Paper 2019/136 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2019/136 ↗

Divisible E-Cash from Constrained Pseudo-Random Functions

Abstract

Electronic cash (e-cash) is the digital analogue of regular cash which aims at preserving users' privacy. Following Chaum's seminal work, several new features were proposed for e-cash to address the practical issues of the original primitive. Among them, divisibility has proved very useful to enable efficient storage and spendings. Unfortunately, it is also very difficult to achieve and, to date, quite a few constructions exist, all of them relying on complex mechanisms that can only be instantiated in one specific setting. In addition security models are incomplete and proofs sometimes hand-wavy. In this work, we first provide a complete security model for divisible e-cash, and we study the links with constrained pseudo-random functions (PRFs), a primitive recently formalized by Boneh and Waters. We exhibit two frameworks of divisible e-cash systems from constrained PRFs achieving some specific properties: either key homomorphism or delegability. We then formally prove these frameworks, and address two main issues in previous constructions: two essential security notions were either not considered at all or not fully proven. Indeed, we introduce the notion of clearing, which should guarantee that only the recipient of a transaction should be able to do the deposit, and we show the exculpability, that should prevent an honest user to be falsely accused, was wrong in most proofs of the previous constructions. Some can easily be repaired, but this is not the case for most complex settings such as constructions in the standard model. Consequently, we provide the first construction secure in the standard model, as a direct instantiation of our framework.