealing cryptographic primitive that allows Al- ice and Bob to securely evaluate a function on their secret inputs in a steganographic manner, i.e., even the existence of a computation is oblivious to each party - unless the output of the function is favourable to both. A prominent form of covert computation is covert authentica- tion, where Alice and Bob want to authenticate each other based on their credentials, in a way such that the party who does not hold the appro- priate credentials cannot pass the authentication and is even unable to distinguish a protocol instance from random noise. Jarecki (PKC’14) put forward a blueprint for designing covert authentication protocols, which relies on a covert conditional key-encapsulation mechanism, an identity escrow scheme, a covert commitment scheme and a Σ-protocol satisfying several specific properties. He also proposed an instantiation based on the Strong RSA, the Decisional Quadratic Residuosity and the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumptions. Despite being very efficient, Jarecki’s con- struction is vulnerable against quantum adversaries. In fact, designing covert authentication protocols from post-quantum assumptions remains an open problem. In this work, we present several contributions to the study of covert authentication protocols. First, we identify several technical obstacles in realizing Jarecki’s blueprint under lattice assumptions. To remedy, we then provide a new generic construction of covert Mutual Authentica- tion (MA) protocol, that departs from given blueprint and that requires somewhat weaker properties regarding the employed cryptographic ingre- dients. Next, we instantiate our generic construction based on commonly used lattice assumptions. The protocol is proven secure in the random oracle model, assuming the hardness of the Module Learning With Errors (M-LWE) and Module Short Integer Solution (M-SIS) and the NTRU problems, and hence, is potentially quantum-safe. In the process, we also develop an approximate smooth projective hashing function associated with a covert commitment, based on the M-LWE assumption. We then demonstrate that this new ingredient can be smoothly combined with existing lattice-based techniques to yield a secure covert MA scheme.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
A More Complete Analysis of the Signal Double Ratchet Algorithm
Alexander Bienstock, Jaiden Fairoze, Sanjam Garg, Pratyay Mukherjee, and Srinivasan Raghuraman
Seminal works by Cohn-Gordon, Cremers, Dowling, Garratt, and Stebila [EuroS&P 2017] and Alwen, Coretti and Dodis [EUROCRYPT 2019] provided the first formal frameworks for studying the widely-used Signal Double Ratchet (DR for short) algorithm. In this work, we develop a new Universally Composable (UC) definition F_DR that we show is provably achieved by the DR protocol. Our definition captures not only the security and correctness guarantees of the DR already identified in the prior state-of-the-art analyses of Cohn-Gordon et al. and Alwen et al., but also more guarantees that are absent from one or both of these works. In particular, we construct six different modified versions of the DR protocol, all of which are insecure according to our definition F_DR, but remain secure according to one (or both) of their definitions. For example, our definition is the first to capture CCA-style attacks possible immediately after a compromise — attacks that, as we show, the DR protocol provably resists, but were not captured by prior definitions. We additionally show that multiple compromises of a party in a short time interval, which the DR should be able to withstand, as we understand from its whitepaper, nonetheless introduce a new non-trivial (albeit minor) weakness of the DR. Since the definitions in the literature (including our F_DR above) do not capture security against this more nuanced scenario, we define a new stronger definition F_TR that does. Finally, we provide a minimalistic modification to the DR (that we call the Triple Ratchet, or TR for short) and show that the resulting protocol securely realizes the stronger functionality F_TR. Remarkably, the modification incurs no additional communication cost and virtually no additional computational cost. We also show that these techniques can be used to improve communication costs in other scenarios, e.g. practical Updatable Public Key Encryption schemes and the re-randomized TreeKEM protocol of Alwen et al. [CRYPTO 2020] for Secure Group Messaging.
Last updated:  2022-06-24
A New Framework For More Efficient Round-Optimal Lattice-Based (Partially) Blind Signature via Trapdoor Sampling
Rafael del Pino and Shuichi Katsumata
Blind signatures, proposed by Chaum (CRYPTO'82), are interactive protocols between a signer and a user, where a user can obtain a signature without revealing the message to be signed. Recently, Hauck et al. (EUROCRYPT'20) observed that all efficient lattice-based blind signatures following the blueprint of the original blind signature by Rükert (ASIACRYPT'10) have a flawed security proof. This puts us in a situation where all known lattice-based blind signatures have at least two of the following drawbacks: heuristic security; 1 MB or more signature size; only supporting bounded polynomially many signatures, or being based on non-standard assumptions. In this work, we construct the first round-optimal (i.e., two-round) lattice-based blind signature with a signature size of roughly 100 KB that supports unbounded polynomially many signatures and is provably secure under standard assumptions. Even if we allow non-standard assumptions and more rounds, ours provide the shortest signature size while simultaneously supporting unbounded polynomially many signatures. The main idea of our work is revisiting the generic blind signature construction by Fischlin (CRYPTO'06) and optimizing the commit-then-open proof using techniques tailored to lattices. Our blind signature is also the first to have a formal security proof in the quantum random oracle model. Finally, our blind signature extends naturally to partially blind signatures, where the user and signer can include an agreed-upon public string in the message.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Stronger Security for Non-Interactive Threshold Signatures: BLS and FROST
Mihir Bellare, Stefano Tessaro, and Chenzhi Zhu
We give a unified syntax, and a hierarchy of definitions of security of increasing strength, for non-interactive threshold signature schemes. They cover both fully non-interactive schemes (these are ones that have a single-round signing protocol, the canonical example being threshold-BLS) and ones, like FROST, that have a prior round of message-independent pre-processing. The definitions in the upper echelon of our hierarchy ask for security that is well beyond any currently defined, let alone proven to be met by the just-mentioned schemes, yet natural, and important for modern applications like securing digital wallets. We prove that BLS and FROST are better than advertised, meeting some of these stronger definitions. Yet, they fall short of meeting our strongest definition, a gap we fill for FROST via a simple enhancement to the scheme. We also surface subtle differences in the security achieved by variants of FROST.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Sustained Space and Cumulative Complexity Trade-offs for Data-Dependent Memory-Hard Functions
Jeremiah Blocki and Blake Holman
