At first glance, privacy and zero-knowledgeness seem to be similar properties. A scheme is private when no information is revealed on the prover and in a zero-knowledge scheme, communications should not leak provers' secrets. Until recently, privacy threats were only partially formalized and some zero-knowledge (ZK) schemes have been proposed so far to ensure privacy. We here explain why the intended goal is not reached. Following the privacy model proposed by Vaudenay at Asiacrypt 2007, we then reconsider the analysis of these schemes and thereafter introduce a general framework to modify identification schemes leading to different levels of privacy. Our new protocols can be useful, for instance, for identity documents, where privacy is a great issue. Furthermore, we propose efficient implementations of zero-knowledge and private identification schemes based on modifications of the GPS scheme. The security and the privacy are based on a new problem: the Short Exponent Strong Diffie-Hellman (SESDH) problem. The hardness of this problem is related to the hardness of the Strong Diffie-Hellman (SDH) problem and to the hardness of the Discrete Logarithm with Short Exponent (DLSE) problem. The security and privacy of these new schemes are proved in the random oracle paradigm.

In this paper we revisit Wiener's method (IEEE-IT 1990) of continued fraction (CF) to find new weaknesses in RSA. We consider RSA with $N = pq$, $q < p < 2q$, public encryption exponent $e$ and private decryption exponent $d$. Our motivation is to find out when RSA is insecure given $d$ is $O(N^\delta)$, where we are mostly interested in the range $0.3 \leq \delta \leq 0.5$. Given $\rho$ $(1 \leq \rho \leq 2)$ is known to the attacker, we show that the RSA keys are weak when $d = N^\delta$ and $\delta < \frac{1}{2} - \frac{\gamma}{2}$, where $|\rho q - p| \leq \frac{N^\gamma}{16}$. This presents additional results over the work of de Weger (AAECC 2002). We also discuss how the lattice based idea of Boneh-Durfee (IEEE-IT 2000) works better to find weak keys beyond the bound $\delta < \frac{1}{2} - \frac{\gamma}{2}$. Further we show that, the RSA keys are weak when $d < \frac{1}{2} N^\delta$ and $e$ is $O(N^{\frac{3}{2}-2\delta})$ for $\delta \leq \frac{1}{2}$. Using similar techniques we also present new results over the work of Blömer and May (PKC 2004).

This paper studies the security of ARIA against impossible differential cryptanalysis. Firstly an algorithm is given to find many new 4-round impossible differentials of ARIA. Followed by such impossible differentials, we improve the previous impossible differential attack on 5/6-round ARIA. We also point out that the existence of such impossible differentials are due to the bad properties of the binary matrix employed in the diffusion layer.

Many practical applications use hybrid encryption mechanism to deal with large plaintext messages or real-time communication since the performance of the public key encryption scheme is poor. The key encapsulation is a crucial part in hybrid encryption mechanism, which allows a sender to generate a random session key and distribute it to recipient. In this paper we present a proxy key re-encapsulation scheme for group communication. The proxy in our scheme is allowed to transform the encapsulated message corresponding to group A's public key into one that can be decapsulated by the member in group B. It can be used in cases when a group users need to perform sensitive operation without holding the necessary secret key.

With the advent of mobile and portable devices such as cell phones and PDAs, wireless content distribution has become a major means of communications and entertainment. In such applications, a central authority needs to deliver encrypted data to a large number of recipients in such a way that only a privileged subset of users can decrypt it. A broadcasting news channel may face this problem, for example, when a large number of people subscribe to a daily exclusive news feature. This is exactly the kind of problem that \textit{broadcast encryption} attempts to efficiently solve. On top of this, especially in the current digital era, junk content or spam is a major turn off in almost every Internet application. If all the users who subscribe to the news feed receive meaningless noise or any unwanted content, then the broadcaster is going to lose them. This results in the additional requirement that subscribers have source authentication with respect to their broadcaster. \textit{Broadcast signcryption}, which enables the broadcaster to simultaneously encrypt and sign the content meant for a specific set of users in a single logical step, provides the most efficient solution to the dual problem of confidentiality and authentication. Efficiency is a major concern, because mobile devices have limited memory and computational power and wireless bandwidth is an extremely costly resource. While several alternatives exist in implementing broadcast signcryption schemes, identity-based (ID-based) schemes are arguably the best suited because of the unique advantage that they provide --- any unique, publicly available parameter of a user can be his public key, which eliminates the need for a complex public key infrastructure. In ASIAN 2004, Mu et al. \cite{MSLR04} propose what they call an ID-based authenticated broadcast encryption scheme, which is also a broadcast signcryption scheme, as the security goals are the same. They claim that their scheme provides message authentication and confidentiality and formally prove that the broadcaster's secret is not compromised, but in this paper, we demonstrate that even without knowing the broadcaster's secret, it is possible for a legal user to impersonate the broadcaster. We demonstrate this by mounting a universal forgeability attack --- any valid user, on receiving and decrypting a valid ciphertext from a broadcaster, can generate a valid ciphertext on any message on behalf of that broadcaster for the same set of legal receivers to which the broadcaster signcrypted the earlier message, without knowing any secrets. Following this, we propose a new ID-based broadcast signcryption (IBBSC) scheme, and formally prove its security under the strongest existing security models for broadcast signcryption (IND-CCA2 and EUF-CMA2).

In this paper, we present a new ID-based two-party authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocol, which makes use of a new technique called twin Diffie-Hellman problem proposed by Cash, Kiltz and Shoup. We show that our scheme is secure under bilinear Diffie-Hellman (BDH) assumption in the enhanced Canetti-Krawczyk (eCK) model, which better supports the adversary's queries than previous AKE models. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme is the \emph{first} ID-based AKE protocol provably secure in eCK model.

In Pattern Recognition, vol. 36, 2003, Hou proposed a four-share visual cryptography scheme for color images. The scheme splits a secret image into four shares, the black mask and the other three shares. It was claimed that without knowing the black mas, no information about the secret image can be obtained even if all the other three shares are known. In this paper, we show that this may be true for a few specific two-color secret images only. In all other cases however, security cannot be guaranteed. We show that an attacker can compromise a randomly chosen two-color secret image from any two of the other three shares with probability 4/7. The advantage will increase to 6/7 if all the other three shares are known. If the secret image has three or four colors, we show that the attacker can compromise it with probability 4/7 and 8/35, respectively. Finally, we show that our technique can be extended to compromising secret images with more than four colors.

Alice and Bob may develop a spontaneous, yet infrequent need for online confidential exchange. They may be served by an 'encryption-on-demand' (EoD) service which will enable them to communicate securely with no prior preparations, and no after effects. We delineate a possible EoD service, and describe some of its theoretical and practical features. The proposed framework is a website which could tailor-make an encryption package to be downloaded by both Alice and Bob for their ad-hoc use. The downloaded package will include the cryptographic algorithm and a unique key, which may be of any size, since Alice and Bob will not have to enter, or regard the key per se, they would simply use the downloaded page to encrypt and decrypt their data. After their secure exchange both Alice and Bob may ignore, or discard the downloaded software, and restart the same procedure, with a different tailor-made package, exactly when needed. This framework allows for greater flexibility in managing the complexity aspects that ensures security. Alice and Bob will not have to know what encryption scheme they use. The server based tailoring program could pseudo-randomly pick AES, DES, RSA, ECC, select a short, or long key, and otherwise greatly increase the variability that would have to be negotiated by a cryptanalyst. Encryption-on-demand is offered on http://youdeny.com . Features are described.

We show how to effectively convert a secret-shared bit $b$ over a prime field to another field. If initially given a random replicated secret share this conversion can be done by the cost of revealing one secret shared value. By using a pseudo-random function it is possible to convert arbitrary many bit values from one initial random replicated share. Furthermore, we generalize the conversion to handle general values of a bounded size.

Oblivious transfer is one of the most important cryptographic primitives, both for theoretical and practical reasons and several protocols were proposed during the years. We provide the first oblivious transfer protocol which is simultaneously optimal on the following list of parameters: Security: it has universal composition. Trust in setup assumptions: only one of the parties needs to trust the setup and some setup is needed for UC security. Trust in computational assumptions: only one of the parties needs to trust a computational assumption. Round complexity: it uses only two rounds. Communication complexity: it communicates O(1) group elements to transfer one out of two group elements. The Big-O notation hides 32, meaning that the communication is probably not optimal, but is essentially optimal in that the overhead is at least constant. Our construction is based on pairings, and we assume the presence of a key registration authority.

