The most compact quantum-safe proof systems for large circuits are PCP-type systems such as Ligero, Aurora, and Shockwave, that only use weak cryptographic assumptions, namely hash functions modeled as random oracles. One would expect that by allowing for stronger assumptions, such as the hardness of Module-SIS, it should be possible to design more compact proof systems. But alas, despite considerable progress in lattice-based proofs, no such proof system was known so far. We rectify this situation by introducing a Lattice-Based Recursively Amortized Demonstration Of R1CS (LaBRADOR), with more compact proof sizes than known hash-based proof systems, both asymptotically and concretely for all relevant circuit sizes. LaBRADOR proves knowledge of a solution for an R1CS mod $2^{64}+1$ with $2^{20}$ constraints, with a proof size of only 58 KB, an order of magnitude more compact than previous quantum-safe proofs.

Authenticated key-exchange (AKE) protocols are an important class of protocols that allow two parties to establish a common session key over an insecure channel such as the Internet to then protect their communication. They are widely deployed in security protocols such as TLS, IPsec and SSH. Besides the confidentiality of the communicated data, an orthogonal but increasingly important goal is the protection of the confidentiality of the identities of the involved parties (aka privacy). For instance, the Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) mechanism for TLS 1.3 has been designed for exactly this reason. Recently, a series of works (Zhao CCS'16, Arfaoui et al. PoPETS'19, Schäge et al. PKC'20) studied privacy guarantees of (existing) AKE protocols by integrating privacy into AKE models. We observe that these so called privacy-preserving AKE (PPAKE) models are typically strongly tailored to the specific setting, i.e., concrete protocols they investigate. Moreover, the privacy guarantees in these models might be too weak (or even are non-existent) when facing active adversaries. In this work we set the goal to provide a single PPAKE model that captures privacy guarantees against different types of attacks, thereby covering previously proposed notions as well as so far not achieved privacy guarantees. In doing so, we obtain different "degrees" of privacy within a single model, which, in its strongest forms also capture privacy guarantees against powerful active adversaries. We then proceed to investigate (generic) constructions of AKE protocols that provide strong privacy guarantees in our PPAKE model. This includes classical Diffie-Hellman type protocols as well as protocols based on generic building blocks, thus covering post-quantum instantiations.

A significant shortcoming of traditional access control mechanisms is their heavy reliance on reference monitors. Being single points of failure, monitors need to run in protected mode and have permanent online presence in order to handle all access requests. Cryptographic access control offers an alternative solution that provides better scalability and deployability. It relies on security guarantees of the underlying cryptographic primitives and the appropriate key distribution/management in the system. In order to rigorously study security guarantees that a cryptographic access control system can achieve, providing formal security definitions for the system is of great importance, since the security guarantee of the underlying cryptographic primitives cannot be directly translated into those of the system. In this paper, we follow the line of the existing studies on the cryptographic enforcement of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). Inspired by the study focusing on the relation between the existing security definitions for such systems, we identify two types of attacks not described in the existing works. Therefore, we propose two new security definitions with the goal of appropriately modeling cryptographic enforcement of Role-Based Access Control policies and studying the relation between our new definitions and the existing ones. In addition, we show that the cost of supporting dynamic policy updates is inherently expensive by presenting two lower bounds for such systems that guarantee correctness and secure access.

Functional Commitments (FC) allow one to reveal functions of committed data in a succinct and verifiable way. In this paper we put forward the notion of additive-homomorphic FC and show two efficient, pairing-based, realizations of this primitive supporting multivariate polynomials of constant degree and monotone span programs, respectively. We also show applications of the new primitive in the contexts of homomorphic signatures: we show that additive-homomorphic FCs can be used to realize homomorphic signatures (supporting the same class of functionalities as the underlying FC) in a simple and elegant way. Using our new FCs as underlying building blocks, this leads to the (seemingly) first expressive realizations of multi-input homomorphic signatures not relying on lattices or multilinear maps.

Two-party ECDSA signatures have received much attention due to their widespread deployment in cryptocurrencies. Depending on whether or not the message is required, we could divide two-party signing into two different phases, namely, offline and online. Ideally, the online phase should be made as lightweight as possible. At the same time, the cost of the offline phase should remain similar to that of a normal signature generation. However, the existing two-party protocols of ECDSA are not optimal: either their online phase requires decryption of a ciphertext, or their offline phase needs at least two executions of multiplicative-to-additive conversion which dominates the overall complexity. This paper proposes an online-friendly two-party ECDSA with a lightweight online phase and a single multiplicative-to-additive function in the offline phase. It is constructed by a novel design of a re-sharing of the secret key and a linear sharing of the nonce. Our scheme significantly improves previous protocols based on either oblivious transfer or homomorphic encryption. We implement our scheme and show that it outperforms prior online-friendly schemes (i.e., those have lightweight online cost) by a factor of roughly 2 to 9 in both communication and computation. Furthermore, our two-party scheme could be easily extended to the $2$-out-of-$n$ threshold ECDSA.

We present a novel approach to honest majority secure multiparty computation in the preprocessing model with information theoretic security that achieves the best online communication complexity. The online phase of our protocol requires $12$ elements in total per multiplication gate with circuit-dependent preprocessing, or $20$ elements in total with circuit-independent preprocessing. Prior works achieved linear online communication complexity in $n$, the number of parties, with the best prior existing solution involving $1.5n$ elements per multiplication gate. Only one recent work (Goyal et al, CRYPTO'22) achieves constant online communication complexity, but the constants are large ($108$ elements for passive security, and twice that for active security). That said, our protocol offers a very efficient information theoretic online phase for any number of parties. The total end-to-end communication cost with the preprocessing phase is linear in $n$, i.e., $10n + 44$, which is larger than the $4n$ complexity of the state-of-the-art protocols. The gap is not significant when the online phase must be optimized as a priority and a reasonably large number of parties is involved. Unlike previous works based on packed secret-sharing to reduce communication complexity, we further reduce the communication by avoiding the use of complex and expensive network routing or permutations tools. Furthermore, we also allow for a maximal honest majority adversary, while most previous works require the set of honest parties to be strictly larger than a majority. Our protocol is simple and offers concrete efficiency. To illustrate this we present a full-fledged implementation together with experimental results that show improvements in online phase runtimes that go up to $5\times$ in certain settings (e.g. $45$ parties, LAN network, circuit of depth $10$ with $1$M gates).

We design $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ — a highly configurable, stateful, single-server Private Information Retrieval (PIR) scheme that involves an offline phase that is completely client-independent. Coupled with small online overheads, it leads to much smaller amortized financial costs on the server-side than previous approaches. In terms of performance for a database of $1$ million $1$KB elements, $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ requires $< 1$ second for responding to a client query, has a server response size blow-up factor of $< 3.6\times$, and financial costs are $\sim \$1$ for answering $100,000$ client queries. Our experimental analysis is built upon a simple, non-optimized Rust implementation, illustrating that $\mathsf{FrodoPIR}$ is particularly suitable for deployments that involve large numbers of clients.

We propose three interactive zero-knowledge arguments for arithmetic circuit of size $N$ in the common random string model, which can be converted to be non-interactive by Fiat-Shamir heuristics in the random oracle model. First argument features $O(\sqrt{\log N})$ communication and round complexities and $O(N)$ computational complexity for the verifier. Second argument features $O(\log N)$ communication and $O(\sqrt{N})$ computational complexity for the verifier. Third argument features $O(\log N)$ communication and $O(\sqrt{N}\log N)$ computational complexity for the verifier. Contrary to first and second arguments, the third argument is free of reliance on pairing-friendly elliptic curves. The soundness of three arguments is proven under the standard discrete logarithm and/or the double pairing assumption, which is at least as reliable as the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption.

With the recent availability of cloud quantum computing services, the question of verifying quantum computations delegated by a client to a quantum server is becoming of practical interest. While Verifiable Blind Quantum Computing (VBQC) has emerged as one of the key approaches to address this challenge, current protocols still need to be optimised before they are truly practical. To this end, we establish a fundamental correspondence between error-detection and verification and provide sufficient conditions to both achieve security in the Abstract Cryptography framework and optimise resource overheads of all known VBQC-based protocols. As a direct application, we demonstrate how to systematise the search for new efficient and robust verification protocols for $\mathsf{BQP}$ computations. While we have chosen Measurement-Based Quantum Computing (MBQC) as the working model for the presentation of our results, one could expand the domain of applicability of our framework via direct known translation between the circuit model and MBQC.

We initiate the study of Private Certifier Intersection (PCI), which allows mutually distrusting parties to establish a trust basis for cross-validation of claims if they have one or more trust authorities (certifiers) in common. This is one of the essential requirements for verifiable presentations in Web 3.0, since it provides additional privacy without compromising on decentralization. A PCI protocol allows two or more parties holding certificates to identify a common set of certifiers while additionally validating the certificates issued by such certifiers, without leaking any information about the certifiers not in the output intersection. In this paper, we formally define the notion of multi-party PCI in the Simplified-UC framework for two different settings depending on whether certificates are required for any of the claims (called PCI-Any) or all of the claims (called PCI-All). We then design and implement two provably secure and practically efficient PCI protocols supporting validation of digital signature-based certificates: a PCI-Any protocol for ECDSA-based certificates and a PCI-All protocol for BLS-based certificates. The technical centerpiece of our proposals is the first secretsharing-based MPC framework supporting efficient computation of elliptic curve-based arithmetic operations, including elliptic curve pairings, in a black-box way. We implement this framework by building on top of the well-known MP-SPDZ library using OpenSSL and RELIC for elliptic curve operations, and use this implementation to benchmark our proposed PCI protocols in the LAN and WAN settings. In an intercontinental WAN setup with parties located in different continents, our protocols execute in less than a minute on input sets of size 40, which demonstrates the practicality of our proposed solutions.

In the UC framework, protocols must be subroutine respecting; therefore, shared trusted setup might cause security issues. To address this drawback, Generalized UC (GUC) framework is introduced by Canetti \emph{et al.} (TCC 2007). In this work, we investigate the impossibility and feasibility of GUC-secure commitments using global random oracles (GRO) as the trusted setup. In particular, we show that it is impossible to have a 2-round (1-round committing and 1-round opening) GUC-secure commitment in the global observable RO model by Canetti \emph{et al.} (CCS 2014). We then give a new round-optimal GUC-secure commitment that uses only Minicrypt assumptions (i.e. the existence of one-way functions) in the global observable RO model. Furthermore, we also examine the complete picture on round complexity of the GUC-secure commitments in various global RO models.

Ring signatures allow signers to produce verifiable signatures and remain anonymous within a set of signers (i.e., the ring) while doing so. They are well-suited to protocols that target anonymity as a primary goal, for example, anonymous cryptocurrencies. However, standard ring signatures do not ensure that signers are held accountable if they act maliciously. Fraser and Quaglia (CANS'21) introduced a ring signature variant that they called report and trace ring signatures which balances the anonymity guarantee of standard ring signatures with the need to hold signers accountable. In particular, report and trace ring signatures introduce a reporting system whereby ring members can report malicious message/signature pairs. A designated tracer can then revoke the signer's anonymity if, and only if, a ring member submits a report to the tracer. Fraser and Quaglia present a generic construction of a report and trace ring signature scheme and outline an instantiation for which it is claimed that the complexity of signing is linear in the size of the ring $|R|$. In this paper, we introduce a new instantiation of Fraser and Quaglia's generic report and trace ring signature construction. Our instantiation uses a pairing-based variant of ElGamal that we define. We demonstrate that our instantiation is more efficient. In fact, we highlight that the efficiency of Fraser and Quaglia's instantiation omits a scaling factor of $\lambda$ where $\lambda$ is a security parameter. As such, the complexity of signing for their instantiation grows linearly in $\lambda \cdot |R|$. Our instantiation, on the other hand, achieves signing complexity linear in $|R|$. We also introduce a new pairing-free report and trace ring signature construction reaching a similar signing complexity. Whilst this construction requires some additional group exponentiations, it can be instantiated over any prime order group for which the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption holds.