Memory-hard functions (MHFs) are a useful cryptographic primitive which can be used to design egalitarian proof of work puzzles and to protect low entropy secrets like passwords against brute-force attackers. Intuitively, a memory-hard function is a function whose evaluation costs are dominated by memory costs even if the attacker uses specialized hardware (FPGAs/ASICs), and several cost metrics have been proposed to quantify this intuition. For example, space-time cost looks at the product of running time and the maximum space usage over the entire execution of an algorithm. Alwen and Serbinenko (STOC 2015) observed that the space-time cost of evaluating a function multiple times may not scale linearly in the number of instances being evaluated and introduced the stricter requirement that a memory-hard function has high cumulative memory complexity (CMC) to ensure that an attacker's amortized space-time costs remain large even if the attacker evaluates the function on multiple different inputs in parallel. Alwen et al. (EUROCRYPT 2018) observed that the notion of CMC still gives the attacker undesirable flexibility in selecting space-time tradeoffs e.g., while the MHF scrypt has maximal CMC $\Omega(N^2)$, an attacker could evaluate the function with constant $O(1)$ memory in time $O(N^2)$. Alwen et al. introduced an even stricter notion of Sustained Space complexity and designed an MHF which has $s=\Omega(N/\log N)$ sustained complexity $t=\Omega(N)$ i.e., any algorithm evaluating the function in the parallel random oracle model must have at least $t=\Omega(N)$ steps where the memory usage is at least $\Omega(N/\log N)$. In this work, we use dynamic pebbling games and dynamic graphs to explore tradeoffs between sustained space complexity and cumulative memory complexity for data-dependent memory-hard functions such as Argon2id and scrypt. We design our own dynamic graph (dMHF) with the property that {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either (1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N)$ space, or (2) has CMC $\Omega(N^{3-\epsilon})$ --- substantially larger than $N^2$. For Argon2id we show that {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either(1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N^{1-\epsilon})$ space, or (2) has CMC $\omega(N^2)$. We also present a dynamic version of DRSample (Alwen et al. 2017) for which {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either (1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N/\log N)$ space, or (2) has CMC $\Omega(N^3/\log N)$.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Sharing Transformation and Dishonest Majority MPC with Packed Secret Sharing
Vipul Goyal, Antigoni Polychroniadou, and Yifan Song
In the last few years, the efficiency of secure multi-party computation (MPC) in the dishonest majority setting has increased by several orders of magnitudes starting with the SPDZ protocol family which offers a speedy information-theoretic online phase in the prepossessing model. However, state-of-the-art $n$-party MPC protocols in the dishonest majority setting incur online communication complexity per multiplication gate which is linear in the number of parties, i.e. $O(n)$, per gate across all parties. In this work, we construct the first MPC protocols in the preprocessing model for dishonest majority with sub-linear communication complexity per gate in the number of parties $n$. To achieve our results, we extend the use of packed secret sharing to the dishonest majority setting. For a constant fraction of corrupted parties (i.e. if 99 percent of the parties are corrupt), we can achieve a communication complexity of $O(1)$ field elements per multiplication gate across all parties. At the crux of our techniques lies a new technique called sharing transformation. The sharing transformation technique allows us to transform shares under one type of linear secret sharing scheme into another, and even perform arbitrary linear maps on the secrets of (packed) secret sharing schemes with optimal communication complexity. This technique can be of independent interest since transferring shares from one type of scheme into another (e.g., for degree reduction) is ubiquitous in MPC. Furthermore, we introduce what we call sparsely packed Shamir sharing which allows us to address the issue of network routing efficiently, and packed Beaver triples which is an extension of the widely used technique of Beaver triples for packed secret sharing (for dishonest majority).
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Ilan Komargodski, Shin’ichiro Matsuo, Elaine Shi, and Ke Wu
It is well-known that in the presence of majority coalitions, strongly fair coin toss is impossible. A line of recent works have shown that by relaxing the fairness notion to game theoretic, we can overcome this classical lower bound. In particular, Chung et al. (CRYPTO'21) showed how to achieve approximately (game-theoretically) fair leader election in the presence of majority coalitions, with round complexity as small as $O(\log \log n)$ rounds. In this paper, we revisit the round complexity of game-theoretically fair leader election. We construct $O(\log^* n)$ rounds leader election protocols that achieve $(1-o(1))$-approximate fairness in the presence of $(1-o(1)) n$-sized coalitions. Our protocols achieve the same round-fairness trade-offs as Chung et al.'s and have the advantage of being conceptually simpler. Finally, we also obtain game-theoretically fair protocols for committee election which might be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Single Server PIR with Sublinear Amortized Time and Polylogarithmic Bandwidth
Arthur Lazzaretti and Charalampos Papamanthou
In Private Information Retrieval (PIR), a client wishes to access an index $i$ from a public $n$-bit database without revealing any information about this index. Recently, a series of works starting with the seminal paper of Corrigan-Gibbs et al. (Eurocrypt 2020) have introduced offline-online PIR schemes with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ (amortized) server time, $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ (amortized) bandwidth and no additional storage at the server, in both the single-server and two-server models. As a followup to this work, Shi et al. (CRYPTO 2021) further decreased the bandwidth to polylogarithmic, but only in the two-server model. In this paper we fill this gap by constructing the first single-server PIR with $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$ amortized server time and polylogarithmic bandwidth. Central to our approach is a new cryptographic primitive that we call extended puncturable pseudorandomn set: With an extended puncturable pseudorandom set, one can represent a random set succinctly (e.g., with a fixed-size key), and can, at the same time both add and remove elements from the set, by manipulating the key. This extension improves previously-proposed constructions that supported only removal, and could have further applications. We acknowledge our work has limitations; more work is required to bring our ideas closer to practice, due to the use of cryptographic primitives such as FHE (only in the offline phase) and LWE-based privately-puncturable PRFs. However, our protocol yields the best asymptotic complexities in single-server PIR to date and we believe it is an important step towards eventually building a practical PIR scheme.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Public Randomness Extraction with Ephemeral Roles and Worst-Case Corruptions
Jesper Buus Nielsen, João Ribeiro, and Maciej Obremski
