4915 results
Removable Weak Keys for Discrete Logarithm Based Cryptography
We describe a novel type of weak cryptographic private key that can exist in any discrete logarithm based
public-key cryptosystem set in a group of prime order $p$ where $p-1$ has small divisors.
Unlike the weak private keys based on numerical size (such as smaller private keys, or private keys lying in an interval) that will always exist in any DLP cryptosystems, our type of weak private keys occurs purely due to parameter choice of $p$, and hence, can be removed with appropriate value of $p$.
Using the theory of implicit group representations, we present algorithms that can determine whether a key
is weak, and if so, recover the private key from the corresponding public key.
We analyze several elliptic curves proposed in the literature and in various standards, giving counts
of the number of keys that can be broken with relatively small amounts of computation. Our results show
that many of these curves, including some from standards, have a considerable number of such weak private keys.
We also use our methods to show that none of the 14 outstanding Certicom Challenge problem instances are
weak in our sense, up to a certain weakness bound.
Making the BKW Algorithm Practical for LWE
The Learning with Errors (LWE) problem is one of the main mathematical foundations of post-quantum cryptography. One of the main groups of algorithms for solving LWE is the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman (BKW) algorithm. This paper presents new improvements for BKW-style algorithms for solving LWE instances. We target minimum concrete complexity and we introduce a new reduction step where we partially reduce the last position in an iteration and finish the reduction in the next iteration, allowing non-integer step sizes. We also introduce a new procedure in the secret recovery by mapping the problem to binary problems and applying the Fast Walsh Hadamard Transform. The complexity of the resulting algorithm compares favourably to all other previous approaches, including lattice sieving. We additionally show the steps of implementing the approach for large LWE problem instances. The core idea here is to overcome RAM limitations by using large file-based memory.
B-SIDH: supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman using twisted torsion
This paper explores a new way of instantiating isogeny-based cryptography in which parties can work in both the (p+1)-torsion of a set of supersingular curves and in the (p-1)-torsion corresponding to the set of their quadratic twists. Although the isomorphism between a given supersingular curve and its quadratic twist is not defined over GF(p^2) in general, restricting operations to the x-lines of both sets of twists allows all arithmetic to be carried out over GF(p^2) as usual. Furthermore, since supersingular twists always have the same GF(p^2)-rational j-invariant, the SIDH protocol remains unchanged when Alice and Bob are free to work in both sets of twists.
This framework lifts the restrictions on the shapes of the underlying prime fields originally imposed by Jao and De Feo, and allows a range of new options for instantiating isogeny-based public key cryptography. These include alternatives that exploit Mersenne and Montgomery-friendly primes, as well as the possibility of significantly reducing the size of the primes in the Jao-De Feo construction at no known loss of asymptotic security. For a given target security level, the resulting public keys are smaller than the public keys of all of the key encapsulation schemes currently under consideration in the NIST post-quantum standardisation effort.
The best known attacks against the instantiations proposed in this paper are the classical path finding algorithm due to Delfs and Galbraith and its quantum adapation due to Biasse, Jao and Sankar; these run in respective time O(p^(1/2)) and O(p^(1/4)), and are essentially memory-free. The upshot is that removing the big-O's and obtaining concrete security estimates is a matter of costing the circuits needed to implement the corresponding isogeny. In contrast to other post-quantum proposals, this makes the security analysis of B-SIDH rather straightforward.
Searches for friendly parameters are used to find several primes that range from 237 to 256 bits, the conjectured security of which are comparable to the 434-bit prime used to target NIST level 1 security in the SIKE proposal. One noteworthy example is a 247-bit prime for which Alice's secret isogeny is 7901-smooth and Bob's secret isogeny is 7621-smooth.
Multi-key Fully-Homomorphic Encryption in the Plain Model
The notion of multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (multi-key FHE) [Löpez-Alt, Tromer, Vaikuntanathan, STOC'12] was proposed as a generalization of fully homomorphic encryption to the multiparty setting. In a multi-key FHE scheme for $n$ parties, each party can individually choose a key pair and use it to encrypt its own private input. Given $n$ ciphertexts computed in this manner, the parties can homomorphically evaluate a circuit $C$ over them to obtain a new ciphertext containing the output of $C$, which can then be decrypted via a decryption protocol. The key efficiency property is that the size of the (evaluated) ciphertext is independent of the size of the circuit.
Multi-key FHE with one-round decryption [Mukherjee and Wichs, Eurocrypt'16], has found several powerful applications in cryptography over the past few years. However, an important drawback of all such known schemes is that they require a trusted setup.
In this work, we address the problem of constructing multi-key FHE in the plain model. We obtain the following results:
- A multi-key FHE scheme with one-round decryption based on the hardness of learning with errors (LWE), ring LWE, and decisional small polynomial ratio (DSPR) problems.
- A variant of multi-key FHE where we relax the decryption algorithm to be non-compact -- i.e., where the decryption complexity can depend on the size of $C$ -- based on the hardness of LWE. We call this variant multi-homomorphic encryption (MHE). We observe that MHE is already sufficient for some applications of multi-key FHE.
CP-ABE for Circuits (and more) in the Symmetric Key Setting
The celebrated work of Gorbunov, Vaikuntanathan and Wee provided the first key policy attribute based encryption scheme (ABE) for circuits from the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption. However, the arguably more natural ciphertext policy variant has remained elusive, and is a central primitive not yet known from LWE.
In this work, we construct the first symmetric key ciphertext policy attribute based encryption scheme (CP-ABE) for all polynomial sized circuits from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. In more detail, the ciphertext for a message $m$ is labelled with an access control policy $f$, secret keys are labelled with public attributes $x$ from the domain of $f$ and decryption succeeds to yield the hidden message $m$ if and only if $f(x)=1$. The size of our public and secret key do not depend on the size of the circuits supported by the scheme -- this enables our construction to support circuits of unbounded size (but bounded depth). Our construction is secure against collusions of unbounded size. We note that current best CP-ABE schemes [BSW07,Wat11,LOSTW10,OT10,LW12,RW13,Att14,Wee14,AHY15,CGW15,AC17,KW19] rely on pairings and only support circuits in the class NC1 (albeit in the public key setting).
We adapt our construction to the public key setting for the case of bounded size circuits. The size of the ciphertext and secret key as well as running time of encryption, key generation and decryption satisfy the efficiency properties desired from CP-ABE, assuming that all algorithms have RAM access to the public key. However, the running time of the setup algorithm and size of the public key depends on the circuit size bound, restricting the construction to support circuits of a-priori bounded size. We remark that the inefficiency of setup is somewhat mitigated by the fact that setup must only be run once.
We generalize our construction to consider attribute and function hiding. The compiler of lockable obfuscation upgrades any attribute based encryption scheme to predicate encryption, i.e. with attribute hiding [GKW17,WZ17]. Since lockable obfuscation can be constructed from LWE, we achieve ciphertext policy predicate encryption immediately. For function privacy, we show that the most natural notion of function hiding ABE for circuits, even in the symmetric key setting, is sufficient to imply indistinguishability obfuscation. We define a suitable weakening of function hiding to sidestep the implication and provide a construction to achieve this notion for both the key policy and ciphertext policy case. Previously, the largest function class for which function private predicate encryption (supporting unbounded keys) could be achieved was inner product zero testing, by Shen, Shi and Waters [SSW09].
Improved Key Recovery of the HFEv- Signature Scheme
The HFEv- signature scheme is a twenty year old multivariate
public key signature scheme. It uses the Minus and the Vinegar modifier
on the original HFE scheme. An instance of the HFEv- signature scheme
called GeMSS is one of the alternative candidates for signature schemes
in the third round of the NIST Post Quantum Crypto (PQC) Standardization Project.
In this paper, we propose a new key recovery attack on
the HFEv- signature scheme. We show that the Minus modification does
not enhance the security of cryptosystems of the HFE family, while the
Vinegar modification increases the complexity of our attack only by a
polynomial factor. By doing so, we show that the proposed parameters
of the GeMSS scheme are not as secure as claimed. Our attack shows
that it is very difficult to build a secure and efficient signature scheme
on the basis of HFEv-.
Functional Encryption for Quadratic Functions from k-Lin, Revisited
We present simple and improved constructions of public-key functional encryption (FE) schemes for quadratic functions. Our main results are:
- an FE scheme for quadratic functions with constant-size keys as well as shorter ciphertexts than all prior schemes based on static assumptions;
– a public-key partially-hiding FE that supports NC1 computation on public attributes and quadratic computation on the private message, with ciphertext size independent of the length of the public attribute.
Both constructions achieve selective, simulation-based security against unbounded collusions, and rely on the (bi-lateral) k-linear assumption in prime-order bilinear groups. At the core of these constructions is a new reduction from FE for quadratic functions to FE for linear functions.