We give round-optimal {\em black-box} constructions of two-party and multiparty protocols in the common random/reference string (CRS) model, with security against malicious adversaries, based on any two-round oblivious transfer (OT) protocol in the same model. Specifically, we obtain two types of results. \begin{enumerate} \item {\bf Two-party protocol.} We give a (two-round) {\it two-sided NISC} protocol that makes black-box use of two-round (malicious-secure) OT in the CRS model. In contrast to the standard setting of non-interactive secure computation (NISC), two-sided NISC allows communication from both parties in each round and delivers the output to both parties at the end of the protocol. Prior black-box constructions of two-sided NISC relied on idealized setup assumptions such as OT correlations, or were proven secure in the random oracle model. \item {\bf Multiparty protocol.} We give a three-round secure multiparty computation protocol for an arbitrary number of parties making black-box use of a two-round OT in the CRS model. The round optimality of this construction follows from a black-box impossibility proof of Applebaum et al. (ITCS 2020). Prior constructions either required the use of random oracles, or were based on two-round malicious-secure OT protocols that satisfied additional security properties. \end{enumerate}

In recent years, permisionless blockchains have received a lot of attention both from industry and academia, where substantial effort has been spent to develop consensus protocols that are secure under the assumption that less than half (or a third) of a given resource (e.g., stake or computing power) is controlled by corrupted parties. The security proofs of these consensus protocols usually assume the availability of a network functionality guaranteeing that a block sent by an honest party is received by all honest parties within some bounded time. To obtain an overall protocol that is secure under the same corruption assumption, it is therefore necessary to combine the consensus protocol with a network protocol that achieves this property under that assumption. In practice, however, the underlying network is typically implemented by flooding protocols that are not proven to be secure in the setting where a fraction of the considered total weight can be corrupted. This has led to many so-called eclipse attacks on existing protocols and tailor-made fixes against specific attacks. To close this apparent gap, we present the first practical flooding protocol that provably delivers sent messages to all honest parties after a logarithmic number of steps. We prove security in the setting where all parties are publicly assigned a positive weight and the adversary can corrupt parties accumulating up to a constant fraction of the total weight. This can directly be used in the proof-of-stake setting, but is not limited to it. To prove the security of our protocol, we combine known results about the diameter of Erdős–Rényi graphs with reductions between different types of random graphs. We further show that the efficiency of our protocol is asymptotically optimal. The practicality of our protocol is supported by extensive simulations for different numbers of parties, weight distributions, and corruption strategies. The simulations confirm our theoretical results and show that messages are delivered quickly regardless of the weight distribution, whereas protocols that are oblivious of the parties' weights completely fail if the weights are unevenly distributed. Furthermore, the average message complexity per party of our protocol is within a small constant factor of such a protocol.

We introduce a notion of round-robin secure sampling that captures several protocols in the literature, such as the "powers-of-tau" setup protocol for pairing-based polynomial commitments and zk-SNARKs, and certain verifiable mixnets. Due to their round-robin structure, protocols of this class inherently require $n$ sequential broadcast rounds, where $n$ is the number of participants. We describe how to compile them generically into protocols that require only $O(\sqrt{n})$ broadcast rounds. Our compiled protocols guarantee output delivery against any dishonest majority. This stands in contrast to prior techniques, which require $\Omega(n)$ sequential broadcasts in most cases (and sometimes many more). Our compiled protocols permit a certain amount of adversarial bias in the output, as all sampling protocols with guaranteed output must, due to Cleve's impossibility result (STOC'86). We show that in the context of the aforementioned applications, this bias is harmless.

Certificate authorities in public key infrastructures typically require entities to prove possession of the secret key corresponding to the public key they want certified. While this is straightforward for digital signature schemes, the most efficient solution for public key encryption and key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) requires an interactive challenge-response protocol, requiring a departure from current issuance processes. In this work we investigate how to non-interactively prove possession of a KEM secret key, specifically for lattice-based KEMs, motivated by the recently proposed KEMTLS protocol which replaces signature-based authentication in TLS 1.3 with KEM-based authentication. Although there are various zero-knowledge (ZK) techniques that can be used to prove possession of a lattice key, they yield large proofs or are inefficient to generate. We propose a technique called verifiable generation, in which a proof of possession is generated at the same time as the key itself is generated. Our technique is inspired by the Picnic signature scheme and uses the multi-party-computation-in-the-head (MPCitH) paradigm; this similarity to a signature scheme allows us to bind attribute data to the proof of possession, as required by certificate issuance protocols. We show how to instantiate this approach for two lattice-based KEMs in Round 3 of the NIST post-quantum cryptography standardization project, Kyber and FrodoKEM, and achieve reasonable proof sizes and performance. Our proofs of possession are faster and an order of magnitude smaller than the previous best MPCitH technique for knowledge of a lattice key, and in size-optimized cases can be comparable to even state-of-the-art direct lattice-based ZK proofs for Kyber. Our approach relies on a new result showing the uniqueness of Kyber and FrodoKEM secret keys, even if the requirement that all secret key components are small is partially relaxed, which may be of independent interest for improving efficiency of zero-knowledge proofs for other lattice-based statements.

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is the key enabler for emerging intelligent transportation systems. Applications built on top of V2X require both authentication and privacy protection for the vehicles. The common approach to meet both requirements is to use pseudonyms which are short-term identities. However, both industrial standards and state-of-the-art research are not designed for resource-constrained environments. In addition, they make a strong assumption about the security of the vehicle's on-board computation units. In this paper, we propose a lightweight auto-refreshing pseudonym protocol LARP for V2X. LARP supports efficient operations for resource-constrained devices, and provides security even when parts of the vehicle are compromised. We provide formal security proof showing that the protocol is secure. We conduct experiments on a Raspberry Pi 4. The results demonstrate that LARP is feasible and practical.

Broadcast is an essential primitive for secure computation. We focus in this paper on optimal resilience (i.e., when the number of corrupted parties $t$ is less than a third of the computing parties $n$), and with no setup or cryptographic assumptions. While broadcast with worst case $t$ rounds is impossible, it has been shown [Feldman and Micali STOC'88, Katz and Koo CRYPTO'06] how to construct protocols with expected constant number of rounds in the private channel model. However, those constructions have large communication complexity, specifically $\mathcal{O}(n^2L+n^6\log n)$ expected number of bits transmitted for broadcasting a message of length $L$. This leads to a significant communication blowup in secure computation protocols in this setting. In this paper, we substantially improve the communication complexity of broadcast in constant expected time. Specifically, the expected communication complexity of our protocol is $\mathcal{O}(nL+n^4\log n)$. For messages of length $L=\Omega(n^3 \log n)$, our broadcast has no asymptotic overhead (up to expectation), as each party has to send or receive $\mathcal{O}(n^3 \log n)$ bits. We also consider parallel broadcast, where $n$ parties wish to broadcast $L$ bit messages in parallel. Our protocol has no asymptotic overhead for $L=\Omega(n^2\log n)$, which is a common communication pattern in perfectly secure MPC protocols. For instance, it is common that all parties share their inputs simultaneously at the same round, and verifiable secret sharing protocols require the dealer to broadcast a total of $\mathcal{O}(n^2\log n)$ bits. As an independent interest, our broadcast is achieved by a packed verifiable secret sharing, a new notion that we introduce. We show a protocol that verifies $\mathcal{O}(n)$ secrets simultaneously with the same cost of verifying just a single secret. This improves by a factor of $n$ the state-of-the-art.

Ring signatures allow a user to sign messages on behalf of an ad hoc set of users - a ring - while hiding her identity. The original motivation for ring signatures was whistleblowing [Rivest et al. ASIACRYPT'01]: a high government employee can anonymously leak sensitive information while certifying that it comes from a reliable source, namely by signing the leak. However, essentially all known ring signature schemes require the members of the ring to publish a structured verification key that is compatible with the scheme. This creates somewhat of a paradox since, if a user does not want to be framed for whistleblowing, they will stay clear of signature schemes that support ring signatures. In this work, we formalize the concept of universal ring signatures (URS). A URS enables a user to issue a ring signature with respect to a ring of users, independently of the signature schemes they are using. In particular, none of the verification keys in the ring need to come from the same scheme. Thus, in principle, URS presents an effective solution for whistleblowing. The main goal of this work is to study the feasibility of URS, especially in the standard model (i.e. no random oracles or common reference strings). We present several constructions of URS, offering different trade-offs between assumptions required, the level of security achieved, and the size of signatures: * Our first construction is based on superpolynomial hardness assumptions of standard primitives. It achieves compact signatures. That means the size of a signature depends only logarithmically on the size of the ring and on the number of signature schemes involved. * We then proceed to study the feasibility of constructing URS from standard polynomially-hard assumptions only. We construct a non-compact URS from witness encryption and additional standard assumptions. * Finally, we show how to modify the non-compact construction into a compact one by relying on indistinguishability obfuscation.

We investigate the security of succinct arguments against quantum adversaries. Our main result is a proof of knowledge-soundness in the post-quantum setting for a class of multi-round interactive protocols, including those based on the recursive folding technique of Bulletproofs. To prove this result, we devise a new quantum rewinding strategy, the first that allows for rewinding across many rounds. This technique applies to any protocol satisfying natural multi-round generalizations of special soundness and collapsing. For our main result, we show that recent Bulletproofs-like protocols based on lattices satisfy these properties, and are hence sound against quantum adversaries.

We revisit the well-studied problem of preventing steganographic communication in multi-party communications. While this is known to be a provably impossible task, we propose a new model that allows circumventing this impossibility. In our model, the parties first publish a single message during an honest non-interactive pre-processing phase and then later interact in an execution phase. We show that in this model, it is indeed possible to prevent any steganographic communication in zero-knowledge protocols. Our solutions rely on standard cryptographic assumptions.

In 3GPP mobile networks, application data is transferred between the phone and an access point over a wireless link. The mobile network wireless link is special since one channel endpoint is handed over from one access point to another as the phone physically moves. Key evolution during handover has been analyzed in various works, but these do not combine the analysis with analysis of the wireless-link application-data encryption protocol that uses the keys. To enable formal analysis of the 4G/5G wireless link, we develop a game-based security framework for such channels and define flexible key insulation security notions for application data transfer, including forward and backward security in the given adversary model. Our notions are modular and combine a bidirectional application data transfer channel with a generic framework for multiparty channel-evolution protocols. These two components interact, and the security of the channel-evolution protocol may rely on the security of the data transfer channel for some or all its messages. We also develop the first formal model of 4G/5G wireless link security including both handover key evolution and application data transfer, in the complexity theoretic setting. We prove the model secure w.r.t. our security notions. As a byproduct, we identify recommendations for improving the security of future mobile network standards to achieve key insulation. Specifically, we show that the current standards do not achieve forward secure encryption, even though this appears to be an explicit goal. We show how this can be rectified.

One-time programs, originally formulated by Goldwasser et al. [CRYPTO'08], are a powerful cryptographic primitive with compelling applications. Known solutions for one-time programs, however, require specialized secure hardware that is not widely available (or, alternatively, access to blockchains and very strong cryptographic tools). In this work we investigate the possibility of realizing one-time programs from a recent and now more commonly available hardware functionality: the counter lockbox. A counter lockbox is a stateful functionality that protects an encryption key under a user-specified password, and enforces a limited number of incorrect guesses. Counter lockboxes have become widely available in consumer devices and cloud platforms. We show that counter lockboxes can be used to realize one-time programs for general functionalities. We develop a number of techniques to reduce the number of counter lockboxes required for our constructions, that may be of independent interest.

In the light of NIST’s announced reopening of the call for digital signature proposals in 2023 due to lacking diversity, there is a strong need for constructions based on other established hardness assumptions. In this work we construct a new post-quantum secure digital signature scheme based on the $MinRank$ problem, a problem with a long history of applications in cryptanalysis that led to a strong belief in its hardness. Initially following a design by Courtois (Asiacrypt '01) based on the Fiat--Shamir transform, we make use of several recent developments in the design of sigma protocols to reduce signature size and improve efficiency. This includes the recently introduced $sigma \; protocol \; with \; helper$ paradigm (Eurocrypt '19) and combinations with $cut$-$and$-$choose$ techniques (CCS '18). Moreover, we introduce several improvements to the core of the scheme to further reduce its signature size.

Trading goods lies at the backbone of the modern economy and the recent advent of cryptocurrencies has opened the door for trading decentralized (digital) assets: A large fraction of the value of cryptocurrencies comes from the inter-currency exchange and trading, which has been arguably the most successful application of decentralized money. The security issues observed with centralized, custodial cryptocurrency exchanges have motivated the design of atomic swaps, a protocol for coin exchanges between any two users. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, no atomic swap protocol exists that simultaneously satisfies the following simple but desired properties: (i) non-custodial, departing from a third party trusted holding the coins from users during the exchange; (ii) universal, that is, compatible with all (current and future) cryptocurrencies; (iii) multi-asset, supporting the exchange of multiple coins in a single atomic swap. From a theoretical standpoint, in this work we show a generic protocol to securely swap $n$ coins from any (possible multiple) currencies for $\tilde{n}$ coins of any other currencies, for any $n$ and $\tilde{n}$. We do not require any custom scripting language supported by the corresponding blockchains, besides the bare minimum ability to verify signatures on transactions. For the special case when the blockchains use ECDSA or Schnorr signatures, we design a practically efficient protocol based on adaptor signatures and time-lock puzzles. As a byproduct of our approach, atomic swaps transactions no longer include custom scripts and are identical to standard one-to-one transactions. We also show that our protocol naturally generalizes to any cycle of users, i.e., atomic swaps with more than two participants. To demonstrate the practicality of our approach, we have evaluated a prototypical implementation of our protocol for Schnorr/ECDSA signatures and observed that an atomic swap requires below one second on commodity machines. Even on blockchains with expressive smart contract support (e.g., Ethereum), our approach reduces the on-chain cost both in terms of transaction size and gas cost.