We distill a simple information-theoretic model for randomness extraction motivated by the task of generating publicly verifiable randomness in blockchain settings and which is closely related to You-Only-Speak-Once (YOSO) protocols (CRYPTO 2021). With the goal of avoiding denial-of-service attacks, parties speak only once and in sequence by broadcasting a public value and forwarding secret values to future parties. Additionally, an unbounded adversary can corrupt any chosen subset of at most $t$ parties. In contrast, existing YOSO protocols only handle random corruptions. As a notable example, considering worst-case corruptions allows us to reduce trust in the role assignment mechanism, which is assumed to be perfectly random in YOSO. We study the maximum corruption threshold $t$ which allows for unconditional randomness extraction in our model: - With respect to feasibility, we give protocols for $t$ corruptions and $n=6t+1$ or $n=5t$ parties depending on whether the adversary learns secret values forwarded to corrupted parties immediately once they are sent or only once the corrupted party is executed, respectively. Both settings are motivated by practical implementations of secret value forwarding. To design such protocols, we go beyond the committee-based approach that is sufficient for random corruptions in YOSO but turns out to be sub-optimal for chosen corruptions. - To complement our protocols, we show that low-error randomness extraction is impossible with corruption threshold $t$ and $n \leq 4t$ parties in both settings above. This also provides a separation between chosen and random corruptions, since the latter allows for randomness extraction with close to $n/2$ random corruptions.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
TERSE: Tiny Encryptions and Really Speedy Execution for Post-Quantum Private Stream Aggregation
Jonathan Takeshita, Zachariah Carmichael, Ryan Karl, and Taeho Jung
The massive scale and performance demands of privacy-preserving data aggregation make integration of security and privacy difficult. Traditional tools in private computing are not well-suited to handle these challenges, especially for more limited client devices. Efficient primitives and protocols for secure and private data aggregation are a promising approach for private data analytics with resource-constrained devices. However, even such efficient primitives may be much slower than computation with plain data (i.e., without security/privacy guarantees). In this paper, we present TERSE, a new Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) protocol for quantum-secure time-series additive data aggregation. Due to its simplicity, low latency, and low communication overhead, TERSE is uniquely well-suited for real-world deployment. In our implementation, TERSE shows very low latency for both clients and servers, achieving encryption latency on a smartphone of 0.0003 ms and aggregation latency of 0.006 ms for 1000 users. TERSE also shows significant improvements in latency over other state-of-the-art quantum-secure PSA, achieving improvements of 1796x to 12406x for encryption at the client's end and 848x to 5433x for aggregation and decryption at the server's end.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Tight Preimage Resistance of the Sponge Construction
Charlotte Lefevre and Bart Mennink
The cryptographic sponge is a popular method for hash function design. The construction is in the ideal permutation model proven to be indifferentiable from a random oracle up to the birthday bound in the capacity of the sponge. This result in particular implies that, as long as the attack complexity does not exceed this bound, the sponge construction achieves a comparable level of collision, preimage, and second preimage resistance as a random oracle. We investigate these state-of-the-art bounds in detail, and observe that while the collision and second preimage security bounds are tight, the preimage bound is not tight. We derive an improved and tight preimage security bound for the cryptographic sponge construction. The result has direct implications for various lightweight cryptographic hash functions. For example, the NIST Lightweight Cryptography finalist Ascon-Hash does not generically achieve $2^{128}$ preimage security as claimed, but even $2^{192}$ preimage security. Comparable improvements are obtained for the modes of Spongent, PHOTON, ACE, Subterranean 2.0, and QUARK, among others.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Superposition Meet-in-the-Middle Attacks: Updates on Fundamental Security of AES-like Hashing
Zhenzhen Bao, Jian Guo, Danping Shi, and Yi Tu
The Meet-in-the-Middle approach is one of the most powerful cryptanalysis techniques, demonstrated by its applications in preimage attacks on the full MD4, MD5, Tiger, HAVAL, and Haraka-512 v2 hash functions, and key recovery of the full block cipher KTANTAN. The success relies on the separation of a primitive into two independent chunks, where each active cell of the state is used to represent only one chunk or is otherwise considered unusable once mixed. We observe that some of such cells are linearly mixed and can be as useful as the independent ones. This leads to the introduction of superposition states and a whole suite of accompanied techniques, which we incorporate into the MILP-based search framework proposed by Bao et al. at EUROCRYPT 2021 and Dong et al. at CRYPTO 2021, and find applications on a wide range of AES-like hash functions and block ciphers.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
More Efficient Dishonest Majority Secure Computation over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ via Galois Rings
Daniel Escudero, Chaoping Xing, and Chen Yuan
In this work we present a novel actively secure multiparty computation protocol in the dishonest majority setting, where the computation domain is a ring of the type $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. Instead of considering an "extension ring" of the form $\mathbb{Z}_{2^{k+\kappa}}$ as in SPD$\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ (Cramer et al, CRYPTO 2018) and its derivatives, we make use of an actual ring extension, or more precisely, a Galois ring extension $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}[\mathtt{X}]/(h(\mathtt{X}))$ of large enough degree, in order to ensure that the adversary cannot cheat except with negligible probability. These techniques have been used already in the context of honest majority MPC over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}$, and to the best of our knowledge, our work constitutes the first study of the benefits of these tools in the dishonest majority setting. Making use of Galois ring extensions requires great care in order to avoid paying an extra overhead due to the use of larger rings. To address this, reverse multiplication-friendly embeddings (RMFEs) have been used in the honest majority setting (e.g. Cascudo et al, CRYPTO 2018), and more recently in the dishonest majority setting for computation over $\mathbb{Z}_2$ (Cascudo and Gundersen, TCC 2020). We make use of the recent RMFEs over $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}$ from (Cramer et al, CRYPTO 2021), together with adaptations of some RMFE optimizations introduced in (Abspoel et al, ASIACRYPT 2021) in the honest majority setting, to achieve an efficient protocol that only requires in its online phase $12.4k(n-1)$ bits of amortized communication complexity and one round of communication for each multiplication gate. We also instantiate the necessary offline phase using Oblivious Linear Evaluation (OLE) by generalizing the approach based on Oblivious Transfer (OT) proposed in MASCOT (Keller et al, CCS 2016). To this end, and as an additional contribution of potential independent interest, we present a novel technique using Multiplication-Friendly Embeddings (MFEs) to achieve OLE over Galois ring extensions using black-box access to an OLE protocol over the base ring $\mathbb{Z}_{p^k}$ without paying a quadratic cost in terms of the extension degree. This generalizes the approach in MASCOT based on Correlated OT Extension. Finally, along the way we also identify a bug in a central proof in MASCOT, and we implicitly present a fix in our generalized proof.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Batch Private Information Retrieval with Private Preprocessing
Kevin Yeo