Pattern Matching on Encrypted Data
Pattern matching is one of the most fundamental and important paradigms in several application domains such as digital forensics, cyber threat intelligence, or genomic and medical data analysis. While it is a straightforward operation when performed on plaintext data, it becomes a challenging task when the privacy of both the analyzed data and the analysis patterns must be preserved. In this paper, we propose new provably correct, secure, and relatively efficient (compared to similar existing schemes) public and private key based constructions that allow arbitrary pattern matching over encrypted data while protecting both the data to be analyzed and the patterns to be matched. That is, except the pattern provider (resp. the data owner), all other involved parties in the proposed constructions will learn nothing about the patterns to be searched (resp. the data to be inspected). Compared to existing solutions, the constructions we propose has some interesting properties: (1) the size of the ciphertext is linear to the size of plaintext and independent of the sizes and the number of the analysis patterns; (2) the sizes of the issued trapdoors are constant on the size of the data to be analyzed; and (3) the search complexity is linear on the size of the data to be inspected and is constant on the sizes of the analysis patterns. The conducted evaluations show that our constructions drastically improve the performance of the most efficient state of the art solution.
On Perfect Correctness in (Lockable) Obfuscation
In a lockable obfuscation scheme a party takes as input a program $P$, a lock value $\alpha$, a message $m$ and produces an obfuscated program $\tilde{P}$. The obfuscated program can be evaluated on an input $x$ to learn the message $m$ if $P(x)= \alpha$. The security of such schemes states that if $\alpha$ is randomly chosen (independent of $P$ and $m$), then one cannot distinguish an obfuscation of $P$ from a ``dummy'' obfuscation.
Existing constructions of lockable obfuscation achieve provable security under the Learning with Errors assumption. One limitation of these constructions is that they achieve only statistical correctness and allow for a possible one sided error where the obfuscated program could output the $m$ on some value $x$ where $P(x) \neq \alpha$.
In this work we motivate the problem of studying perfect correctness in lockable obfuscation for the case where the party performing the obfuscation might wish to inject a backdoor or hole in correctness. We begin by studying the existing constructions and identify two components that are susceptible to imperfect correctness. The first is in the LWE-based pseudo random generators (PRGs) that are non-injective, while the second is in the last level testing procedure of the core constructions.
We address each in turn. First, we build upon previous work to design injective PRGs that are provably secure from the LWE assumption. Next, we design an alternative last level testing procedure that has additional structure to prevent correctness errors. We then provide a surgical proof of security (to avoid redundancy) that connects our construction to the construction by Goyal, Koppula, and Waters (GKW). Specifically, we show how for a random value $\alpha$ an obfuscation under our new construction is indistinguishable from an obfuscation under the existing GKW construction.
Tightly-Secure Authenticated Key Exchange, Revisited
We introduce new tightly-secure authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols that are extremely efficient, yet have only a constant security loss and can be instantiated in the random oracle model both from the standard DDH assumption and a subgroup assumption over RSA groups. These protocols can be deployed with optimal parameters, independent of the number of users or sessions, without the need to compensate a security loss with increased parameters and thus decreased computational efficiency.
We use the standard “Single-Bit-Guess” AKE security (with forward secrecy and state corruption) requiring all challenge keys to be simultaneously pseudo-random. In contrast, most previous papers on tightly secure AKE protocols (Bader et al., TCC 2015; Gjøsteen and Jager, CRYPTO 2018; Liu et al., ASIACRYPT 2020) concentrated on a non-standard “Multi-Bit-Guess” AKE security
which is known not to compose tightly with symmetric primitives to build a secure communication channel.
Our key technical contribution is a new generic approach to construct tightly-secure AKE protocols based on non-committing key encapsulation mechanisms. The resulting DDH-based protocols are considerably more efficient than all previous constructions.
Efficient Privacy Preserving Logistic Regression Inference and Training
Recently, privacy-preserving logistic regression techniques on distributed data among several data owners drew attention in terms of their applicability in federated learning environment. Many of them have been built upon cryptographic primitives such as secure multiparty computations(MPC) and homomorphic encryptions(HE) to protect the privacy of data. The secure multiparty computation provides fast and secure unit operations for arithmetic and bit operations but they often does not scale with large data well enough due to large computation cost and communication overhead. From recent works, many HE primitives provide their operations in a batch sense so that the technique can be an appropriate choice in a big data environment. However computationally expensive operations such as ciphertext slot rotation or refreshment(so called bootstrapping) and large public key size are hurdles that hamper widespread of the technique in the industry-level environment.
In this paper, we provide a new hybrid approach of a privacy-preserving logistic regression training and a inference, which utilizes both MPC and HE techniques to provide efficient and scalable solution while minimizing needs of key management and complexity of computation in encrypted state. Utilizing batch sense properties of HE, we present a method to securely compute multiplications of vectors and matrices using one HE multiplication, compared to the naive approach which requires linear number of multiplications regarding to the size of input data. We also show how we used a 2-party additive secret sharing scheme to control noises of expensive HE operations such as bootstrapping efficiently.
Novel Single-Trace ML Profiling Attacks on NIST 3 Round candidate Dilithium
Dilithium is a lattice-based digital signature, one of the finalist candidates in the NIST's standardization process for post-quantum cryptography. In this paper, we propose a first side-channel attack on the process of signature generation of Dilithium. During the Dilithium signature generation process, we used NTT encryption single-trace for machine learning-based profiling attacks. In addition, it is possible to attack masked Dilithium using sparse multiplication. The proposed method is shown through experiments that all key values can be exposed 100% through a single-trace regardless of the optimization level.
Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Multi-Identity and Multi-Attribute Pure FHE
A multi-identity pure fully homomorphic encryption (MIFHE) enables a server to perform arbitrary computation on the ciphertexts that are encrypted under different identities. In case of multi-attribute pure FHE (MAFHE), the ciphertexts are associated with different attributes. Clear and McGoldrick (CANS 2014) gave the first chosen-plaintext attack secure MIFHE and MAFHE based on indistinguishability obfuscation. In this study, we focus on building MIFHE and MAFHE which are se-
cure under type 1 of chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA1) security model. In particular, using witness pseudorandom functions (Zhandry, TCC 2016) and multi-key pure FHE or MFHE (Mukherjee and Wichs, EUROCRYPT 2016) we propose the following constructions:
– CCA secure identity-based encryption (IBE) that enjoys an optimal size ciphertexts, which we extend to a CCA1 secure MIFHE scheme.
– CCA secure attribute-based encryption (ABE) having an optimal size ciphertexts, which we transform into a CCA1 secure MAFHE scheme.
By optimal size, we mean that the bit-length of a ciphertext is the bit-length of the message plus a security parameter multiplied with a constant. Known constructions of multi-identity(attribute) FHEs are either leveled, that is, support only bounded depth circuit evaluations or secure in a weaker CPA security model. With our new approach, we achieve
both CCA1 security and evaluation on arbitrary depth circuits for multi-identity(attribute) FHE schemes.
Fast Computing of Quadratic Forms of HFE Polynomials over fields of characteristic two
In this paper the author introduces methods that represent elements of a Finite Field $F_q$ as matrices that linearize certain operations like the product of elements in $F_q$. Since the Central Polynomial Map $\mathcal{F}(X)$ coming from the HFE scheme involves multiplication of elements in a Finite Field $F_q$, using a \textit{novel method} based in Linear Algebra the Quadratic Forms resulting from the polynomial map of the Public Key can be computed in few steps and these are bounded by the matrix $R$ that represents the linear action of the polynomial remainder modulo $f(t)$, which is the irreducible polynomial that identifies $F_q$. When the irreducible polynomial $f(t)$ is of the form $t^a+t^b+1$ \textit{modulo $2$}, the matrix $R$ is computed deterministically in few steps and all the Quadratic Forms are derived from this matrix. The research done tells that the central Polynomial Map $\mathcal{F}(X)$ is computed extremely fast, for example, in the CAS \textit{Mathematica}, taking an HFE Polynomial, Quadratic Forms are computed in $\textcolor{red}{\approx 1.4}$ seconds for the case $n=128$. This raises the more general lemma that Quadratic Forms obtained from BigField schemes are entirely dependent on the selected irreducible polynomial $f(t)$ as the matrix $R$ is conditioned by the structure of this polynomial.
Stronger bounds on the cost of computing Groebner bases for HFE systems
We give upper bounds for the solving degree and the last fall degree of the polynomial system associated to the HFE (Hidden Field Equations) cryptosystem. Our bounds improve the known bounds for this type of systems. We also present new results on the connection between the solving degree and the last fall degree and prove that, in some cases, the solving degree is independent of coordinate changes.
Semi-regular sequences and other random systems of equations
The security of multivariate cryptosystems and digital signature schemes relies on the hardness of solving a system of polynomial equations over a finite field. Polynomial system solving is also currently a bottleneck of index-calculus algorithms to solve the elliptic and hyperelliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. The complexity of solving a system of polynomial equations is closely related to the cost of computing Gröbner bases, since computing the solutions of a polynomial system can be reduced to finding a lexicographic Gröbner basis for the ideal generated by the equations. Several algorithms for computing such bases exist: We consider those based on repeated Gaussian elimination of Macaulay matrices. In this paper, we analyze the case of random systems, where random systems means either semi-regular systems, or quadratic systems in $n$ variables which contain a regular sequence of $n$ polynomials. We provide explicit formulae for bounds on the solving degree of semi-regular systems with $m>n$ equations in $n$ variables, for equations of arbitrary degrees for $m=n+1$, and for any $m$ for systems of quadratic or cubic polynomials. In the appendix, we provide a table of bounds for the solving degree of semi-regular systems of $m=n+k$ quadratic equations in $n$ variables for $2\leq k,n\leq 100$ and online we provide the values of the bounds for $2\leq k,n\leq 500$. For quadratic systems which contain a regular sequence of $n$ polynomials, we argue that the Eisenbud-Green-Harris conjecture, if true, provides a sharp bound for their solving degree, which we compute explicitly.