From the viewpoint of x-coordinate-only arithmetic on elliptic curves, switching between the Edwards model and the Montgomery model is quasi cost-free. We use this observation to speed up Montgomery's algorithm, reducing the complexity of a doubling step from 2M + 2S to 1M + 3S for suitably chosen curve parameters.

This paper extends Joux-Naccache-Thomé's $e$-th root algorithm to the static Diffie-Hellman problem ({\sc sdhp}). The new algorithm can be adapted to diverse finite fields by customizing it with an {\sc nfs}-like core or an {\sc ffs}-like core. In both cases, after a number of {\sc sdhp} oracle queries, the attacker builds-up the ability to solve new {\sc sdhp} instances {\sl unknown before the query phase}. While sub-exponential, the algorithm is still significantly faster than all currently known {\sc dlp} and {\sc sdhp} resolution methods. We explore the applicability of the technique to various cryptosystems. The attacks were implemented in ${\mathbb F}_{2^{1025}}$ and also in ${\mathbb F}_{p}$, for a $516$-bit $p$.

A new universal hash family is described. Messages are sequences over a finite field $\rF_q$ while keys are sequences over an extension field $\rF_{q^n}$. A linear map $\psi$ from $\rF_{q^n}$ to itself is used to compute the output digest. Of special interest is the case $q=2$. For this case, we show that there is an efficient way to implement $\psi$ using a tower field representation of $\rF_{q^n}$. From a practical point of view, the focus of our constructions is small hardware and other resource constrained applications. For such platforms, our constructions compare favourably to previous work.

In this paper, we present algorithms for implementation of the GHS attack to Elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). In particular, we consider two large classes of elliptic curves over cubic extension fields of odd characteristics which have weak covering curves against GHS attack, whose existence have been shown recently. We show an algorithm to find definition equation of the covering curve and an algorithm to transfer DLP of the elliptic curve to Jacobian of the covering curve. An algorithm to test if the covering curve is hyperelliptic is also shown in the appendix.

We consider a new form of authenticated key exchange which we call multi-factor password-authenticated key exchange, where session establishment depends on successful authentication of multiple short secrets that are complementary in nature, such as a long-term password and a one-time response, allowing the client and server to be mutually assured of each other's identity without directly disclosing private information to the other party. Multi-factor authentication can provide an enhanced level of assurance in higher security scenarios such as online banking, virtual private network access, and physical access because a multi-factor protocol is designed to remain secure even if all but one of the factors has been compromised. We introduce the first formal security model for multi-factor password-authenticated key exchange protocols, propose an efficient and secure protocol called MFPAK, and provide a formal argument to show that our protocol is secure in this model. Our security model is an extension of the Bellare-Pointcheval-Rogaway security model for password-authenticated key exchange and the formal analysis proceeds in the random oracle model.

Existing commitment schemes were addressed under the classic two-party scenario. However, popularity of the secure multi-party computation in today's lush network communication is motivating us to adopt more sophisticate commitment schemes. In this paper, we study for the first time multireceiver commitment in unconditionally secure setting, i.e., one committer promises a group of verifiers a common secret value (in computational setting it is trivial). We extend the Rivest model for this purpose and present a provably secure generic construction using multireceiver authentication codes (without secrecy) as a building block. Two concrete schemes are proposed as its immediate implementations, which are almost as efficient as an optimal MRA-code. Furthermore, to affirmatively answer the open question of Pinto, Souto, Matos and Antunes, we present also a generic construction (for two-party case) using only an A-code with secrecy. Finally, we show the possibility of constructing multireceiver commitment schemes using other primitives such as verifiable secret sharing. We leave open problems and believe the work will open doors for more interesting research.

In this paper, we present some new variants based on the Weil pairing for efficient pairing computations. The new pairing variants have the short Miller iteration loop and simple final exponentiation. We then show that computing the proposed pairings is more efficient than computing the Weil pairing. Experimental results for these pairings are also given.

Recently Cash, Kiltz, and Shoup showed a variant of the Cramer-Shoup (CS) public key encryption (PKE) scheme whose chosen-ciphertext (CCA) security relies on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption. The cost for this high security is that the size of ciphertexts is much longer than the CS scheme. In this paper, we show how to achieve CCAsecurity under the CDH assumption without increasing the size of ciphertexts. We further show a more efficient scheme under the hashed Diffie-Hellman (HDH) assumption such that the size of ciphertexts is the same as that of the Kurosawa-Desmedt (KD) scheme. Note that the CDH and HDH assumptions are weaker than the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption which the CS and KD schemes rely on. Both of our schemes are based on a certain broadcast encryption (BE) scheme while the Cash-Kiltz-Shoup scheme is based on a different paradigm which is called the Twin DH problem. As an independent interest, we also show a generic method of constructing CCA-secure PKE schemes from BE schemes such that the existing CCA-secure constructions can be viewed as special cases.

Recently, a fast modular multiexponentiation algorithm for computing A^X B^Y (mod N) was proposed. The authors claimed that on average their algorithm only requires to perform 1.306k modular multiplications (MMs), where k is the bit length of the exponents. This claimed performance is significantly better than all other comparable algorithms, where the best known result by other algorithms achieves 1.503k MMs only. In this paper, we give a formal complexity analysis and show the claimed performance is not true. The actual computational complexity of the algorithm should be 1.556k. This means that the best modular multiexponentiation algorithm based on canonical-sighed-digit technique is still not able to overcome the 1.5k barrier.

In this paper, we present a novel method for constructing a super-optimal pairing with great efficiency, which we call the omega pairing. The computation of the omega pairing requires the simple final exponentiation and short loop length in Miller's algorithm which leads to a significant improvement over the previously known techniques on certain pairing-friendly curves. Experimental results show that the omega pairing is about 22% faster and 19% faster than the super-optimal pairing proposed by Scott at security level of AES 80 bits on certain pairing-friendly curves in affine coordinate systems and projective coordinate systems, respectively.

In 2007, $\ell$-Invertible Cycles ($\ell$IC) was proposed by Ding et al. This is one of the most efficient trapdoors for encryption/signature schemes, and of the mixed field type for multivariate quadratic public-key cryptosystems. Such schemes fit on the implementation over low cost smart cards or PDAs. In 2008, Fouque et al. proposed an efficient attack against the $\ell$IC signature scheme by using Gröbner basis algorithms. However, they only explicitly dealt with the odd case, i.e. $\ell$ is odd, but the even case; they only implemented their proposed attack in the odd case. In this paper, we propose an another practical attack against the $\ell$IC encryption/signature scheme. Our proposed attack does not employ Gröbner basis algorithms, and can be applied to the both even and odd cases. We show the efficiency of the attack by using some experimental results. Furthermore, the attack can be also applied to the $\ell$IC- scheme. To the best of our knowledge, we for the first time show some experimental results of a practical attack against the $\ell$IC- scheme for the even case.

We present an efficient, covert-channel-resistant, receipt-free ballot casting scheme that can be used by humans without trusted hardware. In comparison to the recent Moran-Naor proposal, our scheme produces a significantly shorter ballot, prevents covert channels in the ballot, and opts for statistical soundness rather than everlasting privacy (achieving both seems impossible). The human interface remains the same, based on Neff's MarkPledge scheme, and requires of the voter only short-string operations.

A seminal result of Cleve (STOC '86) is that, in general, complete fairness is impossible to achieve in two-party computation. In light of this, various techniques for obtaining partial fairness have been suggested in the literature. We propose a definition of partial fairness within the standard real-/ideal-world paradigm that addresses deficiencies of prior definitions. We also show broad feasibility results with respect to our definition: partial fairness is possible for any (randomized) functionality $f:X \times Y \rightarrow Z^1 \times Z^2$ at least one of whose domains or ranges is polynomial in size. Our protocols are always private, and when one of the domains has polynomial size our protocols also simultaneously achieve the usual notion of security with abort. In contrast to some prior work, we rely on standard assumptions only. We also show that, as far as general feasibility is concerned, our results are optimal. Specifically, there exist functions with super-polynomial domains and ranges for which it is impossible to achieve our definition.

A significant amount of research has focused on methods to improve the efficiency of cryptographic pairings; in part this work is motivated by the wide range of applications for such primitives. Although numerous hardware accelerators for pairing evaluation have used parallelism within extension field arithmetic to improve efficiency, similar techniques have not been examined in software thus far. In this paper we focus on parallelism within one pairing evaluation (intra-pairing), and parallelism between different pairing evaluations (inter-pairing). We identify several methods for exploiting such parallelism (extending previous results in the context of ECC) and show that it is possible to accelerate pairing evaluation by a significant factor in comparison to a naive approach.