In this paper, we study batch private information retrieval with private preprocessing. Private information retrieval (PIR) is the problem where one or more servers hold a database of $n$ bits and a client wishes to retrieve the $i$-th bit in the database from the server(s). In PIR with private preprocessing (also known as offline-online PIR), the client is able to compute a private $r$-bit hint in an offline stage that may be leveraged to perform retrievals in $t$ online time. For privacy, the client wishes to hide index $i$ from an adversary that has compromised some of the servers. We will focus on the batch PIR setting where the client performs queries to retrieve the contents of multiple entries simultaneously. We present a tight characterization for the trade-offs between hint size and online query time. For any $\ell = O(1)$ and $\ell$-server PIR scheme that enables clients to perform batch retrievals of $k$ entries, we prove a lower bound of $tr = \Omega(nk)$ when $r \ge k$. When $r < k$, we prove that $t = \Omega(n)$. Our lower bounds hold when the scheme errs with probability at most $1/15$ and against PPT adversaries that only compromise one server. Our results also improve the best known lower bounds for the single query setting by a logarithmic factor. On the positive side, we show there exists a construction with a single-round query algorithm such that $tr = \tilde{O}(nk)$ that matches our lower bound up to logarithmic factors.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Counting Vampires: From Univariate Sumcheck to Updatable ZK-SNARK
Helger Lipmaa, Janno Siim, and Michal Zajac
We propose a univariate sumcheck argument $\mathfrak{Count}$ of essentially optimal communication efficiency of one group element. While the previously most efficient univariate sumcheck argument of Aurora is based on polynomial commitments, $\mathfrak{Count}$ is based on inner-product commitments. We use $\mathfrak{Count}$ to construct a new pairing-based updatable and universal zk-SNARK $\mathfrak{Vampire}$ with the shortest known argument length (four group and two finite field elements) for $\mathsf{NP}$. In addition, $\mathfrak{Vampire}$ uses the aggregated polynomial commitment scheme of Boneh \emph{et al}.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Privacy-Preserving IP Verification
Dimitris Mouris, Charles Gouert, and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
The rapid growth of the globalized integrated circuit (IC) supply chain has drawn the attention of numerous malicious actors that try to exploit it for profit. One of the most prominent targets of such parties is the third-party intellectual property (3PIP) vendors and their circuit designs. With the increasing number of transactions between vendors and system integrators, the threat of IP reuse and piracy has become a significant consideration for the IC industry. What is more, the correctness of 3PIP designs should be verified before integration, imposing another challenge for 3PIP vendors since they have to prove the functionality of their designs to system integrators while protecting the privacy of the circuit implementations. To eliminate this deadlock, we utilize the cryptographic technique of 'zero-knowledge proofs' to enable 3PIP vendors to convince system integrators about various functional properties of a circuit (e.g., area, power, frequency) without disclosing its netlist (i.e., in zero-knowledge). Our approach comprises a circuit compiler that transforms arbitrary netlists into a zero knowledge-friendly format and a library of modules that provide cryptographic guarantees for various properties of the netlist while hiding the actual gates. We evaluate our method using combinational and sequential circuits from the ISCAS and ITC benchmark suites.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Pika: Secure Computation using Function Secret Sharing over Rings
Sameer Wagh
Machine learning algorithms crucially depend on non-linear mathematical functions such as division (for normalization), exponentiation (for softmax and sigmoid), tanh (as an activation function), logarithm (for cross-entropy loss), and square root (for back-propagation of normalization layers). However, when machine learning is performed over secure computation, these protocols incur a large communication overhead and high round complexity. In this work, we propose new multi-party computation (MPC) protocols for such functions. Our protocols achieve constant round complexity (3 for semi-honest, 4 for malicious), an order of magnitude lower communication (54-121x lower than prior art), and high concrete efficiency (2-1163x faster runtime). We rely on recent advances in function secret sharing (FSS) to construct these protocols. Our contributions can be summarized as follows: (1) A constant round protocol to securely evaluate non-linear functions such as division, exponentiation, logarithm, and tanh (in comparison to prior art which uses round complexity proportional to the rounds of iterative methods/required precision) with high accuracy. This construction largely follows prior work in look-up style secure computation. (2) Our main contribution is the extension of the above protocol to be secure in the presence of malicious adversaries in the honest majority setting. We provide a malicious sketching protocol for FSS schemes that works over rings and in order to prove its security, we extend (and prove) a corresponding form of Schwartz-Zippel lemma over rings. This is the first such extension of the lemma and it can be of independent interest in other domains of secure computation. (3) We implement our protocol and showcase order of magnitude improvements in runtime and communication. Given the low round complexity and substantially lower communication, our protocols achieve even better performance over network constrained environments such as WAN. Finally, we showcase how such functions can lead to scalability in machine learning. Note that techniques presented are applicable beyond the application of machine learning as the protocols effectively present an efficient 1-out-of-N oblivious transfer or an efficient private information retrieval protocol.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Non-Commutative Ring Learning With Errors From Cyclic Algebras
Charles Grover, Andrew Mendelsohn, Cong Ling, and Roope Vehkalahti
The Learning with Errors (LWE) problem is the fundamental backbone of modern lattice based cryptography, allowing one to establish cryptography on the hardness of well-studied computational problems. However, schemes based on LWE are often impractical, so Ring LWE was introduced as a form of structured' LWE, trading off a hard to quantify loss of security for an increase in efficiency by working over a well chosen ring. Another popular variant, Module LWE, generalizes this exchange by implementing a module structure over a ring. In this work, we introduce a novel variant of LWE over cyclic algebras (CLWE) to replicate the addition of the ring structure taking LWE to Ring LWE by adding cyclic structure to Module LWE. The proposed construction is both more efficient than Module LWE and conjecturally more secure than Ring LWE, the best of both worlds. We show that the security reductions expected for an LWE problem hold, namely a reduction from certain structured lattice problems to the hardness of the decision variant of the CLWE problem. As a contribution of theoretic interest, we view CLWE as the first variant of Ring LWE which supports non-commutative multiplication operations. This ring structure compares favorably with Module LWE, and naturally allows a larger message space for error correction coding.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Romeo: Conversion and Evaluation of HDL Designs in the Encrypted Domain
Charles Gouert and Nektarios Georgios Tsoutsos