Inner-Product Functional Encryption with Fine-Grained Access Control
We construct new functional encryption schemes that combine the access control functionality of attribute-based encryption with the possibility of performing linear operations on the encrypted data. While such a primitive could be easily realized from fully fledged functional encryption schemes, what makes our result interesting is the fact that our schemes simultaneously achieve all the following properties. They are public-key, efficient and can be proved secure under standard and well established assumptions (such as LWE or pairings). Furthermore, security is guaranteed in the setting where adversaries are allowed to get functional keys that decrypt the challenge ciphertext. Our first results are two functional encryption schemes for the family of functions that allow users to embed policies (expressed by monotone span programs) in the encrypted data, so that one can generate functional keys to compute weighted sums on the latter. Both schemes are pairing-based and quite generic: they combine the ALS functional encryption scheme for inner products from Crypto 2016 with any attribute-based encryption schemes relying on the dual-system encryption methodology. As an additional bonus, they yield simple and elegant multi-input extensions essentially for free, thereby broadening the set of applications for such schemes. Multi-input is a particularly desirable feature in our setting, since it gives a finer access control over the encrypted data, by allowing users to associate different access policies to different parts of the encrypted data. Our second result builds identity-based functional encryption for inner products from lattices. This is achieved by carefully combining existing IBE schemes from lattices with adapted, LWE-based, variants of ALS. We point out to intrinsic technical bottlenecks to obtain richer forms of access control from lattices. From a conceptual point of view, all our results can be seen as further evidence that more expressive forms of functional encryption can be realized under standard assumptions and with little computational overhead.
Asymptotic complexities of discrete logarithm algorithms in pairing-relevant finite fields
We study the discrete logarithm problem at the boundary case between small and medium characteristic finite fields, which is precisely the area where finite fields used in pairing-based cryptosystems live. In order to evaluate the security of pairing-based protocols, we thoroughly analyze the complexity of all the algorithms that coexist at this boundary case: the Quasi-Polynomial algorithms, the Number Field Sieve and its many variants, and the Function Field Sieve. We adapt the latter to the particular case where the extension degree is composite, and show how to lower the complexity by working in a shifted function field. All this study finally allows us to give precise values for the characteristic asymptotically achieving the highest security level for pairings. Surprisingly enough, there exist special characteristics that are as secure as general ones.
Offline Witness Encryption from Witness PRF and Randomized Encoding in CRS model
Witness pseudorandom functions (witness PRFs) generate a pseudorandom value corresponding to an instance x of an NP language and the same pseudorandom value can be recomputed if a witness w that x is in the language is known. Zhandry (TCC 2016) introduced the idea of witness PRFs and gave a construction using multilinear maps. Witness PRFs can be interconnected with the recent powerful cryptographic primitive called witness encryption. In witness encryption, a message can be encrypted with respect to an instance x of an NP language and a decryptor that knows a witness w corresponding to the instance x can recover the message from the ciphertext. Mostly, witness encryption was constructed using obfuscation or multilinear maps.
In this work, we build (single relation) witness PRFs using a puncturable pseudorandom function and a randomized encoding in common reference string (CRS) model. Next, we propose construction of an offline witness encryption having short ciphertexts from a public-key encryption scheme, an extractable witness PRF and a randomized encoding in CRS model. Furthermore, we show how to convert our single relation witness PRF into a multi-relation witness PRF and the offline witness encryption into an offline functional witness encryption scheme.
Semi-Adaptively Secure Offline Witness Encryption from Puncturable Witness PRF
In this work, we introduce the notion of puncturable witness pseudorandom function (pWPRF) which is a stronger variant of WPRF proposed by Zhandry, TCC 2016. The punctured technique is similar to what we have seen for puncturable PRFs and is capable of extending the applications of WPRF. Specifically, we construct a semi-adaptively secure offline witness encryption (OWE) scheme using a pWPRF, an indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and a symmetric-key encryption (SKE), which enables us to encrypt messages along with NP statements. We show that replacing iO with extractability obfuscation, the OWE turns
out to be an extractable offline witness encryption scheme. To gain finer control over data, we further demonstrate how to convert our OWEs into offline functional witness encryption (OFWE) and extractable OFWE. All of our OWEs and OFWEs produce an optimal size ciphertext, in particular, encryption of a message is as small as the size of the message plus the security parameter multiplied with a constant, which is optimal for any public-key encryption scheme. On the other hand, in any previous OWE, the size of a ciphertext increases polynomially with the size of messages. Finally, we show that the WPRF of Pal et al. (ACISP 2019) can be extended to a pWPRF and an extractable pWPRF.
Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Attribute-Hiding Non-Zero Inner Product Encryptions and Its Applications
Non-zero inner product encryption (NIPE) allows a user to encrypt a message with an attribute vector and a receiver holding a secret-key associated to a predicate vector can recover the message from the ciphertext if the inner product between the attribute and predicate vectors is non-zero. The main focus is to hide messages in most of the existing NIPEs and the
associated attribute is trivially included in the ciphertext. In this work, we investigate the design of NIPEs that are capable of hiding attributes along with messages and secure against active adversaries. In particular, we describe a generic
ransformation of an attribute-hiding chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) secure NIPE from an inner product functional encryption
(IPFE) and a quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge (QANIZK) proof system. This leads us to a set of attribute-hiding NIPEs (AHNIPE) with security based on several assumptions such as plain Decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH), Learning With Errors (LWE) and Decision Composite Reciprocity (DCR). Furthermore, we build a more efficient and concrete construction of a CCA secure AHNIPE the security of which can be based on DDH and Kernel Matrix Diffie-Hellman (KerMDH) assumptions. As DDH implies the computational KerMDH assumption, the latter construction achieves a CCA secure AHNIPE from minimal assumption to date. We explore a few applications of AHNIPE. More specifically, we show that AHNIPE directly implies an anonymous identity-based revocation (IBR) scheme. Consequently, we get the first CCA secure IBR solely based on plain DDH assumption in the standard model, improving the security of any previous anonymous CCA secure IBR scheme which is proven secure relying on pairing-based assumptions in the random oracle model. Moreover, we add a tracing algorithm to our anonymous IBR scheme to convert it into an efficient anonymous trace and revoked scheme with CCA security.
Tight adaptive reprogramming in the QROM
The random oracle model (ROM) enjoys widespread popularity, mostly because it tends to allow for tight and conceptually simple proofs where provable security in the standard model is elusive or costly. While being the adequate replacement of the ROM in the post-quantum security setting, the quantum-accessible random oracle model (QROM) has thus far failed to provide these advantages in many settings. In this work, we focus on adaptive reprogrammability, a feature of the ROM enabling tight and simple proofs in many settings. We show that the straightforward quantum-accessible generalization of adaptive reprogramming is feasible by proving a bound on the adversarial advantage in distinguishing whether a random oracle has been reprogrammed or not. We show that our bound is tight by providing a matching attack. We go on to demonstrate that our technique recovers the mentioned advantages of the ROM in three QROM applications:
1) We give a tighter proof of security of the message compression routine as used by XMSS.
2) We show that the standard ROM proof of chosen-message security for Fiat-Shamir signatures can be lifted to the QROM, straightforwardly, achieving a tighter reduction than previously known.
3) We give the first QROM proof of security against fault injection and nonce attacks for the hedged Fiat-Shamir transform.
Towards Constructing Fully Homomorphic Encryption without Ciphertext Noise from Group Theory
In CRYPTO 2008, one year earlier than Gentry's pioneering \lq\lq bootstrapping'' technique on constructing the first fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme, Ostrovsky and Skeith III had suggested a completely different approach towards achieving FHE. Namely, they showed that the $\mathsf{NAND}$ operator can be realized in some \emph{non-commutative} groups; consequently, in combination with the $\mathsf{NAND}$ operator realized in such a group, homomorphically encrypting the elements of the group will yield an FHE scheme. However, no observations on how to homomorphically encrypt the group elements were presented in their paper, and there have been no follow-up studies in the literature based on their approach.
The aim of this paper is to exhibit more clearly what is sufficient and what seems to be effective for constructing FHE schemes based on their approach. First, we prove that it is sufficient to find a surjective homomorphism $\pi \colon \widetilde{G} \to G$ between finite groups for which bit operators are realized in $G$ and the elements of the kernel of $\pi$ are indistinguishable from the general elements of $\widetilde{G}$. Secondly, we propose new methodologies to realize bit operators in some groups, which enlarges the possibility of the group $G$ to be used in our framework. Thirdly, we give an observation that a naive approach using matrix groups would never yield secure FHE due to an attack utilizing the \lq\lq linearity'' of the construction. Then we propose an idea to avoid such \lq\lq linearity'' by using combinatorial group theory, and give a prototypical but still \emph{incomplete} construction in the sense that it is \lq\lq non-compact'' FHE, i.e., the ciphertext size is unbounded (though the ciphertexts are noise-free as opposed to the existing FHE schemes). Completely realizing FHE schemes based on our proposed framework is left as a future research topic.