The re-encryption mix-net (RMN) is a basic cryptographic tool that is widely used in the privacy protection domain and requires anonymity support; for example, it is used in electronic voting, web browsing, and location systems. To protect information about the relationship between senders and messages, a number of mix servers in RMNs shuffle and forward a list of input ciphertexts in a cascading manner. The output of the last mix server is decrypted to yield the set of original messages. The main downside of this approach is that the mixing process requires a number of rounds that is linear in the number of mix servers. This implies that a long round delay would cause network latency, which can dominate local computational latencies. To minimize the effect of network latency, RMN protocols with constant round complexity are more desirable. In this work, we propose a new RMN protocol that runs in $O(1)$ rounds in the number of mix servers and that UC-realizes a hybrid model with access to some functionalities for secure communication and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). Interestingly, because our protocol does not require a ZKP protocol for a verifiable shuffle, we also achieve a considerable efficiency gain in terms of computation cost. Our main tools are secret sharing and an ElGamal encryption that is extended in the sense that it works on a multiplicative group under field extension. Importantly, this extended ElGamal encryption scheme acquires a new capability: it can efficiently decompose a decrypted message into unique values. We provide a detailed report on the theoretical performance and security analysis of this method.

SNARKs for some standard cryptographic primitives tend to be plenty designed with SNARK-unfriendly operations such as XOR. Previous protocols such as [GW20] worked around this problem by the introduction of lookup arguments. However, these protocols were only appliable over the same circuit. RapidUp is a protocol that solves this limitation by unfolding the grand-product polynomial into two (equivalent) polynomials of the same size. Morevoer, a generalization of previous protocols is presented by the introduction of selectors.

Most MPC protocols require the set of parties to be active for the entire duration of the computation. Deploying MPC for use cases such as complex and resource-intensive scientific computations increases the barrier of entry for potential participants. The model of Fluid MPC (Crypto 2021) tackles this issue by giving parties the flexibility to participate in the protocol only when their resources are free. As such, the set of parties is dynamically changing over time. In this work, we extend Fluid MPC, which only considered an honest majority, to the setting where the majority of participants at any point in the computation may be corrupt. We do this by presenting variants of the SPDZ protocol, which support dynamic participants. Firstly, we describe a universal preprocessing for SPDZ, which allows a set of $n$ parties to compute some correlated randomness, such that later on, any subset of the parties can use this to take part in an online secure computation. We complement this with a Dynamic SPDZ online phase, designed to work with our universal preprocessing, as well as a protocol for securely realising the preprocessing. Our preprocessing protocol is designed to efficiently use pseudorandom correlation generators, thus, the parties' storage and communication costs can be almost independent of the function being evaluated. We then extend this to support a fluid online phase, where the set of parties can dynamically evolve during the online phase. Our protocol achieves maximal fluidity and security with abort, similarly to the previous, honest majority construction. Achieving this requires a careful design and techniques to guarantee a small state complexity, allowing us to switch between committees efficiently.

Single Secret Leader Election protocols (SSLE, for short) allow a group of users to select a random leader so that the latter remains secret until she decides to reveal herself. Thanks to this feature, SSLE can be used to build an election mechanism for proof-of-stake based blockchains. In particular, a recent work by Azouvi and Cappelletti (ACM AFT 2021) shows that in comparison to probabilistic leader election methods, SSLE-based proof-of-stake blockchains have significant security gains, both with respect to grinding attacks and with respect to the private attack. Yet, as of today, very few concrete constructions of SSLE are known. In particular, all existing protocols are only secure in a model where the adversary is supposed to corrupt participants before the protocol starts -- an assumption that clashes with the highly dynamic nature of decentralized blockchain protocols. In this paper we make progress in the study of SSLE by proposing new efficient constructions that achieve stronger security guarantees than previous work. In particular, we propose the first SSLE protocol that achieves adaptive security. Our scheme is proven secure in the universal composability model and achieves efficiency comparable to previous, less secure, realizations in the state of the art.

For a group $\mathbb{G}$ of unknown order, a *Proof of Exponentiation* (PoE) allows a prover to convince a verifier that a tuple $(y,x,q,T)\in \mathbb{G}^2\times\mathbb{N}^2$ satisfies $y=x^{q^T}$. PoEs have recently found exciting applications in constructions of verifiable delay functions and succinct arguments of knowledge. The current PoEs that are practical in terms of proof-size only provide restricted soundness guarantees: Wesolowski's protocol (Journal of Cryptology 2020) is only computationally-sound (i.e., it is an argument), whereas Pietrzak's protocol (ITCS 2019) is statistically-sound only in groups that come with the promise of not having any small subgroups. On the other hand, the only statistically-sound PoE in *arbitrary* groups of unknown order is due to Block et al. (CRYPTO 2021), and it can be seen as an elaborate parallel repetition of Pietrzak's PoE. Therefore, to achieve $\lambda$ bits of security, say $\lambda=80$, the number of repetitions required -- and hence the (multiplicative) overhead incurred in proof-size -- is as large as $\lambda$. In this work, we propose a statistically-sound PoE for arbitrary groups for the case where the exponent $q$ is the product of all primes up to some bound $B$. For such a structured exponent, we show that it suffices to run only $\lambda/\log(B)$ parallel instances of Pietrzak's PoE. This reduces the concrete proof-size compared to Block et al. by an order of magnitude. Furthermore, we show that in the known applications where PoEs are used as a building block such structured exponents are viable. Finally, we also discuss batching of our PoE, showing that many proofs (for the same $\mathbb{G}$ and $q$ but different $x$ and $T$) can be batched by adding only a single element to the proof per additional statement.

Bit commitment (BC) is one of the most important fundamental protocols in secure multi-party computation. However, it is generally believed that unconditionally secure bit commitment is impossible even with quantum resources. In this paper, we design a secure non-interactive bit commitment protocol by exploiting the no-communication theorem of the quantum entangled states, whose security relies on the indistinguishability of whether the Bell states are measured or not. The proposed quantum bit commitment (QBC) is secure against classical adversaries with unlimited computing power, and the probability of a successful attack by quantum adversaries decreases exponentially as $n$ (the number of qubits in a group) increases.

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) is the basis of modern Secure Group Messaging (SGM) protocols. At a high level, a CGKA protocol enables a group of users to continuously compute a shared (evolving) secret while members of the group add new members, remove other existing members, and perform state updates. The state updates allow CGKA to offer desirable security features such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security. CGKA is regarded as a practical primitive in the real-world. Indeed, there is an IETF Messaging Layer Security (MLS) working group devoted to developing a standard for SGM protocols, including the CGKA protocol at their core. Though known CGKA protocols seem to perform relatively well when considering natural sequences of performed group operations, there are no formal guarantees on their efficiency, other than the $O(n)$ bound which can be achieved by trivial protocols, where $n$ is the number of group numbers. In this context, we ask the following questions and provide negative answers. 1. Can we have CGKA protocols that are efficient in the worst case? We start by answering this basic question in the negative. First, we show that a natural primitive that we call Compact Key Exchange (CKE) is at the core of CGKA, and thus tightly captures CGKA's worst-case communication cost. Intuitively, CKE requires that: first, $n$ users non-interactively generate key pairs and broadcast their public keys, then, some other special user securely communicates to these $n$ users a shared key. Next, we show that CKE with communication cost $o(n)$ by the special user cannot be realized in a black-box manner from public-key encryption, thus implying the same for CGKA, where $n$ is the corresponding number of group members. Surprisingly, this impossibility holds even in an offline setting, where parties have access to the sequence of group operations in advance. 2. Can we realize one CGKA protocol that works as well as possible in all cases? Here again, we present negative evidence showing that no such protocol based on black-box use of public-key encryption exists. Specifically, we show two distributions over sequences of group operations such that no CGKA protocol obtains optimal communication costs on both sequences.

In this paper, we study zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs for circuit satisfiability that can prove to $n$ verifiers at a time efficiently. The proofs are secure against the collusion of a prover and a subset of $t$ verifiers. We refer to such ZK proofs as multi-verifier zero-knowledge (MVZK) proofs and focus on the case that a majority of verifiers are honest (i.e., $t<n/2$). We construct efficient MVZK protocols in the random oracle model where the prover sends one message to each verifier, while the verifiers only exchange one round of messages. When the threshold of corrupted verifiers $t<n/2$, the prover sends $1/2+o(1)$ field elements per multiplication gate to every verifier; when $t<n(1/2-\epsilon)$ for some constant $0<\epsilon<1/2$, we can further reduce the communication to $O(1/n)$ field elements per multiplication gate per verifier. Our MVZK protocols demonstrate particularly high scalability: the proofs are streamable and only require a memory proportional to what is needed to evaluate the circuit in the clear.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have recently introduced support for Schnorr signatures whose cleaner algebraic structure, as compared to ECDSA, allows for simpler and more practical constructions of highly demanded "$t$-of-$n$" threshold signatures. However, existing Schnorr threshold signature schemes still fall short of the needs of real-world applications due to their assumption that the network is synchronous and due to their lack of robustness, i.e., the guarantee that $t$ honest signers are able to obtain a valid signature even in the presence of other malicious signers who try to disrupt the protocol. This hinders the adoption of threshold signatures in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, e.g., in second-layer protocols built on top of cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose ROAST, a simple wrapper that turns a given threshold signature scheme into a scheme with a robust and asynchronous signing protocol, as long as the underlying signing protocol is semi-interactive (i.e., has one preprocessing round and one actual signing round), provides identifiable aborts, and is unforgeable under concurrent signing sessions. When applied to the state-of-the-art Schnorr threshold signature scheme FROST, which fulfills these requirements, we obtain a simple, efficient, and highly practical Schnorr threshold signature scheme.

We study the round complexity of secure multiparty computation (MPC) in the challenging model where full security, including guaranteed output delivery, should be achieved at the presence of an active rushing adversary who corrupts up to half of parties. It is known that 2 rounds are insufficient in this model (Gennaro et al., Crypto 2002), and that 3 round protocols can achieve computational security under public-key assumptions (Gordon et al., Crypto 2015; Ananth et al., Crypto 2018; and Badrinarayanan et al., Asiacrypt 2020). However, despite much effort, it is unknown whether public-key assumptions are inherently needed for such protocols, and whether one can achieve similar results with security against computationally-unbounded adversaries. In this paper, we use Minicrypt-type assumptions to realize 3-round MPC with full and active security. Our protocols come in two flavors: for a small (logarithmic) number of parties $n$, we achieve an optimal resiliency threshold of $t\leq \lfloor (n-1)/2\rfloor$, and for a large (polynomial) number of parties we achieve an almost-optimal resiliency threshold of $t\leq 0.5n(1-\epsilon)$ for an arbitrarily small constant $\epsilon > 0$. Both protocols can be based on sub-exponentially hard injective one-way functions in the plain model. If the parties have an access to a collision resistance hash function, we can derive statistical everlasting security for every NC1 functionality, i.e., the protocol is secure against adversaries that are computationally bounded during the execution of the protocol and become computationally unlimited after the protocol execution. As a secondary contribution, we show that in the strong honest-majority setting ($t<n/3$), every NC1 functionality can be computed in 3 rounds with everlasting security and complexity polynomial in $n$ based on one-way functions. Previously, such a result was only known based on collision-resistance hash function.

Random sampling from specified distributions is an important tool with wide applications for analysis of large-scale data. In this paper we study how to randomly sample when the distribution is partitioned among two parties' private inputs. Of course, a trivial solution is to have one party send a (possibly encrypted) description of its weights to the other party who can then sample over the entire distribution (possibly using homomorphic encryption). However, this approach requires communication that is linear in the input size which is prohibitively expensive in many settings. In this paper, we investigate secure 2-party sampling with \emph{sublinear communication} for many standard distributions. We develop protocols for $L_1$, and $L_2$ sampling. Additionally, we investigate the feasibility of sublinear product sampling, showing impossibility for the general problem and showing a protocol for a restricted case of the problem. We additionally show how such product sampling can be used to instantiate a sublinear communication 2-party exponential mechanism for differentially-private data release.

We describe an actively secure OT extension protocol in the random oracle model with efficiency very close to the passively secure IKNP protocol of Ishai et al. (Crypto 2003). For computational security parameter $\kappa$, our protocol requires $\kappa$ base OTs, and is the first practical, actively secure protocol to match the cost of the passive IKNP extension in this regard. The added communication cost is only additive in $O(\kappa)$, independent of the number of OTs being created, while the computation cost is essentially two finite field operations per extended OT. We present implementation results that show our protocol takes no more than 5% more time than the passively secure IKNP extension, in both LAN and WAN environments, and thus is essentially optimal with respect to the passive protocol. *Update, 2022:* Roy (Crypto 2022) showed that Lemma 1, which the core of our proof relies on, is incorrect, so our protocol does not currently have a security proof. Roy also presented a protocol with an alternative consistency check and complete security proof, which also fixes issues with instantiating the hash function raised earlier by Guo et al. (IEEE S&P 2020) and Masny and Rindal (ACM CCS 2019). In Section 4, we show how to fix our protocol using the techniques by Roy.

We solve a long-standing challenge to the integrity of votes cast without the supervision of a voting booth: “improper influence,” which we define as any combination of vote buying and voter coercion. Our approach allows each voter, or their trusted agent(s), to cancel their vote in a way that is unstoppable, irrevocable, and forever unattributable to the voter. In particular, our approach enhances security of online, remote, public-sector elections, for which there is a growing need and the threat of improper influence is most acute. In this extended abstract, we introduce the new approach, compare it with previous methods, and concisely summarize the protocols. In our full paper, we give detailed cryptographic protocols, show how they can be applied to several voting settings, describe our implementation in a full voting system called VoteXX, and provide UC proofs. Our system protects against the strongest adversary considered in prior related work and is suitable for widespread use in public elections.

Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Exchange (PPAKE) provides protection both for the session keys and the identity information of the involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the concept of robustness into PPAKE. Robustness enables each user to confirm whether itself is the target recipient of the first round message in the protocol. With the help of robustness, a PPAKE protocol can successfully avoid the heavy redundant communications and computations caused by the ambiguity of communicants in the existing PPAKE, especially in broadcast channels. We propose a generic construction of robust PPAKE from key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), digital signature (SIG), message authentication code (MAC), pseudo-random generator (PRG) and symmetric encryption (SE). By instantiating KEM, MAC, PRG from the DDH assumption and SIG from the CDH assumption, we obtain a specific robust PPAKE scheme in the standard model, which enjoys forward security for session keys, explicit authentication and forward privacy for user identities. Thanks to the robustness of our PPAKE, the number of broadcast messages per run and the computational complexity per user are constant, and in particular, independent of the number of users in the system.

Secure messaging schemes such as the Signal protocol rely on out-of-band channels to verify the authenticity of long-running communication. Such out-of-band checks however are only rarely actually performed by users in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method for performing continuous authentication during a secure messaging session, without the need for an out-of-band channel. Leveraging the users' long-term secrets, our Authentication Steps extension guarantees authenticity as long as long-term secrets are not compromised, strengthening Signal's post-compromise security. Our mechanism further allows to detect a potential compromise of long-term secrets after the fact via an out-of-band channel. Our protocol comes with a novel, formal security definition capturing continuous authentication, a general construction for Signal-like protocols, and a security proof for the proposed instantiation. We further provide a prototype implementation which seamlessly integrates on top of the official Signal Java library, together with bandwidth and storage overhead benchmarks.

In ASIACRYPT 2016, Bellare, Fuchsbauer, and Scafuro studied the security of NIZK arguments under subverted Structured Reference String (SRS) and presented some positive and negative results. In their best positive result, they showed that by defining an SRS as a tuple of knowledge assumption in bilinear groups (e.g. $g^a, g^b, g^{ab}$), and then using a Non-Interactive (NI) zap to prove that either there is a witness for the statement $\mathsf{x}$ or one knows the trapdoor of SRS (e.g. $a$ or $b$), one can build NIZK arguments that can achieve soundness and $\textit{subversion zero-knowledge}$ (zero-knowledge without trusting a third party; Sub-ZK). In this paper, we expand their idea and use NI zaps (of knowledge) to build NIZK arguments (of knowledge) with $\textit{updatable}$, $\textit{universal}$, and $\textit{succinct}$ SRS. To this end, we first show that their proposed sound and Sub-ZK NIZK argument can also achieve $\textit{updatable}$ soundness, which is a more desired notion than the plain soundness. Updatable soundness allows the verifier to update the SRS one time and bypass the need for a trusted third party. Then, we show that using a similar OR language, given a NI zap (of knowledge) and a $\textit{key-updatable}$ signature scheme, one can build NIZK arguments that can achieve Sub-ZK and $\textit{updatable}$ simulation soundness (resp. $\textit{updatable}$ simulation extractability). The proposed constructions are the first NIZK arguments that have updatable and succinct SRS, and do not require a random oracle. Our instantiations show that in the resulting NIZK arguments the computational cost for the parties to verify/update the SRS is negligible, namely, a few exponentiations and pairing checks. The run times of the prover and verifier, as well as the size of the proof, are asymptotically the same as those of the underlying NI zap.

In the classical notion of multiparty computation (MPC), an honest party learning private inputs of others, either as a part of protocol specification or due to a malicious party's unspecified messages, is not considered a potential breach. Several works in the literature exploit this seemingly minor loophole to achieve the strongest security of guaranteed output delivery via a trusted third party, which nullifies the purpose of MPC. Alon et al. (CRYPTO 2020) presented the notion of Friends and Foes ($\mathtt{FaF}$) security, which accounts for such undesired leakage towards honest parties by modelling them as semi-honest (friends) who do not collude with malicious parties (foes). With real-world applications in mind, it's more realistic to assume parties are semi-honest rather than completely honest, hence it is imperative to design efficient protocols conforming to the $\mathtt{FaF}$ security model. Our contributions are not only motivated by the practical viewpoint, but also consider the theoretical aspects of $\mathtt{FaF}$ security. We prove the necessity of semi-honest oblivious transfer for $\mathtt{FaF}$-secure protocols with optimal resiliency. On the practical side, we present QuadSquad, a ring-based 4PC protocol, which achieves fairness and GOD in the $\mathtt{FaF}$ model, with an optimal corruption of $1$ malicious and $1$ semi-honest party. QuadSquad is, to the best of our knowledge, the first practically efficient $\mathtt{FaF}$ secure protocol with optimal resiliency. Its performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art dishonest majority protocols while improving the security guarantee from abort to fairness and GOD. Further, QuadSquad elevates the security by tackling a stronger adversarial model over the state-of-the-art honest-majority protocols, while offering a comparable performance for the input-dependent computation. We corroborate these claims by benchmarking the performance of QuadSquad. We also consider the application of liquidity matching that deals with highly sensitive financial transaction data, where $\mathtt{FaF}$ security is apt. We design a range of $\mathtt{FaF}$ secure building blocks to securely realize liquidity matching as well as other popular applications such as privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML). Inclusion of these blocks makes QuadSquad a comprehensive framework.

Decentralized cryptocurrencies still suffer from three interrelated weaknesses: Low transaction rates, high transaction fees, and long confirmation times. Payment Channels promise to be a solution to these issues, and many constructions for real-life cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, are known. Somewhat surprisingly, no such solution is known for Monero, the largest privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, without requiring system-wide changes like a hard-fork of its blockchain. In this work, we close this gap by presenting \textsc{PayMo}, the first payment channel protocol that is fully compatible with Monero. \textsc{PayMo} does not require any modification of Monero and can be readily used to perform off-chain payments. Notably, transactions in \textsc{PayMo} are identical to standard transactions in Monero, therefore not hampering the coins' fungibility. Using \textsc{PayMo}, we also construct the first fully compatible secure atomic-swap protocol for Monero: One can now securely swap a token of Monero with a token of several major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Cardano, etc. Before our work, it was not known how to implement secure atomic swaps protocols for Monero without forcing a hard fork. Our main technical contribution is a new construction of an efficient verifiable timed linkable ring signature, where signatures can be hidden for a pre-determined amount of time, in a verifiable way. Our scheme is fully compatible with the transaction scheme of Monero and it might be of independent interest. We implemented \textsc{PayMo} and our results show that, even with high network latency and with a single CPU core, two regular users can perform up to 93500 payments over a span of 2 minutes (the block production rate of Monero). This is approximately five orders of magnitude improvement over the current payment rate of Monero.

A number of recent works have constructed cryptographic protocols with flavors of adaptive security by having a randomly-chosen anonymous committee run at each round. Since most of these protocols are stateful, transferring secret states from past committees to future, but still unknown, committees is a crucial challenge. Previous works have tackled this problem with approaches tailor-made for their specific setting, which mostly rely on using a blockchain to orchestrate auxiliary committees that aid in state hand-over process. In this work, we look at this challenge as an important problem on its own and initiate the study of Encryption to the Future (EtF) as a cryptographic primitive. First, we define a notion of an EtF scheme where time is determined with respect to an underlying blockchain and a lottery selects parties to receive a secret message at some point in the future. While this notion seems overly restrictive, we establish two important facts: 1. if used to encrypt towards parties selected in the ``far future'', EtF implies witness encryption for NP over a blockchain; 2. if used to encrypt only towards parties selected in the ``near future'', EtF is not only sufficient for transferring state among committees as required by previous works, but also captures previous tailor-made solutions. To corroborate these results, we provide a novel construction of EtF based on witness encryption over commitments (cWE), which we instantiate from a number of standard assumptions via a construction based on generic cryptographic primitives. Finally, we show how to use ``near future'' EtF to obtain ``far future'' EtF with a protocol based on an auxiliary committee whose communication complexity is \emph{independent} of the length of plaintext messages being sent to the future.

Security concerns about a machine learning model used in a prediction-as-a-service include the privacy of the model, the query and the result. Secure inference solutions based on homomorphic encryption (HE) and/or multiparty computation (MPC) have been developed to protect all the sensitive information. One of the most efficient type of solution utilizes HE for linear layers, and MPC for non-linear layers. However, for such hybrid protocols with semi-honest security, an adversary can malleate the intermediate features in the inference process, and extract model information more effectively than methods against inference service in plaintext. In this paper, we propose SEEK, a general extraction method for hybrid secure inference services outputing only class labels. This method can extract each layer of the target model independently, and is not affected by the depth of the model. For ResNet-18, SEEK can extract a parameter with less than 50 queries on average, with average error less than $0.03\%$.

We introduce a new notion of public key encryption, knowledge encryption, for which its ciphertexts can be reduced to the public-key, i.e., any algorithm that can break the ciphertext indistinguishability can be used to extract the (partial) secret key. We show that knowledge encryption can be built solely on any two-round oblivious transfer with game-based security, which are known based on various standard (polynomial-hardness) assumptions, such as the DDH, the Quadratic($N^{th}$) Residuosity or the LWE assumption. We use knowledge encryption to construct the first three-round (weakly) simulatable oblivious transfer. This protocol satisfies (fully) simulatable security for the receiver, and weakly simulatable security ($(T, \epsilon)$-simulatability) for the sender in the following sense: for any polynomial $T$ and any inverse polynomial $\epsilon$, there exists an efficient simulator such that the distinguishing gap of any distinguisher of size less than $T$ is at most $\epsilon$. Equipped with these tools, we construct a variety of fundamental cryptographic protocols with low round-complexity, assuming only the existence of two-round oblivious transfer with game-based security. These protocols include three-round delayed-input weak zero knowledge argument, three-round weakly secure two-party computation, three-round concurrent weak zero knowledge in the BPK model, and a two-round commitment with weak security under selective opening attack. These results improve upon the assumptions required by the previous constructions. Furthermore, all our protocols enjoy the above $(T, \epsilon)$-simulatability (stronger than the distinguisher-dependent simulatability), and are quasi-polynomial time simulatable under the same (polynomial hardness) assumption.

We present a new framework for building round-optimal one-sided statistically secure two party computation (2PC) protocols in the plain model. We demonstrate that a relatively weak notion of oblivious transfer (OT), namely a three round elementary oblivious transfer $\textsf{eOT}$ with statistical receiver privacy, along with a non-interactive commitment scheme suffices to build a one-sided statistically secure two party computation protocol with black-box simulation. Our framework enables the first instantiations of round-optimal one-sided statistically secure 2PC protocols from the CDH assumption and certain families of isogeny-based assumptions. As part of our compiler, we introduce the following new one-sided statistically secure primitives in the pre-processing model that might also be of independent interest: 1. Three round statistically sender private random-OT where only the last OT message depends on the receiver's choice bit and the sender receives random outputs generated by the protocol. 2. Four round delayed-input statistically sender private conditional disclosure of secrets where the first two rounds of the protocol are independent of the inputs of the parties. The above primitives are directly constructed from $\textsf{eOT}$ and hence we obtain their instantiations from the same set of assumptions as our 2PC.

We introduce an efficient transformation from univariate polynomial commitment based zk-SNARKs to their transparent counterparts. The transformation is achieved with the help of a new IOP primitive which we call a list polynomial commitment. This primitive is applicable for preprocessing zk-SNARKs over both prime and binary fields. We present the primitive itself along with a soundness analysis of the transformation and instantiate it with an existing universal proof system. We also present benchmarks for a proof of concept implementation alongside a comparison with the current non-transparent state-of-the-art. Our results show competitive efficiency both in terms of proof size and generation times. At the 80-bit security level, our benchmarks provide proof generation times of about a minute and proof sizes of around 515 KB for a circuit with one million gates.

Anonymity is an (abstract) security goal that is especially important to threatened user groups. Therefore, widely deployed communication protocols implement various measures to hide different types of information (i.e., metadata) about their users. Before actually defining anonymity, we consider an attack vector about which targeted user groups can feel concerned: continuous, temporary exposure of their secrets. Examples for this attack vector include intentionally planted viruses on victims' devices, as well as physical access when their users are detained. Inspired by Signal's Double-Ratchet Algorithm, Ratcheted (or Continuous) Key Exchange (RKE) is a novel class of protocols that increase confidentiality and authenticity guarantees against temporary exposure of user secrets. For this, an RKE regularly renews user secrets such that the damage due to past and future exposures is minimized; this is called Post-Compromise Security and Forward-Secrecy, respectively. With this work, we are the first to leverage the strength of RKE for achieving strong anonymity guarantees under temporary exposure of user secrets. We extend existing definitions for RKE to capture attacks that interrelate ciphertexts, seen on the network, with secrets, exposed from users' devices. Although, at first glance, strong authenticity (and confidentiality) conflicts with strong anonymity, our anonymity definition is as strong as possible without diminishing other goals. We build strongly anonymity-, authenticity-, and confidentiality-preserving RKE and, along the way, develop new tools with applicability beyond our specific use-case: Updatable and Randomizable Signatures as well as Updatable and Randomizable Public Key Encryption. For both new primitives, we build efficient constructions.

