Recently, Baseri et al. proposed a secure untraceable off-line electronic cash system. They claimed that their scheme could achieve security requirements of an e-cash system such as, untraceability, anonymity, unlinkability, double spending checking, un-forgeability, date-attachability, and prevent forging coins. They further prove the un-forgeability security feature by using the hardness of discrete logarithm problems. However, after cryptanalysis, we found that the scheme cannot attain the security feature, untraceability. We, therefore, modify it to comprise this desired requirement, which is very important in an e-cash system.

In this paper, we address the problem of formal and automated security verification of WSN transport protocols that may perform cryptographic operations. The verification of this class of protocols is difficult because they typically consist of complex behavioral characteristics, such as real-time, probabilistic, and cryptographic operations. To solve this problem, we propose a probabilistic timed calculus for cryptographic protocols, and demonstrate how to use this formal language for proving security or vulnerability of protocols. The main advantage of the proposed language is that it supports an expressive syntax and semantics, including bisimilarities that supports real-time, probabilistic, and cryptographic issues at the same time. Hence, it can be used to verify the systems that involve these three property in a more convenient way. In addition, we propose an automatic verification method, based on the well-known PAT process analysis toolkit, for this class of protocols. For demonstration purposes, we apply the proposed manual and automatic proof methods for verifying the security of DTSN and SDTP, which are two of the recently proposed WSN tranport protocols.

We revisit the problem of cross-domain secure communication between two users belonging to different security domains within an open and distributed environment. Existing approaches presuppose that either the users are in possession of public key certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA), or the associated domain authentication servers share a long-term secret key. In this paper, we propose a variety of four-party password-based authenticated key exchange (4PAKE) protocols that take a different approach from previous work. The users are not required to have public key certificates, but they simply reuse their login passwords they share with their respective domain authentication servers. On the other hand, the authentication servers, assumed to be part of a standard PKI, act as ephemeral CAs that "certify'' some key materials that the users can subsequently use to exchange and agree on a session key. Moreover, we adopt a compositional approach. That is, by treating any secure two-party password-based key exchange (2PAKE) protocol and two-party asymmetric-key/symmetric-key based key exchange (2AAKE/2SAKE) protocol as black boxes, we combine them to obtain generic and provably secure 4PAKE protocols. We also show that one can derive a 4PAKE protocol from just a 2PAKE protocol.

Recently, Fan et al. proposed a user efficient recoverable off-line e-cash scheme with fast anonymity revoking. They claimed that their scheme could achieve security requirements of an e-cash system such as, anonymity, unlinkability, double spending checking, anonymity control, and rapid anonymity revoking on double spending. They further formally prove the unlinkability and the un-forgeability security features. However, after crypto-analysis, we found that the scheme cannot attain the two proven security features, anonymity and unlinkability. We, therefore, modify it to comprise the two desired requirements which are very important in an e-cash system.

Even as data and analytics driven applications are becoming increasingly popular, retrieving data from shared databases poses a threat to the privacy of their users. For example, investors/patients retrieving records about interested stocks/diseases from a stock/medical database leaks sensitive information to the database server. PIR (Private Information Retrieval) is a promising security primitive to protect the privacy of users' interests. PIR allows the retrieval of a data record from a database without letting the database server know which record is being retrieved. The privacy guarantees could either be information theoretic or computational. Ever since the first PIR schemes were proposed, a lot of work has been done to reduce the communication cost in the information-theoretic settings - particularly the question communication cost, i.e., the traffic from the user to the database server. The answer communication cost (the traffic from the database server to the user) has however barely been improved. When question communication cost is much lower than the record length, reducing question communication cost has marginal benefit on lowering overall communication cost. In contrast, reducing answer cost becomes very important. In this paper we propose ramp secret sharing based mechanisms that reduce the answer communication cost in information-theoretic PIR. We have designed four information-theoretic PIR schemes, using three ramp secret sharing approaches, achieving answer communication cost close to the cost of non-private information retrieval. Evaluation shows that our PIR schemes can achieve lower communication cost and the same level of privacy compared with existing schemes. Our PIR schemes' usages are demonstrated for realistic settings of outsourced data sharing and P2P content delivery scenarios. Thus, our approach makes PIR a viable communication efficient technique to protect user interest privacy.

In our previous work, we have proposed a framework which allows tools that can check standard noninterference properties but a priori cannot deal with cryptography to establish cryptographic indistinguishability properties, such as privacy properties, for Java programs. We refer to this framework as the CVJ framework (Cryptographic Verification of Java Programs) in this paper. While so far the CVJ framework directly supports public-key encryption (without corruption and without a public-key infrastructure) only, in this work we further instantiate the framework to support, among others, public-key encryption and digital signatures, both with corruption and a public-key infrastructure, as well as (private) symmetric encryption. Since these cryptographic primitives are very common in security-critical applications, our extensions make the framework much more widely applicable. To illustrate the usefulness and applicability of the extensions proposed in this paper, we apply the framework along with the tool Joana, which allows for the fully automatic verification of noninterference properties of Java programs, to establish cryptographic privacy properties of a (non-trivial) cloud storage application, where clients can store private information on a remote server.

It is common nowadays for data owners to outsource their data to the cloud. Since the cloud cannot be fully trusted, the outsourced data should be encrypted. This however brings a range of problems, such as: How should a data owner grant search capabilities to the data users? How can the authorized data users search over a data owner's outsourced encrypted data? How can the data users be assured that the cloud faithfully executed the search operations on their behalf? Motivated by these questions, we propose a novel cryptographic solution, called {\em verifiable attribute-based keyword search} (\vabks). The solution allows a data user, whose credentials satisfy a data owner's access control policy, to (i) search over the data owner's outsourced encrypted data, (ii) outsource the tedious search operations to the cloud, and (iii) verify whether the cloud has faithfully executed the search operations. We formally define the security requirements of \vabks\ and describe a construction that satisfies them. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical and deployable.

We present Path ORAM, an extremely simple Oblivious RAM protocol with a small amount of client storage. Partly due to its simplicity, Path ORAM is the most practical ORAM scheme known to date with small client storage. We formally prove that Path ORAM has a$O(log N) bandwidth cost for blocks of size B = Omega(log^2 N) bits. For such block sizes, Path ORAM is asymptotically better than the best known ORAM schemes with small client storage. Due to its practicality, Path ORAM has been adopted in the design of secure processors since its proposal.

Mobile text messages are currently vulnerable to inspection, modification, and replay by network operators and those that influence network operators. This paper describes a set of protocols that provide end-to-end message confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity over the high latency, low bandwidth, Short Message Service provided by GSM networks.

We present a pseudo-random bit generator expanding a uniformly random bit-string r of length k/2, where k is the security parameter, into a pseudo-random bit-string of length 2k − log^2(k) using one modular exponentiation. In contrast to all previous high expansion-rate pseudo-random bit generators, no hashing is necessary. The security of the generator is proved relative to Paillier’s composite degree residuosity assumption. As a first application of our pseudo-random bit generator we exploit its efficiency to optimise Paillier’s crypto-system by a factor of (at least) 2 in both running time and usage of random bits. We then exploit the algebraic properties of the generator to construct an efficient protocol for secure constant-round multiparty function evaluation in the cryptographic setting. This construction gives an improvement in communication complexity over previous protocols in the order of nk^2, where n is the number of participants and k is the security parameter, resulting in a communication complexity of O(nk^2|C|) bits, where C is a Boolean circuit computing the function in question.

We propose a non-interactive zero knowledge \emph{pairwise multiset sum equality test (PMSET)} argument in the common reference string (CRS) model that allows a prover to show that the given committed multisets $\AAA_j$ for $j \in \set{1, 2, 3, 4}$ satisfy $\AAA_1 \uplus \AAA_2 = \AAA_3 \uplus \AAA_4$, i.e., every element is contained in $\AAA_1$ and $\AAA_2$ exactly as many times as in $\AAA_3$ and $\AAA_4$. As a corollary to the $\PUTME$ argument, we present arguments that enable to efficiently verify the correctness of various (multi)set operations, for example, that one committed set is the intersection or union of two other committed sets. The new arguments have constant communication and verification complexity (in group elements and group operations, respectively), whereas the CRS length and the prover's computational complexity are both proportional to the cardinality of the (multi)sets. We show that one can shorten the CRS length at the cost of a small increase of the communication and the verifier's computation.

Recently, Shm et al. Proposed an efficient identity-based broadcast authentication scheme based on Tso et al.’s IBS scheme with message recovery to achieve security requirements in wireless sensor networks. They claim that their scheme can achieve security requirements and mitigated DOS attack by limiting the times of signature verification failures in wireless sensor networks (WSN). However, we found that the scheme cannot attain the security level as they claimed. We will demonstrate it in this article.

We describe, and implement, a maliciously secure protocol for two-party computation in a parallel computational model. The protocol is based on cut-and-choose of Yao’s garbled circuit and an efficient oblivious transfer extension. The implementation is done using CUDA and yields fast results in a financially feasible and practical setting by using a consumer grade CPU and GPU. Our protocol introduces a novel construction in order to verify consistency of the garbled circuit constructor’s input in a parallel and maliciously secure setting.

A widespread security claim of the Bitcoin system, presented in the original Bitcoin whitepaper, states that the security of the system is guaranteed as long as there is no attacker in possession of half or more of the total computational power used to maintain the system. This claim, however, is proved based on theoretically flawed assumptions. In the paper we analyze two kinds of attacks based on two theoretical flaws: the Block Discarding Attack and the Difficulty Raising Attack. We argue that the current theoretical limit of attacker's fraction of total computational power essential for the security of the system is in a sense not $\frac{1}{2}$ but a bit less than $\frac{1}{4}$, and outline proposals for protocol change that can raise this limit to be as close to $\frac{1}{2}$ as we want. The basic idea of the Block Discarding Attack has been noted as early as 2010, and lately was independently though-of and analyzed by both author of this paper and authors of a most recently pre-print published paper. We thus focus on the major differences of our analysis, and try to explain the unfortunate surprising coincidence. To the best of our knowledge, the second attack is presented here for the first time.

In the setting of multiparty computation a set of parties with private inputs wish to compute some joint function of their inputs, whilst preserving certain security properties (like privacy and correctness). An adaptively secure protocol is one in which the security properties are preserved even if an adversary can adaptively and dynamically corrupt parties during a computation. This provides a high level of security, that is arguably necessary in today's world of active computer break-ins. Until now, the work on adaptively secure multiparty computation has focused almost exclusively on the setting of an honest majority, and very few works have considered the honest minority and two-party cases. In addition, significant computational and communication costs are incurred by most protocols that achieve adaptive security. In this work, we consider the two-party setting and assume that honest parties may \emph{erase} data. We show that in this model it is possible to securely compute any two-party functionality in the presence of \emph{adaptive semi-honest adversaries}. Furthermore, our protocol remains secure under concurrent general composition (meaning that it remains secure irrespective of the other protocols running together with it). Our protocol is based on Yao's garbled-circuit construction and, importantly, is as efficient as the analogous protocol for static corruptions. We argue that the model of adaptive corruptions with erasures has been unjustifiably neglected and that it deserves much more attention.