Gadget-Based iNTRU Lattice Trapdoors
We present two new related families of lattice trapdoors based on the inhomogeneous NTRU problem
(iNTRU) defined in Genise et. al (ASIACRYPT 2019).
Our constructions are ``gadget-based'' and offer compact secret keys and
preimages and compatibility with existing,
efficient preimage sampling algorithms. Our trapdoors
can be used as a fundamental building block in lattice-based schemes
relying lattice trapdoors. In addition,
we implemented our trapdoors using the PALISADE library.
Extending the Signed Non-zero Bit and Sign-Aligned Columns Methods to General Bases for Use in Cryptography
An efficient scalar multiplication algorithm is a crucial component of elliptic curve cryptosystems. We propose a scalar multiplication algorithm based on scalar recodings that is regular in nature. Our scalar multiplication algorithm is made from two scalar recoding algorithms called $\Recode$ and $\Align$. $\Recode$ is the generalization of the signed non-zero bit recoding algorithm given by Hedabou, Pinel and Bénéteau in 2005. It recodes the $k$-ary representation of the given scalar into a signed non-zero form by means of a small lookup table. On the other hand, $\Align$ is the generalized $k$-ary version of the sign-aligned columns recoding algorithm given by Faz-Hernández, Longa and Sánchez in 2014. It recodes the $k$-ary representation of a scalar in such a way that the sign of each of its digits agrees with a given $\lbrace 1,-1 \rbrace$-valued sequence. When analyzing the choice of $k \in \lbrace 2,3 \rbrace$, we find some theoretical evidence that $k=3$ may offer better performance in certain scenarios.
Adaptively secure Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption
In a threshold symmetric-key encryption (TSE) scheme, encryption/decryption is performed by interacting with any threshold number of parties who hold parts of the secret-keys. Security holds as long as the number of corrupt (possibly colluding) parties stay below the threshold. Recently, Agrawal et al. [CCS 2018] (alternatively called DiSE) initiated the study of TSE. They proposed a generic TSE construction based on any distributed pseudorandom function (DPRF). Instantiating with DPRF constructions by Naor, Pinkas and Reingold [Eurocrypt 1999] (also called NPR) they obtained several efficient TSE schemes with various merits. However, their security models and corresponding analyses consider only static (and malicious) corruption, in that the adversary fixes the set of corrupt parties in the beginning of the execution before acquiring any information (except the public parameters) and is not allowed to change that later.
In this work we augment the DiSE TSE definitions to the fully adaptive (and malicious) setting, in that the adversary is allowed to corrupt parties dynamically at any time during the execution. The adversary may choose to corrupt a party depending on the information acquired thus far, as long as the total number of corrupt parties stays below the threshold. We also augment DiSE’s DPRF definitions to support adaptive corruption. We show that their generic TSE construction, when plugged-in with an adaptive DPRF (satisfying our definition), meets our adaptive TSE definitions.
We provide an efficient instantiation of the adaptive DPRF, proven secure assuming decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption (DDH), in the random oracle model. Our construction borrows ideas from Naor, Pinkas and Reingold’s [Eurocrypt 1999] statically secure DDH-based DPRF (used in DiSE) and Libert, Joye and Yung’s [PODC 2014] adaptively secure threshold signature. Similar to DiSE, we also give an extension satisfying a strengthened adaptive DPRF definition, which in turn yields a stronger adaptive TSE scheme. For that, we construct a simple and efficient adaptive NIZK protocol for proving a specific commit-and-prove style statement in the random oracle model assuming DDH.
Security of Public Key Encryption against Resetting Attacks
Ciphertext indistinguishability under chosen plaintext attacks is a standard security notion for public key encryption. It crucially relies on the usage of good randomness and is trivially unachievable if the randomness is known by the adversary. Yilek (CT-RSA'10) defined security against resetting attacks, where randomness might be reused but remains unknown to the adversary. Furthermore, Yilek claimed that security against adversaries making a single query to the challenge oracle implies security against adversaries making multiple queries to the challenge oracle. This is a typical simplification for indistinguishability security notions proven via a standard hybrid argument. The given proof, however, was pointed out to be flawed by Paterson, Schuldt, and Sibborn (PKC'14). Prior to this work, it has been unclear whether this simplification of the security notion also holds in case of resetting attacks.
We remedy this state of affairs as follows. First, we show the strength of resetting attacks by showing that many public key encryption schemes are susceptible to these attacks. As our main contribution, we show that the simplification to adversaries making only one query to the challenge oracle also holds in the light of resetting attacks. More precisely, we show that the existing proof can not be fixed and give a different proof for the claim. Finally, we define real-or-random security against resetting attacks and prove it equivalent to the notion by Yilek which is of the form left-or-right.
Improved Cryptanalysis of UOV and Rainbow
The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, we simplify the description of the Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar scheme (UOV) and its Rainbow variant, which makes it easier to understand the scheme and the existing attacks. We hope that this will make UOV and Rainbow more approachable for cryptanalysts. Secondly, we give two new attacks against the UOV and Rainbow signature schemes; the intersection attack that applies to both UOV and Rainbow and the rectangular MinRank attack that applies only to Rainbow. Our attacks are more powerful than existing attacks. In particular, we estimate that compared to previously known attacks, our new attacks reduce the cost of a key recovery by a factor of $2^{17}$, $2^{53}$, and $2^{73}$ for the parameter sets submitted to the second round of the NIST PQC standardization project targeting the security levels I, III, and V respectively. For the third round parameters, the cost is reduced by a factor of $2^{20}$, $2^{40}$, and $2^{55}$ respectively. This means all these parameter sets fall short of the security requirements set out by NIST.
Protecting the Privacy of Voters: New Definitions of Ballot Secrecy for E-Voting
Protecting the privacy of voters is a basic requirement of any electronic voting scheme, and formal definitions can be used to prove that a scheme satisfies privacy. In this work, we provide new game-based definitions of ballot secrecy for electronic voting schemes. First, we propose an intuitive definition in the honest model, i.e., a model in which all election officials are honest. Then, we show that this definition can be easily extended to the malicious ballot box setting and a setting that allows for a distributed tallier. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, we provide the first game-based definition of ballot secrecy that models both a malicious ballot box and a malicious subset of talliers. We demonstrate that our definitions of ballot secrecy are satisfiable, defining electronic voting scheme constructions which we prove satisfy our definitions. Finally, we revisit existing definitions, exploring their limitations and contextualising our contributions to the field.
Unbounded Inner-Product Functional Encryption, with Succinct Keys
In 2015, Abdalla et al. introduced Inner-Product Functional Encryption, where both ciphertexts and decryption keys are vectors of fixed size $n$, and keys enable the computation of an inner product between the two. In practice, however, the size of the data parties are dealing with may vary over time. Having a public key of size $n$ can also be inconvenient when dealing with very large vectors.
We define the Unbounded Inner-Product functionality in the context of Public-Key Functional Encryption, and introduce schemes that realize it under standard assumptions. In an Unbounded Inner-Product Functional Encryption scheme, a public key allows anyone to encrypt unbounded vectors, that are essentially mappings from $\mathbb{N}^*$ to $\mathbb{Z}_p$. The owner of the master secret key can generate functional decryption keys for other unbounded vectors. These keys enable one to evaluate the inner product between the unbounded vector underlying the ciphertext and the unbounded vector in the functional decryption key, provided certain conditions on the two vectors are met. We build Unbounded Inner-Product Functional Encryption by introducing pairings, using a technique similar to that of Boneh-Franklin Identity-Based Encryption. A byproduct of this is that our scheme can be made Identity-Based "for free". It is also the first Public-Key Inner-Product Functional Encryption Scheme with a constant size public key (and master secret key), as well constant-size functional decryption keys: each consisting of just one group element.
The Multi-Base Discrete Logarithm Problem: Tight Reductions and Non-Rewinding Proofs for Schnorr Identification and Signatures
We introduce the Multi-Base Discrete Logarithm (MBDL) problem. We use this to give reductions, for Schnorr and Okamoto identification and signatures, that are non-rewinding and, by avoiding the notorious square-root loss, tighter than the classical ones from the Discrete Logarithm (DL) problem. This fills a well-known theoretical and practical gap regarding the security of these schemes. We show that not only is the MBDL problem hard in the generic group model, but with a bound that matches that for DL, so that our new reductions justify the security of these primitives for group sizes in actual use.
CSI-RAShi: Distributed key generation for CSIDH
We present an honest-majority Distributed Key Generation protocol (DKG) based on Shamir's $(k,n)$-threshold secret sharing in the setting of Very Hard Homogenous Spaces (VHHS). DKG's in the DLOG setting use Pedersen commitments, for which there is no known analogue in the VHHS setting. As a replacement, we introduce a new primitive called piecewise verifiable proofs, which allow a prover to prove that a list of NP-statements is valid with respect to a common witness, and such that the different statements can be verified individually. Our protocol is robust and actively secure in the Quantum Random Oracle Model. For $n$ participants, the total runtime of our protocol is\break $2+\lambda+n(1+4\lambda)$ group action evaluations, where $\lambda$ is the underlying security parameter, and is thus independent of the threshold $k$. When instantiated with CSIDH-512, this amounts to approximately $4.5+18n$ seconds.