In 1998, Cai and Cusick proposed a lattice-based public-key cryptosystem based on the similar ideas of the Ajtai-Dwork cryptosystem, but with much less data expansion. However, they didn't give any security proof. In our paper, we present an efficient ciphertext-only attack which runs in polynomial time against the cryptosystem to recover the message, so the Cai-Cusick lattice-based public-key cryptosystem is not secure. We also present two chosen-ciphertext attacks to get a similar private key which acts as the real private key.

In the last years, DNA sequencing techniques have advanced to the point that DNA identification and paternity testing has become almost a commodity. Due to the critical nature of DNA related data, this causes substantial privacy issues. In this paper, we introduce cryptographic privacy enhancing protocols that allow to perform the most common DNA-based identity, paternity and ancestry tests and thus implement privacy-enhanced online genealogy services or research projects. In the semi-honest attacker model, the protocols guarantee that no sensitive information about the involved DNA is exposed, and are resilient against common forms of measurement errors during DNA sequencing. The protocols are practical and efficient, both in terms of communication and computation complexity.

The irreducible factor $r(x)$ of $\mathrm{\Phi}_{k}(u(x))$ and $u(x) $ are often used in constructing pairing-friendly curves. $u(x)$ and $u_{c} \equiv u(x)^{c} \pmod{r(x)}$ are selected to be the Miller loop control polynomial in Ate pairing and $\mathrm{Ate}_{i}$ pairing. In this paper we show that when $4|k$ or the minimal prime which divides $k$ is larger than $2$, some $u(x)$ and $r(x)$ can not be used as curve generation parameters if we want $\mathrm{Ate}_{i}$ pairing to be efficient. We also show that the Miller loop length can not reach the bound $\frac{\mathrm{log_{2}r}}{\varphi(k)}$ when we use the factorization of $\mathrm{\Phi}_{k}(u(x))$ to generate elliptic curves.

In this paper, we analyze an RFID identification scheme which is designed to provide forward untraceability and backward untraceability. We show that if a standard cryptographic pseudorandom bit generator (PRBG) is used in the scheme, then the scheme may fail to provide forward untraceability and backward untraceability. To achieve the desired untraceability features, the scheme can use a robust PRBG which provides forward security and backward security. We also note that the backward security is stronger than necessary for the backward untraceability of the scheme.

In this paper, we give security proofs for ElGamal encryption scheme and its variant by Damgard (DEG). For the ElGamal encryption, we show that (1) under the delayed-target discrete log assumption and a variant of the generalized knowledge-of-exponent assumption, ElGamal encryption is one-way under non-adaptive chosen cipher attacks; (2) one-wayness of ElGamal encryption under non-adaptive chosen cipher attacks is equivalent to the hardness of the delayed-target computational Diffie-Hellman problem. For DEG, (1) we give a new proof that DEG is semantically secure against non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks under the delayed-target decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption (although the same result has been presented in the literature before, our proof seems simpler); (2) we show that the DHK1 assumption, which was first proposed for DEG security proof, is stronger than necessary. A decisional (thus weaker) version of DHK1 assumption is sufficient for DEG security proof.

Montgomery's trick is a technique which can be used to quickly compute multiple field inversion simultaneously. We extend this technique to simultaneous field divisions (that is, combinations of field multiplications and field inversion). The generalized Montgomery's trick is faster in some fields than a simple inversion with Montgomery's trick followed by a simple field multiplication

The paper discusses the hardware and software security requirements in an embedded device that are involved in the transfer of secure digital data. The paper gives an overview on the security processes like encryption/decryption, key agreement, digital signatures and digital certificates that are used to achieve data protection during data transfer. The paper also discusses the security requirements in the device to prevent possible physical attacks to expose the secure data such as secret keys from the device. The paper also briefs on the security enforced in a device by the use of proprietary security technology and also discusses the security measures taken during the production of the device.

In this paper, we survey the basic paradigms and notions of secure multiparty computation and discuss their relevance to the field of privacy-preserving data mining. In addition to reviewing definitions and constructions for secure multiparty computation, we discuss the issue of efficiency and demonstrate the difficulties involved in constructing highly efficient protocols. We also present common errors that are prevalent in the literature when secure multiparty computation techniques are applied to privacy-preserving data mining. Finally, we discuss the relationship between secure multiparty computation and privacy-preserving data mining, and show which problems it solves and which problems it does not.

We prove that the binomials $x^{p^s+1}-\alpha x^{p^k+p^{2k+s}}$ define perfect nonlinear mappings in $GF(p^{3k})$ for an appropriate choice of the integer $s$ and $\alpha \in GF(p^{3k})$. We show that these binomials are inequivalent to known perfect nonlinear monomials. As a consequence we obtain new commutative semifields for $p\geq 5$ and odd $k$.

In this paper, based on the scheme proposed by Barreto et al in ASIACRYPT 2005, an identity-based signcryption scheme in multiple Private Key Generator (PKG) environment is proposed, which mitigates the problems referred to users' private keys escrow and distribution in single PKG system. For security of the scheme, it is proved to satisfy the properties of message confidentiality and existential signature-unforgeability, assuming the intractability of the q-Strong Diffie-Hellman problem and the q-Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Inversion problem. For efficiency, compared with the state-of-the-art signcryption schemes of the same kind, our proposal needs less pairing computations and is shown to be the most efficient identity-based signcryption schemes for multiple PKGs up to date.

Efficiently computable homomorphisms allow elliptic curve point multiplication to be accelerated using the Gallant-Lambert-Vanstone (GLV) method. We extend results of Iijima, Matsuo, Chao and Tsujii which give such homomorphisms for a large class of elliptic curves by working over quadratic extensions and demonstrate that these results can be applied to the GLV method. Our implementation runs in between 0.70 and 0.84 the time of the previous best methods for elliptic curve point multiplication on curves without small class number complex multiplication. Further speedups are possible when using more special curves.

The threat of DPA attacks is of crucial importance when designing cryptographic hardware. As a result, several DPA countermeasures at the cell level have been proposed in the last years, but none of them offers perfect protection against DPA attacks. Moreover, all of these DPA-resistant logic styles increase the power consumption and the area consumption significantly. On the other hand, there are some logic styles which provide less power dissipation (so called charge recovery logic) that can be considered as a DPA countermeasure. In this article we examine them from the DPA-resistance point of view. As an example of charge recovery logic styles, 2N-2N2P is evaluated. It is shown that the usage of this logic style leads to an improvement of the DPA-resistance and at the same time reduces the energy consumption which make it especially suitable for pervasive devices. In fact, it is the first time that a proposed DPA-resistant logic style consumes less power than the corresponding standard CMOS circuit.

In a key retrieval scheme, a human user interacts with a client computer to retrieve a key. A scheme is user-sure if any adversary without access to the the user cannot distinguish the retrieved key from a random key. A scheme is user-safe if any adversary without access to the client's keys, or simultaneous user and client access, cannot exploit the user to distinguish the retrieved key from a random key. A multiple-round key retrieval scheme, where the user is given informative prompts to which the user responds, is proved to be user-sure and user-safe. Remote key retrieval involves a keyless client and a remote, keyed server. User-sure and user-safe are defined similarly for remote key retrieval. The scheme is user-anonymous if the server cannot identify the user. A remote version of the multiple-round key retrieval scheme is proved to be user-sure, user-safe and user-anonymous.

Recent collision-finding attacks against hash functions such as MD5 and SHA-1 motivate the use of provably collision-resistant (CR) functions in their place. Finding a collision in a provably CR function implies the ability to solve some hard problem (e.g., factoring). Unfortunately, existing provably CR functions make poor replacements for hash functions as they fail to deliver behaviors demanded by practical use. In particular, they are easily distinguished from a random oracle. We initiate an investigation into building hhash functions from provably CR functions. As a method for achieving this, we present the Mix-Compress-Mix (MCM) construction; it envelopes any provably CR function H (with suitable regularity properties) between two injective ``mixing'' stages. The MCM construction simultaneously enjoys (1) provable collision-resistance in the standard model, and (2) indifferentiability from a monolithic random oracle when the mixing stages themselves are indifferentiable from a random oracle that observes injectivity. We instantiate our new design approach by specifying a blockcipher-based construction that appropriately realizes the mixing stages.

This contribution discusses the information leakage of flip-flops for different DPA-resistant logic styles. We show that many of the proposed side-channel resistant logic styles still employ flip-flops that leak data-dependent information. Furthermore, we apply simple models for the leakage of masked flip-flops to design a new attack on circuits implemented using masked logic styles. Contrary to previous attacks on masked logic styles, our attack does not predict the mask bit and does not need detailed knowledge about the attacked device, e.g., the circuit layout. Moreover, our attack works even if all the load capacitances of the complementary logic signals are perfectly balanced and even if the PRNG is ideally unbiased. Finally, after performing the attack on DRSL, MDPL, and iMDPL circuits we show that single-bit masks do not influence the exploitability of the revealed leakage of the masked flip-flops.