Many RFID authentication protocols have been proposed to provide desired security and privacy level for RFID systems. Almost all of these protocols are based symmetric cryptography because of the limited resources of RFID tags. Recently Cheng et. al have been proposed an RFID security protocol based on chaotic maps. In this paper, we analyze the security of this protocol and discover its vulnerabilities. We firstly present a de-synchronization attack in which a passive adversary makes the shared secrets out-of-synchronization by eavesdropping just one protocol session. We secondly present a secret disclosure attack in which a passive adversary extracts secrets of a tag by eavesdropping just one protocol session. An adversary having the secrets of the tag can launch some other attacks.

Key agreement allows multi-parties exchanging public information to create a common secret key that is known only to those entities over an insecure network. In recent years, several identity-based authenticated key agreement protocols have been proposed. In this study, we analyze three identity-based tripartite authenticated key agreement protocols. After the analysis, we found that these protocols do not possess the desirable security attributes.

Dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption (DSSE) enables a client to encrypt his document collection in a way that it is still searchable and efficiently updatable. However, all DSSE constructions that have been presented in the literature so far come with several problems: Either they leak a significant amount of information (e.g., hashes of the keywords contained in the updated document) or are inefficient in terms of space or search/update time (e.g., linear in the number of documents). In this paper we revisit the DSSE problem. We propose the first DSSE scheme that achieves the best of both worlds, i.e., both small leakage and efficiency. In particular, our DSSE scheme leaks significantly less information than any other previous DSSE construction and supports both updates and searches in sublinear time in the worst case, maintaining at the same time a data structure of only linear size. We finally provide an implementation of our construction, showing its practical efficiency.

A reputation system for a set of entities is essentially a list of scores that provides a measure of the reliability of each entity in the set. The score given to an entity can be interpreted (and in the reputation system literature it often is~\cite{FRS}) as the probability that an entity will behave honestly. In this paper, we ask whether or not it is possible to utilize reputation systems for carrying out secure multiparty computation. We provide formal definitions of secure computation in this setting, and carry out a theoretical study of feasibility. We present almost tight results showing when it is and is not possible to achieve \emph{fair} secure computation in our model. We suggest applications for our model in settings where some information about the honesty of other parties is given. This can be preferable to the current situation where either an honest majority is arbitrarily assumed, or a protocol that is secure for a dishonest majority is used and the efficiency and security guarantees (including fairness) of an honest majority are not obtained.

One-round group authenticated key exchange (GAKE) protocols typically provide implicit authentication and appealing bind-width efficiency. As a special case of GAKE -- the pairing-based one-round tripartite authenticated key exchange (3AKE), recently gains much attention of research community due to its strong security. Several pairing-based one-round 3AKE protocols have recently been proposed to achieve provable security in the g-eCK model. In contrast to earlier GAKE models, the g-eCK model particularly formulates the security properties regarding resilience to the leakage of various combinations of long-term key and ephemeral session state, and provision of weak perfect forward secrecy in a single model. However, the g-eCK security proofs of previous protocols are only given under the random oracle model. In this work, we give a new construction for pairing-based one-round 3AKE protocol which is provably secure in the g-eCK model without random oracles. Security of proposed protocol is reduced to the hardness of Cube Bilinear Decisional Diffie-Hellman (CBDDH) problem for symmetric pairing. We also extend the proposed 3AKE scheme to a GAKE scheme with more than three group members, based on multilinear maps. We prove g-eCK security of our GAKE scheme in the standard model under the natural multilinear generalization of the CBDDH assumption.

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be formed by smart objects and services interacting autonomously and in real-time. Recently, Alcaide et al. proposed a fully decentralized anonymous authentication protocol for privacy-preserving IoT target-driven applications. Their system is set up by an ad-hoc community of decentralized founding nodes. Nodes can interact, being participants of cyberphysical systems, preserving full anonymity. In this study, we point out that their protocol is insecure. The adversary can cheat the data collectors by impersonating a legitimate user.

In 2005, Lin and Tzeng proposed a solution to Yao's Millionaires problem in the setting of semi-honest parties. At the end of the protocol only the party (Alice) who is responsible for setting up the system parameters knows the outcome. It does not specify how to have the other party (Bob) know the result. In this note, we present an improvement of the Lin-Tzeng solution. It requires that Alice and Bob alternately perform the original protocol twice. Under the reasonable assumption that a participator does not deviate from the prescribed steps before he/she obtains the outcome, Alice and Bob can almost simultaneously obtain the result. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to show that one participator has only an advantage of $\mbox{ln}\,n/n$ possibility to cheat the other in the reasonable setting.

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) systems are gaining enormous interests at industry due to their vast applications such as supply chain, access control, inventory, transport, health care and home appliances. Although tag identification is the primary security goal of an RFID system, privacy issue is equally, even more, important concern in RFID system because of pervasiveness of RFID tags. Over the years, many protocols have been proposed for RFID tags' identification using different cryptographic primitives. It has been observed that most of them provide tags' identification, but they fail to preserve tags' privacy. It has been also proven that public-key primitives are essential for strong privacy and security requirements in RFID systems. In this paper, we present a mutual authentication protocol for RFID systems using elliptic curves arithmetic. Precisely, the proposed protocol provides narrow-strong and wide-weak privacy and resists tracking attacks under standard complexity assumption. The protocol is compared with related works and found efficient in comparison to others.

A $d$-broadcast primitive is a communication primitive that allows a sender to send a value from a domain of size $d$ to a set of parties. A broadcast protocol emulates the $d$-broadcast primitive using only point-to-point channels, even if some of the parties cheat, in the sense that all correct recipients agree on the same value $v$ (consistency), and if the sender is correct, then $v$ is the value sent by the sender (validity). A celebrated result by Pease, Shostak and Lamport states that such a broadcast protocol exists if and only if $t < n/3$, where $n$ denotes the total number of parties and $t$ denotes the upper bound on the number of cheaters. This paper is concerned with broadcast protocols for any number of cheaters ($t<n$), which can be possible only if, in addition to point-to-point channels, another primitive is available. Broadcast amplification is the problem of achieving $d$-broadcast when $d'$-broadcast can be used once, for $d'<d$. Let $\phi_n(d)$ denote the minimal such $d'$ for domain size~$d$. We show that for $n=3$ parties, broadcast for any domain size is possible if only a single $3$-broadcast is available, and broadcast of a single bit ($d'=2$) is not sufficient, i.e., $\phi_3(d)=3$ for any $d\geq 3$. In contrast, for $n > 3$ no broadcast amplification is possible, i.e., $\phi_n(d)=d$ for any $d$. However, if other parties than the sender can also broadcast some short messages, then broadcast amplification is possible for \emph{any}~$n$. Let $\phi^*_n(d)$ denote the minimal $d'$ such that $d$-broadcast can be constructed from primitives $d'_1$-broadcast, \ldots, $d'_k$-broadcast, where $d'=\prod_i d'_i$ (i.e., $\log d'=\sum_i \log d'_i$). Note that $\phi^*_n(d)\leq\phi_n(d)$. We show that broadcasting $8n\log n$ bits in total suffices, independently of $d$, and that at least $n-2$ parties, including the sender, must broadcast at least one bit. Hence $\min(\log d,n-2) \leq \log \phi^*_n(d) \leq 8n\log n$.

We study the classical problem of privacy amplification, where two parties Alice and Bob share a weak secret $X$ of min-entropy $k$, and wish to agree on secret key $R$ of length $m$ over a public communication channel completely controlled by a computationally unbounded attacker Eve. Despite being extensively studied in the literature, the problem of designing ``optimal'' efficient privacy amplification protocols is still open, because there are several optimization goals. The first of them is (1) minimizing the {\em entropy loss} $L=k-m$ (it is known that the optimal value for $L=O(\lambda)$, where $\eps=2^{-\lambda}$ is the desired security of the protocol). Other important considerations include (2) minimizing the number of communication rounds, (3) maintaining security even after the secret key is used (this is called {\em post-application robustness}), and (4) ensuring that the protocol $P$ does not leak some ``useful information'' about the source $X$ (this is called {\em source privacy}). Additionally, when dealing with a very long source $X$, as happens in the so-called Bounded Retrieval Model (BRM), extracting as long a key as possible is no longer the goal. Instead, the goals are (5) to touch as little of $X$ as possible (for efficiency), and (6) to be able to run the protocol many times on the same $X$, extracting multiple secure keys. Achieving goals (1)-(4) (or (2)-(6) in BRM) simultaneously has remained open, and, indeed, all known protocols fail to achieve at least two of them. In this work we improve upon the current state-of-the-art, by designing a variety of new privacy amplification protocols, in several cases achieving {\em optimal parameters for the first time}. Moreover, in most cases we do it by giving relatively {\em general transformations} which convert a given protocol $P$ into a ``better'' protocol $P'$. In particular, as special cases of these transformations (applied to best known prior protocols), we achieve the following privacy amplification protocols for the first time: \begin{itemize} \item $4$-round (resp. $2$-round) {\em source-private} protocol with {\em optimal entropy loss} $L=O(\lambda)$, whenever $k = \Omega(\lambda^2)$ (resp. $k > \frac{n}{2}(1-\alpha)$ for some universal constant $\alpha>0$). Best previous constant round source-private protocols achieved $L=\Omega(\lambda^2)$. \item $3$-round {\em post-application-robust} protocols with {\em optimal entropy loss} $L=O(\lambda)$, whenever $k = \Omega(\lambda^2)$ or $k > \frac{n}{2}(1-\alpha)$ (the latter is also {\em source-private}). Best previous post-application robust protocols achieved $L=\Omega(\lambda^2)$. \item The first BRM protocol capable of extracting the optimal number $\Theta(k/\lambda)$ of session keys, improving upon the previously best bound $\Theta(k/\lambda^2)$. (Additionally, our BRM protocol is post-application-robust, takes $2$ rounds, and can be made source-private by increasing the number of rounds to $4$.) \end{itemize}

In this paper, we propose efficient protocols to obliviously execute non-deterministic and deterministic finite automata (NFA and DFA) in the arithmetic black box (ABB) model. In contrast to previous approaches, our protocols do not use expensive public-key operations, relying instead only on computation with secret-shared values. Additionally, the complexity of our protocols is largely offline. In particular, if the DFA is available during the precomputation phase, then the online complexity of evaluating it on an input string requires a small constant number of operations per character. This makes our protocols highly suitable for certain outsourcing applications.

Deniable authentication protocols allow a sender to authenticate a receiver, in a way that the receiver cannot convince a third party that such authentication (or any authentication) ever took place. In this study, we construct a fully deniable mutual authentication protocol based on RSA signature, and then a deniable authenticated key exchange protocol is constructed from the proposed protocol.

We consider the Secure Broadcast problem in incomplete networks. We study the resilience of the Certified Propagation Algorithm (CPA), which is particularly suitable for ad hoc networks. We address the issue of determining the maximum number of corrupted players $t^{\mathrm{CPA}}_{\max}$ that CPA can tolerate under the $t$-locally bounded adversary model, in which the adversary may corrupt at most $t$ players in each player's neighborhood. For any graph $G$ and dealer-node $D$ we provide upper and lower bounds on $t^{\mathrm{CPA}}_{\max}$ that can be efficiently computed in terms of a graph theoretic parameter that we introduce in this work. Along the way we obtain an efficient 2-approximation algorithm for $t^{\mathrm{CPA}}_{\max}$. We further introduce two more graph parameters, one of which matches $t^{\mathrm{CPA}}_{\max}$exactly. Our approach allows to provide an affirmative answer to the open problem of CPA Uniqueness posed by Pelc and Peleg in 2005.