Privacy is a notoriously difficult property to achieve in complicated systems and especially in electronic voting schemes. Moreover, electronic voting schemes is a class of systems that require very high assurance. The literature contains a number of ballot privacy definitions along with security proofs for common systems. Some machine-checked security proofs have also appeared. We define a new ballot privacy notion that captures a larger class of voting schemes. This notion improves on the state of the art by taking into account that verification in many schemes will happen or must happen after the tally has been published, not before as in previous definitions. As a case study we give a machine-checked proof of privacy for Selene, which is a remote electronic voting scheme which offers an attractive mix of security properties and usability. Prior to our work, the computational privacy of Selene has never been formally verified. Finally, we also prove that MiniVoting and Belenios satisfies our definition.

Kahrobaei, Tortora, Tota showed how, to any nilpotent group of class n, one can associate a non-interactive key exchange protocol between n+1 users. The multilinear commutator maps associated to nilpotent groups play a key role in this protocol. In the present paper, we explore some alternative platforms, such as pro-p groups.

In the Zendoo white paper we introduced a novel sidechain construction for Bitcoin-like blockchains, which allows a mainchain to create and communicate with sidechains of different types without knowing their internal structure. In this paper, we take a step further by introducing a comprehensive method for sidechains to communicate amongst each other. We will also discuss the details of a cross-chain token transfer protocol that extends the generic communication mechanism. With the cross-chain token transfer protocol, it can enable a broad range of new applications, such as an exchange platform, that allows the ability to trade tokens issued from different sidechains.

We consider the computation of sparse, $(\varepsilon, \delta)$-differentially private~(DP) histograms in the two-server model of secure multi-party computation~(MPC), which has recently gained traction in the context of privacy-preserving measurements of aggregate user data. We introduce protocols that enable two semi-honest non-colluding servers to compute histograms over the data held by multiple users, while only learning a private view of the data. Our solution achieves the same asymptotic $\ell_\infty$-error of $O\left(\frac{\log(1/\delta)}{\varepsilon}\right)$ as in the central model of DP, but \emph{without} relying on a trusted curator. The server communication and computation costs of our protocol are independent of the number of histogram buckets, and are linear in the number of users, while the client cost is independent of the number of users, $\varepsilon$, and $\delta$. Its linear dependence on the number of users lets our protocol scale well, which we confirm using microbenchmarks: for a billion users, $\varepsilon = 0.5$, and $\delta = 10^{-11}$, the per-user cost of our protocol is only $1.08$ ms of server computation and $339$ bytes of communication. In contrast, a baseline protocol using garbled circuits only allows up to $10^6$ users, where it requires 600 KB communication per user.

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) has been proposed to allow multiple mutually distrustful data owners to jointly train machine learning (ML) models on their combined data. However, by design, MPC protocols faithfully compute the training functionality, which the adversarial ML community has shown to leak private information and can be tampered with in poisoning attacks. In this work, we argue that model ensembles, implemented in our framework called SafeNet, are a highly MPC-amenable way to avoid many adversarial ML attacks. The natural partitioning of data amongst owners in MPC training allows this approach to be highly scalable at training time, provide provable protection from poisoning attacks, and provably defense against a number of privacy attacks. We demonstrate SafeNet's efficiency, accuracy, and resilience to poisoning on several machine learning datasets and models trained in end-to-end and transfer learning scenarios. For instance, SafeNet reduces backdoor attack success significantly, while achieving $39\times$ faster training and $36 \times$ less communication than the four-party MPC framework of Dalskov et al. Our experiments show that ensembling retains these benefits even in many non-iid settings. The simplicity, cheap setup, and robustness properties of ensembling make it a strong first choice for training ML models privately in MPC.

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) -- or Group Ratcheting -- lies at the heart of a new generation of scalable End-to-End secure (E2E) cryptographic multi-party applications. One of the most important (and first deployed) CGKAs is ITK which underpins the IETF's upcoming Messaging Layer Security E2E secure group messaging standard. To scale beyond the group sizes possible with earlier E2E protocols, a central focus of CGKA protocol design is to minimize bandwidth requirements (i.e. communication complexity). In this work, we advance both the theory and design of CGKA culminating in an extremely bandwidth efficient CGKA. To that end, we first generalize the standard CGKA communication model by introducing server-aided CGKA (saCGKA) which generalizes CGKA and more accurately models how most E2E protocols are deployed in the wild. Next, we introduce the SAIK protocol; a modification of ITK, designed for real-world use, that leverages the new capabilities available to an saCGKA to greatly reduce its communication (and computational) complexity in practical concrete terms. Further, we introduce an intuitive, yet precise, security model for saCGKA. It improves upon existing security models for CGKA in several ways. It more directly captures the intuitive security goals of CGKA. Yet, formally it also relaxes certain requirements allowing us to take advantage of the saCGKA communication model. Finally, it is significantly simpler making it more tractable to work with and easier to build intuition for. As a result, the security proof of SAIK is also simpler and more modular. Finally, we provide empirical data comparing the (at times, quite dramatically improved) complexity profile of SAIK to state-of-the art CGKAs. For example, in a newly created group with 10K members, to change the group state (e.g. add/remove parties) ITK requires each group member download 1.38MB. However, with SAIK, members download no more than 2.7KB.

Piecewise constant codes form an expressive and well-understood class of codes. In this work, we show that many piecewise constant codes admit exact coverings by polynomial-cardinality collections of hyperplanes. We prove that any boolean function whose "on-set" has been covered in just this manner can be evaluated by two parties with malicious security. This represents an interesting connection between covering codes, affine-linear algebra over prime fields, and secure computation. We observe that many natural boolean functions' on-sets admit expressions as piecewise constant codes (and hence can be computed securely). Our protocol supports secure computation on committed inputs; we describe applications in blockchains and credentials. We finally present an efficient implementation of our protocol.

In this expository article we present an overview of the current state-of-the-art in post-quantum group-based cryptography. We describe several families of groups that have been proposed as platforms, with special emphasis in polycyclic groups and graph groups, dealing in particular with their algorithmic properties and cryptographic applications. We then, describe some applications of combinatorial algebra in fully homomorphic encryption. In the end we discussing several open problems in this direction.

Private set-intersection (PSI) is one of the most practically relevant special-purpose secure multiparty computation tasks, as it is motivated by many real-world applications. In this paper we present a new private set-intersection protocol which is laconic, meaning that the protocol only has two rounds and that the first message is independent of the set sizes. Laconic PSI can be useful in applications, where servers with large sets would like to learn the intersection of their set with smaller sets owned by resource-constrained clients and where multiple rounds of interactions are not possible. Previously, practically relevant laconic PSI protocols were only known from factoring-type assumptions. The contributions of this work are twofold: 1) We present the first laconic PSI protocol based on assumptions over pairing-friendly elliptic curves; and 2) For the first time we provide empirical evaluation of any laconic PSI protocol by carefully implementing and optimising both our and previous protocols. Our experimental results shows that our protocol outperforms prior laconic PSI protocols.

Many attribute-based anonymous credential (ABC) schemes have been proposed allowing a user to prove the possession of some attributes, anonymously. They became more and more practical with, for the most recent papers, a constant-size credential to show a subset of attributes issued by a unique credential issuer. However, proving possession of attributes coming from $K$ different credential issuers usually requires $K$ independent credentials to be shown. Only attribute-based credential schemes from aggregate signatures can overcome this issue. In this paper, we propose new ABC schemes from aggregate signatures with randomizable tags. We consider malicious credential issuers, with adaptive corruptions and collusions with malicious users. Whereas our constructions only support selective disclosures of attributes, to remain compact, our approach significantly improves the complexity in both time and memory of the showing of multiple attributes: for the first time, the cost for the prover is (almost) independent of the number of attributes and the number of credential issuers. Whereas anonymous credentials require privacy of the user, we also propose the first schemes allowing traceability by a specific tracing authority.

We give black-box, round-optimal protocol compilers from semi-honest security to malicious security in the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and in the 1-out-of-2 oblivious transfer (OT) correlations model. We use our compilers to obtain the following black-box constructions of general-purpose protocols for secure computation tolerating static, malicious corruptions of all-but-one participants: \begin{itemize} \item A two-round, two-party protocol in the random oracle model, making black-box use of a two-round semi-honest secure protocol. Prior to our work, such a result was not known even for special functionalities such as OT. As an application, we get efficient constructions of two-round malicious OT/OLE in the random oracle model based on a black-box use of two-round semi-honest OT/OLE. \item A three-round multiparty protocol in the random oracle model, making a black-box use of two-round semi-honest OT. This protocol matches a known round complexity lower bound due to Applebaum et al. (ITCS 2020) and is based on a minimal cryptographic primitive. \item A two-round multiparty protocol in the OT correlations model, making a black-box use of a semi-malicious protocol. This improves over a similar protocol of the authors (Crypto 2021) by eliminating an adaptive security requirement and replacing nonstandard multiparty OT correlations by standard ones. As an application, we get 2-round protocols for arithmetic branching programs that make a black-box use of the underlying field. \end{itemize} As a contribution of independent interest, we provide a new variant of the IPS compiler (Ishai, Prabhakaran and Sahai, Crypto 2008) in the two-round setting, where we relax requirements on the IPS ``inner protocol'' by strengthening the ``outer protocol''.

In this paper, we propose a new protocol for private computation on set intersection (PCI) which is an extension of private set intersection (PSI). In PSI, each party has a private set and both want to securely compute the intersection of their sets such that only the result is revealed and nothing else. In PCI, we want to additionally apply a private computation on the result. The goal is to reveal only the result of such a secure evaluation on the intersection and nothing else. We particularly focus on a client-server setting where the server's set is significantly larger than the client's set and the result of the computation should be revealed only to the client. The protocol aims at a low communication overhead which is sublinear in the server's set size. Such PSI protocols have already been realized using fully homomorphic encryption (FHE). However, they do not allow for private post-processing to enable PCI. There are also protocols enabling PCI which are in addition very fast with respect to the computational overhead. Their drawback is that they have a communication overhead which is at least linear in the larger set. We present a PSI protocol which can be used for arbitrary post-processing without creating a new protocol for every special-purpose PCI functionality. Our construction relies on the evaluation of a branching program using an FHE scheme. Using the properties of an FHE scheme, we build a non-interactive protocol with extendable functionalities. That means, we can not only securely compute the intersection but use the encrypted result to apply further computations without revealing the intersection itself. To the best of our knowledge, this results in the first PCI protocol with communication cost sublinear in the larger set. Compared to previous work, we can reduce the communication by factor 47.

Protocols solving authenticated consensus in synchronous networks with Byzantine faults have been widely researched and known to exists if and only if $n>2f$ for $f$ Byzantine faults. Similarly, protocols solving authenticated consensus in partially synchronous networks are known to exist if $n>3f+2k$ for $f$ Byzantine faults and $k$ crash faults. Currently, the only known synchronous protocol for consensus with a resilience of $n>2f+k$ is a binary consensus protocol. In this work we fill a natural gap in our knowledge by presenting MixSync, an authenticated multivalued consensus protocol in synchronous networks resilient to $f$ Byzantine faults and $k$ crash faults if $n>2f+k$. As a basic building block, we first define and then construct a publicly verifiable crusader agreement protocol with the same resilience. The protocol uses a simple double-send round to guarantee non-equivocation, a technique later used in the MixSync protocol. We then discuss how to construct a state machine replication protocol using these ideas, and how they can be used in general to make such protocols resilient to crash faults. Finally, we prove lower bounds showing that $n>2f+k$ is optimally resilient for consensus and state machine replication protocols.

Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) is a cryptographic protocol to share a common session key among multiple parties. Usually, PKI-based AKE schemes are designed to guarantee secrecy of the session key and mutual authentication. However, in practice, there are many cases where mutual authentication is undesirable such as in anonymous networks like Tor and Riffle, or difficult to achieve due to the certificate management at the user level such as the Internet. Goldberg et al. formulated a model of anonymous one-sided AKE which guarantees the anonymity of the client by allowing only the client to authenticate the server, and proposed a concrete scheme. However, existing anonymous one-sided AKE schemes are only known to be secure in the random oracle model. In this paper, we propose generic constructions of anonymous one-sided AKE in the random oracle model and in the standard model, respectively. Our constructions allow us to construct the first post-quantum anonymous one-sided AKE scheme from isogenies in the standard model.

We present a novel, complete definition of metadata-private messaging (MPM) and show that our definition is achievable and non-trivially more general than previous attempts that we are aware of. Our main contributions are: 1) We describe a vulnerability in existing MPM implementations through a variation of the compromised-friend (CF) attack proposed by Angel et al. Our attack can compromise the exact metadata of any conversations between honest users. 2) We present a security definition for MPM systems assuming that some friends may be compromised. 3) We present a protocol satisfying our security definition based on Anysphere, an MPM system we deployed in practice.