Signcryption is a cryptographic primitive that performs digital signature and public key encryption simultaneously, at a lower computational costs and communication overheads than the signature-then-encryption approach. Recently, two identity-based threshold signcryption schemes[12],[26] have been proposed by combining the concepts of identity-based threshold signature and signcryption together. However, the formal models and security proofs for both schemes are not considered. In this paper, we formalize the concept of identity-based threshold signcryption and give a new scheme based on the bilinear pairings. We prove its confidentiality under the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption and its unforgeability under the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our scheme turns out to be more efficient than the two previously proposed schemes.

A growing number of online services, such as Google, Yahoo!, and Amazon, are starting to charge users for their storage. Customers often use these services to store valuable data such as email, family photos and videos, and disk backups. Today, a customer must entirely trust such external services to maintain the integrity of hosted data and return it intact. Unfortunately, no service is infallible. To make storage services accountable for data loss, we present protocols that allow a third-party auditor to periodically verify the data stored by a service and assist in returning the data intact to the customer. Most importantly, our protocols are privacy-preserving, in that they never reveal the data contents to the auditor. Our solution removes the burden of verification from the customer, alleviates both the customer’s and storage service’s fear of data leakage, and provides a method for independent arbitration of data retention contracts.

The need for secure logging is well-understood by the security professionals, including both researchers and practitioners. The ability to efficiently verify all (or some) log entries is important to any application employing secure logging techniques. In this paper, we begin by examining state-of-the-art in secure logging and identify some problems inherent to systems based on trusted third-party servers. We then propose a different approach to secure logging based upon recently developed Forward-Secure Sequential Aggregate (FssAgg) authentication techniques. Our approach offers both space-efficiency and provable security. We illustrate two concrete schemes -- one private-verifiable and one public-verifiable -- that offer practical secure logging without any reliance on on-line trusted third parties or secure hardware. We also investigate the concept of immutability in the context of forward secure sequential aggregate authentication to provide finer grained verification. Finally, we report on some experience with a prototype built upon a popular code version control system.

In this paper, we show how to construct secure obfuscation for Deterministic Finite Automata, assuming non-uniformly strong one-way functions exist. We revisit the software protection approaches originally proposed by [B79,G87,GO96,K80] and revise them to the current obfuscation setting of Barak et al. [BGI+01]. Under this model, we introduce an efficient oracle that retains some ``small" secret about the original program. Using this secret, we can construct an obfuscator and two-party protocol that securely obfuscates Deterministic Finite Automata against malicious adversaries. The security of this model retains the strong ``virtual black box" property originally proposed in [BGI+01] while incorporating the stronger condition of dependent auxiliary inputs in [GTK05]. Additionally, we further show that our techniques remain secure under concurrent self-composition with adaptive inputs and that Turing machines are obfuscatable under this model.

This paper presents preimage attacks for the hash functions 3-pass HAVAL and step-reduced MD5. Introduced in 1992 and 1991 respectively, these functions underwent severe collision attacks, but no preimage attack. We describe two preimage attacks on the compression function of 3-pass HAVAL. The attacks have a complexity of about $2^{224}$ compression function evaluations instead of $2^{256}$. Furthermore, we present several preimage attacks on the MD5 compression function that invert up to 47 (out of 64) steps within $2^{96}$ trials instead of $2^{128}$. Though our attacks are not practical, they show that the security margin of 3-pass HAVAL and step-reduced MD5 with respect to preimage attacks is not as high as expected.

In this work we consider the following primitive, that we call {\it restricted adaptive oblivious transfer}. On the one hand, the owner of a database wants to restrict the access of users to this data according to some policy, in such a way that a user can only obtain information satisfying the restrictions imposed by the owner. On the other hand, a legitimate user wants to privately retrieve allowed parts of the data, in a sequential and adaptive way, without letting the owner know which part of the data is being obtained. After having formally described the components and required properties of a protocol for restricted adaptive oblivious transfer, we propose two generic ways to realize this primitive. The first one uses a cryptographic tool which has received a lot of attention from the literature in the last years: cryptosystems which are both multiplicatively and additively homomorphic. Our second generic construction is based on secret sharing schemes.

In this paper we consider the problem of increasing the number of possible challenge values from 2 to $s$ in various zero-knowledge cut and choose protocols. First we discuss doing this for graph isomorphism protocol. Then we show how increasing this number improves efficiency of protocols for double discrete logarithm and $e$-th root of discrete logarithm which are potentially very useful tools for constructing complex cryptographic protocols. The practical improvement given by our paper is 2-4 times in terms of both time complexity and transcript size.

Abelian class group Cl(D) of imaginary quadratic order with odd squarefree discriminant D is used in public key cryptosystems, based on discrete logarithm problem in class group and in cryptosystems, based on isogenies of elliptic curves. Discrete logarithm problem in Cl(D) is hard if #Cl(D) is prime or has large prime divisor. But no algorithms for generating such D are known. We propose probabilistic algorithm that gives discriminant of imaginary quadratic order O_D with subgroup of given prime order l. Algorithm is based on properties of Hilbert class field polynomial H_D for elliptic curve over field of p^l elements. Let trace of Frobenius endomorphism is T, discriminant of Frobenius endomorphism D = T^2-4p^l and j is not in prime field. Then deg(H_D) = #Cl(O_D) and #Cl(D)=0 (mod l). If Diophantine equation D = T^2-4p^l with variables l<O(|D|^(1/4)), prime p and T has solution only for l=1, then class number is prime.

In click-based graphical password schemes that allow arbitrary click locations on image, a click should be verified as correct if it is close within a predefined distance to the originally chosen location. This condition should hold even when for security reasons the password hash is stored in the system, not the password itself. To solve this problem, a robust discretization method has been proposed, recently. In this paper, we show that previous work on discretization does not give optimal results with respect to the entropy of the graphical passwords and propose a new discretization method to increase the password space. To improve the security further, we also present several methods that use multiple hash computations for password verification.

In this paper we propose a new cryptanalytic method against block ciphers, which combines both algebraic and statistical techniques. More speci&#64257;cally, we show how to use algebraic relations arising from differential characteristics to speed up and improve key-recovery differntial attacks against block ciphers. To illustrate the new technique, we apply algebraic techniques to mount differential attacks against round reduced variants of Present-128.

Because of the algebraic attacks, a high algebraic immunity is now an important criteria for Boolean functions used in stream ciphers. In this paper, by using the relationship between some flats and support of a n variables Boolean function f, we introduce a general method to determine the algebraic immunity of a Boolean function and finally construct some balanced functions with optimum algebraic immunity.

A proof of retrievability (POR) is a compact proof by a file system (prover) to a client (verifier) that a target file $F$ is intact, in the sense that the client can fully recover it. As PORs incur lower communication complexity than transmission of $F$ itself, they are an attractive building block for high-assurance remote storage systems. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework for the design of PORs. Our framework improves the previously proposed POR constructions of Juels-Kaliski and Shacham-Waters, and also sheds light on the conceptual limitations of previous theoretical models for PORs. It supports a fully Byzantine adversarial model, carrying only the restriction—fundamental to all PORs—that the adversary’s error rate $\epsilon$ be bounded when the client seeks to extract $F$. Our techniques support efficient protocols across the full possible range of $\epsilon$, up to $\epsilon$ non-negligibly close to 1. We propose a new variant on the Juels-Kaliski protocol and describe a prototype implementation. We demonstrate practical encoding even for files $F$ whose size exceeds that of client main memory.

Most of the attacks against (reduced) SHA-2 family in literature have used local collisions which are valid for linearized version of SHA-2 hash functions. Recently, at FSE '08, an attack against reduced round SHA-256 was presented by Nikolić and Biryukov which used a local collision which is valid for the actual SHA-256 function. It is a 9-step local collision which starts by introducing a modular difference of 1 in the two messages. It succeeds with probability roughly 1/3. We build on the work of Nikolić and Biryukov and provide a generalized nonlinear local collision which accepts an arbitrary initial message difference. This local collision succeeds with probability 1. Using this local collision we present attacks against 18-step SHA-256 and 18-step SHA-512 with arbitrary initial difference. Both of these attacks succeed with probability 1. We then present special cases of our local collision and show two different differential paths for attacking 20-step SHA-256 and 20-step SHA-512. One of these paths is the same as presented by Nikolić and Biryukov while the other one is a new differential path. Messages following both these differential paths can be found with probability 1. This improves on the previous result where the success probability of 20-step attack was 1/3. Finally, we present two differential paths for 21-step collisions for SHA-256 and SHA-512, one of which is a new path. The success probability of these paths for SHA-256 is roughly $2^{-15}$ and $2^{-17}$ which improves on the 21-step attack having probability $2^{-19}$ reported earlier. We show examples of message pairs following all the presented differential paths for up to 21-step collisions in SHA-256. We also show first real examples of colliding message pairs for up to 20-step reduced SHA-512.