On Index Calculus Algorithms for Subfield Curves
In this paper we further the study of index calculus methods for solving the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem (ECDLP). We focus on the index calculus for subfield curves, also called Koblitz curves, defined over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with ECDLP in $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}$. Instead of accelerating the solution of polynomial systems during index calculus as was predominantly done in previous work, we define factor bases that are invariant under the $q$-power Frobenius automorphism of the field $\mathbb{F}_{q^n}$, reducing the number of polynomial systems that need to be solved. A reduction by a factor of $1/n$ is the best one could hope for. We show how to choose factor bases to achieve this, while simultaneously accelerating the linear algebra step of the index calculus method for Koblitz curves by a factor $n^2$.
Furthermore, we show how to use the Frobenius endomorphism to improve symmetry breaking for Koblitz curves.
We provide constructions of factor bases with the desired properties, and we study their impact on the polynomial system solving costs experimentally.
This work gives an answer to the problem raised in the literature on how the Frobenius endomorphism can be used to speed-up index calculus on subfield curves.
Efficient Attribute-based Proxy Re-Encryption with Constant Size Ciphertexts
Attribute-based proxy re-encryption (ABPRE) allows a semi-trusted proxy to transform an encryption under an access-policy into an encryption under a new access policy, without revealing any information about the underlying message. Such a primitive facilitates fine-grained secure sharing of encrypted data in the cloud. In its key-policy flavor, the re-encryption key is associated with an access structure that specifies which type of ciphertexts can be re-encrypted. Only two attempts have been made towards realising key-policy ABPRE (KP-ABPRE), one satisfying replayable chosen ciphertext security (RCCA security) and the other claiming to be chosen ciphertext secure (CCA secure). We show that both the systems are vulnerable to RCCA and CCA attacks respectively. We further propose a selective CCA secure KP-ABPRE scheme in this work. Since we demonstrate attacks on the only two existing RCCA secure and CCA secure schemes in the literature, our scheme becomes the first KP-ABPRE scheme satisfying selective CCA security. Moreover, our scheme has an additional attractive property, namely collusion resistance. A proxy re-encryption scheme typically consists of three parties: a delegator who delegates his decryption rights, a proxy who performs re-encryption, and a delegatee to whom the decryption power is delegated to. When a delegator wishes to share his data with a delegatee satisfying an access-policy, the proxy can collude with the malicious delegatee to attempt to obtain the private keys of the delegator during delegation period. If the private keys are exposed, security of the delegator's data is completely compromised. The proxy or the delegatee can obtain all confidential data of the delegator at will at any time, even after the delegation period is over. Hence, achieving collusion resistance is indispensable to real-world applications. In this paper, we show that our construction satisfies collusion resistance. Our scheme is proven collusion resistant and selective CCA secure in the random oracle model, based on Bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption.
RSA for poor men: a cryptosystem based on probable primes to base 2 numbers
We show it is possible to build an RSA-type cryptosystem by utilizing \textit{probable primes to base 2} numbers. Our modulus $N$ is the product $n\cdot m$ of such numbers (so here both prime and some composite, e.g. Carmichael or Fermat, numbers are acceptable) instead of prime numbers. Moreover, we require for $n$ and $m$ to be co-prime only, and so we don't have to worry about whether any of the numbers $n, m$ is composite or not.
The encryption and decryption processes are similar as those in the RSA. Hence, in this cryptosystem we may apply the above kind of numbers of arbitrary length being still sure that the system works well. The price for that is not so high: the size of a message $M$ (as a number) permitted by the new system must be smaller than log (in base 2) of $n\cdot m$.
The proposed cryptosystem can be applied in the case the numbers $n,m$ are 'sufficiently large' for a user, or as a completion of the
classical RSA if $m,n$ are probable primes but possibly not prime, or in a 'secret sharing'-type cryptosystem.
The numbers $n,m$ can be also taken from a narrower class of probable primes to base 2 numbers, e.g., Euler, or strong, or Baillie-PSW.
Semi-Commutative Masking: A Framework for Isogeny-based Protocols, with an Application to Fully Secure Two-Round Isogeny-based OT
We define semi-commutative invertible masking structures which aim to capture the methodology of exponentiation-only protocol design (such as discrete logarithm and isogeny-based cryptography). We discuss two instantiations: the first is based on commutative group actions and captures both the action of exponentiation in the discrete logarithm setting and the action of the class group of commutative endomorphism rings of elliptic curves, in the style of the CSIDH key-exchange protocol; the second is based on the semi-commutative action of isogenies of supersingular elliptic curves, in the style of the SIDH key-exchange protocol.
We then construct two oblivious transfer protocols using this new structure and prove that these UC-securely realise the oblivious transfer functionality in the random-oracle-hybrid model against passive adversaries with static corruptions.
Moreover, by starting from one of these two protocols and using the compiler introduced by Döttling et al. (Eurocrypt 2020), we
achieve the first fully UC-secure two-round OT protocol based on supersingular isogenies.
Low-gate Quantum Golden Collision Finding
The golden collision problem asks us to find a single, special collision among the outputs of a pseudorandom function. This generalizes meet-in-the-middle problems, and is thus applicable in many contexts, such as cryptanalysis of the NIST post-quantum candidate SIKE.
The main quantum algorithms for this problem are memory-intensive, and the costs of quantum memory may be very high. The quantum circuit model implies a linear cost for random access, which annihilates the exponential advantage of the previous quantum collision-finding algorithms over Grover's algorithm or classical van Oorschot-Wiener.
Assuming that quantum memory is costly to access but free to maintain, we provide new quantum algorithms for the golden collision problem with high memory requirements but low gate costs. Under the assumption of a two-dimensional connectivity layout, we provide better quantum parallelization methods for generic and golden collision finding. This lowers the quantum security of the golden collision and meet-in-the-middle problems, including SIKE.
Multivariate Cryptographic Primitive based on the product of the roots of a polynomial over a field
Cryptographic Primitives in Multivariate Public Key Cryptography are of relevant interest, specially in the quadratic case. These primitives classify the families of schemes that we encounter in this field. In this paper, the reader can find a new primitive based on the product of the roots of a polynomial over a field, where the coefficients of this polynomials are the elementary symmetric polynomials on $n$ variables, which guarantees a solution when inverting the scheme. Moreover, a cryptosystem and a digital signature scheme are built on top of this primitive, where distinct parametrizations and criteria that define the schemes are commented, along with applications of attacks available in literature.
Generic Constructions of Secure-Channel Free Searchable Encryption with Adaptive Security
For searching keywords against encrypted data, the public key encryption scheme with keyword search (PEKS), and its an extension called secure-channel free PEKS (SCF-PEKS) have been proposed.
In SCF-PEKS, a receiver makes a trapdoor for a keyword, and uploads it on a server. A sender computes an encrypted keyword, and sends it to the server. The server executes the searching procedure (called the test algorithm, which takes as inputs an encrypted keyword, trapdoor, and secret key of the server).
In this paper, we extend the security of SCF-PEKS, calling it adaptive SCF-PEKS, wherein an adversary (modeled as a ``malicious-but-legitimate" receiver) is allowed to issue test queries \emph{adaptively}, and show that adaptive SCF-PEKS can be generically constructed by anonymous identity-based encryption (anonymous IBE) only. That is, for constructing adaptive SCF-PEKS we need not require any additional cryptographic primitive when compared to the Abdalla et al. PEKS construction (J. Cryptology 2008), even though adaptive SCF-PEKS requires additional functionalities. Note that our generic construction needs to apply the KEM/DEM framework (a.k.a. hybrid encryption), where KEM stands for key encapsulation mechanism, and DEM stands for data encapsulation mechanism. We also show that there is a class of anonymous IBE that can be applied for constructing adaptive SCF-PEKS without using hybrid encryption, and propose an adaptive SCF-PEKS construction based on this IBE. Although our second construction is not fully generic, it is efficient compared to the first, since we can exclude the DEM part. Finally, we instantiate an adaptive SCF-PEKS scheme (via our second construction) that achieves a similar level of efficiency for the costs of the test procedure and encryption, compared to the (non-adaptive secure) SCF-PEKS scheme by Fang et al. (CANS2009).
An Algorithmic Reduction Theory for Binary Codes: LLL and more
In this article, we propose an adaptation of the algorithmic reduction theory of lattices to binary codes. This includes the celebrated LLL algorithm (Lenstra, Lenstra, Lovasz, 1982), as well as adaptations of associated algorithms such as the Nearest Plane Algorithm of Babai (1986). Interestingly, the adaptation of LLL to binary codes can be interpreted as an algorithmic version of the bound of Griesmer (1960) on the minimal distance of a code.
Using these algorithms, we demonstrate ---both with a heuristic analysis and in practice--- a small polynomial speed-up over the Information-Set Decoding algorithm of Lee and Brickell (1988) for random binary codes. This appears to be the first such speed-up that is not based on a time-memory trade-off.
The above speed-up should be read as a very preliminary example of the potential of a reduction theory for codes, for example in cryptanalysis. In constructive cryptography, this algorithmic reduction theory could for example also be helpful for designing trapdoor functions from codes.