As cloud computing becomes increasingly ubiquitous, protecting the confidentiality of data outsourced to third parties becomes a priority. While encryption is a natural solution to this problem, traditional algorithms may only protect data at rest and in transit, but do not support encrypted processing. In this work we introduce Romeo, which enables easy-to-use privacy-preserving processing of data in the cloud using homomorphic encryption. Romeo automatically converts arbitrary programs expressed in Verilog HDL into equivalent homomorphic circuits that are evaluated using encrypted inputs. For our experiments, we employ cryptographic circuits, such as AES, and benchmarks from the ISCAS'85 and ISCAS'89 suites.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Fiddling the Twiddle Constants - Fault Injection Analysis of the Number Theoretic Transform
Prasanna Ravi, Bolin Yang, Shivam Bhasin, Fan Zhang, and Anupam Chattopadhyay
In this work, we present the first fault injection analysis of the Number Theoretic Transform (NTT). The NTT is an integral computation unit, widely used for polynomial multiplication in several structured lattice-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and digital signature schemes. We identify a critical single fault vulnerability in the NTT, which severely reduces the entropy of its output. This in turn enables us to perform a wide-range of attacks applicable to lattice-based KEMs as well as signature schemes. In particular, we demonstrate novel key recovery and message recovery attacks targeting the key generation and encryption procedure of Kyber KEM. We also propose novel existential forgery attacks targeting deterministic and probabilistic signing procedure of Dilithium, followed by a novel verification bypass attack targeting its verification procedure. All proposed exploits are demonstrated with high success rate using electromagnetic fault injection on state-of-the-art implementations of Kyber and Dilithium, from the open-source pqm4 library on the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Generation of independent'' points on elliptic curves by means of Mordell--Weil lattices
Dmitrii Koshelev
This article develops a novel method of generating independent'' points on an ordinary elliptic curve $E$ over a finite field. Such points are actively used in the Pedersen vector commitment scheme and its modifications. In particular, the new approach is relevant for Pasta curves (of $j$-invariant $0$), which are very popular in the given type of elliptic cryptography. These curves are defined over highly $2$-adic fields, hence successive generation of points via a hash function to $E$ is an expensive solution. Our method also satisfies the NUMS (Nothing Up My Sleeve) principle, but it works faster on average. More precisely, instead of finding each point separately in constant time, we suggest to sample several points at once with some probability.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Verifiable Relation Sharing and Multi-Verifier Zero-Knowledge in Two Rounds: Trading NIZKs with Honest Majority
Benny Applebaum, Eliran Kachlon, and Arpita Patra
We introduce the problem of Verifiable Relation Sharing (VRS) where a client (prover) wishes to share a vector of secret data items among $k$ servers (the verifiers) while proving in zero-knowledge that the shared data satisfies some properties. This combined task of sharing and proving generalizes notions like verifiable secret sharing and zero-knowledge proofs over secret-shared data. We study VRS from a theoretical perspective and focus on its round complexity. As our main contribution, we show that every efficiently-computable relation can be realized by a VRS with an optimal round complexity of two rounds where the first round is input-independent (offline round). The protocol achieves full UC-security against an active adversary that is allowed to corrupt any $t$-subset of the parties that may include the client together with some of the verifiers. For a small (logarithmic) number of parties, we achieve an optimal resiliency threshold of $t<0.5(k+1)$, and for a large (polynomial) number of parties, we achieve an almost-optimal resiliency threshold of $t<0.5(k+1)(1-\epsilon)$ for an arbitrarily small constant $\epsilon>0$. Both protocols can be based on sub-exponentially hard injective one-way functions. If the parties have an access to a collision resistance hash function, we can derive statistical everlasting security, i.e., the protocols are secure against adversaries that are computationally bounded during the protocol execution and become computationally unbounded after the protocol execution. Previous 2-round solutions achieve smaller resiliency thresholds and weaker security notions regardless of the underlying assumptions. As a special case, our protocols give rise to 2-round offline/online constructions of multi-verifier zero-knowledge proofs (MVZK). Such constructions were previously obtained under the same type of assumptions that are needed for NIZK, i.e., public-key assumptions or random-oracle type assumptions (Abe et al., Asiacrypt 2002; Groth and Ostrovsky, Crypto 2007; Boneh et al., Crypto 2019; Yang, and Wang, Eprint 2022). Our work shows, for the first time, that in the presence of an honest majority these assumptions can be replaced with more conservative Minicrypt''-type assumptions like injective one-way functions and collision-resistance hash functions. Indeed, our MVZK protocols provide a round-efficient substitute for NIZK in settings where an honest majority is present. Additional applications are also presented.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
Probing Security through Input-Output Separation and Revisited Quasilinear Masking
Dahmun Goudarzi, Thomas Prest, Matthieu Rivain, and Damien Vergnaud
The probing security model is widely used to formally prove the security of masking schemes. Whenever a masked implementation can be proven secure in this model with a reasonable \emph{leakage rate}, it is also provably secure in a realistic leakage model known as the \emph{noisy leakage model}. This paper introduces a new framework for the composition of probing-secure circuits. We introduce the security notion of \emph{input-output separation} (IOS) for a refresh gadget. From this notion, one can easily compose gadgets satisfying the classical probing security notion --which does not ensure composability on its own-- to obtain a \emph{region probing secure} circuit. Such a circuit is secure against an adversary placing up to $t$ probes in each gadget composing the circuit, which ensures a tight reduction to the more realistic noisy leakage model. After introducing the notion and proving our composition theorem, we compare our approach to the composition approaches obtained with the (Strong) Non-Interference (S/NI) notions as well as the Probe-Isolating Non-Interference (PINI) notion. We further show that any uniform SNI gadget achieves the IOS security notion, while the converse is not true. We further describe a refresh gadget achieving the IOS property for any linear sharing with a quasilinear complexity $\Theta(n \log n)$ and a $O(1/\log n)$ leakage rate (for an $n$-size sharing). This refresh gadget is a simplified version of the quasilinear SNI refresh gadget proposed by Battistello, Coron, Prouff, and Zeitoun (ePrint 2016). As an application of our composition framework, we revisit the quasilinear-complexity masking scheme of Goudarzi, Joux and Rivain (Asiacrypt 2018). We improve this scheme by generalizing it to any base field (whereas the original proposal only applies to field with $n$th powers of unity) and by taking advantage of our composition approach. We further patch a flaw in the original security proof and extend it from the random probing model to the stronger region probing model. Finally, we present some application of this extended quasilinear masking scheme to AES and MiMC and compare the obtained performances.