Collisions in the LPS cryptographic hash function of Charles, Goren and Lauter have been found by Zémor and Tillich, but it was not clear whether computing preimages was also easy for this hash function. We present a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm solving this problem. Subsequently, we study the Morgenstern hash, an interesting variant of LPS hash, and break this function as well. Our attacks build upon the ideas of Zémor and Tillich but are not straightforward extensions of it. Finally, we discuss fixes for the Morgenstern hash function and other applications of our results.

The round complexity of interactive protocols is one of their most important complexity measures. In this work we prove that existing lower bounds for the round complexity of VSS can be circumvented by introducing a negligible probability of error in the reconstruction phase. Previous results show matching lower and upper bounds of {\em three} rounds for VSS, with $n = 3t+1$, where the reconstruction of the secrets always succeeds, i.e. with probability 1. In contrast we show that with a negligible probability of error in the reconstruction phase: \begin{enumerate} \item There exists an efficient 2-round VSS protocol for $n = 3t + 1$. If we assume that the adversary is non-rushing then we can achieve a 1-round reconstruction phase. \item There exists an efficient 1-round VSS for $t = 1$ and $n > 3$. \item We prove that our results are optimal both in resilience and number of sharing rounds by showing: \begin{enumerate} \item There does not exist a 2-round WSS \footnote{WSS is a weaker notion of VSS.} (and hence VSS) for $n \leq 3t$. \item There does not exist a 1-round VSS protocol for $t \geq 2$ and $n \geq 4$. \end{enumerate} \end{enumerate}

This paper presents a new shape for ordinary elliptic curves over fields of characteristic 2. Using the new shape, this paper presents the first complete addition formulas for binary elliptic curves, i.e., addition formulas that work for all pairs of input points, with no exceptional cases. If n >= 3 then the complete curves cover all isomorphism classes of ordinary elliptic curves over F_2^n. This paper also presents dedicated doubling formulas for these curves using 2M + 6S + 3D, where M is the cost of a field multiplication, S is the cost of a field squaring, and D is the cost of multiplying by a curve parameter. These doubling formulas are also the first complete doubling formulas in the literature, with no exceptions for the neutral element, points of order 2, etc. Finally, this paper presents complete formulas for differential addition, i.e., addition of points with known difference. A differential addition and doubling, the basic step in a Montgomery ladder, uses 5M + 4S + 2D when the known difference is given in affine form.

Biggs has recently proposed the critical group of a certain class of finite graphs as a platform group for cryptosystems relying on the difficulty of the discrete log problem. The paper uses techniques from the theory of Picard groups on finite graphs to show that the discrete log problem can be efficiently solved in Biggs's groups. Thus this class of groups is not suitable as a platform for discrete log based cryptography.

Recent articles~\cite{kucuk,ckp08,isobe,cryptoeprint:2008:128} introduce the concept of phase shifting equivalent keys in stream ciphers, and exploit this concept in order to mount attacks on some specific ciphers. The idea behind phase shifting equivalent keys is that, for many ciphers, each internal state can be considered as the result of an injection of a key and initialization vector. This enables speeding up the standard exhaustive search algorithm among the $2^n$ possible keys by decreasing the constant factor of $2^n$ in the time complexity of the algorithm. However, this has erroneously been stated in~\cite{isobe,cryptoeprint:2008:128} as decreasing the complexity of the algorithm below $2^n$. In this note, we show why this type of attacks, using phase shifting equivalent keys to improve exhaustive key search, can never reach time complexity below $2^n$, where $2^n$ is the size of the key space.

The *selective decommitment problem* can be described as follows: assume an adversary receives a number of commitments and then may request openings of, say, half of them. Do the unopened commitments remain secure? Although this question arose more than twenty years ago, no satisfactory answer could be presented so far. We answer the question in several ways: - If simulation-based security is desired (i.e., if we demand that the adversary's output can be simulated by a machine that does not see the unopened commitments), then security is *not achievable* for non-interactive or perfectly binding commitment schemes via black-box reductions to standard cryptographic assumptions. *However,* we show how to achieve security in this sense with interaction and a non-black-box reduction to one-way permutations. - If only indistinguishability of the unopened commitments from random commitments is desired, then security is *not achievable* for (interactive or non-interactive) perfectly binding commitment schemes, via black-box reductions to standard cryptographic assumptions. *However,* any statistically hiding scheme *does* achieve security in this sense. Our results give an almost complete picture when and how security under selective openings can be achieved. Applications of our results include: - Essentially, an encryption scheme *must* be non-committing in order to achieve provable security against an adaptive adversary. - When implemented with our commitment scheme, the interactive proof for graph 3-coloring due to Goldreich et al. becomes black-box zero-knowledge under parallel composition. On the technical side, we develop a technique to show very general impossibility results for black-box proofs.

Recently, non-black-box techniques have enjoyed great success in cryptography. In particular, they have led to the construction of \emph{constant round} protocols for two basic cryptographic tasks (in the plain model): non-malleable zero-knowledge (NMZK) arguments for NP, and non-malleable commitments. Earlier protocols, whose security proofs relied only on black-box techniques, required non-constant (e.g., $O(\log n)$) number of rounds. Given the inefficiency (and complexity) of existing non-black-box techniques, it is natural to ask whether they are \emph{necessary} for achieving constant-round non-malleable cryptographic protocols. In this paper, we answer this question in the \emph{negative}. Assuming the validity of a recently introduced assumption, namely the \emph{Gap Discrete Logarithm} (Gap-DL) assumption [MMY06], we construct a constant round \emph{simulation-extractable} argument system for NP, which implies NMZK. The Gap-DL assumption also leads to a very simple and natural construction of \emph{non-interactive non-malleable commitments}. In addition, plugging our simulation-extractable argument in the construction of Katz, Ostrovsky, and Smith [KOS03] yields the first $O(1)$-round secure multiparty computation with a dishonest majority using only black-box techniques. Although the Gap-DL assumption is relatively new and non-standard, in addition to answering some long standing open questions, it brings a new approach to non-malleability which is simpler and very natural. We also demonstrate that \odla~holds unconditionally against \emph{generic} adversaries.

MiFare Crypto 1 is a lightweight stream cipher used in London's Oyster card, Netherland's OV-Chipcard, US Boston's CharlieCard, and in numerous wireless access control and ticketing systems worldwide. Recently, researchers have been able to recover this algorithm by reverse engineering. We have examined MiFare from the point of view of the so called "algebraic attacks". We can recover the full 48-bit key of MiFare algorithm in 200 seconds on a PC, given 1 known IV (from one single encryption). The security of this cipher is therefore close to zero. This is particularly shocking, given the fact that, according to the Dutch press, 1 billion of MiFare Classic chips are used worldwide, including in many governmental security systems.

The lower bound on the number of n-variable balanced symmetric functions over finite fields GF(p) presented in {\cite{Cusick}} is improved in this paper.

We study the possibility of constructing encryption schemes secure under messages that are chosen depending on the key~$k$ of the encryption scheme itself. We give the following separation results that hold both in the private and in the public key settings: \begin{itemize} \item Let~$\mathcal{H}$ be the family of $\poly(n)$-wise independent hash-functions. There exists no fully-black-box reduction from an encryption scheme secure against key-dependent messages to one-way permutations (and also to families of trapdoor permutations) if the adversary can obtain encryptions of~$h(k)$ for~$h \in \mathcal{H}$. \item There exists no reduction from an encryption scheme secure against key-dependent messages to, essentially, \emph{any} cryptographic assumption, if the adversary can obtain an encryption of~$g(k)$ for an \emph{arbitrary} $g$, as long as the reduction's proof of security treats both the adversary and the function $g$ as black boxes. \end{itemize}

In an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol, a Sender with messages M_1,...,M_N and a Receiver with indices s_1,...,s_k interact in such a way that at the end the Receiver obtains M_{s_1},...,M_{s_k} without learning anything about the other messages, and the Sender does not learn anything about s_1,...,s_k. In an adaptive protocol, the Receiver may obtain M_{s_{i-1}} before deciding on $s_i$. Efficient adaptive OT protocols are interesting both as a building block for secure multiparty computation and for enabling oblivious searches on medical and patent databases. Historically, adaptive OT protocols were analyzed with respect to a ``half-simulation'' definition which Naor and Pinkas showed to be flawed. In 2007, Camenisch, Neven, and shelat, and subsequent other works, demonstrated efficient adaptive protocols in the full-simulation model. These protocols, however, all use standard rewinding techniques in their proofs of security and thus are not universally composable. Recently, Peikert, Vaikuntanathan and Waters presented universally composable (UC) non-adaptive OT protocols (for the 1-out-of-2 variant). However, it is not clear how to preserve UC security while extending these protocols to the adaptive k-out-of-N setting. Further, any such attempt would seem to require O(N) computation per transfer for a database of size N. In this work, we present an efficient and UC-secure adaptive k-out-of-N OT protocol, where after an initial commitment to the database, the cost of each transfer is constant. Our construction is secure under bilinear assumptions in the standard model.