We present a Stamp\&Extend time-stamping scheme based on linking via modified creation of Schnorr signatures. The scheme is based on lazy construction of a tree of signatures. Stamp\&Extend returns a timestamp immediately after the request, unlike the schemes based on the concept of timestamping rounds. Despite the fact that all timestamps are linearly linked, verification of a timestamp requires a logarithmic number of steps with respect to the chain length. An extra feature of the scheme is that any attempt to forge a timestamp by the Time Stamping Authority (TSA) results in revealing its secret key, providing an undeniable cryptographic evidence of misbehavior of TSA. Breaking Stamp\&Extend requires not only breaking Schnorr signatures, but to some extend also breaking Pedersen commitments.

Certificateless public key cryptography is an attractive paradigm since it eliminates the use of certificates in traditional public key cryptography and alleviates the inherent key escrow problem in identity-based cryptography. Recently, Xiong et al. proposed a certificateless signature scheme and proved that their scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attack under the random oracle model. He et al. pointed out that Xiong et al.’s scheme is insecure against the Type II adversary. But, their forged signatures are not random, and their improved scheme has the same security defects as Xiong et al.’s scheme. In this paper, we present two malicious-but-passive KGC attack methods on Xiong et al.’s scheme and our results show that their scheme is insecure against malicious-but-passive KGC attack.

In the setting of searchable symmetric encryption (SSE), a data owner D outsources a database (or document/file collection) to a remote server E in encrypted form such that D can later search the collection at E while hiding information about the database and queries from E. Leakage to E is to be confined to well-defined forms of data-access and query patterns while preventing disclosure of explicit data and query plaintext values. Recently, Cash et al presented a protocol, OXT, which can run arbitrary Boolean queries in the SSE setting and which is remarkably efficient even for very large databases. In this paper we investigate a richer setting in which the data owner D outsources its data to a server E but D is now interested to allow clients (third parties) to search the database such that clients learn the information D authorizes them to learn but nothing else while E still does not learn about the data or queried values as in the basic SSE setting. Furthermore, motivated by a wide range of applications, we extend this model and requirements to a setting where, similarly to private information retrieval, the client's queried values need to be hidden also from the data owner D even though the latter still needs to authorize the query. Finally, we consider the scenario in which authorization can be enforced by the data owner D without D learning the policy, a setting that arises in court-issued search warrants. We extend the OXT protocol of Cash et al to support arbitrary Boolean queries in all of the above models while withstanding adversarial non-colluding servers (D and E) and arbitrarily malicious clients, and while preserving the remarkable performance of the protocol.

Minimal Latency Tunneling (MinimaLT) is a new network protocol that provides ubiquitous encryption for maximal confidentiality, including protecting packet headers. MinimaLT provides server and user authentication, extensive Denial-of-Service protections, privacy-preserving IP mobility, and fast key erasure. We describe the protocol, demonstrate its performance relative to TLS and unencrypted TCP/IP, and analyze its protections, including its resilience against DoS attacks. By exploiting the properties of its cryptographic protections, MinimaLT is able to eliminate three-way handshakes and thus create connections faster than unencrypted TCP/IP.

In 2012, Alagheband and Aref presented a dynamic and secure key manage ment model for hierarchical heterogeneous sensor networks. They proposed a signcryption algorithm which is the main building block in their key management model. They proved the algorithm is as strong as the elliptical curve discrete logarithm problem. In this work, we study the security of their signcryption algorithm. It is regretful that we found their algorithm is insecure. The adversary can impersonate the base station by sending forged messages to the cluster leaders after capturing the signcrypted messages. Hence, the key management model proposed by them is insecure. Then, we propose an improved signcryption algorithm to fix this weakness.

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) has recently attracted a lot of interest since it can be used to protect the privacy of data user's data access pattern from (honest but curious) outsourced storage. This is achieved by simulating each original data read or write operation with some read and write operations on some real and dummy data items. This paper proposes two single-server write-only ORAM schemes and one multi-server write-only ORAM scheme, which simulate only the write operations and protect only the write pattern. The reduction of functions however allows to build much simpler and efficient (in terms of communication cost and storage usage) write-only ORAMs. Write-only ORAM can be used in conjunction with Private Information Retrieval (PIR), which is a technique to protect data user's read patterns, in order to protect both write and read patterns. Write-only ORAM may be used alone too, when only write patterns need protection. We study two usage scenarios: (i) data publishing/sharing: where a data owner shares the data with others, who only consume the published information. Data consumers should not have write access to the outsourced data, and thus cannot use ORAM to protect their read patterns in this scenario. To hide access patterns from the outsourced storage, the data owner can use ORAM to write data, and data consumers use PIR to read data. Alternatively, for some applications, a data consumer can trivially download all data once or regularly, and neither the data owner nor data consumers mind that the outsourced storage learns such read pattern. Compared with using traditional ORAM, using the simpler write-only ORAM here produces much less communication cost and/or client-side storage usage. Our single-server write-only ORAM scheme produces lower (typically one order lower) communication cost with the same client-side storage usage, or requires much less (typically at least one order less) client-side storage to achieve the same level of communication cost than the best known single-server full functional ORAM schemes do. Compared with the best known multi-server ORAM scheme, our write-only ORAM schemes have lower (typically one order lower) communication cost, or achieve the same communication cost with the same client-side storage usage in single-server setting. (ii) the data owner's personal use: Our write-only ORAM schemes combined with PIR can be used as building blocks for some existing full functional ORAM schemes. This leads to the reduction of the communication costs for two full-functional ORAM schemes by the factors of $O(\log N)$ and $O(\sqrt{\log N}\times \log\log N)$, where $N$ is the maximum data item count. One of these resulting schemes has a communication cost of $O(l)$, where $l$ is data item length. This is typically one order lower than the previous best known ORAM scheme's cost, which is $O(\log N \times l)$. The other resulting scheme also achieves $O(\log N \times l)$ communication cost, but its client-side storage usage is several orders lower than the best known single-server ORAM's.

In synchronous networks, protocols can achieve security guarantees that are not possible in an asynchronous world: i.e., they can simultaneously achieve input completeness (all honest parties’ inputs are included in the computation) and guaranteed termination (honest parties do not “hang” indefinitely). In practice truly syn- chronous networks rarely exist, but synchrony can be emulated if channels have (known) latency and parties have loosely synchronized clocks. The framework of universal composability (UC) is inherently asynchronous, but several approaches for adding synchrony to the framework have been proposed. However, we show that the existing proposals do not provide the expected guarantees. Given this, we propose a “clean slate” approach to defining synchrony in the UC framework by introducing functionalities exactly meant to model, respectively, bounded-delay networks and loosely synchronized clocks. We show that the expected guarantees of synchronous computation can be realized given these functionalities, and that previous models can all be expressed within our new framework.

Groth-Sahai proofs are efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that have found widespread use in pairing-based cryptography. We propose efficiency improvements of Groth-Sahai proofs in the SXDH setting, which is the one that yields the most efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. - We replace some of the commitments with ElGamal encryptions, which reduces the prover's computation and for some types of equations reduces the proof size. - Groth-Sahai proofs are zero-knowledge when no public elements are paired to each other. We observe that they are also zero-knowledge when base elements for the groups are paired to public constants. - The prover's computation can be reduced by letting her pick her own common reference string. By giving a proof she has picked a valid common reference string this does not compromise soundness. - We define a type-based commit-and-prove scheme, which allows commitments to be reused in many different proofs.

Anonymous credentials provide a powerful tool for making assertions about identity while maintaining privacy. However, a limitation of today's anonymous credential systems is the need for a trusted credential issuer --- which is both a single point of failure and a target for compromise. Furthermore, the need for such a trusted issuer can make it challenging to deploy credential systems in practice, particularly in the ad hoc network setting (e.g., anonymous peer-to-peer networks) where no single party can be trusted with this responsibility. In this work we propose a novel anonymous credential scheme that eliminates the need for a trusted credential issuer. Our approach builds on recent results in the area of electronic cash and uses techniques --- such as the calculation of a distributed transaction ledger --- that are currently in widespread deployment in the Bitcoin payment system. Using this decentralized ledger and standard cryptographic primitives, we propose and provide a proof of security for a basic anonymous credential system that allows users to make flexible identity assertions with strong privacy guarantees. Finally, we discuss a number of practical applications for our techniques, including resource management in ad hoc networks and prevention of Sybil attacks. We implement our scheme and measure its efficiency.

The problem of fair and privacy-preserving ordered set reconciliation arises in a variety of applications like auctions, e-voting, and appointment reconciliation. While several multi-party protocols have been proposed that solve this problem in the semi-honest model, there are no multi-party protocols that are secure in the malicious model so far. In this paper, we close this gap. Our newly proposed protocols are shown to be secure in the malicious model based on a variety of novel non-interactive zero-knowledge-proofs. We describe the implementation of our protocols and evaluate their performance in comparison to protocols solving the problem in the semi-honest case.

A PAKR (Password-Authenticated Key Retrieval) protocol and its multi-server system allow one party (say, client), who has a rememberable password, to retrieve a long-term static key in an exchange of messages with at least one other party (say, server) that has a private key associated with the password. In this paper, we analyze the only one PAKR (named as PKRS-1) standardized in IEEE 1363.2 [9] and its multi-server system (also, [11]) by showing that any passive/active attacker can find out the client's password and the static key with off-line dictionary attacks. This result is contrary to the security statement of PKRS-1 (see Chapter 10.2 of IEEE 1363.2 [9]).

An argument system for NP is a proof system that allows efficient verification of NP statements, given proofs produced by an untrusted yet computationally-bounded prover. Such a system is non-interactive and publicly-verifiable if, after a trusted party publishes a proving key and a verification key, anyone can use the proving key to generate non-interactive proofs for adaptively-chosen NP statements, and proofs can be verified by anyone by using the verification key. We present an implementation of a publicly-verifiable non-interactive argument system for NP. The system, moreover, is a zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge. It directly proves correct executions of programs on TinyRAM, a random-access machine tailored for efficient verification of nondeterministic computations. Given a program $P$ and time bound T, the system allows for proving correct execution of $P$, on any input $x$, for up to T steps, after a one-time setup requiring $\tilde{O}(|P| T)$ cryptographic operations. An honest prover requires $\tilde{O}(|P| \cdot T)$ cryptographic operations to generate such a proof, while proof verification can be performed with only $O(|x|)$ cryptographic operations. This system can be used to prove the correct execution of C programs, using our TinyRAM port of the GCC compiler. This yields a zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) for program executions in the preprocessing model -- a powerful solution for delegating NP computations, with several features not achieved by previously-implemented primitives. Our approach builds on recent theoretical progress in the area. We present efficiency improvements and implementations of two main ingredients: * Given a C program, we produce a circuit whose satisfiability encodes the correctness of execution of the program. Leveraging nondeterminism, the generated circuit's size is merely quasilinear in the size of the computation. In particular, we efficiently handle arbitrary and data-dependent loops, control flow, and memory accesses. This is in contrast with existing ``circuit generators'', which in the general case produce circuits of quadratic size. * Given a linear PCP for verifying satisfiability of circuits, we produce a corresponding SNARK. We construct such a linear PCP (which, moreover, is zero-knowledge and very efficient) by building on and improving on recent work on quadratic arithmetic programs.