\par Topology-hiding computation (THC) enables $n$ parties to perform a secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocol in an incomplete communication graph while keeping the communication graph hidden. The work of Akavia et al. (CRYPTO 2017 and JoC 2020) shown that THC is feasible for any graph. In this work, we focus on the efficiency of THC and give improvements for various tasks including broadcast, sum and general computation. We mainly consider THC on undirected cycles, but we also give two results for THC on general graphs. All of our results are derived in the presence of a passive adversary statically corrupting any number of parties. \par In the undirected cycles, the state-of-the-art topology-hiding broadcast (THB) protocol is the Akavia-Moran (AM) protocol of Akavia et al. (EUROCRYPT 2017). We give an optimization for the AM protocol such that the communication cost of broadcasting $O(\kappa)$ bits is reduced from $O(n^2\kappa^2)$ bits to $O(n^2\kappa)$ bits. We also consider the sum and general computation functionalities. Previous to our work, the only THC protocols realizing the sum and general computation functionalities are constructed by using THB to simulate point-to-point channels in an MPC protocol realizing the sum and general computation functionalities, respectively. By allowing the parties to know the exact value of the number of the parties (the AM protocol and our optimization only assume the parties know an upper bound of the number of the parties), we can derive more efficient THC protocols realizing these two functionalities. As a result, comparing with previous works, we reduce the communication cost by a factor of $O(n\kappa)$ for both the sum and general computation functionalities. \par As we have mentioned, we also get two results for THC on general graphs. The state-of-the-art THB protocol for general graphs is the Akavia-LaVigne-Moran (ALM) protocol of Akavia et al. (CRYPTO 2017 and JoC 2020). Our result is that our optimization for the AM protocol also applies to the ALM protocol and can reduce its communication cost by a factor of $O(\kappa)$. Moreover, we optimize the fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) based GTHC protocol of LaVigne et al. (TCC 2018) and reduce its communication cost from $O(n^8\kappa^2)$ FHE ciphertexts and $O(n^5\kappa)$ FHE public keys to $O(n^6\kappa)$ FHE ciphertexts and $O(n^5\kappa)$ FHE public keys.

Elections are an important corner stone of democratic processes. In addition to publishing the final result (e.g., the overall winner), elections typically publish the full tally consisting of all (aggregated) individual votes. This causes several issues, including loss of privacy for both voters and election candidates as well as so-called Italian attacks that allow for easily coercing voters. Several e-voting systems have been proposed to address these issues by hiding (parts of) the tally. This property is called tally-hiding. Existing tally-hiding e-voting systems in the literature aim at hiding (part of) the tally from everyone, including voting authorities, while at the same time offering verifiability, an important and standard feature of modern e-voting systems which allows voters and external observers to check that the published election result indeed corresponds to how voters actually voted. In contrast, real elections often follow a different common practice for hiding the tally: the voting authorities internally compute (and learn) the full tally but publish only the final result (e.g., the winner). This practice, which we coin publicly tally-hiding, indeed solves the aforementioned issues for the public, but currently has to sacrifice verifiability due to a lack of practical systems. In this paper, we close this gap. We formalize the common notion of publicly tally-hiding and propose the first provably secure verifiable e-voting system, called Kryvos, which directly targets publicly tally-hiding elections. We instantiate our system for a wide range of both simple and complex voting methods and various result functions. We provide an extensive evaluation which shows that Kryvos is practical and able to handle a large number of candidates, complex voting methods and result functions. Altogether, Kryvos shows that the concept of publicly tally-hiding offers a new trade-off between privacy and efficiency that is different from all previous tally-hiding systems and which allows for a radically new protocol design resulting in a practical e-voting system.

The Oblivious Cross-Tags (OXT) protocol due to Cash et al. (CRYPTO'13) is a highly scalable searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) scheme that allows fast processing of conjunctive and more general Boolean queries over encrypted relational databases. A longstanding open question has been to extend OXT to also support queries over joins of tables without pre-computing the joins. In this paper, we solve this open question without compromising on the nice properties of OXT with respect to both security and efficiency. We propose Join Cross-Tags (JXT) - a purely symmetric-key solution that supports efficient conjunctive queries over (equi) joins of encrypted tables without any pre-computation at setup. JXT is fully compatible with OXT, and can be used in conjunction with OXT to support a wide class of SQL queries directly over encrypted relational databases. JXT incurs a storage cost (over OXT) of a factor equal to the number of potential join-attributes in a table, which is usually compensated by the fact that JXT is a fully symmetric-key solution (as opposed to OXT which relies on discrete-log hard groups). We prove the (adaptive) simulation-based security of JXT with respect to a rigorously defined leakage profile.

During the last decades, many advances in the field of automated security protocol analysis have seen the field mature and grow from being applicable to toy examples, to modeling intricate protocol standards and finding real-world vulnerabilities that extensive manual analysis had missed. However, modern security protocols often contain elements for which such tools were not originally designed, such as protocols that construct, by design, terms of unbounded size, such as counters, trees, and blockchains. Protocol analysis tools such as Tamarin and ProVerif have some very restricted support, but typically lack the ability to effectively reason about dynamically growing unbounded-depth terms. In this work, we introduce subterm-based proof techniques that are tailored for automated protocol analysis in the Tamarin prover. In several case studies, we show that these techniques improve automation (allow for analyzing more protocols, or remove the need for manually specified invariants), efficiency (reduce proof size for existing analyses), and expressive power (enable new kinds of properties). In particular, we provide the first automated proofs for TreeKEM, S/Key, and Tesla Scheme~2; and we show substantial benefits, most notably in WPA2 and 5G-AKA, two of the largest automated protocol proofs.

Decentralized token exchanges allow for secure trading of tokens without a trusted third party. However, decentralization is mostly achieved at the expense of transaction privacy. For a fair exchange, transactions must remain private to hide the participants and volumes while maintaining the possibility for non-interactive execution of trades. In this paper we present a swap confidential transaction system (SwapCT) which is related to ring confidential transactions (e.g. used in Monero) but supports multiple token types to trade among and enables secure, partial transactions for non-interactive swaps. We prove that SwapCT is secure in a strict, formal model and present its efficient performance in a prototype implementation with logarithmic signature sizes for large anonymity sets. For our construction we design an aggregatable signature scheme which might be of independent interest. Our SwapCT system thereby enables a secure and private exchange for tokens without a trusted third party.

We construct non-malleable codes in the split-state model with codeword length $m + 3\lambda$ or $m+5\lambda$, where $m$ is the message size and $\lambda$ is the security parameter, depending on how conservative one is. Our scheme is very simple and involves a single call to a block cipher meeting a new security notion which we dub entropic fixed-related-key security, which essentially means that the block cipher behaves like a pseudorandom permutation when queried upon inputs sampled from a distribution with sufficient min-entropy, even under related-key attacks with respect to an arbitrary but fixed key relation. Importantly, indistinguishability only holds with respect to the original secret key (and not with respect to the tampered secret key). In a previous work, Fehr, Karpman, and Mennink (ToSC 2018) used a related assumption (where the block cipher inputs can be chosen by the adversary, and where indistinguishability holds even with respect to the tampered key) to construct a non-malleable code in the split-state model with codeword length $m + 2\lambda$. Unfortunately, no block cipher (even an ideal one) satisfies their assumption when the tampering function is allowed to be cipher-dependent. In contrast, we are able to show that entropic fixed-related-key security holds in the ideal cipher model with respect to a large class of cipher-dependent tampering attacks (including those which break the assumption of Fehr, Karpman, and Mennink).

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) is increasingly being used to address privacy issues in various applications. The recent work of Alon et al. (CRYPTO'20) identified the shortcomings of traditional MPC and defined a Friends-and-Foes (FaF) security notion to address the same. We showcase the need for FaF security in real-world applications such as dark pools. This subsequently necessitates designing concretely efficient FaF-secure protocols. Towards this, keeping efficiency at the center stage, we design ring-based FaF-secure MPC protocols in the small-party honest-majority setting. Specifically, we provide (1,1)-FaF secure 5 party computation protocols (5PC) that consider one malicious and one semi-honest corruption and constitutes the optimal setting for attaining honest-majority. At the heart of it lies the multiplication protocol that requires a single round of communication with 8 ring elements (amortized). To facilitate having FaF-secure variants for several applications, we design a variety of building blocks optimized for our FaF setting. The practicality of the designed (1,1)-FaF secure 5PC framework is showcased by benchmarking dark pools. In the process, we also improve the efficiency and security of the dark pool protocols over the existing traditionally secure ones. This improvement is witnessed as a gain of up to $62\times$ in throughput compared to the existing ones. Finally, to demonstrate the versatility of our framework, we also benchmark popular deep neural networks.

We study the problem of multi-user dynamic searchable symmetric encryption (DMUSSE) where a data owner stores its encrypted documents on an untrusted remote server and wishes to selectively allow multiple users to access them by issuing keyword search queries. Specifically, we consider the case where some of the users may be corrupted and colluding with the server to extract additional information about the dataset (beyond what they have access to). We provide the first formal security definition for the dynamic setting as well as forward and backward privacy definitions. We then propose μSE, the first provably secure DMUSSE scheme and instantiate it in two versions, one based on oblivious data structures and one based on update queues, with different performance trade-offs. Furthermore, we extend μSE to support verifiability of results. To achieve this, users need a secure digest initially computed by the data owner and changed after every update. We efficiently accommodate this, without relying on a trusted third party, by adopting a blockchain-based approach for the digests’ dissemination and deploy our schemes over the permissioned Hyperledger Fabric blockchain. We prototype both versions and experimentally evaluate their practical performance, both as stand-alone systems and running on top of Hyperledger Fabric.

Zero Knowledge Set Membership Proofs (zkSMPs) allow efficiently, i.e. sublinearly in the size of the set, proving membership of a value in a set in zero knowledge with respect to the value. They have been used to construct anonymous cryptocurrencies such as ZCash, which uses a zero knowledge Merkle proof to show that the inputs of a transaction belong to the Transaction Output (TXO) set. Using a Merkle tree instantiated with a pair of Pedersen hash functions between an amicable cycle of elliptic curves, similarly to Curve Trees, and the Weil Elliptic Curve Inner Product (ECIPs) proofs, I design a set membership protocol with substantially smaller witness sizes than other Merkle zkSMPs. This protocol uses a pair of communicating Bulletproofs, one over each curve, whose total proof size I am able to reduce by proving portions of each verifier inside the other proof. Using these techniques, along with an adaptation of the Bulletproofs++ confidential transaction protocol, I design an anonymous transaction protocol for a decentralized cryptocurrency, whose security argument is reducible to the discrete log problem over a pair of elliptic curves and that does not require a trusted setup. Over a $256$ bit field, these transactions are $1349 + 64n + 32 \lceil \log_2 c \rceil$ bytes for $n$ inputs, $m$ outputs, $d$ depth, and $c$ proof capacity, which is bounded by a linear function of $n d$, $n$, and $m$ and is equal to $1$ for up to $m < 1000$ or $n < 37$ when $d = 48$. Proving complexity is quasilinear and verifier complexity is linear in both $n d$ and $m$, and in practice verification will be dominated by the cost of two Bulletproof verifications of length $1536$ and $1744$ for $c=1$. $\mu$Cash support efficient batch verification, user defined assets and multi-asset confidential transactions, privacy preserving multi-party proving, adaptor signatures, absolute and relative time locks, and a multiphase transaction structure to support scriptless scripts for private atomic swaps and payment channels. This protocol is likely compatible with the Halo accumulation scheme, although I do not investigate this.

Weak coin flipping is an important cryptographic primitive, as it is the strongest known secure two-party computation primitive, that classically becomes secure only when certain assumptions are made (e.g. computational hardness), while quantumly there exist protocols that achieve arbitrarily close to perfect security. This breakthrough result was established by C. Mochon in 2007 [arXiv:0711.4114], however, his proof of existence was partially non-constructive, thus, setting back the proposal of explicit protocols. In this work, we report three different solutions to the quantum weak coin flipping problem. In particular, we propose different methods that result---either analytically or numerically---in the operators needed to construct weak coin flipping protocols with different levels of security, including nearly perfect security. In order to develop these methods, we study the quantum weak coin flipping problem from both an algebraic and a geometric perspective. We also analytically construct illustrative examples of weak coin flipping protocols achieving different levels of security.

Cryptanalysis of block ciphers is an active and important research area with an extensive volume of literature. For this work, we focus on SBox-based ciphers, as they are widely used and cover a large class of block ciphers. While there have been prior works that have consolidated attacks on block ciphers, they usually focus on describing and listing the attacks. Moreover, the methods for evaluating a cipher's security are often ad hoc, differing from cipher to cipher, as attacks and evaluation techniques are developed along the way. As such, we aim to organise the attack literature, as well as the work on security evaluation. In this work, we present a systematization of cryptanalysis of SBox-based block ciphers focusing on three main areas: (1) Evaluation of block ciphers against standard cryptanalytic attacks; (2) Organisation and relationships between various attacks; (3) Comparison of the evaluation and attacks on existing ciphers.