We propose a novel approach for quantifying a system's resistance to unknown-message side-channel attacks. The approach is based on a measure of the secret information that an attacker can extract from a system from a given number of side-channel measurements. We provide an algorithm to compute this measure, and we use it to analyze the resistance of hardware implementations of cryptographic algorithms with respect to power and timing attacks. In particular, we show that message-blinding -- the common countermeasure against timing attacks -- reduces the rate at which information about the secret is leaked, but that the complete information is still eventually revealed. Finally, we compare information measures corresponding to unknown-message, known-message, and chosen-message attackers and show that they form a strict hierarchy.

Modular polynomials are an important tool in many algorithms involving elliptic curves. In this article we generalize this concept to the genus 2 case. We give the theoretical framework describing the genus 2 modular polynomials and discuss how to explicitly compute them.

Proxy Signatures, introduced by Mambo, Usuda and Okamoto, allow a designated person to sign on behalf of an original signer. Braid groups has been playing an important role in the theory of cryptography as these are non commutative groups used in cryptography. Some digital signature schemes have been given but no proxy signature scheme has been introduced over braid groups. In this paper we have proposed proxy signature scheme using conjugacy search problem over braid groups. Our proxy signature scheme is partial delegated protected proxy signature.

A deniable authentication protocol enables a receiver to identify the source of the given messages but unable to prove to a third party the identity of the sender. In recent years, several non-interactive deniable authentication schemes have been proposed in order to enhance efficiency. In this paper, we propose a security model for non-interactive deniable authentication schemes. Then a non-interactive deniable authentication scheme is presented based on designated verifier proofs. Furthermore, we prove the security of our scheme under the DDH assumption.

Unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) operating in hostile environments face the risk of compromise. % by a mobile adversary. Unable to off-load collected data to a sink or some other trusted external entity, sensors must protect themselves by attempting to mitigate potential compromise and safeguarding their data. In this paper, we focus on techniques that allow unattended sensors to recover from intrusions by soliciting help from peer sensors. We define a realistic adversarial model and show how certain simple defense methods can result in sensors re-gaining secrecy and authenticity of collected data, despite adversary's efforts to the contrary. We present an extensive analysis and a set of simulation results that support our observations and demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed techniques.

Current remote e-voting schemes aim at a number of security objectives. However, this is not enough for providing secure online elections in practice. Beyond a secure e-voting protocol, there are many organizational and technical security requirements that have to be satisfied by the operational environment in which the scheme is implemented. We have investigated four state-of-the-art e-voting protocols in order to identify the organizational and technical requirements which these protocols need to be met in order to work correctly. Satisfying these requirements is a costly task which reduces the potential advantages of e-voting considerably. We introduce the concept of a Voting Service Provider (VSP) which carries out electronic elections as a trusted third party and is responsible for satisfying the organizational and technical requirements. We show which measures the VSP takes to meet these requirements. To establish trust in the VSP we propose a Common Criteria evaluation and a legal framework. Following this approach, we show that the VSP enables secure, cost-effective, and thus feasible online elections.

The black-box extraction problem over rings has (at least) two important interpretations in cryptography: An efficient algorithm for this problem implies (i) the equivalence of computing discrete logarithms and solving the Diffie-Hellman problem and (ii) the in-existence of secure ring-homomorphic encryption schemes. In the special case of a finite field, Boneh/Lipton and Maurer/Raub showed that there exist algorithms solving the black-box extraction problem in subexponential time. It is unknown whether there exist more efficient algorithms. In this work we consider the black-box extraction problem over finite rings of characteristic $n$, where $n$ has at least two different prime factors. We provide a polynomial-time reduction from factoring $n$ to the black-box extraction problem for a large class of finite commutative unitary rings. Under the factoring assumption, this implies the in-existence of certain efficient generic reductions from computing discrete logarithms to the Diffie-Hellman problem on the one side, and might be an indicator that secure ring-homomorphic encryption schemes exist on the other side.

We give an algorithm that produces families of Weil numbers for ordinary abelian varieties over finite fields with prescribed embedding degree. The algorithm uses the ideas of Freeman, Stevenhagen, and Streng to generalize the Brezing-Weng construction of pairing-friendly elliptic curves. We discuss how CM methods can be used to construct these varieties, and we use our algorithm to give examples of pairing-friendly ordinary abelian varieties of dimension 2 and 3 that are absolutely simple and have smaller $\rho$-values than any previous such example.

When computing scalar multiples on Koblitz curves, the Frobenius endomorphism can be used to replace the usual doublings on the curve. This involves digital expansions of the scalar to the complex base $\tau=(\pm 1\pm \sqrt{-7})/2$ instead of binary expansions. As in the binary case, this method can be sped up by enlarging the set of valid digits at the cost of precomputing some points on the curve. In the binary case, it is known that a simple syntactical condition (the so-called $w$-NAF-condition) on the expansion ensures that the number of curve additions is minimised. The purpose of this paper is to show that this is not longer true for the base $\tau$ and $w\in\{4,5,6\}$. Even worse, it is shown that there is no longer an online algorithm to compute an optimal expansion from the digits of some standard expansion from the least to the most significant digit, which can be interpreted as chaotic behaviour. The proofs heavily depend on symbolic computations involving transducer automata.

The abstraction of cryptographic operations by term algebras, called Dolev-Yao models, is essential in almost all tool-supported methods for proving security protocols. Recently significant progress was made in proving that Dolev-Yao models offering the core cryptographic operations such as encryption and digital signatures can be sound with respect to actual cryptographic realizations and security definitions. Recent work, however, has started to extend Dolev-Yao models to more sophisticated operations with unique security features. Zero-knowledge proofs arguably constitute the most amazing such extension. In this paper, we first identify which additional properties a cryptographic (non-interactive) zero-knowledge proof needs to fulfill in order to serve as a computationally sound implementation of symbolic (Dolev-Yao style) zero-knowledge proofs; this leads to the novel definition of a symbolically-sound zero-knowledge proof system. We prove that even in the presence of arbitrary active adversaries, such proof systems constitute computationally sound implementations of symbolic zero-knowledge proofs. This yields the first computational soundness result for symbolic zero-knowledge proofs and the first such result against fully active adversaries of Dolev-Yao models that go beyond the core cryptographic operations.

All practical software hardening schemes, as well as practical encryption schemes, e.g., AES, were not proven to be secure. One technique to enhance security is {\em robust combiners}. An algorithm $C$ is a robust combiner for specification $S$, e.g., privacy, if for any two implementations $X$ and $Y$, of a cryptographic scheme, the combined scheme $C(X,Y)$ satisfies $S$ provided {\em either} $X$ {\em or} $Y$ satisfy $S$. We present the first robust combiners for software hardening, specifically for obfuscation \cite{barak:obfuscation}, and for White-Box Remote Program Execution (\w) \cite{herzberg2009towards}. WBRPE and obfuscators are software hardening techniques that are employed to protect execution of programs in remote, hostile environment. \w\ provides a software only platform allowing secure execution of programs on untrusted, remote hosts, ensuring privacy of the program, and of the inputs to the program, as well as privacy and integrity of the result of the computation. Obfuscators protect the code (and secret data) of the program that is sent to the remote host for execution. Robust combiners are particularly important for software hardening, where there is no standard whose security is established. In addition, robust combiners for software hardening are interesting from software engineering perspective since they introduce new techniques of reductions and code manipulation.

A theoretical approach for integer factoring using complex analysis is to apply Newton's method on an analytic function whose zeros, within in a certain strip, correspond to factors of a given integer. A few successful toy experiments of factoring small numbers with this approach, implemented in a naive manner that amounts to complexified trial division, show that, at least for small numbers, Newton's method finds the requisite zeros, at least some of time (factors of nearby numbers were also sometimes found). Nevertheless, some heuristic arguments predict that this approach will be infeasible for factoring numbers of the size currently used in cryptography.