We consider applications involving a number of servers in the cloud that go through a sequence of online periods where the servers communicate, separated by offline periods where the servers are idle. During the offline periods, we assume that the servers need to securely store sensitive information such as cryptographic keys. Applications like this include many cases where secure multiparty computation is outsourced to the cloud, and in particular a number of online auctions and benchmark computations with confidential inputs. We consider fully autonomous servers that switch between online and offline periods without communicating with anyone from outside the cloud, and semi-autonomous servers that need a limited kind of assistance from outside the cloud when doing the transition. We study the levels of security one can - and cannot - obtain in this model, propose light-weight protocols achieving maximal security, and report on their practical performance.

Everyone is concerned about Internet security, yet most traffic is not cryptographically protected. Typical justification is that most attackers are off-path and cannot intercept traffic; hence, intuitively, challenge-response defenses should suffice to ensure authenticity. Often, the challenges re-use existing header fields to protect widelydeployed protocols such as TCP and DNS. We argue that this practice may often give an illusion of security. We review recent off-path TCP injection and DNS poisoning attacks, enabling attackers to circumvent existing challenge-response defenses. Both TCP and DNS attacks are non-trivial, yet practical. The attacks foil widely deployed security mechanisms, and allow a wide range of exploits, such as long-term caching of malicious objects and scripts. We hope that this review article will help improve defenses against off-path attackers. In particular, we hope to motivate, when feasible, adoption of cryptographic mechanisms such as SSL/TLS, IPsec and DNSSEC, providing security even against stronger Man-in-the-Middle attackers.

We present a password-authenticated group key exchange protocol where each user has his/her own password. Advantage of such protocol is in short passwords, which can be easily memorized. On the other hand these protocols face the low password entropy. In the first part we define security model based on models of Abdalla, Fouque and Pointcheval and Bellare, Pointcheval, Rogaway. We construct MLHL (Multi-LHL) protocol, which is based on LHL protocol proposed by Lee, Hwang and Lee. However, LHL protocol is flawed as pointed by Abdalla, Bresson, Chevassut and Choo, Raymond. We prove that our protocol is secure authenticated key exchange protocol with forward secrecy property and that the protocol is resistant against attacks on LHL protocol.

Helios 2.0 is an open-source web-based end-to-end verifiable electronic voting system, suitable for use in low-coercion environments. In this article, we analyse ballot secrecy in Helios and discover a vulnerability which allows an adversary to compromise the privacy of voters. The vulnerability exploits the absence of ballot independence in Helios and works by replaying a voter's ballot or a variant of it, the replayed ballot magnifies the voter's contribution to the election outcome and this magnification can be used to violated privacy. We demonstrate the practicality of the attack by violating a voter's privacy in a mock election using the software implementation of Helios. Moreover, the feasibility of an attack is considered in the context of French legislative elections and, based upon our findings, we believe it constitutes a real threat to ballot secrecy. We present a fix and show that our solution satisfies a formal definition of ballot secrecy using the applied pi calculus. Furthermore, we present similar vulnerabilities in other electronic voting protocols -- namely, the schemes by Lee et al., Sako & Kilian, and Schoenmakers -- which do not assure ballot independence. Finally, we argue that independence and privacy properties are unrelated, and non-malleability is stronger than independence.

The notion of time plays an important role in many practically deployed cryptographic protocols, ranging from One-Time-Password (OTP) tokens to the Kerberos protocol. However, time is difficult to model in a Turing machine environment. We propose the first such model, where time is modelled as a global counter T . We argue that this model closely matches several implementations of time in computer environments. The usefulness of the model is shown by giving complexity-theoretic security proofs for OTP protocols, HMQV-like one-round AKE protocols, and a variant of the basic Kerberos building block.

The scope of mobile phones has skyrocketed in recent years to such an extent that smartphone sales are expected to surpass those of PCs by the end of 2011. Equipped with relatively powerful processors and fairly large memory and storage capabilities, smartphones can accommodate increasingly complex interactive applications. As a result, the growing amount of sensitive information shared by smartphone users raises serious privacy concerns and motivates the need for appropriate privacy-preserving mechanisms. In this paper, we present a novel architecture geared for privacy-sensitive applications where personal information is shared among users and decisions are made based on given optimization criteria. Specifically, we focus on two application scenarios: (i) privacy-preserving interest sharing, i.e., discovering shared interests without leaking users' private information, and (ii) private scheduling, i.e., determining common availabilities and location preferences that minimize associate costs, without exposing any sensitive information. We propose efficient yet provably-private solutions, and conduct an extensive experimental analysis that attests to the practicality of the attained privacy features.

We construct a protocol for constant round Two-Party Secure Function Evaluation in the standard model which improves previous protocols in several ways. We are able to reduce the number of calls to Oblivious Transfer by a factor proportional to the security parameter. In addition to being more efficient than previous instantiations, our protocol only requires black box calls to OT and Commitment. This is achieved by the use of a faulty variant of the Cut-and-Choose OT. The concepts of Garbling Schemes, faulty Cut-and-Choose Oblivious Transfer and Privacy Amplification are combined using the Cut-and-Choose paradigm to obtain the final protocol.

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

A Secure Two Party Computation (S2PC) protocol allows two parties to compute over their combined private inputs, as if intermediated by a trusted third party. In the active model, security is maintained even if one party is malicious, deviating from the protocol specification. For example, a honest party retains privacy of its input and is ensured a correct output. This can be achieved with a cut-and-choose of garbled circuits (C&C-GCs), where some GCs are verified for correctness and the remaining are evaluated to determine the circuit output. This paper presents a new C&C-GCs-based S2PC protocol, with significant advantages in efficiency and applicability. First, in contrast with prior protocols that require a majority of evaluated GCs to be correct, the new protocol only requires that at least one evaluated GC is correct. In practice this reduces the total number of GCs to approximately one third, for the same statistical security goal. This is accomplished by augmenting the C&C with a new forge-and-lose technique based on bit commitments with trapdoor. Second, the output of the new protocol includes reusable XOR-homomorphic bit commitments of all circuit input and output bits, thereby enabling efficient linkage of several S2PCs in a reactive manner. The protocol has additional interesting characteristics (which may allow new comparison tradeoffs). The number of exponentiations is only linear with the number of input and output wires and a statistical parameter -- this is an improvement over protocols whose number of exponentiations is proportional to the number of GCs multiplied by the number of input and output wires. It uses unconditionally hiding bit commitments with trapdoor as the basis of oblivious transfers, with the circuit evaluator choosing a single value and the circuit constructor receiving two (a sort of 2-out-of-1 oblivious transfer, instead of the typical 1-out-of-2). The verification of consistency of circuit input and output keys across different GCs is embedded in the C&C structure.

Provable Data Possession (\PDP) allows data owner to periodically and remotely audit their data stored in a cloud storage, without retrieving the file and without keeping a local copy. Ateniese~\emph{et al.} (CCS 07) proposed the first {\PDP} scheme, which is very efficient in communication and storage. However their scheme requires a lot of group exponentiation operations: In the setup, one group exponentiation is required to generate a tag per each data block. In each verification, (equivalently) $(m + \ell)$ group exponentiations are required to generate a proof, where $m$ is the size of a data block and $\ell$ is the number of blocks accessed during a verification. This paper proposed an efficient {\PDP} scheme. Compared to Ateniese~\emph{et al.} (CCS 07), the proposed scheme has the same complexities in communication and storage, but is more efficient in computation: In the setup, no group exponentiations are required. In each verification, only (equivalently) $m$ group exponentiations are required to generate a proof. The security of the proposed scheme is proved under Knowledge of Exponent Assumption and Factoriztion Assumption.

Many electronic ticketing systems for public transportation have been deployed around the world. Using the example of Singapore's EZ-Link system we show that it is easy to invade a traveller's privacy and obtain his travel records in a real-world system. Then we propose encrypted bill processing of the travel records preventing any kind of privacy breach. Clear advantages of using bill processing instead of electronic cash are the possibility of privacy-preserving data mining analyses by the transportation company and monthly billing entailing a tighter customer relation and advanced tariffs. Moreover, we provide an implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution.

Non-malleable coding, introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010), aims for protecting the integrity of information against tampering attacks in situations where error-detection is impossible. Intuitively, information encoded by a non-malleable code either decodes to the original message or, in presence of any tampering, to an unrelated message. Non-malleable coding is possible against any class of adversaries of bounded size. In particular, Dziembowski et al. show that such codes exist and may achieve positive rates for any class of tampering functions of size at most $2^{2^{\alpha n}}$, for any constant $\alpha \in [0, 1)$. However, this result is existential and has thus attracted a great deal of subsequent research on explicit constructions of non-malleable codes against natural classes of adversaries. In this work, we consider constructions of coding schemes against two well-studied classes of tampering functions; namely, bit-wise tampering functions (where the adversary tampers each bit of the encoding independently) and the much more general class of split-state adversaries (where two independent adversaries arbitrarily tamper each half of the encoded sequence). We obtain the following results for these models. 1. For bit-tampering adversaries, we obtain explicit and efficiently encodable and decodable non-malleable codes of length $n$ achieving rate $1-o(1)$ and error (also known as "exact security") $\exp(-\tilde{\Omega}(n^{1/7}))$. Alternatively, it is possible to improve the error to $\exp(-\tilde{\Omega}(n))$ at the cost of making the construction Monte Carlo with success probability $1-\exp(-\Omega(n))$ (while still allowing a compact description of the code). Previously, the best known construction of bit-tampering coding schemes was due to Dziembowski et al. (ICS 2010), which is a Monte Carlo construction achieving rate close to .1887. 2. We initiate the study of seedless non-malleable extractors as a natural variation of the notion of non-malleable extractors introduced by Dodis and Wichs (STOC 2009). We show that construction of non-malleable codes for the split-state model reduces to construction of non-malleable two-source extractors. We prove a general result on existence of seedless non-malleable extractors, which implies that codes obtained from our reduction can achieve rates arbitrarily close to 1/5 and exponentially small error. In a separate recent work, the authors show that the optimal rate in this model is 1/2. Currently, the best known explicit construction of split-state coding schemes is due to Aggarwal, Dodis and Lovett (ECCC TR13-081) which only achieves vanishing (polynomially small) rate.

Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010), encode messages $s$ in a manner so that tampering the codeword causes the decoder to either output $s$ or a message that is independent of $s$. While this is an impossible goal to achieve against unrestricted tampering functions, rather surprisingly non-malleable coding becomes possible against every fixed family $F$ of tampering functions that is not too large (for instance, when $|F| \le \exp(2^{\alpha n})$ for some $\alpha \in [0, 1)$ where $n$ is the number of bits in a codeword). In this work, we study the "capacity of non-malleable coding", and establish optimal bounds on the achievable rate as a function of the family size, answering an open problem from Dziembowski et al. (ICS 2010). Specifically, 1. We prove that for every family $F$ with $|F| \le \exp(2^{\alpha n})$, there exist non-malleable codes against $F$ with rate arbitrarily close to $1-\alpha$ (this is achieved w.h.p. by a randomized construction). 2. We show the existence of families of size $\exp(n^{O(1)} 2^{\alpha n})$ against which there is no non-malleable code of rate $1-\alpha$ (in fact this is the case w.h.p for a random family of this size). 3. We also show that $1-\alpha$ is the best achievable rate for the family of functions which are only allowed to tamper the first $\alpha n$ bits of the codeword, which is of special interest. As a corollary, this implies that the capacity of non-malleable coding in the split-state model (where the tampering function acts independently but arbitrarily on the two halves of the codeword) equals $1/2$. We also give an efficient Monte Carlo construction of codes of rate close to 1 with polynomial time encoding and decoding that is non-malleable against any fixed $c > 0$ and family $F$ of size $\exp(n^c)$, in particular tampering functions with, say, cubic size circuits.

In this paper, we revisit the private over-threshold data aggregation problem, and formally define the problem's security requirements as both data and user privacy goals. To achieve both goals, and to strike a balance between efficiency and functionality, we devise a novel cryptographic construction that comes in two schemes; a fully decentralized construction and its practical but semi-decentralized variant. Both schemes are provably secure in the semi-honest model. We analyze the computational and communication complexities of our construction, and show that it is much more efficient than the existing protocols in the literature. Finally, we show that our basic protocol is efficiently transformed into a stronger protocol secure in the presence of malicious adversaries, together with performance and security analysis.

Proxy signatures allow an entity (the delegator) to delegate his signing capabilities to other entities (called proxies), who can then produce signatures on behalf of the delegator. Typically, a delegator may not want to give a proxy the power to sign any message on his behalf, but only messages from a well defined message space. Therefore, the so called delegation by warrant approach has been introduced. Here, a warrant is included into the delegator's signature (the so called certificate) to describe the message space from which a proxy is allowed to choose messages to produce valid signatures for. Interestingly, in all previously known constructions of proxy signatures following this approach, the warrant is made explicit and, thus, is an input to the verification algorithm of a proxy signature. This means, that a verifier learns the entire message space for which the proxy has been given the signing power. However, it may be desirable to hide the remaining messages in the allowed message space from a verifier. This scenario has never been investigated in context of proxy signatures, but seems to be interesting for practical applications. In this paper, we resolve this issue by introducing so called warrant-hiding proxy signatures. We provide a formal security definition of such schemes by augmenting the well established security model for proxy signatures by Boldyreva et al. Furthermore, we discuss strategies how to realize this warrant-hiding property and we also provide two concrete instantiations of such a scheme. They enjoy different advantages, but are both entirely practical. Moreover, we prove them secure with respect to the augmented security model.

This note reports major previously unpublished security vulnerabilities in the password-only authenticated three-party key exchange protocol due to Lee and Hwang (Information Sciences, 180, 1702-1714, 2010): (1) the Lee-Hwang protocol is susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack and thus fails to achieve implicit key authentication; (2) the protocol cannot protect clients' passwords against an offline dictionary attack; and (3) the indistinguishability-based security of the protocol can be easily broken even in the presence of a passive adversary.

In frameworks for universal composability, complex protocols can be built from sub-protocols in a modular way using composition theorems. However, as first pointed out and studied by Canetti and Rabin, this modular approach often leads to impractical implementations. For example, when using a functionality for digital signatures within a more complex protocol, parties have to generate new verification and signing keys for every session of the protocol. This motivates to generalize composition theorems to so-called joint state (composition) theorems, where different copies of a functionality may share some state, e.g., the same verification and signing keys. In this paper, we present a joint state theorem which is more general than the original theorem of Canetti and Rabin, for which several problems and limitations are pointed out. We apply our theorem to obtain joint state realizations for three functionalities: public-key encryption, replayable public-key encryption, and digital signatures. Unlike most other formulations, our functionalities model that ciphertexts and signatures are computed locally, rather than being provided by the adversary. To obtain the joint state realizations, the functionalities have to be designed carefully. Other formulations proposed in the literature are shown to be unsuitable. Our work is based on the IITM model. Our definitions and results demonstrate the expressivity and simplicity of this model. For example, unlike Canetti's UC model, in the IITM model no explicit joint state operator needs to be defined and the joint state theorem follows immediately from the composition theorem in the IITM model.

Katz and Vaikuntanathan recently improved smooth projective hash functions in order to build one-round password-authenticated key exchange protocols (PAKE). To achieve security in the UC framework they allowed the simulator to extract the hashing key, which required simulation-sound non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that are unfortunately inefficient. We improve the way the latter extractability is obtained by introducing the notion of trapdoor smooth projective hash function (TSPHF). A TSPHF is an SPHF with a trapdoor, which may not allow to recover the complete hashing key, but which still allows to compute the hash value, which is enough for an application to PAKE with UC-security against static corruptions. We additionally show that TSPHFs yield zero-knowledge proofs in two flows, with straight-line extractability. Besides those quite interesting applications of TSPHF, we also show how to generically build them on languages of ciphertexts, using any ElGamal-like encryption. Our concrete instantiations lead to efficient one-round UC-secure PAKE, extractable zero-knowledge arguments, and verifiable encryption of Waters signatures. In the case of the PAKE, our construction is the most efficient one-round UC-secure PAKE to date.

Zero-knowledge protocols are one of the fundamental concepts in modern cryptography and have countless applications. However, after more than 30 years from their introduction, there are only very few languages (essentially those with a group structure) for which we can construct zero-knowledge protocols that are efficient enough to be used in practice. In this paper we address the problem of how to construct efficient zero-knowledge protocols for generic languages and we propose a protocol based on Yao's garbled circuit technique. The motivation for our work is that in many cryptographic applications it is useful to be able to prove efficiently statements of the form e.g., ``I know x s.t. y=SHA-256(x)'' for a common input y (or other ``unstructured'' languages), but no efficient protocols for this task are currently known. It is clear that zero-knowledge is a subset of secure two-party computation (i.e., any protocol for generic secure computation can be used to do zero-knowledge). The main contribution of this paper is to construct an efficient protocol for the special case of secure two-party computation where only one party has input (like in the zero-knowledge case). The protocol achieves active security and is essentially only twice as slow as Yao's garbled circuit protocol. This is a great improvement with respect to the cut-n-choose technique to make Yao's protocol actively secure, where the complexity grows linearly with the security parameter.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol is the most widely used security protocol on the Internet. It supports negotiation of a wide variety of cryptographic primitives through different cipher suites, various modes of client authentication, and additional features such as renegotiation. Despite its widespread use, only recently has the full TLS protocol been proven secure, and only the core cryptographic protocol with no additional features. These additional features have been the cause of several practical attacks on TLS. In 2009, Ray and Dispensa demonstrated how TLS renegotiation allows an attacker to splice together its own session with that of a victim, resulting in a man-in-the-middle attack on TLS-reliant applications such as HTTP. TLS was subsequently patched with two defence mechanisms for protection against this attack. We present the first formal treatment of renegotiation in secure channel establishment protocols. We add optional renegotiation to the authenticated and confidential channel establishment model of Jager et al., an adaptation of the Bellare--Rogaway authenticated key exchange model. We describe the attack of Ray and Dispensa on TLS within our model. We show generically that the proposed fixes for TLS offer good protection against renegotiation attacks, and give a simple new countermeasure that provides renegotiation security for TLS even in the face of stronger adversaries.

At STOC '87, Goldreich et al.~presented two protocols for secure multi-party computation (MPC) among $n$ parties: The first protocol provides \emph{passive} security against $t<n$ corrupted parties. The second protocol provides even \emph{active} security, but only against $t<n/2$ corrupted parties. Although these protocols provide security against the provably highest possible number of corruptions, each of them has its limitation: The first protocol is rendered completely insecure in presence of a single active corruption, and the second protocol is rendered completely insecure in presence of $\lceil n/2 \rceil$ passive corruptions. At Crypto 2006, Ishai et al.~combined these two protocols into a single protocol which provides passive security against $t<n$ corruptions and active security against $t<n/2$ corruptions. This protocol unifies the security guarantees of the passive world and the active world (``best of both worlds''). However, the corruption threshold $t<n$ can be tolerated only when \emph{all} corruptions are passive. With a single active corruption, the threshold is reduced to $t<n/2$. As our main result, we introduce a \emph{dynamic tradeoff} between active and passive corruptions: We present a protocol which provides security against $t<n$ passive corruptions, against $t<n/2$ active corruptions, \emph{and everything in between}. In particular, our protocol provides full security against $k$ active corruptions, as long as less than $n-k$ parties are corrupted in total, for any unknown $k$. The main technical contribution is a new secret sharing scheme that, in the reconstruction phase, releases secrecy \emph{gradually}. This allows to construct non-robust MPC protocols which, in case of an abort, still provide some level of secrecy. Furthermore, using similar techniques, we also construct protocols for reactive MPC with hybrid security, i.e., different thresholds for secrecy, correctness, robustness, and fairness. Intuitively, the more corrupted parties, the less security is guaranteed.

In 2011, the authors [8] presented an adaptive oblivious transfer (OT) scheme based on Decisional 3-Party Diffie-Hellman (3DDH) assumption. The encryption used in the scheme is a combination of the Boneh-Boyen IBE scheme and a variation of the Hohenberger-Waters signature. The scheme is somewhat inefficient since it combines the two underlying schemes in a simple way. In this paper, we present an improvement of the OT scheme and show its security under 3DDH assumption. The proposed skills are helpful for designing and analyzing other cryptographic schemes.

In 2009, Seo et al. proposed an anonymous hierarchical identity-based encryption (IBE). The ciphertext consists of $(C_1, C_2, C_3, C_4)$, where $C_1$ is the blinded message, $C_4$ is the blinded identity, both $C_2$ and $C_3$ are used as decrypting helpers. To prove its security, the authors defined five games and introduced a strong simulator who is able to select different Setups for those games. In this paper, we optimize the IBE scheme by removing one decrypting helper and the strong simulator. We show its security under the $\ell$-computational Diffie-Hellman assumption with a normal simulator who only requires a unique Setup.

This work presents the design, analysis and implementation of the first sub-linear searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) protocol that supports conjunctive search and general Boolean queries on symmetrically-encrypted data and that scales to very large data sets and arbitrarily-structured data including free text search. To date, work in this area has focused mainly on single-keyword search. For the case of conjunctive search, prior SSE constructions required work linear in the total number of documents in the database and provided good privacy only for structured attribute-value data, rendering these solutions too slow and inflexible for large practical databases. In contrast, our solution provides a realistic and practical trade-off between performance and privacy by efficiently supporting very large databases at the cost of moderate and well-defined leakage to the outsourced server (leakage is in the form of data access patterns, never as direct exposure of plaintext data or searched values). A key aspect of our protocols is that it allows the searcher to pivot its conjunctive search on the estimated least frequent keyword in the conjunction. We show that a Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) based pseudo-random function can be used not just to implement search tokens but also to hide query access pattern of non-pivot, and hence possibly highly frequent, keywords in conjunctive queries. We present a formal cryptographic analysis of the privacy and security of our protocols and establish precise upper bounds on the allowed leakage. To demonstrate the real-world practicality of our approach, we provide performance results of a prototype applied to several large representative data sets.