Circuit-based private set intersection (circuit-PSI) enables two parties with input set $X$ and $Y$ to compute a function $f$ over the intersection set $X \cap Y$, without revealing any other information. State-of-the-art protocols for circuit-PSI commonly involves a procedure that securely checks whether two input strings are equal and outputs an additive share of the equality result. This procedure is typically performed by generic two party computation protocols, and its cost occupies quite large portion of the total cost of circuit-PSI. In this work, we propose {\textit{equality preserving compression}} (EPC) protocol that compresses the length of equality check targets while preserving equality using homomorphic encryption (HE) scheme, which is secure against the semi-honest adversary. This can be seamlessly applied to state-of-the-art circuit-PSI protocol frameworks. We demonstrate by implementation that our EPC provides $10-40\%$ speed-up for circuit-PSI with set size from $2^{16}$ to $2^{20}$, on LAN network. We believe that EPC protocol itself can be independent interest, which can be applied to other application than PSI.

This work addresses the security flaw in the original VeriFL protocol and proposes a patched protocol. The patched protocol is secure against any static malicious adversary with a certain threshold and only introduces moderate modifications to the original protocol.

Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) enable fast, scalable, and cheap payments by moving transactions off-chain, thereby overcoming debilitating drawbacks of blockchains. However, current algorithms exhibit frequent payment failures when a payment is routed via multiple intermediaries. One of the key challenges for designing PCNs is to drastically reduce this failure rate. In this paper, we design a Bitcoin-compatible protocol that allows intermediaries to split payments on the path. Intermediaries can thus easily adapt the routing to the local conditions, of which the sender is unaware. Our protocol provides both termination and atomicity of payments and provably guarantees that no participant loses funds even in the presence of malicious parties. An extended version of our basic protocol further provides unlinkability between two partial payments belonging to the same transaction, which – as we argue – is important to guarantee the success of split payments. Besides formally modeling and proving the security of our construction, we conducted an in-depth simulation-based evaluation of various routing algorithms and splitting methods. Concretely, we present Interdimensional SpeedyMurmurs, a modification of the SpeedyMurmurs protocol that increases the flexibility of the route choice combined with splitting. Even in the absence of splitting, Interdimensional SpeedyMurmurs increases the success ratio of transactions drastically in comparison to a Lightning-style protocol by close to 50%.

It has been forty years since the TCP/IP protocol blueprint, which is the core of modern worldwide Internet, was published. Over this long period, technology has made rapid progress. These advancements are slowly putting pressure and placing new demands on the underlying network architecture design. Therefore, there was a need for innovations that can handle the increasing demands of new technologies like IoT while ensuring secrecy and privacy. It is how Named Data Networking (NDN) came into the picture. NDN enables robust data distribution with interest-based content retrieval and leave-copy-everywhere caching policy. Even though NDN has surfaced as a future envisioned and decisive machinery for data distribution in IoT, it suffers from new data security challenges like content poisoning attacks. In this attack, an attacker attempts to introduce poisoned content with an invalid signature into the network. Given the circumstances, there is a need for a cost-effective signature scheme, requiring inexpensive computing resources and fast when implemented. An identity-based signature scheme (IBS) seems to be the natural choice to address this problem. Herein, we present an IBS, namely Mul-IBS relying on multivariate public key cryptography (MPKC), which leads the race among the post-quantum cryptography contenders. A 5-pass identification scheme accompanying a safe and secure signature scheme based on MPKC works as key ingredients of our design. Our Mul-IBS attains optimal master public key size, master secret key size, and user’s secret key size in the context of multivariate identity-based signatures. The proposed scheme Mul-IBS is proven to be secure in the model “existential unforgeability under chosen-message and chosen identity attack (uf-cma)” contingent upon the fact that Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem is NP-hard. The proposed design Mul-IBS can be utilized as a crucial cryptographic building block to build a robust and resilient IoT-based NDN architecture.

The fair exchange problem has faced for a long time the bottleneck of a required trusted third party. The recent development of blockchains introduces a new type of party to this problem, whose trustworthiness relies on a public ledger and distributed computation. The challenge in this setting is to reconcile the minimalistic and public nature of blockchains with elaborate fair exchange requirements, from functionality to privacy. Zero-knowledge contingent payments (ZKCP) are a class of protocols that are promising in this direction, allowing the fair exchange of data for payment. We propose a new ZKCP protocol that, when compared to others, requires less computation from the blockchain and less interaction between parties. The protocol is based on two-party (weak) adaptor signatures, which we show how to instantiate from state of the art multiparty signing protocols. We improve the symbolic definition of ZKCP security and, for automated verification with Tamarin, we propose a general security reduction from the theory of abelian groups to the theory of exclusive or.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) provides a natural solution for privacy-preserving cloud computing, but a straightforward FHE protocol may suffer from high computational overhead and a large ciphertext expansion rate, especially for computation-intensive tasks over large data, which are the main obstacles toward practical privacy-preserving cloud computing. In this paper, we present HEAD, a generic privacy-preserving cloud computing protocol that can be based on most mainstream (typically a BGV or GSW style scheme) FHE schemes with more compact storage and less computational costs than the straightforward FHE counterpart. In particular, our protocol enjoys a ciphertext/plaintext expansion rate of 1 (i.e., no expansion) in a cloud computing server, instead of a factor of hundreds of thousands. This is achieved by means of ``pseudorandomly masked'' ciphertexts, and the efficient transformations of them into FHE ciphertexts to facilitate privacy-preserving cloud computing. Depending on the underlying FHE in use, our HEAD protocol can be instantiated with the three masking techniques, namely modulo-subtraction-masking, modulo-division-masking, and XOR-masking, to support the decimal integer, real, or binary messages. Thanks to these masking techniques, various homomorphic computation tasks are made more efficient and less prone to noise accumulation. Furthermore, our multi-input masking and unmasking operations are more flexible than the FHE SIMD-batching, by supporting an on-demand configuration of FHE during each cloud computing request. We evaluate the performance of HEAD protocols on BFV, BGV, CKKS, and FHEW schemes based on the PALISADE and SEAL libraries, which confirms the theoretical analysis of the storage savings, the reduction in terms of computational complexity and noise accumulation. For example, in the BFV computation optimization, the sum or product of eight ciphertexts overhead is reduced from 336.3 ms to 6.3 ms, or from 1219.4 ms to 9.5 ms, respectively. We also embed HEAD into a mainstream database, PostgreSQL, in a client-server cloud storage and computing style. Compared with a straightforward FHE protocol, our experiments show that HEAD does not incur ciphertext expansion, and exhibits at least an order of magnitude saving in computing time at the server side for various tasks (on a hundred ciphertexts), by paying a reasonable price in client pre-processing time and communication. Our storage advantage not only gets around the database storage limitation but also reduces the I/O overhead.

The highly transmissible COVID-19 disease is a serious threat to people’s health and life. To automate tracing those who have been in close physical contact with newly infected people and/or to analyse tracing-related data, researchers have proposed various ad-hoc programs that require being executed on users’ smartphones. Nevertheless, the existing solutions have two primary limitations: (1) lack of generality: for each type of analytic task, a certain kind of data needs to be sent to an analyst; (2) lack of transparency: parties who provide data to an analyst are not necessarily infected individuals; therefore, infected individuals’ data can be shared with others (e.g., the analyst) without their fine-grained and direct consent. In this work, we present Glass-Vault, a protocol that addresses both limitations simultaneously. It allows an analyst to run authorised programs over the collected data of infectious users, without learning the input data. Glass-Vault relies on a new variant of generic Functional Encryption that we propose in this work. This new variant, called DD-Steel, offers these two additional properties: dynamic and decentralised. We illustrate the security of both Glass-Vault and DD-Steel in the Universal Composability setting. Glass-Vault is the first UC-secure protocol that allows analysing the data of Exposure Notification users in a privacy-preserving manner. As a sample application, we indicate how it can be used to generate “infection heatmaps”.

Modern-day mobile communications allow users to connect from any place, at any time. However, this ubiquitous access comes at the expense of their privacy. Currently, the operators providing mobile service to users learn call-and SMS-metadata, and even the contents of those exchanges. A main reason behind this is the Lawful-Interception (LI) requirement, by which serving networks must provide this (meta-)data to authorities, given a warrant. At ESORICS 2021, Arfaoui et al. pioneered a primitive called Lawful-Interception Key-Exchange, which achieves the best of both worlds: (provably) privacy-enhanced communications, and finegrained fine-grained, limited access to user data. Their work had two important shortcomings. First, their protocol required pairings which, while sufficiently efficient, might not always be available in the mobile setting. More importantly, that scheme was only applicable in a domestic setting, where the concerned users (Alice and Bob) were subject to the same LI authorities. The case of roaming was left as an open question. In this paper we answer that open question. We extend the framework of Arfaoui et al. to allow Alice and Bob (now subject to potentially two sets of authorities) to establish a secure channel that guarantees the strong properties afforded by the LIKE schemes of ESORICS 2021. Our construction is pairing-free, faster than that of Arfaoui et al., and its security relies on standard assumptions.

The FIDO2 protocol is a globally used standard for passwordless authentication, building on an alliance between major players in the online authentication space. While already widely deployed, the standard is still under active development. Since version 2.1 of its CTAP sub-protocol, FIDO2 can potentially be instantiated with post-quantum secure primitives. We provide the first formal security analysis of FIDO2 with the CTAP 2.1 and WebAuthn 2 sub-protocols. Our security models build on work by Barbosa et al. for their analysis of FIDO2 with CTAP 2.0 and WebAuthn 1, which we extend in several ways. First, we provide a more fine-grained security model that allows us to prove more relevant protocol properties, such as guarantees about token binding agreement, the None attestation mode, and user verification. Second, we can prove post-quantum security for FIDO2 under certain conditions and minor protocol extensions. Finally, we show that for some threat models, the downgrade resilience of FIDO2 can be improved, and show how to achieve this with a simple modification.

Hash chains are a simple way to generate pseudorandom data, but are inefficient in situations that require long chains. This can cause unnecessary overhead for use cases including logical clocks, synchronizing the heads of a pseudorandom stream, or non-interactive key agreement. This paper presents the “skip ratchet”, a novel pseudorandom function that can be efficiently incremented by arbitrary intervals.

We address the problem of privately evaluating a branching program on encrypted data. This scenario is a 2-party protocol consisting of a server and a client. The server privately holds a branching program which is a representation of a boolean function using a directed acyclic graph. The client holds a secret input to the branching program. The goal of the computation is to evaluate the client's input on the server program such that only the result is revealed to the client, and nothing is revealed to the server. To solve this problem Ishai-Paskin introduced a public-key encryption scheme that is based on Damgård-Jurik additively homomorphic encryption and has the property, that given a branching program $P$ and an encryption $c$ of an input $y$, it is possible to efficiently compute a succinct ciphertext $c'$ corresponding to $P(y)$. The entire computation is done by the server relying on the fact that Damgård-Jurik scheme has length-flexible ciphertexts which allows multiplications between ciphertexts of different sizes under the same encryption key. Although the decryption of the Damgård-Jurik scheme is theoretically efficient, the size of $c'$ and the decoding time depend on the depth of the branching program. In this paper, we propose a new scheme where the input is instead encrypted using fully homomorphic encryption and discuss different variants and optimizations. The entire computation is also done by the server but the size of the resulting ciphertext is independent of the depth of the program. We implement Ishai-Paskin and our scheme and show that the running time of our scheme is an order of magnitude smaller.

Unique ring signatures (URS) were introduced by Franklin and Zhang (FC 2012) as a unification of linkable and traceable ring signatures. In URS, each member within a ring can only produce, on behalf of the ring, at most one signature for a message. Applications of URS potentially are e-voting systems and e–token systems. In blockchain technology, URS has been implemented for mixing contracts. However, existing URS schemes are based on the Discrete Logarithm Problem, which is insecure in the post-quantum setting. In this paper, we design a new lattice-based URS scheme where the signature size is logarithmic in the number of ring members. The proposed URS exploits a Merkle tree-based accumulator as a building block in the lattice setting. Our scheme is secure under the Short Integer Solution and Learning With Rounding assumptions in the random oracle model.

Recent advances in password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols can offer stronger security guarantees for globally deployed security protocols. Notably, the OPAQUE protocol [Eurocrypt2018] realizes Strong Asymmetric PAKE (saPAKE), strengthening the protection offered by aPAKE to compromised servers: after compromising an saPAKE server, the adversary still has to perform a full brute-force search to recover any passwords or impersonate users. However, (s)aPAKEs do not protect client storage, and can only be applied in the so-called asymmetric setting, in which some parties, such as servers, do not communicate with each other using the protocol. Nonetheless, passwords are also widely used in symmetric settings, where a group of parties share a password and can all communicate (e.g., Wi-Fi with client devices, routers, and mesh nodes; or industrial IoT scenarios). In these settings, the (s)aPAKE techniques cannot be applied, and the state-of-the-art still involves handling plaintext passwords. In this work, we propose the notions of (strong) identity-binding PAKEs that improve this situation: they protect against compromise of any party, and can also be applied in the symmetric setting. We propose counterparts to state-of-the-art security notions from the asymmetric setting in the UC model, and construct protocols that provably realize them. Our constructions bind the local storage of all parties to abstract identities, building on ideas from identity-based key exchange, but without requiring a third party. Our first protocol, CHIP, generalizes the security of aPAKE protocols to all parties, forcing the adversary to perform a brute-force search to recover passwords or impersonate others. Our second protocol, CRISP, additionally renders any adversarial pre-computation useless, thereby offering saPAKE-like guarantees for all parties, instead of only the server. We evaluate prototype implementations of our protocols and show that even though they offer stronger security for real-world use cases, their performance is in line with, or even better than, state-of-the-art protocols.