This paper investigates some properties of $\tau$-adic expansions of scalars. Such expansions are widely used in the design of scalar multiplication algorithms on Koblitz Curves, but at the same time they are much less understood than their binary counterparts. Solinas introduced the width-$w$ $\tau$-adic non-adjacent form for use with Koblitz curves. This is an expansion of integers $z=\sum_{i=0}^\ell z_i\tau^i$, where $\tau$ is a quadratic integer depending on the curve, such that $z_i\ne 0$ implies $z_{w+i-1}=\ldots=z_{i+1}=0$, like the sliding window binary recodings of integers. It uses a redundant digit set, i.e., an expansion of an integer using this digit set need not be uniquely determined if the syntactical constraints are not enforced. We show that the digit sets described by Solinas, formed by elements of minimal norm in their residue classes, are uniquely determined. Apart from this digit set of minimal norm representatives, other digit sets can be chosen such that all integers can be represented by a width-$w$ non-adjacent form using those digits. We describe an algorithm recognizing admissible digit sets. Results by Solinas and by Blake, Murty, and Xu are generalized. In particular, we introduce two new useful families of digit sets. The first set is syntactically defined. As a consequence of its adoption we can also present improved and streamlined algorithms to perform the precomputations in $\tau$-adic scalar multiplication methods. The latter use an improvement of the computation of sums and differences of points on elliptic curves with mixed affine and López-Dahab coordinates. The second set is suitable for low-memory applications, generalizing an approach started by Avanzi, Ciet, and Sica. It permits to devise a scalar multiplication algorithm that dispenses with the initial precomputation stage and its associated memory space. A suitable choice of the parameters of the method leads to a scalar multiplication algorithm on Koblitz Curves that achieves sublinear complexity in the number of expensive curve operations.

In this paper we present a real-world hardware-assisted attack on the well-known A5/1 stream cipher which is (still) used to secure GSM communication in most countries all over the world. During the last ten years A5/1 has been intensively analyzed. However, most of the proposed attacks are just of theoretical interest since they lack from practicability — due to strong preconditions, high computational demands and/or huge storage requirements — and have never been fully implemented. In contrast to these attacks, our attack which is based on the work by Keller and Seitz [KS01] is running on an existing special-purpose hardware device, called COPACOBANA. With the knowledge of only 64 bits of keystream the machine is able to reveal the corresponding internal 64-bit state of the cipher in about 7 hours on average. Besides providing a detailed description of our attack architecture as well as implementation results, we propose and analyze an optimization that leads again to an improvement of about 16% in computation time.

In this paper I describe the construction of Dynamic SHA-2 family of cryptographic hash functions. They are built with design components from the SHA-2 family, but I use the bits in message as parameters of function G, R and ROTR operation in the new hash functionh. It enabled us to achieve a novel design principle: When message is changed, the calculation will be different. It make the system can resistant against all extant attacks.

Multiple-point multiplication on elliptic curves is the highest computational complex operation in the elliptic curve cyptographic based digital signature schemes. We describe three algorithms for multiple-point multiplication on elliptic curves over prime and binary fields, based on the representations of two scalars, as sums of mixed powers of 2 and 3. Our approaches include sliding window mechanism and some precomputed values of points on the curve. A proof for formulae to calculate the number of double-based elements, doublings and triplings below 2^n is listed. Affine coordinates and Jacobian coordinates are considered in both prime fields and binary fields. We have achieved upto 24% of improvements in new algorithms for multiple-point multiplication.

Certificateless cryptography achieves the best of the two worlds: it inherits from identity-based techniques a solution to the certificate management problem in public-key encryption, whilst removing the secret key escrow functionality inherent to the identity-based setting. Signcryption schemes achieve confidentiality and authentication simultaneously by combining public-key encryption and digital signatures, offering better overall performance and security. In this paper, we introduce the notion of certificateless signcryption and present an efficient construction which guarantees security under insider attacks, and therefore provides forward secrecy and non-repudiation. The scheme is shown to be secure using random oracles under a variant of the bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption.

The SHA-256 hash function has started getting attention recently by the cryptanalysis community due to the various weaknesses found in its predecessors such as MD4, MD5, SHA-0 and SHA-1. We make two contributions in this work. First we describe message modification techniques and use them to obtain an algorithm to generate message pairs which collide for the actual SHA-256 reduced to 18 steps. Our second contribution is to present differential paths for 19, 20, 21, 22 and 23 steps of SHA-256. We construct parity check equations in a novel way to find these characteristics. Further, the 19-step differential path presented here is constructed by using only 15 local collisions, as against the previously known 19-step near collision differential path which consists of interleaving of 23 local collisions. Our 19-step differential path can also be seen as a single local collision at the message word level. We use a linearized local collision in this work. These results do not cause any threat to the security of the SHA-256 hash function.

We study the interplay of network connectivity and the issues related to the ‘possibility’, ‘feasibility’ and ‘optimality’ for unconditionally reliable message transmission (URMT) and unconditionally secure message transmission (USMT) in an undirected synchronous network, under the influence of an adaptive mixed adversary having unbounded computing power, who can corrupt some of the nodes in the network in Byzantine, omission, fail-stop and passive fashion respectively. We consider two types of adversary, namely threshold and non-threshold. One of the important conclusions we arrive at from our study is that allowing a negligible error probability significantly helps in the ‘possibility’, ‘feasibility’ and ‘optimality’ of both reliable and secure message transmission protocols. To design our protocols, we propose several new techniques which are of independent interest.

Reducing the minimum assumptions needed to construct various cryptographic primitives is an important and interesting task in theoretical cryptography. Oblivious Transfer, one of the most basic cryptographic building blocks, is also studied under this scenario. Reducing the minimum assumptions for Oblivious Transfer seems not an easy task, as there are a few impossibility results under black-box reductions. Until recently, it is widely believed that Oblivious Transfer can be constructed with trapdoor permutations but not trapdoor functions in general. In this paper, we enhance previous results and show one Oblivious Transfer protocol based on a collection of trapdoor functions with some extra properties. We also provide reasons for adding the extra properties and argue that the assumptions in the protocol are nearly minimum.

We use hybrid encryption with Fuzzy Identity-Based Encryption (Fuzzy-IBE) schemes, and present the first and efficient fuzzy identity-based key encapsulation mechanism (Fuzzy-IB-KEM) schemes which are chosen-ciphertext secure (CCA) without random oracle in the selective-ID model. To achieve these goals, we consider Fuzzy-IBE schemes as consisting of separate key and data encapsulation mechanisms (KEM-DEM), and then give the definition of Fuzzy-IB-KEM. Our main idea is to enhance Sahai and Waters' "large universe" construction (Sahai and Waters, 2005), chosen-plaintext secure (CPA) Fuzzy-IBE, by adding some redundant information to the ciphertext to make it CCA-secure.

We implement one-out-of-two bit oblivious transfer (OT) based on the assumptions used in the McEliece cryptosystem: the hardness of decoding random binary linear codes, and the difficulty of distinguishing a permuted generating matrix of Goppa codes from a random matrix. To our knowledge this is the first OT reduction to these problems only.

The Brezing-Weng method is a general framework to generate families of pairing-friendly elliptic curves. Here, we introduce an improvement which can be used to generate more curves with larger discriminants. Apart from the number of curves this yields, it provides an easy way to avoid endomorphism rings with small class number.

$k$-times anonymous authentication ($k$-TAA) schemes allow members of a group to be authenticated anonymously by application providers for a bounded number of times. Dynamic $k$-TAA allows application providers to independently grant or revoke users from their own access group so as to provide better control over their clients. In terms of time and space complexity, existing dynamic $k$-TAA schemes are of complexities O($k$), where $k$ is the allowed number of authentication. In this paper, we construct a dynamic $k$-TAA scheme with space and time complexities of $O(log(k))$. We also outline how to construct dynamic $k$-TAA scheme with a constant proving effort. Public key size of this variant, however, is $O(k)$. We then describe a trade-off between efficiency and setup freeness of AP, in which AP does not need to hold any secret while maintaining control over their clients. To build our system, we modify the short group signature scheme into a signature scheme and provide efficient protocols that allow one to prove in zero-knowledge the knowledge of a signature and to obtain a signature on a committed block of messages. We prove that the signature scheme is secure in the standard model under the $q$-SDH assumption. Finally, we show that our dynamic $k$-TAA scheme, constructed from bilinear pairing, is secure in the random oracle model.