MuSig-DN: Schnorr Multi-Signatures with Verifiably Deterministic Nonces
MuSig is a multi-signature scheme for Schnorr signatures, which supports key aggregation and is secure in the plain public key model. Standard derandomization techniques for discrete logarithm-based signatures such as RFC 6979, which make the signing procedure immune to catastrophic failures in the randomness generation, are not applicable to multi-signatures as an attacker could trick an honest user into producing two different partial signatures with the same randomness, which would reveal the user's secret key.
In this paper, we propose a variant of MuSig in which signers generate their nonce deterministically as a pseudorandom function of the message and all signers' public keys and prove that they did so by providing a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof to their cosigners. The resulting scheme, which we call MuSig-DN, is the first Schnorr multi-signature scheme with deterministic signing. Therefore its signing protocol is robust against failures in the randomness generation as well as attacks trying to exploit the statefulness of the signing procedure, e.g., virtual machine rewinding attacks. As an additional benefit, a signing session in MuSig-DN requires only two rounds instead of three as required by all previous Schnorr multi-signatures including MuSig. To instantiate our construction, we identify a suitable algebraic pseudorandom function and provide an efficient implementation of this function as an arithmetic circuit. This makes it possible to realize MuSig-DN efficiently using zero-knowledge proof frameworks for arithmetic circuits which support inputs given in Pedersen commitments, e.g., Bulletproofs. We demonstrate the practicality of our technique by implementing it for the secp256k1 elliptic curve used in Bitcoin.
Lattice-based Key Sharing Schemes - A Survey
Public key cryptography is an indispensable component used in almost all of our present day digital infrastructure. However, most if not all of it is predominantly built upon hardness guarantees of number theoretic problems that can be broken by large scale quantum computers in the future. Sensing the imminent threat from continued advances in quantum computing, NIST has recently initiated a global level standardization process for quantum resistant public-key cryptographic primitives such as public key encryption, digital signatures and key encapsulation mechanisms. While the process received proposals from various categories of post-quantum cryptography, lattice-based cryptography features most prominently among all the submissions. Lattice-based cryptography offers a very attractive alternative to traditional public-key cryptography mainly due to the variety of lattice-based schemes offering varying flavors of security and efficiency guarantees. In this paper, we survey the evolution of lattice-based key sharing schemes (public key encryption and key encapsulation schemes) and cover various aspects ranging from theoretical security guarantees, general algorithmic frameworks, practical implementation aspects and physical attack security, with special focus on lattice-based key sharing schemes competing in the NIST's
standardization process. Please note that our work is focussed on the results available from the second round of the NIST's standardization process while the standardization process has progressed to the third and final round at the time of publishing this document.
Revisiting ECM on GPUs
Modern public-key cryptography is a crucial part of our contemporary life where a secure communication channel with another party is needed. With the advance of more powerful computing architectures – especially Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) – traditional approaches like RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes are more and more in danger of being broken.
We present a highly optimized implementation of Lenstra’s ECM algorithm customized for GPUs. Our implementation uses state-of-the-art elliptic curve arithmetic and optimized integer arithmetic while providing the possibility of arbitrarily scaling ECM’s parameters allowing an application even for larger discrete logarithm problems. Furthermore, the proposed software is not limited to any specific GPU generation and is to the best of our knowledge the first implementation supporting multiple
device computation. To this end, for a bound of B1=8,192 and a modulus size of 192 bit, we achieve a throughput of 214 thousand ECM trials per second on a modern RTX 2080 Ti GPU considering only the first stage of ECM. To solve the Discrete Logarithm Problem for larger bit sizes, our software can easily support larger parameter sets such that a throughput of 2,781 ECM trials per second is achieved using B1=50,000, B2=5,000,000, and a modulus size of 448 bit.
The Provable Security of Ed25519: Theory and Practice
A standard requirement for a signature scheme is that it is existentially unforgeable under chosen message attacks (EUF-CMA), alongside other properties of interest such as strong unforgeability (SUF-CMA), and resilience against key substitution attacks.
Remarkably, no detailed proofs have ever been given for these security properties for EdDSA, and in particular its Ed25519 instantiations. Ed25519 is one of the most efficient and widely used signature schemes, and different instantiations of Ed25519 are used in protocols such as TLS 1.3, SSH, Tor, Zcash, and WhatsApp/Signal. The differences between these instantiations are subtle, and only supported by informal arguments, with many works assuming results can be directly transferred from Schnorr signatures. Similarly, several proofs of protocol security simply assume that Ed25519 satisfies properties such as EUF-CMA or SUF-CMA.
In this work we provide the first detailed analysis and security proofs of Ed25519 signature schemes. While the design of the schemes follows the well-established Fiat-Shamir paradigm, which should guarantee existential unforgeability, there are many side cases and encoding details that complicate the proofs, and all other security properties needed to be proven independently.
Our work provides scientific rationale for choosing among several Ed25519 variants and understanding their properties, fills a much needed proof gap in modern protocol proofs that use these signatures, and supports further standardisation efforts.
CRYSTALS -- Kyber: a CCA-secure module-lattice-based KEM
Rapid advances in quantum computing, together with the announcement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to define new standards for digital-signature, encryption, and key-establishment protocols, have created significant interest in post-quantum cryptographic schemes.
This paper introduces Kyber (part of CRYSTALS -- Cryptographic Suite for Algebraic Lattices -- a package submitted to NIST post-quantum standardization effort in November 2017), a portfolio of post-quantum cryptographic primitives built around a key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM),based on hardness assumptions over module lattices. Our KEM is most naturally seen as a successor to the NewHope KEM (Usenix 2016). In particular, the key and ciphertext sizes of our new construction are about half the size, the KEM offers CCA instead of only passive security, the security is based on a more general (and flexible) lattice problem, and our optimized implementation results in essentially the same running time as the aforementioned scheme.
We first introduce a CPA-secure public-key encryption scheme, apply a variant of the Fujisaki--Okamoto transform to create a CCA-secure KEM, and eventually construct, in a black-box manner, CCA-secure encryption, key exchange, and authenticated-key-exchange schemes. The security of our primitives is based on the hardness of Module-LWE in the classical and quantum random oracle models, and our concrete parameters conservatively target more than $128$ bits of post-quantum security.
A New Code Based Signature Scheme without Trapdoors
We present a signature scheme for Hamming metric random linear codes via the Schnorr-Lyubashevsky framework that employs the rejection sampling on appropriate probability distributions instead of using trapdoors. Such an approach has been widely believed to be more challenging for linear codes as compared to lattices with Gaussian distributions. We prove that our signature scheme achieves EUF-CMA security under the assumption of the decoding one out of many problem or achieves strong EUF-CMA security under the assumption of the codeword finding problem under relaxed parameters. We provide an instantiation of the signature scheme based on Ring-LPN instances as well as quasi-cyclic codes and present some concrete parameters. In addition, a proof of concept implementation of the scheme is provided. We compare our scheme with previous unsuccessful similar attempts and provide a rigorous security analysis of our scheme.
Our construction primarily relies on an efficient rejection sampling lemma for binary linear codes with respect to suitably defined variants of the binomial distribution. Essentially, the rejection sampling lemma indicates that adding a small weight vector to a large weight vector has no significant effect on the distribution of the large weight vector. Concretely, we prove that if the large weight is at least the square of the small weight and the large weight vector admits binomial distribution, the sum distribution of the two vectors can be efficiently adjusted to a binomial distribution via the rejection step and independent from the small weight vector. As a result, our scheme outputs a signature distribution that is independent of the secret key.
Compared to two existing code based signature schemes, namely Durandal and Wave, the security of our scheme is reduced to full-fledged hard coding problems i.e., codeword finding problem and syndrome decoding problem for random linear codes. By contrast, the security of the Durandal and Wave schemes is reduced to newly introduced product spaces subspaces indistinguishability problem and the indistinguishability of generalized $(U,U+V)$ codes problem, respectively. We believe that building our scheme upon the more mature hard coding problems provides stronger confidence to the security of our signature scheme.
Authenticated Dictionaries with Cross-Incremental Proof (Dis)aggregation
Authenticated dictionaries (ADs) are a key building block of many cryptographic systems, such as transparency logs, distributed file systems and cryptocurrencies. In this paper, we propose a new notion of cross-incremental proof (dis)aggregation for authenticated dictionaries, which enables aggregating multiple proofs with respect to different dictionaries into a single, succinct proof. Importantly, this aggregation can be done incrementally and can be later reversed via disaggregation. We give an efficient authenticated dictionary construction from hidden-order groups that achieves cross-incremental (dis)aggregation. Our construction also supports updating digests, updating (cross-)aggregated proofs and precomputing all proofs efficiently. This makes it ideal for stateless validation in cryptocurrencies with smart contracts. As an additional contribution, we give a second authenticated dictionary construction, which can be used in more malicious settings where dictionary digests are adversarially-generated, but features only “one-hop” proof aggregation (with respect to the same digest). We add support for append-only proofs to this construction, which gives us an append-only authenticated dictionary (AAD) that can be used for transparency logs and, unlike previous AAD constructions, supports updating and aggregating proofs.