The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is designed to enable trustworthy computation and communication over open networks. The TPM provides a way to store cryptographic keys and other sensitive values in its shielded memory and act as \emph{Root of Trust for Storage} (RTS). The TPM interacts with applications via a predefined set of commands (an API). In this paper, we give an abstraction model for the TPM 2.0 specification concentrating on Protected Storage part. With identification and formalization of their secrecy properties, we devise a type system with asymmetric cryptographic primitives to statically enforce and prove their security.

Ad-hoc networks do not rely on a pre-installed infrastructure, but they are formed by end-user devices in a self-organized manner. A consequence of this principle is that end-user devices must also perform routing functions. However, end-user devices can easily be compromised, and they may not follow the routing protocol faithfully. Such compromised and misbehaving nodes can disrupt routing, and hence, disable the operation of the network. In order to cope with this problem, several secured routing protocols have been proposed for ad-hoc networks. However, many of them have design aws that still make them vulnerable to attacks mounted by compromised nodes. In this paper, we propose a formal verication method for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols that helps increasing the condence in a protocol by providing an analysis framework that is more systematic, and hence, less error-prone than the informal analysis. Our approach is based on a new process algebra that we specically developed for secure ad-hoc network routing protocols and a deductive proof technique. The novelty of this approach is that contrary to prior attempts to formal verication of secure ad-hoc network routing protocols, our verication method can be made fully automated, and provides expressiveness for explicitly modelling cryptography privitives

In 2007, Camenisch, Neven and Shelat proposed an adaptive oblivious transfer (OT) in which a sender has $N$ messages, of which a receiver can adaptively choose to receive $k$ one-after-the-other. In this paper, we show that the scheme has a drawback that the sender can only serve a single receiver only once. The drawback results from the deterministic encryption used. To fix it, we suggest to replace the deterministic encryption with a probabilistic encryption. The OT scheme adopts the paradigm of ``encryption and proof of knowledge" in order to force the sender to keep the consistency of the transferred messages. We remark that the paradigm is unnecessary. In most reasonable applications of OT, the transferred messages must be recognizable for the receiver or the sender is willing to disclose some messages to the receiver. This property has been explicitly specified in the earlier works by Rabin, Even, Goldreich and Lempel.

We propose an optimization and generalization of OT extension of Ishai et al. of Crypto 2003. For computational security parameter k, our OT extension for short secrets offers O(log k) factor performance improvement in communication and computation, compared to prior work. In concrete terms, for today's security parameters, this means approx. factor 2-3 improvement. This results in corresponding improvements in applications relying on such OT. In particular, for two-party semi-honest SFE, this results in O(log k) factor improvement in communication over state of the art Yao Garbled Circuit, and has the same asymptotic complexity as the recent multi-round construction of Kolesnikov and Kumaresan of SCN 2012. For multi-party semi-honest SFE, where their construction is inapplicable, our construction implies O(log k) factor communication and computation improvement over best previous constructions. As with our OT extension, for today's security parameters, this means approximately factor 2 improvement in semi-honest multi-party SFE. Our building block of independent interest is a novel IKNP-based framework for 1-out-of-n OT extension, which offers O(log n) factor performance improvement over previous work (for n<=k), and concrete factor improvement of up to 5 for today's security parameters (n=k=128). Our protocol is the first practical OT with communication/computation cost sublinear in the security parameter (prior sublinear constructions of Ishai et al. are not efficient in concrete terms).

In this paper we present new constraints to EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 (EPC-C1 G2) standard which if they have been considered in the design of EPC-C1 G2 complaint authentication protocols, lead to prevent predecessor's protocols' weaknesses and also present the secure ones. Also in this paper as an example, we use Pang \textit{et al.} EPC-C1 G2-friendly protocol which has been recently proposed, to show our proposed constraints in EPC-C1 G2 standard. Pang \textit{et al.}'s protocol security analysis show how its security claim based on untraceability and resistance against de-synchronization attacks is ruined. More precisely, we present very efficient de-synchronization attack and traceability attack against the protocol. Finally, take Pang \textit{et al.} protocol's vulnerability points, we present new conditions to design EPC-C1 G2 complaint protocols and based on it we propose a secure (EPC-C1 G2) RFID authentication scheme which is a good sample to EPC-C1 G2 complaint protocols.

We put forward a new approach for the design of efficient multiparty protocols: 1. Design a protocol for a small number of parties (say, 3 or 4) which achieves security against a single corrupted party. Such protocols are typically easy to construct as they may employ techniques that do not scale well with the number of corrupted parties. 2. Recursively compose with itself to obtain an efficient n-party protocol which achieves security against a constant fraction of corrupted parties. The second step of our approach combines the player emulation technique of Hirt and Maurer (J. Cryptology, 2000) with constructions of logarithmic-depth formulae which compute threshold functions using only constant fan-in threshold gates. Using this approach, we simplify and improve on previous results in cryptography and distributed computing. In particular: - We provide conceptually simple constructions of efficient protocols for Secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) in the presence of an honest majority, as well as broadcast protocols from point-to-point channels and a 2-cast primitive. - We obtain new results on MPC over blackbox groups and other algebraic structures. The above results rely on the following complexity-theoretic contributions, which may be of independent interest: - We show that for every integers j,k such that m = (k-1)/(j-1) is an integer, there is an explicit (poly(n)-time) construction of a logarithmic-depth formula which computes a good approximation of an (n/m)-out-of-n threshold function using only j-out-of-k threshold gates and no constants. - For the special case of n-bit majority from 3-bit majority gates, a non-explicit construction follows from the work of Valiant (J. Algorithms, 1984). For this special case, we provide an explicit construction with a better approximation than for the general threshold case, and also an exact explicit construction based on standard complexity-theoretic or cryptographic assumptions.

The Norwegian government ran a trial of internet remote voting during the 2011 local government elections, and will run another trial during the 2013 parliamentary elections. A new cryptographic voting protocol will be used, where so-called return codes allow voters to verify that their ballots will be counted as cast. This paper discusses this cryptographic protocol, and in particular the ballot submission phase. The security of the protocol relies on a novel hardness assumption similar to Decision Diffie-Hellman. While DDH is a claim that a random subgroup of a non-cyclic group is indistinguishable from the whole group, our assumption is related to the indistinguishability of certain special subgroups. We discuss this question in some detail.

A one-time program is a hypothetical device by which a user may evaluate a circuit on exactly one input of his choice, before the device self-destructs. One-time programs cannot be achieved by software alone, as any software can be copied and re-run. However, it is known that every circuit can be compiled into a one-time program using a very basic hypothetical hardware device called a one-time memory. At first glance it may seem that quantum information, which cannot be copied, might also allow for one-time programs. But it is not hard to see that this intuition is false: one-time programs for classical or quantum circuits based solely on quantum information do not exist, even with computational assumptions. This observation raises the question, "what assumptions are required to achieve one-time programs for quantum circuits?" Our main result is that any quantum circuit can be compiled into a one-time program assuming only the same basic one-time memory devices used for classical circuits. Moreover, these quantum one-time programs achieve statistical universal composability (UC-security) against any malicious user. Our construction employs methods for computation on authenticated quantum data, and we present a new quantum authentication scheme called the trap scheme for this purpose. As a corollary, we establish UC-security of a recent protocol for delegated quantum computation.

We address the problem in which a client stores a large amount of data with an untrusted server in such a way that, at any moment, the client can ask the server to compute a function on some portion of its outsourced data. In this scenario, the client must be able to efficiently verify the correctness of the result despite no longer knowing the inputs of the delegated computation, it must be able to keep adding elements to its remote storage, and it does not have to fix in advance (i.e., at data outsourcing time) the functions that it will delegate. Even more ambitiously, clients should be able to verify in time independent of the input-size – a very appealing property for computations over huge amounts of data. In this work we propose novel cryptographic techniques that solve the above problem for the class of computations of quadratic polynomials over a large number of variables. This class covers a wide range of significant arithmetic computations – notably, many important statistics. To confirm the efficiency of our solution, we show encouraging performance results, e.g., correctness proofs have size below 1 kB and are verifiable by clients in less than 10 milliseconds.

Unconditionally secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows a set of n mutually distrusting parties to securely compute an agreed function f over some finite field in the presence of a computationally unbounded adversary, who can actively corrupt any t out of the n parties. Designing an asynchronous MPC (AMPC) protocol with a communication complexity of O(n) field elements per multiplication gate is a long standing open problem. We solve the open problem by presenting two AMPC protocols with the corruption threshold t < n / 4. Our first protocol is statistically secure (i.e. involves a negligible error in the protocol outcome) in a completely asynchronous setting and improves the communication complexity of the previous best AMPC protocol in the same setting by a factor of \Theta(n). Our second protocol is perfectly secure (i.e. error free) in a hybrid setting, where one round of communication is assumed to be synchronous and improves the communication complexity of the previous best AMPC protocol in the hybrid setting by a factor of \Theta(n^2). Starting with the seminal work of Beaver (CRYPTO 1991), it is by now a well-known technique to evaluate multiplication gates in an MPC protocol using shared random multiplication triples. The central contribution common to both the presented protocols is a new and simple framework for generating shared random multiplication triples. All the existing protocols approach the problem by first producing shared pairs of random values, followed by computing the shared product of each pair of random values by invoking known protocols for multiplication. Our framework takes a completely different approach and avoids using the multiplication protocols that are typically communication intensive. Namely, we ask the parties to verifiably share random multiplication triples and then securely extract shared random multiplication triples unknown to the adversary. The framework is of independent interest and can be adapted to any honest majority setting.

When outsourcing large sets of data to the cloud, it is desirable for clients to efficiently check, whether all outsourced data is still retrievable at any later point in time without requiring to download all of it. Provable data possession (PDP)/proofs of retrievability (PoR), for which various constructions exist, are concepts to solve this issue. Interestingly, by now, no PDP/PoR scheme leading to an efficient construction supporting both private and public verifiability simultaneously is known. In particular, this means that up to now all PDP/PoR schemes either allow public or private verifiability exclusively, since different setup procedures and metadata sets are required. However, supporting both variants simultaneously seems interesting, as publicly verifiable schemes are far less efficient than privately verifiable ones. In this paper, we propose the first simultaneous privately and publicly verifiable (robust) PDP protocol, which allows the data owner to use the more efficient private verification and anyone else to run the public verification algorithm. Our construction, which is based on elliptic curves, achieves this, as it uses the same setup procedure and the same metadata set for private and public verifiability. We provide a rigorous security analysis and prove our construction secure in the random oracle model under the assumption that the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem is intractable. We give detailed comparisons with the most efficient existing approaches for either private or public verifiability with our proposed scheme in terms of storage and communication overhead, as well as computational effort for the client and the server. Our analysis shows that for choices of parameters, which are relevant for practical applications, our construction outperforms all existing privately and publicly verifiable schemes significantly. This means, that even when our construction is used for either private or public verifiability alone, it still outperforms the most efficient constructions known, which is particularly appealing in the public verifiability setting.