Last updated:  2022-06-23
To Label, or Not To Label (in Generic Groups)
Mark Zhandry
Generic groups are an important tool for analyzing the feasibility and in-feasibility of group-based cryptosystems. There are two distinct wide-spread versions of generic groups, Shoup's and Maurer's, the main difference being whether or not group elements are given explicit labels. The two models are often treated as equivalent. In this work, however, we demonstrate that the models are in fact quite different, and care is needed when stating generic group results: - We show that numerous textbook constructions are *not* captured by Maurer, but are captured by Shoup. In the other direction, any construction captured by Maurer *is* captured by Shoup. - For constructions that exist in both models, we show that security is equivalent for "single stage" games, but Shoup security is strictly stronger than Maurer security for some "multi-stage" games. - The existing generic group un-instantiability results do not apply to Maurer. We fill this gap with a new un-instantiability result. - We explain how the known black box separations between generic groups and identity-based encryption do not fully apply to Shoup, and resolve this by providing such a separation. - We give a new un-instantiability result for the *algebraic* group model.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Traceable Receipt-Free Encryption
Henri Devillez, Olivier Pereira, and Thomas Peters
CCA-like game-based security definitions capture confidentiality by asking an adversary to distinguish between honestly computed encryptions of chosen plaintexts. In the context of voting systems, such guarantees have been shown to be sufficient to prove ballot privacy (Asiacrypt'12). In this paper, we observe that they fall short when one seeks to obtain receipt-freeness, that is, when corrupted voters who submit chosen ciphertexts encrypting their vote must be prevented from proving how they voted to a third party. Since no known encryption security notion can lead to a receipt-free ballot submission process, we address this challenge by proposing a novel publicly verifiable encryption primitive coined Traceable Receipt-free Encryption (TREnc) and a new notion of traceable CCA security filling the definitional gap underlined above. We propose two TREnc instances, one generic achieving stronger guarantees for the purpose of relating it to existing building blocks, and a dedicated one based on SXDH. Both support the encryption of group elements in the standard model, while previously proposed encryption schemes aiming at offering receipt-freeness only support a polynomial-size message space, or security in the generic group model. Eventually, we demonstrate how a TREnc can be used to build receipt-free voting protocols, by following a standard blueprint.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
MPC for Group Reconstruction Circuits
Lúcás Críostóir Meier
In this work, we generalize threshold Schnorr signatures, ElGamal encryption, and a wide variety of other functionalities, using a novel formalism of group reconstruction circuits (GRC)s. We construct a UC secure MPC protocol for computing these circuits on secret shared inputs, even in the presence of malicious parties. Applied to concrete circuits, our protocol yields threshold signature and encryption schemes with similar round complexity and concrete eﬃciency to functionality-speciﬁc protocols. Our formalism also generalizes to other functionalities, such as polynomial commitments and openings.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Moz$\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$arella: Efficient Vector-OLE and Zero-Knowledge Proofs Over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$
Carsten Baum, Lennart Braun, Alexander Munch-Hansen, and Peter Scholl
Zero-knowledge proof systems are usually designed to support computations for circuits over $\mathbb{F}_2$ or $\mathbb{F}_p$ for large $p$, but not for computations over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$, which all modern CPUs operate on. Although $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$-arithmetic can be emulated using prime moduli, this comes with an unavoidable overhead. Recently, Baum et al. (CCS 2021) suggested a candidate construction for a designated-verifier zero-knowledge proof system that natively runs over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. Unfortunately, their construction requires preprocessed random vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) to be instantiated over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. Currently, it is not known how to efficiently generate such random VOLE in large quantities. In this work, we present a maliciously secure, VOLE extension protocol that can turn a short seed-VOLE over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ into a much longer, pseudorandom VOLE over the same ring. Our construction borrows ideas from recent protocols over finite fields, which we non-trivially adapt to work over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. Moreover, we show that the approach taken by the QuickSilver zero-knowledge proof system (Yang et al. CCS 2021) can be generalized to support computations over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$. This new VOLE-based proof system, which we call QuarkSilver, yields better efficiency than the previous zero-knowledge protocols suggested by Baum et al. Furthermore, we implement both our VOLE extension and our zero-knowledge proof system, and show that they can generate 13-50 million VOLEs per second for 64 to 256 bit rings, and evaluate 1.3 million 64 bit multiplications per second in zero-knowledge.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Provably Secure Reflection Ciphers
Tim Beyne and Yu Long Chen
This paper provides the first analysis of reflection ciphers such as PRINCE from a provable security viewpoint. As a first contribution, we initiate the study of key-alternating reflection ciphers in the ideal permutation model. Specifically, we prove the security of the two-round case and give matching attacks. The resulting security bound takes form $$O(qp^2/2^{2n}+q^2/2^n)$$, where $$q$$ is the number of construction evaluations and $$p$$ is the number of direct adversarial queries to the underlying permutation. Since the two-round construction already achieves an interesting security lower bound, this result can also be of interest for the construction of reflection ciphers based on a single public permutation. Our second contribution is a generic key-length extension method for reflection ciphers. It provides an attractive alternative to the $FX$ construction, which is used by PRINCE and other concrete key-alternating reflection ciphers. We show that our construction leads to better security with minimal changes to existing designs. The security proof is in the ideal cipher model and relies on a reduction to the two-round Even-Mansour cipher with a single round key. In order to obtain the desired result, we sharpen the bad-transcript analysis and consequently improve the best-known bounds for the single-key Even-Mansour cipher with two rounds. This improvement is enabled by a new sum-capture theorem that is of independent interest.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Tight Bounds on the Randomness Complexity of Secure Multiparty Computation