On the Existence of Weak Keys for QC-MDPC Decoding
We study in this work a particular class of QC-MDPC codes for which the decoding failure rate is significantly larger than for typical QC-MDPC codes of same parameters. Our purpose is to figure out whether the existence of such weak codes impacts the security of cryptographic schemes using QC-MDPC codes as secret keys. A class of weak keys was exhibited in [DGK19]. We generalize it and show that, though their Decoding Failure Rate (DFR) is higher than normal, the set is not large enough to contribute significantly to the average DFR. It follows that with the proper semantically secure transform [HHK17], those weak keys do not affect the IND-CCA status of key encapsulation mechanisms, like BIKE, which are using QC-MDPC codes.
Two-Pass Authenticated Key Exchange with Explicit Authentication and Tight Security
We propose a generic construction of 2-pass authenticated key exchange (AKE) scheme with explicit authentication from key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and signature (SIG) schemes. We improve the security model due to Gjosteen and Jager [Crypto2018] to a stronger one. In the strong model, if a replayed message is accepted by some user, the authentication of AKE is broken. We define a new security notion named ''IND-mCPA with adaptive reveals'' for KEM. When the underlying KEM has such a security and SIG has unforgeability with adaptive corruptions, our construction of AKE equipped with counters as states is secure in the strong model, and stateless AKE without counter is secure in the traditional model. We also present a KEM possessing tight ''IND-mCPA security with adaptive reveals'' from the Computation Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. When the generic construction of AKE is instantiated with the KEM and the available SIG by Gjosteen and Jager [Crypto2018], we obtain the first practical 2-pass AKE with tight security and explicit authentication. In addition, the integration of the tightly IND-mCCA secure KEM (derived from PKE by Han et al. [Crypto2019]) and the tightly secure SIG by Bader et al. [TCC2015] results in the first tightly secure 2-pass AKE with explicit authentication in the standard model.
An Attack on Some Signature Schemes Constructed From Five-Pass Identification Schemes
We present a generic forgery attack on signature schemes constructed from 5-round identification schemes made non-interactive with the Fiat-Shamir transform. The attack applies to ID schemes that use parallel repetition to decrease the soundness error. The attack can be mitigated by increasing the number of parallel repetitions, and our analysis of the attack facilitates parameter selection.
We apply the attack to MQDSS, a post-quantum signature scheme relying on the hardness of the MQ-problem. Concretely, forging a signature for the L1 instance of MQDSS, which should provide 128 bits of security, can be done in $\approx 2^{95}$ operations. We verify the validity of the attack by implementing it for round-reduced versions of MQDSS, and the designers have revised their parameter choices accordingly.
We also survey other post-quantum signature algorithms and find the attack succeeds against PKP-DSS (a signature scheme based on the hardness of the permuted kernel problem) and list other schemes that may be affected. Finally, we use our analysis to choose parameters and investigate the performance of a 5-round variant of the Picnic scheme.
Aggregate Signature with Detecting Functionality from Group Testing
In this paper, we comprehensively study aggregate signatures with detecting functionality, that have functionality of both keyless aggregation of multiple signatures and identifying an invalid message from the aggregate signature, in order to reduce a total amount of signature-size for lots of messages.
Our contribution is (i) to formalize strong security notions for both non-interactive and interactive protocols by taking into account related work such as fault-tolerant aggregate signatures and (non-)interactive aggregate MACs with detecting functionality (i.e., symmetric case); and (ii) to construct aggregate signatures with the functionality from group testing-protocols in a generic and comprehensive way. As instantiations, pairing-based constructions are provided.
R-Propping of HK17: Upgrade for a Detached Proposal of NIST PQC First Round Survey
NIST is currently conducting the 3rd round of a survey to find post-quantum class asymmetric protocols (PQC) [1]. We participated in a joint-team with a fellow researcher of the Interamerican Open University (UAI) with a Key-Exchange Protocol (KEP) called HK17 [2]. The proposal was flawed because Bernstein [3] found a weakness, which was later refined by Li [4] using a quadratic reduction of octonions and quaternions, albeit no objection about the published non-commutative protocol and the one-way trapdoor function (OWTF). This fact promoted the search for a suitable algebraic platform. HK17 had its interest because it was the only first-round offer strictly based on canonical group theory [5]. At last, we adapted the original protocol with the R-propping solution of 3-dimensional tensors [6], yielding Bernstein attack fruitless. Therefore, an El Gamal IND-CCA2 cipher security using Cao [7] arguments are at hand.
Cryptanalysis of RSA: A Special Case of Boneh-Durfee’s Attack
Boneh-Durfee proposed (at Eurocrypt 1999) a polynomial time attacks on RSA small decryption exponent which exploits lattices
and sub-lattice structure to obtain an optimized bounds d < N^0.284 and d < N^0.292 respectively using lattice based Coppersmith’s method. In this paper we propose a special case of Boneh-Durfee’s attack with respect to large private exponent (i.e. d = N^ε > e = N^α where ε and α are the private and public key exponents respectively) for some α ≤ ε, which satisfy the condition d > φ(N) − N^ε. We analyzed lattices whose basis matrices are triangular and non-triangular using large decryption
exponent and focus group attacks respectively. The core objective is to explore RSA polynomials underlying algebraic structure so that we can improve the performance of weak key attacks. In our solution, we implemented the attack and perform several experiments to show that an RSA cryptosystem successfully attacked and revealed possible weak keys which can ultimately enables an adversary to factorize the RSA modulus.
Non-Committing Encryption with Constant Ciphertext Expansion from Standard Assumptions
Non-committing encryption (NCE) introduced by Canetti et al. (STOC '96) is a central tool to achieve multi-party computation protocols secure in the adaptive setting. Recently, Yoshida et al. (ASIACRYPT '19) proposed an NCE scheme based on the hardness of the DDH problem, which has ciphertext expansion $\mathcal{O}(\log\lambda)$ and public-key expansion $\mathcal{O}(\lambda^2)$.
In this work, we improve their result and propose a methodology to construct an NCE scheme that achieves constant ciphertext expansion.Our methodology can be instantiated from the DDH assumption and the LWE assumption. When instantiated from the LWE assumption, the public-key expansion is $\lambda\cdot\mathsf{poly}(\log\lambda)$. They are the first NCE schemes satisfying constant ciphertext expansion without using iO or common reference strings.
Along the way, we define a weak notion of NCE, which satisfies only weak forms of correctness and security.We show how to amplify such a weak NCE scheme into a full-fledged one using wiretap codes with a new security property.
SiGamal: A supersingular isogeny-based PKE and its application to a PRF
We propose two new supersingular isogeny-based public key encryptions: SiGamal and C-SiGamal. They were developed by giving an additional point of the order $2^r$ to CSIDH. SiGamal is similar to ElGamal encryption, while C-SiGamal is a compressed version of SiGamal. We prove that SiGamal and C-SiGamal are IND-CPA secure without using hash functions under a new assumption: the P-CSSDDH assumption. This assumption comes from the expectation that no efficient algorithm can distinguish between a random point and a point that is the image of a public point under a hidden isogeny.
Next, we propose a Naor-Reingold type pseudo random function (PRF) based on SiGamal. If the P-CSSDDH assumption and the CSSDDH$^*$ assumption, which guarantees the security of CSIDH that uses a prime $p$ in the setting of SiGamal, hold, then our proposed function is a pseudo random function. Moreover, we estimate that the computational costs of group actions to compute our proposed PRF are about $\sqrt{\frac{8T}{3\pi}}$ times that of the group actions in CSIDH, where $T$ is the Hamming weight of the input of the PRF.
Finally, we experimented with group actions in SiGamal and C-SiGamal. The computational costs of group actions in SiGamal-512 with a $256$-bit plaintext message space were about $2.62$ times that of a group action in CSIDH-512.
Obfuscating Finite Automata
We construct a VBB and perfect circuit-hiding obfuscator for evasive deterministic finite automata using a matrix encoding scheme with a limited zero-testing algorithm. We construct the matrix encoding scheme by extending an existing matrix FHE scheme. Using obfuscated DFAs we can for example evaluate secret regular expressions or disjunctive normal forms on public inputs. In particular, the possibility of evaluating regular expressions solves the open problem of obfuscated substring matching.
ABDKS Attribute-Based Encryption with Dynamic Keyword Search in Fog Computing
Attribute-based encryption with keyword search (ABKS) achieves both fine-grained access control and keyword search.
However, in the previous ABKS schemes, the search algorithm requires that each keyword between the target keyword set and the ciphertext keyword set be the same, otherwise the algorithm doesn't output any search result, which is not conducive to use. Moreover, the previous ABKS schemes are vulnerable to what we call a \emph{peer-decryption attack}, that is, the ciphertext may be eavesdropped and decrypted by an adversary who has sufficient authorities but no information about the ciphertext keywords.
In this paper, we provide a new system in fog computing, the ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption with dynamic keyword search (ABDKS). In ABDKS, the search algorithm requires only \emph{one} keyword to be identical between the two keyword sets and outputs the corresponding correlation which reflects the number of the same keywords in those two sets.