Peris-Lopez et al. recently provides some guidelines that should be followed to design a secure yoking-proof protocol. In addition, conforming to those guidelines and EPC C1 G2, they presented a yoking-proof for low-cost RFID tags, named Kazahaya. However, in this letter, we scrutinize its security showing how an passive adversary can retrieve secret parameters of patient's tag in cost of O(216) o-line PRNG evaluations. Given the tag's secret parameters, any security claims are ruined. Nevertheless, to show other weaknesses of the protocol and rule out any possible improvement by increasing the length of the used PRNG, we presented a forgery attack that shows that a proof generated at time tn can be used to forge a valid proof for any desired time tj . The success probability of this attack is `1' and the complexity is negligible.

Transferable conditional electronic-cash (e-cash) allows a payer to spend an e-cash based on the outcome not known in advance. It also allows a payee to spend the e-cash to others, or deposit the e-cash to a bank based on the future outcome. Among security properties, the anonymity of the payer has been widely studied. However, the payer is linkable in the existing conditional e-cash schemes. This paper presents the first optimally anonymous and transferable conditional electronic-cash (e-cash) system based on two recent cryptographic primitives, i.e., the Groth-Sahai(GS) proof system and the commuting signatures, to obtain the user's unlinkability and optimal anonymity. A publisher is introduced to publish the conditions, and is firstly formalized. By dividing the deposit protocol into two parts, the anonymity of the user is obtained in the deposit protocol. Compared with the existing conditional e-cash schemes, this scheme has the constant size for the computation and communication. Finally, we give the security proof in the standard model.

In many private set operations, a set is represented by a polynomial over a ring $\Z_{\sigma}$ for a composite integer $\sigma$, where $\Z_\sigma$ is the message space of some additive homomorphic encryption. While it is useful for implementing set operations with polynomial additions and multiplications, a polynomial representation has a limitation due to the hardness of polynomial factorization over $\Z_\sigma$. That is, it is hard to recover a corresponding set from a resulting polynomial over $\Z_\sigma$ if $\sigma$ is not a prime. In this paper, we propose a new representation of a set by a polynomial over $\Z_\sigma$, in which $\sigma$ is a composite integer with {\em known factorization} but a corresponding set can be efficiently recovered from a polynomial except negligible probability in the security parameter. Note that $\Z_\sigma[x]$ is not a unique factorization domain, so a polynomial may be written as a product of linear factors in several ways. To exclude irrelevant linear factors, we introduce a special encoding function which supports early abort strategy. As a result, our representation can be efficiently inverted by computing all the linear factors of a polynomial in $\Z_{\sigma}[x]$ whose roots locate in the image of the encoding function. When we consider group decryption as in most private set operation protocols, inverting polynomial representations should be done without a single party possessing the secret of the utilized additive homomorphic encryption. This is very hard for Paillier's encryption whose message space is $\Z_N$ with unknown factorization of $N$. Instead, we detour this problem by using Naccache-Stern encryption with message space $\Z_\sigma$ where $\sigma$ is a smooth integer with public factorization. As an application of our representation, we obtain a constant round privacy-preserving set union protocol. Our construction improves the complexity than the previous without an honest majority. It can be also used for a constant round multi-set union protocol and a private set intersection protocol even when decryptors do not possess a superset of the resulting set.

Byzantine broadcast is a distributed primitive that allows a specific party (called ``sender'') to consistently distribute a value $v$ among $n$ parties in the presence of potential misbehavior of up to $t$ of the parties. Broadcast requires that correct parties always agree on the same value and if the sender is correct, then the agreed value is $v$. Broadcast without a setup (i.e., from scratch) is achievable from point-to-point channels if and only if $t < n/3$. In case $t \ge n/3$ a trusted setup is required. The setup may be assumed to be given initially or generated by the parties in a setup phase. It is known that generating setup for protocols with cryptographic security is relatively simple and only consists of setting up a public-key infrastructure. However, generating setup for information-theoretically secure protocols is much more involved. In this paper we study the complexity of setup generation for information-theoretic protocols using point-to-point channels and temporarily available broadcast channels. We optimize the number of rounds in which the temporary broadcast channels are used while minimizing the number of bits broadcast with them. We give the first information-theoretically secure broadcast protocol tolerating $t < n/2$ that uses the temporary broadcast channels during only 1 round in the setup phase. Furthermore, only $\cO(n^3)$ bits need to be broadcast with the temporary broadcast channels during that round, independently of the security parameter employed. The broadcast protocol presented in this paper allows to construct the first information-theoretically secure MPC protocol which uses a broadcast channel during only one round. Additionally, the presented broadcast protocol supports refreshing, which allows to broadcast an a priori unknown number of times given a fixed-size setup.

We advocate schemes based on fixed-key AES as the best route to highly efficient circuit-garbling. We provide such schemes making only one AES call per garbled-gate evaluation. On the theoretical side, we justify the security of these methods in the random-permutation model, where parties have access to a public random permutation. On the practical side, we provide the JustGarble system, which implements our schemes. JustGarble evaluates moderate-sized garbled-circuits at an amortized cost of 23.2 cycles per gate (7.25 nsec), far faster than any prior reported results.

The Wired Equivalent Protocol is nowadays considered as unsafe. However the only academic research that tries to break WEP has been done by Fluhrer, Mantin and Shamir, who have published a report on a specific attack. Nevertheless, an unknown person under the pseudonym Korek has published 17 attacks, which are now used by both AirCrack and WepLab. For a network with average load traffic, the FMS attack would need roughfly 40 days in order to find the key (4 millions packets needed), whereas Korek's attacks in addition to stimulation of the network load, reduce this time under 15 minutes (325'000 packets needed) for a 128 bits key (104 bits secret key). We analyzed these attacks, gave a mathematical description of them and explained a new attack, in order to identify new ones.

In a private database query system, a client issues queries to a database and obtains the results without learning anything else about the database and without the server learning the query. While previous work has yielded systems that can efficiently support disjunction queries, performing conjunction queries privately remains an open problem. In this work, we show that using a polynomial encoding of the database enables efficient implementations of conjunction queries using somewhat homomorphic encryption. We describe a three-party protocol that supports efficient evaluation of conjunction queries. Then, we present two implementations of our protocol using Paillier's additively homomorphic system as well as Brakerski's somewhat homomorphic cryptosystem. Finally, we show that the additional homomorphic properties of the Brakerski cryptosystem allow us to handle queries involving several thousand elements over a million-record database in just a few minutes, far outperforming the implementation using the additively homomorphic system.

Deniable authenticated protocol is a new and attractive protocol compared to the traditional authentication protocol. It allows the appointed receiver to identify the source of a given message, but not to prove the identity of the sender to a third party even if the appointed receiver is willing to reveal its private key. In this paper, we first define a security model for certificateless deniable authentication protocols. Then we propose a non-interactive certificateless deniable authentication protocol, by combining deniable authentication protocol with certificateless cryptography. In addition, we prove its security in the random oracle model.

Recently, Khan et al. proposed an enhancement on a remote authentication scheme designed by Wang et al. which emphasizes on using dynamic identity. They claim that their improvement can avoid insider attack. However, we found the scheme lacks the anonymity property. Moreover, R. Madhusudhan et al. indicate their scheme also suffers the insider attack. Due to these observations, in this paper we propose a novel one which not only anonymously authenticates the remote user by using only two passes but also satisfies the ten requirements of an authentication scheme using smart card mentioned by Liao et al..

We show that the Liao and Hsiao's protocol achieves neither tag-authentication nor privacy.

TLS is the most important cryptographic protocol in the Internet. At CRYPTO 2012, Jager et al. presented the first proof of the unmodified TLS with ephemeral Diffie-Hellman key exchange (TLS-DHE) for mutual authentication. Since TLS cannot be proven secure under the classical definition of authenticated key exchange (AKE), they introduce a new security model called authenticated and confidential channel establishment (ACCE) that captures the security properties expected from TLS in practice. We extend this result in two ways. First we show that the cryptographic cores of the remaining ciphersuites, RSA encrypted key transport (TLS-RSA) and static Diffie-Hellman (TLS-DH), can be proven secure for mutual authentication in an extended ACCE model that also allows the adversary to register new public keys. In our security analysis we show that if TLS-RSA is instantiated with a CCA secure public key cryptosystem and TLS-DH is used in scenarios where a) the knowledge of secret key assumption holds or b) the adversary may not register new public keys at all, both ciphersuites can be proven secure in the standard model under standard security assumptions. Next, we present new and strong definitions of ACCE (and AKE) for server-only authentication which fit well into the general framework of Bellare-Rogaway-style models. We show that all three ciphersuites families do remain secure in this server-only setting. Our work identifies which primitives need to be exchanged in the TLS handshake to obtain strong security results under standard security assumptions (in the standard model) and may so help to guide future revisions of the TLS standard and make improvements to TLS's extensibility pay off.

Recently, Tsai et al., Liao et al. and Li et al. each proposed a multi-server authentication protocol. They claimed their protocols are secure and can withstand various attacks. However, we found some security loopholes in each of their schemes, for example, both Tsai et al.’s and Liao et al.‘s schemes suffers from server spoofing attack by an insider server. Li et al.s’ suffers from the lost smart card password-guessing attack. In addition, Liao et al.‘s scheme also has the off-line password-guessing attack. In this paper, we will first review then show the attacks on each of the schemes. Then, based on Li et al.’s scheme, we proposed a novel one and examined its security in several security features. After security analysis, we concluded that our protocol outperformed Li et al.’s scheme in the security feature of lost smart card password-guessing attack. Keywords: multi-server, password authentication protocol

Authentication and key agreement protocols play an important role in wireless sensor communication networks. Recently Xue et al'. suggested a key agreement protocols for WSN which in this paper we show that the protocol has some security flaws. Also we introduce an enhanced authentication and key agreement protocol for WSN satisfying all the security requirements.

Users frequently reuse their passwords when authenticating to various online services. Combined with the use of weak passwords or honeypot/phishing attacks, this brings high risks to the security of the user's account information. In this paper, we propose several protocols that can allow a user to use a single password to authenticate to multiple services securely. All our constructions provably protect the user from dictionary attacks on the password, and cross-site impersonation or honeypot attacks by the online service providers. Our solutions assume the user has access to either an untrusted online cloud storage service (as per Boyen [14]), or a mobile storage device that is trusted until stolen. In the cloud storage scenario, we consider schemes that optimize for either storage server or online service performance, as well as anonymity and unlinkability of the user's actions. In the mobile storage scenario, we minimize the assumptions we make about the capabilities of the mobile device: we do not assume synchronization, tamper resistance, special or expensive hardware, or extensive cryptographic capabilities. Most importantly, the user's password remains secure even after the mobile device is stolen. Our protocols provide another layer of security against malware and phishing. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose such various and provably secure password-based authentication schemes. Lastly, we argue that our constructions are relatively easy to deploy, especially if a few single sign-on services (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Facebook) adopt our proposal.