We design and implement a privacy-preserving Boolean satisfiability (ppSAT) solver, which allows mutually distrustful parties to evaluate the conjunction of their input formulas while maintaining privacy. We first define a family of security guarantees reconcilable with the (known) exponential complexity of SAT solving, and then construct an oblivious variant of the classic DPLL algorithm which can be integrated with existing secure two-party computation (2PC) techniques. We further observe that most known SAT solving heuristics are unsuitable for 2PC, as they are highly data-dependent in order to minimize the number of exploration steps. Faced with how best to trade off between the number of steps and the cost of obliviously executing each one, we design three efficient oblivious heuristics, one deterministic and two randomized. As a result of this effort we are able to evaluate our ppSAT solver on small but practical instances arising from the haplotype inference problem in bioinformatics. We conclude by looking towards future directions for making ppSAT solving more practical, most especially the integration of conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL).

We propose a practical sublinear-size zero-knowledge proof system for Rank-1 Constraint Satisfaction (R1CS) based on lattices. The proof size scales asymptotically with the square root of the witness size. Concretely, the size becomes $2$-$3$ times smaller than Ligero (ACM CCS 2017), which also exhibits square root scaling, for large instances of R1CS. At the core lies an interactive variant of the Schwartz-Zippel Lemma that might be of independent interest.

In this work, we study perfectly-secure multi-party computation (MPC) against general (non-threshold) adversaries. Known protocols in a synchronous network are secure against $Q^{(3)}$ adversary structures, while in an asynchronous network, known protocols are secure against $Q^{(4)}$ adversary structures. A natural question is whether there exists a single protocol which remains secure against $Q^{(3)}$ and $Q^{(4)}$ adversary structures in a synchronous and in an asynchronous network respectively, where the parties are not aware of the network type. We design the first such best-of-both-worlds protocol against general adversaries. Our result generalizes the result of Appan, Chandramouli and Choudhury (PODC 2022), which presents a best-of-both-worlds perfectly-secure protocol against threshold adversaries. To design our protocol, we present two important building blocks which are of independent interest. The first building block is a best-of-both-worlds perfectly-secure Byzantine agreement (BA) protocol for $Q^{(3)}$ adversary structures, which remains secure both in a synchronous, as well as an asynchronous network. The second building block is a best-of-both-worlds perfectly-secure verifiable secret-sharing (VSS) protocol, which remains secure against $Q^{(3)}$ and $Q^{(4)}$ adversary structures in a synchronous network and an asynchronous network respectively.

Many online applications, such as online file backup services, support the sharing of indexed data between a set of devices. These systems may offer client-side encryption of the data, so that the stored data is inaccessible to the online host. A potentially desirable goal in this setting would be to protect not just the contents of the backed-up files, but also their identifiers. However, as these identifiers are typically used for indexing, a deterministic consistent mapping across devices is necessary. Additionally, in a multi-device setting, it may be desirable to maintain an ability to revoke a device’s access—e.g. through rotating encryption keys for new data. We present a new primitive, called the Oblivious Revocable Function (ORF), which operates in the above setting and allows identifiers to be obliviously mapped to a consistent value across multiple devices, while enabling the server to permanently remove an individual device’s ability to map values. This permits a stronger threat model against metadata, in which metadata cannot be derived from identifiers by a revoked device colluding with the service provider, so long as the service provider was honest at the instant of revocation. We describe a simple Diffie- Hellman-based construction that achieves ORFs and provide a proof of security under the UC framework.

The Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol is an open standard for end-to-end (E2E) secure group messaging being developed by the IETF poised for deployment to consumers, industry, and government. It is designed to provide E2E privacy and authenticity for messages in long lived sessions whenever possible despite the participation (at times) of malicious insiders that can adaptively interact with the PKI at will, actively deviate from the protocol, leak honest parties' states, and fully control the network. The core of the MLS protocol (from which it inherits essentially all of its efficiency and security properties) is a Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) protocol. It provides asynchronous E2E group management by allowing group members to agree on a fresh independent symmetric key after every change to the group's state (e.g. when someone joins/leaves the group). In this work, we make progress towards a precise understanding of the insider security of MLS (Draft 12). On the theory side, we overcome several subtleties to formulate the first notion of insider security for CGKA (or group messaging). Next, we isolate the core components of MLS to obtain a CGKA protocol we dub Insider Secure TreeKEM (ITK). Finally, we give a rigorous security proof for ITK. In particular, this work also initiates the study of insider secure CGKA and group messaging protocols. Along the way we give three new (very practical) attacks on MLS and corresponding fixes. (Those fixes have now been included into the standard.) We also describe a second attack against MLS-like CGKA protocols proven secure under all previously considered security notions (including those designed specifically to analyze MLS). These attacks highlight the pitfalls in simplifying security notions even in the name of tractability.

Verifiable Data Streaming (VDS) enables a resource-limited client to continuously outsource data to an untrusted server in a sequential manner while supporting public integrity verification and efficient update. However, most existing VDS schemes require the client to generate all proofs in advance and store them at the server, which leads to a heavy computation burden on the client. In addition, all the previous VDS schemes can perform batch query (i.e., retrieving multiple data entries at once), but are subject to linear communication cost $l$, where $l$ is the number of queried data. In this paper, we first introduce a new cryptographic primitive named Double-trapdoor Chameleon Vector Commitment (DCVC), and then present an unbounded VDS scheme $\mathsf{VDS_1}$ with optimal communication cost in the random oracle model from aggregatable cross-commitment variant of DCVC. Furthermore, we propose, to our best knowledge, the first unbounded VDS scheme $\mathsf{VDS}_2$ with optimal communication and storage overhead in the standard model by integrating Double-trapdoor Chameleon Hash Function (DCH) and Key-Value Commitment (KVC). Both of our schemes enjoy constant-size public key. Finally, we demonstrate the efficiency of our two VDS schemes with a comprehensive performance evaluation.

The emergence of distributed digital currencies has raised the need for a reliable consensus mechanism. In proof-of-stake cryptocur- rencies, the participants periodically choose a closed set of validators, who can vote and append transactions to the blockchain. Each valida- tor can become a leader with the probability proportional to its stake. Keeping the leader private yet unique until it publishes a new block can significantly reduce the attack vector of an adversary and improve the throughput of the network. The problem of Single Secret Leader Election (SSLE) was first formally defined by Boneh et al. in 2020. In this work, we propose a novel framework for constructing SSLE proto- cols, which relies on secure multi-party computation (MPC) and satisfies the desired security properties. Our framework does not use any shuffle or sort operations and has a computational cost for N parties as low as O(N) of basic MPC operations per party. We improve the state-of-the- art for SSLE protocols that do not assume a trusted setup. Moreover, our SSLE scheme efficiently handles weighted elections. That is, for a total weight S of N parties, the associated costs are only increased by a factor of logS. When the MPC layer is instantiated with techniques based on Shamir’s secret-sharing, our SSLE has a communication cost of O(N2) which is spread over O(log N) rounds, can tolerate up to t < N/2 of faulty nodes without restarting the protocol, and its security relies on DDH in the random oracle model. When the MPC layer is instantiated with more efficient techniques based on garbled circuits, our SSLE re- quires all parties to participate, up to N − 1 of which can be malicious, and its security is based on the random oracle model.

Multi-signatures are protocols that allow a group of signers to jointly produce a single signature on the same message. In recent years, a number of practical multi-signature schemes have been proposed in the discrete-log setting, such as MuSigT (CRYPTO'21) and DWMS (CRYPTO'21). The main technical challenge in constructing a multi-signature scheme is to achieve a set of several desirable properties, such as (1) security in the plain public-key (PPK) model, (2) concurrent security, (3) low online round complexity, and (4) key aggregation. However, previous lattice-based, post-quantum counterparts to Schnorr multi-signatures fail to satisfy these properties. In this paper, we introduce MuSigL, a lattice-based multi-signature scheme simultaneously achieving these design goals for the first time. Unlike the recent, round-efficient proposal of Damgård et al. (PKC'21), which had to rely on lattice-based trapdoor commitments, we do not require any additional primitive in the protocol, while being able to prove security from the standard module-SIS and LWE assumptions. The resulting output signature of our scheme therefore looks closer to the usual Fiat--Shamir-with-abort signatures.

Secure multiparty computation can often utilize a trusted source of correlated randomness to achieve better efficiency. A recent line of work, initiated by Boyle et al. (CCS 2018, Crypto 2019), showed how useful forms of correlated randomness can be generated using a cheap, one-time interaction, followed by only "silent" local computation. This is achieved via a pseudorandom correlation generator (PCG), a deterministic function that stretches short correlated seeds into long instances of a target correlation. Previous works constructed concretely efficient PCGs for simple but useful correlations, including random oblivious transfer and vector-OLE, together with efficient protocols to distribute the PCG seed generation. Most of these constructions were based on variants of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) assumption. PCGs for other useful correlations had poor asymptotic and concrete efficiency. In this work, we design a new class of efficient PCGs based on different flavors of the ring-LPN assumption. Our new PCGs can generate OLE correlations, authenticated multiplication triples, matrix product correlations, and other types of useful correlations over large fields. These PCGs are more efficient by orders of magnitude than the previous constructions and can be used to improve the preprocessing phase of many existing MPC protocols.

We study the problem of biometric-based authentication with template confidentiality. Typical schemes addressing this problem, such as Fuzzy Vaults (FV) and Fuzzy Extractors (FE), allow a server, aka Authenticator, to store “random looking” Helper Data (HD) instead of biometric templates in clear. HD hides information about the corresponding biometric while still enabling secure biometric-based authentication. Even though these schemes reduce the risk of storing biometric data, their correspondent authentication procedures typically require sending the HD (stored by the Authenticator) to a client who claims a given identity. The premise here is that only the identity owner - i.e., the person whose biometric was sampled to originally generate the HD - is able to provide the same biometric to reconstruct the proper cryptographic key from HD. As a side effect, the ability to freely retrieve HD, by simply claiming a given identity, allows invested adversaries to perform offline statistical attacks (a biometric analog for dictionary attacks on hashed passwords) or re-usability attacks (if the FE scheme is not reusable) on the HD to eventually recover the user’s biometric. In this work we develop Oblivious Extractors: a new construction that allows an Authenticator to authenticate a user without requiring neither the user to send a biometric to the Authenticator, nor the server to send the HD to the client. Oblivious Extractors provide concrete security advantages for biometric-based authentication systems. From the perspective of secure storage, an oblivious extractor is as secure as its non-oblivious fuzzy extractor counterpart. In addition, it enhances security against aforementioned statistical and re-usability attacks. To demonstrate the construction’s practicality, we implement and evaluate a biometric-based authentication prototype using Oblivious Extractors.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a fundamental problem in secure distributed computing. An MPC protocol allows a set of $n$ mutually distrusting parties to carry out any joint computation of their private inputs, without disclosing any additional information about their inputs. MPC with information-theoretic security (also called unconditional security) provides the strongest security guarantees and remains secure even against computationally unbounded adversaries. Perfectly-secure MPC protocols is a class of information-theoretically secure MPC protocols, which provides all the security guarantees in an error-free fashion. The focus of this work is perfectly-secure MPC. Known protocols are designed assuming either a synchronous or an asynchronous communication network. It is well known that perfectly-secure synchronous MPC protocol is possible as long as adversary can corrupt any $t_s < n/3$ parties. On the other hand, perfectly-secure asynchronous MPC protocol can tolerate up to $t_a < n/4$ corrupt parties. A natural question is does there exist a single MPC protocol for the setting where the parties are not aware of the exact network type and which can tolerate up to $t_s < n/3$ corruptions in a synchronous network and up to $t_a < n/4$ corruptions in an asynchronous network. We design such a best-of-both-worlds perfectly-secure MPC protocol, provided $3t_s + t_a < n$ holds. For designing our protocol, we design two important building blocks, which are of independent interest. The first building block is a best-of-both-worlds Byzantine agreement (BA) protocol tolerating $t < n/3$ corruptions and which remains secure, both in a synchronous as well as asynchronous network. The second building block is a polynomial-based best-of-both-worlds verifiable secret-sharing (VSS) protocol, which can tolerate up to $t_s$ and $t_a$ corruptions in a synchronous and in an asynchronous network respectively.

NSEC5 is a proposed modification to DNSSEC that guarantees two security properties: (1) privacy against offline zone enumeration, and (2) integrity of zone contents, even if an adversary compromises the authoritative nameserver responsible for responding to DNS queries for the zone. In this work, we redesign NSEC5 in order to make it practical and performant. Our NSEC5 redesign features a new verifiable random function (VRF) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), along with a cryptographic proof of its security. This VRF is also of independent interest, as it is being standardized by the IETF and being used by several other projects. We show how to integrate NSEC5 using our ECC-based VRF into DNSSEC, leveraging precomputation to improve performance and DNS protocol-level optimizations to shorten responses. Next, we present the first full-fledged implementation of NSEC5 for both nameserver and recursive resolver, and evaluate performance under aggressive DNS query loads. We find that our redesigned NSEC5 can be viable even for high-throughput scenarios.