An online algorithm is presented that produces an optimal radix-2 representation of an input integer $n$ using digits from the set $D_{\ell,u}=\{a\in\Z:\ell\le a\le u\}$, where $\ell \leq 0$ and $u \geq 1$. The algorithm works by scanning the digits of the binary representation of $n$ from left-to-right (\ie from most-significant to least-significant). The output representation is optimal in the sense that, of all radix-2 representations of $n$ with digits from $D_{\ell,u}$, it has as few nonzero digits as possible (\ie it has \emph{minimal weight}). Such representations are useful in the efficient implementation of elliptic curve cryptography. The strategy the algorithm utilizes is to choose an integer of the form $d 2^i$, where $d \in D_{\ell,u}$, that is closest to $n$ with respect to a particular distance function. It is possible to choose values of $\ell$ and $u$ so that the set $D_{\ell,u}$ is unbalanced in the sense that it contains more negative digits than positive digits, or more positive digits than negative digits. Our distance function takes the possible unbalanced nature of $D_{\ell,u}$ into account.

THIS REPORT IS REPLACED BY REPORT 2009/590.

The purpose of this paper is a description of a model of Kummer surfaces in characteristic 2, together with the associated formulas for the pseudo-group law. Since the classical model has bad reduction, a renormalization of the parameters is required, that can be justified using the theory of algebraic theta functions. The formulas that are obtained are very efficient and may be useful in cryptographic applications. We also show that applying the same strategy to elliptic curves gives Montgomery-like formulas in odd characteristic that are of some interest, and we recover already known formulas by Stam in characteristic 2.

Nowadays it is widely accepted to formulate the security of a protocol carrying out a given task via the ``trusted-party paradigm,'' where the protocol execution is compared with an ideal process where the outputs are computed by a trusted party that sees all the inputs. A protocol is said to securely carry out a given task if running the protocol with a realistic adversary amounts to ``emulating'' the ideal process with the appropriate trusted party. In the Universal Composability (UC) framework the program run by the trusted party is called an {\em ideal functionality}. While this simulation-based security formulation provides strong security guarantees, its usefulness is contingent on the properties and correct specification of the ideal functionality, which, as demonstrated in recent years by the coexistence of complex, multiple functionalities for the same task as well as by their ``unstable'' nature, does not seem to be an easy task. In this paper we address this problem, by introducing a general methodology for the sound specification of ideal functionalities. First, we introduce the class of {\em canonical} ideal functionalities for a cryptographic task, which unifies the syntactic specification of a large class of cryptographic tasks under the same basic template functionality. % Furthermore, this representation enables the isolation of the individual properties of a cryptographic task as separate members of the corresponding class. By endowing the class of canonical functionalities with an algebraic structure we are able to combine basic functionalities to a single final canonical functionality for a given task. Effectively, this puts forth a bottom-up approach for the specification of ideal functionalities: first one defines a set of basic constituent functionalities for the task at hand, and then combines them into a single ideal functionality taking advantage of the algebraic structure. In our framework, the constituent functionalities of a task can be derived either directly or, following a translation strategy we introduce, from existing game-based definitions; such definitions have in many cases captured desired individual properties of cryptographic tasks, albeit in less adversarial settings. Our translation methodology entails a sequence of steps that systematically derive a corresponding canonical functionality given a game-based definition, effectively ``lifting'' the game-based definition to its composition-safe version. We showcase our methodology by applying it to a variety of basic cryptographic tasks, including commitments, digital signatures, zero-knowledge proofs, and oblivious transfer. While in some cases our derived canonical functionalities are equivalent to existing formulations, thus attesting to the validity of our approach, in others they differ, enabling us to ``debug'' previous definitions and pinpoint their shortcomings.

We study the security of step-reduced but otherwise unmodified SHA-256. We show the first collision attacks on SHA-256 reduced to 23 and 24 steps with complexities $2^{18}$ and $2^{28.5}$, respectively. We give example colliding message pairs for 23-step and 24-step SHA-256. The best previous, recently obtained result was a collision attack for up to 22 steps. We extend our attacks to 23 and 24-step reduced SHA-512 with respective complexities of $2^{44.9}$ and $2^{53.0}$. Additionally, we show non-random behaviour of the SHA-256 compression function in the form of free-start near-collisions for up to 31 steps, which is 6 more steps than the recently obtained non-random behaviour in the form of a free-start near-collision. Even though this represents a step forwards in terms of cryptanalytic techniques, the results do not threaten the security of applications using SHA-256.

This is the first article analyzing the security of SHA-256 against fast collision search which considers the recent attacks by Wang et al. We show the limits of applying techniques known so far to SHA-256. Next we introduce a new type of perturbation vector which circumvents the identified limits. This new technique is then applied to the unmodified SHA-256. Exploiting the combination of Boolean functions and modular addition together with the newly developed technique allows us to derive collision-producing characteristics for step-reduced SHA-256, which was not possible before. Although our results do not threaten the security of SHA-256, we show that the low probability of a single local collision may give rise to a false sense of security.

With the digitization of society and the continuous migration of services to the electronic world, individuals have lost significant control over their data. In this paper, we consider the problem of protecting personal information according to privacy policies defined by the data subjects. More specifically, we propose a new primitive allowing a data subject to decide when, how, and by whom his data can be accessed, without the database manager learning anything about his identity, at the time the data is retrieved. The proposed solution, which we call Accredited SPIR, combines symmetrically private information retrieval and privacy-preserving digital credentials. We present three constructions based on the discrete logarithm and RSA problems. Despite the added privacy safeguards, the extra cost incurred by our constructions is negligeable compared to that of the underlying building blocks.

DECIM v2 is a stream cipher submitted to the ECRYPT stream cipher project (eSTREAM) and ISO/IEC 18033-4. No attack against DECIM v2 has been proposed yet. In this paper, we propose a chosen IV attack against DECIM v2 using a new equivalent key class. Our attack can recover an $80$-bit key with a time complexity of $2^{79.90}$ when all bits of the IV are zero. This result is the best one on DECIM v2.

We present a subquadratic ternary field multiplier based on the combination of several variants of the Karatsuba-Ofman scheme recently published. Since one of the most relevant applications for this kind of multipliers is pairing computation, where several field multiplications need to be computed at once, we decided to design a $k$-stage pipeline structure for $k=1,\ldots,4$, where each stage is composed of a 49-trit polynomial multiplier unit. That architecture can compute an average of $k$ field multiplications every three clock cycles, which implies that our four-stage pipeline design can perform more than one field multiplication per clock cycle. When implemented in a Xilinx Virtex V XC5VLX330 FPGA device, this multiplier can compute one field multiplication over \gf($3^{97}$) in just $11.47$ns.

The ASIRRA CAPTCHA [EDHS2007], recently proposed at ACM CCS 2007, relies on the problem of distinguishing images of cats and dogs (a task that humans are very good at). The security of ASIRRA is based on the presumed difficulty of classifying these images automatically. In this paper, we describe a classifier which is 82.7% accurate in telling apart the images of cats and dogs used in ASIRRA. This classifier is a combination of support-vector machine classifiers trained on color and texture features extracted from images. Our classifier allows us to solve a 12-image ASIRRA challenge automatically with probability 10.3%. This probability of success is significantly higher than the estimate given in [EDHS2007] for machine vision attacks. The weakness we expose in the current implementation of ASIRRA does not mean that ASIRRA cannot be deployed securely. With appropriate safeguards, we believe that ASIRRA offers an appealing balance between usability and security. One contribution of this work is to inform the choice of safeguard parameters in ASIRRA deployments.

We provide a convenient mathematical framework that essentially encompasses all known pairing functions based on the Tate pairing. We prove non-degeneracy and bounds on the lowest possible degree of these pairing functions and show how efficient endomorphisms can be used to achieve a further degree reduction.

Probabilistic compositeness tests are of great practical importance in cryptography. Besides prominent tests (like the well-known Miller-Rabin test) there are tests that use Lucas-sequences for testing compositeness. One example is the so-called Frobenius test that has a very low error probability. Using a slight modification of the above mentioned Lucas sequences we present a simple derivation for the Frobenius pseudoprime test in the version proposed by Crandall and Pommerance.

The charge recovery logic families have been designed several years ago not in order to eliminate the side-channel leakage but to reduce the power consumption. However, in this article we present a new charge recovery logic style not only to gain high energy efficiency but also to achieve the resistance against side-channel attacks (SDA) especially against differential power analysis (DPA) attacks. Simulation results show a significant improvement in DPA-resistance level as well as in power consumption reduction in comparison with DPA-resistant logic styles proposed so far.