Beginning with the work of Lindell and Pinkas, researchers have proposed several protocols for secure two-party computation based on the cut-and-choose paradigm. In existing instantiations of this paradigm, one party generates $\kappa$ garbled circuits; some fraction of those are ``checked'' by the other party, and the remaining fraction are evaluated. We introduce here the idea of symmetric cut-and-choose protocols, in which each party generates $\kappa$ circuits to be checked by the other party. The main advantage of our technique is that the number $\kappa$ of garbled circuits can be reduced by a factor of 3 while attaining the same statistical security level as in prior work. Since the number of garbled circuits dominates the costs of the protocol, especially as larger circuits are evaluated, our protocol is expected to run up to 3 times faster than existing schemes. Preliminary experiments validate this claim.

Searchable symmetric encryption (SSE) enables a client to outsource a collection of encrypted documents in the cloud and retain the ability to perform keyword searches without revealing information about the contents of the documents and queries. Although efficient SSE constructions are known, previous solutions are highly sequential. This is mainly due to the fact that, currently, the only method for achieving sub-linear time search is the inverted index approach (Curtmola, Garay, Kamara and Ostrovsky, CCS ’06) which requires the search algorithm to access a sequence of memory locations, each of which is unpredictable and stored at the previous location in the sequence. Motivated by advances in multi-core architectures, we present a new method for constructing sub-linear SSE schemes. Our approach is highly parallelizable and dynamic. With roughly a logarithmic number of cores in place, searches for a keyword w in our scheme execute in o(r) parallel time, where r is the number of documents containing keyword w (with more cores, this bound can go down to O(log n), i.e., independent of the result size r). Such time complexity outperforms the optimal \theta(r) sequential search time - a similar bound holds for the updates. Our scheme also achieves the following important properties: (a) it enjoys a strong notion of security, namely security against adaptive chosen-keyword attacks; (b) compared to existing sub-linear dynamic SSE schemes (e.g., Kamara, Papamanthou, Roeder, CCS ’12), updates in our scheme do not leak any information, apart from information that can be inferred from previous search tokens; (c) it can be implemented efficiently in external memory (with logarithmic I/O overhead). Our technique is simple and uses a red-black tree data structure; its security is proven in the random oracle model.

It is important to be able to evaluate information security systems involving humans. We propose an approach in which we consider the system as a cryptographic protocol, and users are modeled as ordinary players. To model the fact that users make mistakes that affect security, we introduce protocol variants that model mistakes or combinations of mistakes. By analysing the base protocol and its variants, and at the same time considering how likely each variant is, we get a reasonable estimate of the real security of the system. Our work takes the form of a case study of four Norwegian federated identity systems, as well as two proposals for improved systems. The four systems span a good mix of various types of federated identity systems.

At the heart of many fair exchange problems is verifiable escrow: a sender encrypts some value using the public key of a trusted party (called the recovery agent), and then must convince the receiver of the ciphertext that the corresponding plaintext satisfies some property (e.g., it contains the sender's signature on a contract). Previous solutions to this problem are interactive, and often rely on communication-intensive cut-and-choose zero-knowledge proofs. In this paper, we provide a solution that uses generic trusted hardware to create an efficient, non-interactive verifiable escrow scheme. Our solution allows the protocol to use a set of recovery agents with a threshold access structure, the \emph{verifiable group escrow} notion which was informally introduced by Camenisch and Damgard and which is formalized here. Finally, this paper shows how this new non-interactive verifiable escrow scheme can be used to create an efficient optimistic protocol for fair exchange of signatures.

We present novel security requirements for second price auctions and a simple, efficient and practical protocol that provably maintains these requirements. Novel requirements are needed because commonly used requirements, such as the indistinguishability-based secrecy requirement of encryption schemes presented by \cite{goldwasser1982pep}, do not fit properly in the second price auctions context. Additionally, the presented protocol uses a trustworthy supervisor that checks if the auctioneer deviated from the protocol and fines him accordingly. By making sure the expected utility of the auctioneer when deviating from the protocol is lower than his expected utility when abiding by the protocol we ascertain that a {\em rational} auctioneer will abide by the protocol. This allows the supervisor to optimize by performing (computationally-intensive) inspections of the auctioneer with only low probability.

Most voting schemes aim at providing verifiability: voters should be able to check that their ballots did contribute to the outcome (individual verifiability) and that the tallying authorities did their job properly (universal verifiability). Surprisingly, verifiability still does not answer a very simple and natural question: how can I be sure that the published result corresponds to the (sum of) intended votes of the voters? This property is called correctness by Juels, Catalano, and Jakobsson. Actually, even a prominent voting system like Helios does not achieve correctness in the case of a dishonest bulletin board, since it may add ballots. We generalize the aforementioned definition of correctness to account for a malicious bulletin board (full correctness) and we provide a generic construction that transforms a correct voting scheme into a fully correct voting scheme. This construction simply requires to send credentials to the voters, with no additional infrastructure. We further provide a simple and natural criteria that implies voting correctness, which can then be turned into full correctness due to our construction. As an application, we build a variant of Helios that is both fully correct, verifiable and private. Real-world elections often require threshold cryptosystems so that any t out of l trustees can proceed to tallying. We describe a fully distributed (with no dealer) threshold cryptosystem suitable for Helios (in particular, suitable to partial decryption). In doing so we happen to revisit the seminal multi-authority election system from Cramer, Gennaro and Schoenmakers. Altogether, we provide the first proof of privacy, verifiability and correctness for a fully distributed Helios voting scheme (and its enhanced version with credentials), together with its detailed description. This also implies, to our knowledge, the first formal proofs of privacy, verifiability and correctness for the scheme by Cramer et al. Last but not least, we provide an open source implementation of our variant of Helios.

To instill greater confidence in computations outsourced to the cloud, clients should be able to verify the correctness of the results returned. To this end, we introduce Pinocchio, a built system for efficiently verifying general computations while relying only on cryptographic assumptions. With Pinocchio, the client creates a public evaluation key to describe her computation; this setup is proportional to evaluating the computation once. The worker then evaluates the computation on a particular input and uses the evaluation key to produce a proof of correctness. The proof is only 288 bytes, regardless of the computation performed or the size of the inputs and outputs. Anyone can use a public verification key to check the proof. Pinocchio achieves strong asymptotic efficiency by refining the Quadratic Arithmetic Programs of Gennaro, Gentry, Parno, and Raykova (EuroCrypt 2013). Crucially, our evaluation on seven applications demonstrates that Pinocchio is efficient in practice too. Pinocchio's verification time is typically 10ms: 5-7 orders of magnitude less than previous work; indeed Pinocchio is the first general-purpose system to demonstrate per-instance verification cheaper than native execution (for some apps). Pinocchio also reduces the worker's proof effort by an additional 19-60x. As an additional feature, Pinocchio generalizes to zero-knowledge proofs at a negligible cost over the base protocol. Finally, to aid development, Pinocchio provides an end-to-end toolchain that compiles a subset of C into programs that implement the verifiable computation protocol.

Physically Uncloneable Functions (PUFs) [Pap01] are noisy physical sources of randomness. As such, they are naturally appealing for cryptographic applications, and have caught the interest of both theoreticians and practitioners. A major step towards understanding and securely using PUFs was recently taken in [Crypto 2011] where Brzuska, Fischlin, Schröder and Katzenbeisser model PUFs in the Universal Composition (UC) framework of Canetti [FOCS 2001]. Their model considers trusted PUFs only, and thus real-world adversaries can not create malicious PUFs, and can access the physical object only via the prescribed procedure. However,this does not accurately reflect real-life scenarios, where an adversary could be able to create and use malicious PUFs, or access the PUF through other procedures. The goal of this work is to extend the model proposed in [Crypto 2011] in order to capture such real-world attacks. The main contribution of this work is the study of the Malicious PUFs model. Namely, we extend the PUF functionality of Brzuska et al. so that it allows the adversary to create arbitrarily malicious PUFs. Then, we provide positive results in this, more realistic, model. We show that, under computational assumptions, it is possible to UC-securely realize any functionality. Furthermore, we achieve unconditional (not UC) security with malicious PUFs, by showing a statistically hiding statistically binding commitment scheme that uses one PUF only, and such PUF can be malicious. As an additional contribution, we investigate another attack model, where adversaries access to a trusted PUF in a different way (i.e., not following the prescribed procedure). Technically this attack translates into the fact that the simulator cannot observe the queries made to an honest PUF. In this model, queries are oblivious to the simulator, and we call it the "Oblivious Query" model. We are able to achieve unconditionally UC-secure computation, even in this more severe model. This protocol is secure against stronger adversaries compared to the ones of Brzuska et al. Finally, we show the impossibility of UC secure computation in the combination of the above two new models, where the real-world adversary can create malicious PUFs and maliciously access to honest PUFs. Our work sheds light on the significant power and applicability of PUFs in the design of cryptographic protocols modeling adversaries that misbehave with PUFs.

Halevi, Lindell, and Pinkas (CRYPTO 2011) recently proposed a model for secure computation that captures communication patterns that arise in many practical settings, such as secure computation on the web. In their model, each party interacts only once, with a single centralized server. Parties do not interact with each other; in fact, the parties need not even be online simultaneously. In this work we present a suite of new, simple and efficient protocols for secure computation in this "one-pass" model. We give protocols that obtain optimal privacy for the following general tasks: -- Evaluating any multivariate polynomial $F(x_1, \ldots ,x_n)$ (modulo a large RSA modulus N), where the parties each hold an input $x_i$. -- Evaluating any read once branching program over the parties' inputs. As a special case, these function classes include all previous functions for which an optimally private, one-pass computation was known, as well as many new functions, including variance and other statistical functions, string matching, second-price auctions, classification algorithms and some classes of finite automata and decision trees.

A private set intersection (PSI) protocol allows two parties to compute the intersection of their input sets privately. Most of the previous PSI protocols only output the result to one party and the other party gets nothing from running the protocols. However, a mutual PSI protocol in which both parties can get the output is highly desirable in many applications. A major obstacle in designing a mutual PSI protocol is how to ensure fairness. In this paper we present the first fair mutual PSI protocol which is efficient and secure. Fairness of the protocol is obtained in an optimistic fashion, i.e. by using an offline third party arbiter. In contrast to many optimistic protocols which require a fully trusted arbiter, in our protocol the arbiter is only required to be semi-trusted, in the sense that we consider it to be a potential threat to both parties’ privacy but believe it will follow the protocol. The arbiter can resolve disputes without knowing any private information belongs to the two parties. This feature is appealing for a PSI protocol in which privacy may be of ultimate importance.

We discuss an efficient combination of the cryptographic protocols adopted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) for securing the communication of machine readable travel documents and readers. Roughly, in the original protocol the parties first run the Password-Authenticated Connection Establishment (PACE) protocol to establish a shared key and then the reader (optionally) invokes the Active Authentication (AA) protocol to verify the passport's validity. Here, we show that by carefully re-using some of the secret data of the PACE protocol for the AA protocol one can save one exponentiation on the passports's side. We call this the PACE|AA protocol. We then formally prove that this more efficient combination not only preserves the desirable security properties of the two individual protocols but also increases privacy by preventing misuse of the challenge in the Active Authentication protocol. We finally discuss a solution which allows deniable authentication in the sense that the interaction cannot be used as a proof towards third parties.