Vipul Goyal, Yuval Ishai, and Yifan Song
We revisit the question of minimizing the randomness complexity of protocols for secure multiparty computation (MPC) in the setting of perfect information-theoretic security. Kushilevitz and Mansour (SIAM J. Discret. Math., 1997) studied the case of $n$-party semi-honest MPC for the XOR function with security threshold $t<n$, showing that $O(t^2\log(n/t))$ random bits are sufficient and $\Omega(t)$ random bits are necessary. Their positive result was obtained via a non-explicit protocol, whose existence was proved using the probabilistic method. We essentially close the question by proving an $\Omega(t^2)$ lower bound on the randomness complexity of XOR, matching the previous upper bound up to a logarithmic factor (or constant factor when $t=\Omega(n)$). We also obtain an explicit protocol that uses $O(t^2\cdot\log^2n)$ random bits, matching our lower bound up to a polylogarithmic factor. We extend these results from XOR to general symmetric Boolean functions and to addition over a finite Abelian group, showing how to amortize the randomness complexity over multiple additions. Finally, combining our techniques with recent randomness-efficient constructions of private circuits, we obtain an explicit protocol for evaluating a general circuit $C$ using only $O(t^2\cdot\log |C|)$ random bits, by employing additional `helper parties'' who do not contribute any inputs. This upper bound too matches our lower bound up to a logarithmic factor.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Jean Paul Degabriele and Vukašin Karadžić
We introduce a new security notion that lies right in between pseudorandom permutations (PRPs) and strong pseudorandom permutations (SPRPs). We call this new security notion and any (tweakable) cipher that satisfies it a $\textit{rugged pseudorandom permutation}$ (RPRP). Rugged pseudorandom permutations lend themselves to some interesting applications, have practical benefits, and lead to novel cryptographic constructions. Our focus is on variable-length tweakable RPRPs, and analogous to the encode-then-encipher paradigm of Bellare and Rogaway, we can generically transform any such cipher into different AEAD schemes with varying security properties. However, the benefit of RPRPs is that they can be constructed more efficiently as they are weaker primitives than SPRPs (the notion traditionally required by the encode-then-encipher paradigm). We can construct RPRPs using only two layers of processing, whereas SPRPs typically require three layers of processing over the input data. We also identify a new transformation that yields RUP-secure AEAD schemes with more compact ciphertexts than previously known. Further extending this approach, we arrive at a new generalized notion of authenticated encryption and a matching construction, which we refer to as $\textit{nonce-set AEAD}$. Nonce-set AEAD is particularly well-suited in the context of secure channels, like QUIC and DTLS, that operate over unreliable transports and employ a window mechanism at the receiver's end of the channel. We conclude by presenting a generic construction for transforming a nonce-set AEAD scheme into an order-resilient secure channel. Our channel construction sheds new light on order-resilient channels and additionally leads to more compact ciphertexts when instantiated from RPRPs.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Securing Approximate Homomorphic Encryption Using Differential Privacy
Baiyu Li, Daniele Micciancio, Mark Schultz, and Jessica Sorrell
Recent work of Li and Micciancio (Eurocrypt 2021) has shown that the traditional formulation of indistinguishability under chosen plaintext attack (INDCPA) is not adequate to capture the security of approximate homomorphic encryption against passive adversaries, and identified a stronger INDCPA^D security definition (INDCPA with decryption oracles) as the appropriate security target for approximate encryption schemes. We show how to any approximate homomorphic encryption scheme achieving the weak INDCPA security definition, into one which is provably INDCPA^D secure, offering strong guarantees against realistic passive attacks. The method works by post-processing the output of the decryption function with a mechanism satisfying an appropriate notion of differential privacy (DP), adding an amount of noise tailored to the worst-case error growth of the homomorphic computation. We apply these results to the approximate homomorphic encryption scheme of Cheon, Kim, Kim, and Song (CKKS, Asiacrypt 2017), proving that adding Gaussian noise to the output of CKKS decryption suffices to achieve INDCPA^D security. We precisely quantify how much Gaussian noise must be added by proving nearly matching upper and lower bounds, showing that one cannot hope to significantly reduce the amount of noise added in this post-processing step. As an additional contribution, we present and use a finer-grained definition of bit security that distinguishes between a computational security parameter (c) and a statistical one (s). Based on our upper and lower bounds, we propose parameters for the counter-measures recently adopted by open-source libraries implementing CKKS. Lastly, we investigate the plausible claim that smaller DP noise parameters might suffice to achieve INDCPA^D-security for schemes supporting more accurate (dynamic, key dependent) estimates of ciphertext noise during decryption. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that this claim is false, and that DP mechanisms with noise parameters tailored to the error present in a given ciphertext, rather than worst-case error, are vulnerable to INDCPA^D attacks.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Marcel Armour and Bertram Poettering
This work describes a class of Algorithm Substitution Attack (ASA) generically targeting the receiver of a communication between two parties. Our work provides a unified framework that applies to any scheme where a secret key is held by the receiver; in particular, message authentication schemes (MACs), authenticated encryption (AEAD) and public key encryption (PKE). Our unified framework brings together prior work targeting MAC schemes and AEAD schemes; we extend prior work by showing that public key encryption may also be targeted. ASAs were initially introduced by Bellare, Paterson and Rogaway in light of revelations concerning mass surveillance, as a novel attack class against the confidentiality of encryption schemes. Such an attack replaces one or more of the regular scheme algorithms with a subverted version that aims to reveal information to an adversary (engaged in mass surveillance), while remaining undetected by users. Previous work looking at ASAs against encryption schemes can be divided into two groups. ASAs against PKE schemes target key generation by creating subverted public keys that allow an adversary to recover the secret key. ASAs against symmetric encryption target the encryption algorithm and leak information through a subliminal channel in the ciphertexts. We present a new class of attack that targets the decryption algorithm of an encryption scheme for symmetric encryption and public key encryption, or the verification algorithm for an authentication scheme. We present a generic framework for subverting a cryptographic scheme between a sender and receiver, and show how a decryption oracle allows a subverter to create a subliminal channel which can be used to leak secret keys. We then show that the generic framework can be applied to authenticated encryption with associated data, message authentication schemes, public key encryption and KEM/DEM constructions. We consider practical considerations and specific conditions that apply for particular schemes, strengthening the generic approach. Furthermore, we show how the hybrid subversion of key generation and decryption algorithms can be used to amplify the effectiveness of our decryption attack. We argue that this attack represents an attractive opportunity for a mass surveillance adversary. Our work serves to refine the ASA model and contributes to a series of papers that raises awareness and understanding about what is possible with ASAs.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
A PCP Theorem for Interactive Proofs and Applications
Gal Arnon, Alessandro Chiesa, and Eylon Yogev
The celebrated PCP Theorem states that any language in NP can be decided via a verifier that reads $O(1)$ bits from a polynomially long proof. Interactive oracle proofs (IOP), a generalization of PCPs, allow the verifier to interact with the prover for multiple rounds while reading a small number of bits from each prover message. While PCPs are relatively well understood, the power captured by IOPs (beyond NP) has yet to be fully explored. We present a generalization of the PCP theorem for interactive languages. We show that any language decidable by a $k(n)$-round IP has a $k(n)$-round public-coin IOP, where the verifier makes its decision by reading only $O(1)$ bits from each (polynomially long) prover message and $O(1)$ bits from each of its own (random) messages to the prover. Our result and the underlying techniques have several applications. We get a new hardness of approximation result for a stochastic satisfiability problem, we show IOP-to-IOP transformations that previously were known to hold only for IPs, and we formulate a new notion of PCPs (index-decodable PCPs) that enables us to obtain a commit-and-prove SNARK in the random oracle model for nondeterministic computations.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
GPU-accelerated PIR with Client-Independent Preprocessing for Large-Scale Applications
Daniel Günther, Maurice Heymann, Benny Pinkas, and Thomas Schneider
Multi-Server Private Information Retrieval (PIR) is a cryptographic protocol that allows a client to securely query a database entry from $n \geq 2$ servers of which less than $t$ can collude, s.t. the servers learn no information about the query. Highly efficient PIR could be used for large-scale applications like Compromised Credential Checking (C3) (USENIX Security'19), which allows users to check whether their credentials have been leaked in a data breach. However, state-of-the art PIR schemes are not efficient enough for fast online responses at this scale. In this work, we introduce Client-Independent Preprocessing (CIP) PIR that moves $(t-1)/n$ of the online computation to a local, client independent, preprocessing phase suitable for efficient batch precomputations. The online performance of CIP-PIR improves linearly with the number of servers $n$. We show that large-scale applications like C3 with PIR are practical by implementing our CIP-PIR scheme using a parallelized CPU implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first multi-server PIR scheme whose preprocessing phase is completely independent of the client, and where online performance simultaneously improves with the number of servers $n$. In addition, we accelerate for the first time the huge amount of XOR operations in multi-server PIR with GPUs. Our GPU-based CIP-PIR achieves an improvement up to factor $2.1\times$ over our CPU-based implementation for $n=2$ servers, and enables a client to query an entry in a 25 GB database within less than 1 second.
Last updated:  2022-06-22
Suborn Channels: Incentives Against Timelock Bribes
Zeta Avarikioti and Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos
As the Bitcoin mining landscape becomes more competitive, analyzing potential attacks under the assumption of rational miners becomes increasingly relevant. In the rational setting, blockchain users can bribe miners to reap an unfair benefit. Established protocols such as Duplex Micropayment Channels and Lightning Channels are susceptible to bribery, which upends their financial guarantees. Indeed, we prove that in a two-party contract in which the honest party can spend an output right away, whereas the malicious can only spend the same output after a timelock, the latter party can promise a high fee to the miners, who then intentionally ignore the transaction of the honest party in anticipation of the higher fee. This effectively prevents a valid transaction from ever entering the blockchain, resulting in potentially severe financial losses for the honest and considerable gains for the malicious party. We expand previous results on timelock bribes to more realistic blockchains, proving that a general class of contracts are susceptible. We then apply our results to Duplex Micropayment Channels and Lightning Channels, providing exact bounds on their safe operating region. Furthermore, we enhance the Bitcoin Script of Duplex Micropayment Channels so that the coins of a party that attempts to bribe are given to the miners as fees, therefore effectively disincentivizing bribes. Our solution, named Suborn channels, is implemented as a proof-of-concept. We also propose a small change to Lightning Channels that achieves a similar effect. Moreover, we formally express the exact circumstances under which our two proposals ensure alignment of miner incentives with the prescribed protocol outcome.
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