In addition, our ABDKS is resistant to peer-decryption attack, since the decryption requires not only sufficient authority but also at least one keyword of the ciphertext. Beyond that, the ABDKS shifts most computational overheads from resource constrained users to fog nodes. The security analysis shows that the ABDKS can resist Chosen-Plaintext Attack (CPA) and Chosen-Keyword Attack (CKA).
Efficient Post-Quantum SNARKs for RSIS and RLWE and their Applications to Privacy
In this paper we give efficient statistical zero-knowledge proofs (SNARKs) for Module/Ring LWE and Module/Ring SIS relations, providing the remaining ingredient for building efficient cryptographic protocols from lattice-based hardness assumptions.
We achieve our results by exploiting the linear-algebraic nature of the statements supported by the Aurora proof system (Ben-Sasson et al.), which allows us to easily and efficiently encode the linear-algebraic statements that arise in lattice schemes and to side-step the issue of "relaxed extractors", meaning extractors that only recover a witness for a larger relation than the one for which completeness is guaranteed.
We apply our approach to the example use case of partially dynamic group signatures and obtain a lattice-based group signature that protects users against corrupted issuers, and that produces signatures smaller than the state of the art, with signature sizes of less than 300 KB for the comparably secure version of the scheme.
To obtain our argument size estimates for proof of knowledge of RLWE secret, we implemented the NIZK using libiop.
Constant-time verification for cut-and-choose-based signatures
In most post-quantum signature protocols, the verification procedure leaks information about which signature is being verified, and/or which public key is being used to verify the signature, to timing and other side-channel attacks. In some applications, this information leak is a breach of user privacy or system security.
One class of signature protocols, based on the parallel composition of many runs of one or more interactive cut-and-choose protocols, can be modified to enable constant-time verification at low cost by fixing the multiset of challenges which will be chosen at the cut-and-choose step and randomizing only their order based on the hash of the input message. As a side benefit, this technique naturally makes the size and structure of signatures a fixed system parameter, even if the underlying cut-and-choose protocol has different response sizes for each possible challenge at the cut-and-choose step.
When applied to a 5-pass “$q2$” interactive protocol, this technique requires essentially no extra rounds due to how fixed-weight binary vectors interact with the Kales--Zaverucha structural attack. Alternatively, when the data which must be transmitted for one of the two possible challenge values is significantly shorter than the other, or can be made so using standard and/or specialized compression techniques, a longer, lower-weight challenge vector can be used to obtain shorter signatures at the cost of more rounds of the underlying interactive protocol, with a much shallower computation-vs.-size tradeoff than the precomputation tree approach used in Picnic2, MUDFISH, and SUSHSYFISH.
As an example, these techniques reduce MQDSS signatures to under 15 kB and PKP-DSS signatures to under 14 kB with NIST Category 1 security against both secret key recovery and signature forgery.
Further improvements in design and parameters allow PKP-DSS signatures under 10 kB with a security level and performance acceptable for almost all interactive authentication.
The asymptotic ROM proof of security published with MQDSS remains applicable to the optimized system, but the QROM proofs by Don et al. turn out to be invalid even for unmodified MQDSS.
Optimal Broadcast Encryption from LWE and Pairings in the Standard Model
Broadcast Encryption with optimal parameters was a long-standing problem, whose first solution was provided in an elegant work by Boneh, Waters and Zhandry [BWZ14]. However, this work relied on multilinear maps of logarithmic degree, which is not considered a standard assumption. Recently, Agrawal and Yamada [AY20] improved this state of affairs by providing the first construction of optimal broadcast encryption from Bilinear Maps and Learning With Errors (LWE). However, their proof of security was in the generic bilinear group model. In this work, we improve upon their result by providing a new construction and proof in the standard model. In more detail, we rely on the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumption and the Knowledge of OrthogonALity Assumption (KOALA) [BW19] on bilinear groups.
Our construction combines three building blocks: a (computational) nearly linear secret sharing scheme with compact shares which we construct from LWE, an inner-product functional encryption scheme with special properties which is constructed from the bilinear Matrix Decision Diffie Hellman (MDDH) assumption, and a certain form of hyperplane obfuscation, which is constructed using the KOALA assumption. While similar to that of Agrawal and Yamada, our construction provides a new understanding of how to decompose the construction into simpler, modular building blocks with concrete and easy-to-understand security requirements for each one. We believe this sheds new light on the requirements for optimal broadcast encryption, which may lead to new constructions in the future.
New Techniques for Traitor Tracing: Size $N^{1/3}$ and More from Pairings
The best existing pairing-based traitor tracing schemes have $O(\sqrt{N})$-sized parameters, which has stood since 2006. This intuitively seems to be consistent with the fact that pairings allow for degree-2 computations, yielding a quadratic compression.
In this work, we show that this intuition is false by building a tracing scheme from pairings with $O(\sqrt[3]{N})$-sized parameters. We additionally give schemes with a variety of parameter size trade-offs, including a scheme with constant-size ciphertexts and public keys (but linear-sized secret keys). All of our schemes make black-box use of the pairings. We obtain our schemes by developing a number of new traitor tracing techniques, giving the first significant parameter improvements in pairings-based traitor tracing in over a decade.
A taxonomy of pairings, their security, their complexity
The Kim-Barbulescu attack against pairings made it necessary to increase the key sizes of the most popular families of pairings : BN, BLS-12, KSS-16, KSS-18 and BLS-24. The computation of new key sizes was a slow process because it was done in two waves : first a series of theoretical estimations, then a wave of precise estimations based on practical models. In this paper, we propose an up-to-date security evaluation for more then hundred pairing friendly elliptic curves. We evaluate the complexity of a complete pairing execution taking into account the Miller algorithm for different degree of twist and the Final exponentiation for the most promising curves. At 128 bits of security we find that the best pairings in the BD model are BLS-24 and BLS-12. The best pairings are not affected by the new polynomial selection method. At 192 bits of security, we find that the new champions are the less known BLS-24, KSS-16 and KSS-18. At 256 bits of security we conclude that the best pairing is BLS-27.
Public-Key Generation with Verifiable Randomness
We revisit the problem of proving that a user algorithm selected and correctly used a truly random seed in the generation of her cryptographic key. A first approach was proposed in 2002 by Juels and Guajardo for the validation of RSA secret keys. We present a new security model and general tools to efficiently prove that a private key was generated at random according to a prescribed process, without revealing any further information about the private key.
In addition to formalizing randomness verifiability in key generation, which turns out to be highly non-trivial, we give a generic protocol for all key-generation algorithms based on probabilistic circuits and prove its security. We also propose a new protocol for factoring-based cryptography that we prove secure in the aforementioned model, as well as a practical instantiation. This latter relies on a new efficient zero-knowledge argument for the double discrete logarithm problem that achieves an exponential improvement in communication complexity compared to the state of the art, and is of independent interest.
Equipping Public-Key Cryptographic Primitives with Watermarking (or: A Hole Is to Watermark)
Program watermarking enables users to embed an arbitrary string called a mark into a program while preserving the functionality of the program. Adversaries cannot remove the mark without destroying the functionality. Although there exist generic constructions of watermarking schemes for public-key cryptographic (PKC) primitives, those schemes are constructed from scratch and not efficient.
In this work, we present a general framework to equip a broad class of PKC primitives with an efficient watermarking scheme. The class consists of PKC primitives that have a canonical all-but-one (ABO) reduction. Canonical ABO reductions are standard techniques to prove selective security of PKC primitives, where adversaries must commit a target attribute at the beginning of the security game. Thus, we can obtain watermarking schemes for many existing efficient PKC schemes from standard cryptographic assumptions via our framework. Most well-known selectively secure PKC schemes have canonical ABO reductions. Notably, we can achieve watermarking for public-key encryption whose ciphertexts and secret-keys are constant-size, and that is chosen-ciphertext secure.
Our approach accommodates the canonical ABO reduction technique to the puncturable pseudorandom function (PRF) technique, which is used to achieve watermarkable PRFs. We find that canonical ABO reductions are compatible with such puncturable PRF-based watermarking schemes.
Cryptanalysis of a round optimal lattice-based multisignature scheme
Kansal and Dutta recently proposed a multisignature scheme at AFRICACRYPT 2020. This is the first lattice-based multisignature scheme that generates a multisignature in only a single round of interaction and supports public key aggregation. In this letter, we provide a cryptanalysis of this multisignature scheme and demonstrate that the scheme does not satisfy unforgeability requirements. We present an attack strategy to demonstrate that if an adversary obtains a sufficient number of signatures from a signer, he/she can recover the private key of the signer in polynomial time. We also uncover the root cause of the attack and provide a possible solution for this attack to aid future designs of secure multisignature schemes.
Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation for Computationally-Secure Randomness, Consensus, and Threshold Signatures.
In this paper, we present the first fully asynchronous distributed key generation (ADKG) algorithm as well as the first distributed key generation algorithm that can create keys with a dual $(f,2f+1)-$threshold that are necessary for scalable consensus (which so far needs a trusted dealer assumption).
In order to create a DKG with a dual $(f,2f+1)-$ threshold we first answer in the affirmative the open question posed by Cachin et al. how to create an AVSS protocol with recovery thresholds $ f+1 < k \le 2f+1$, which is of independent interest.
Our High-threshold-AVSS (\textit{HAVSS}) uses an asymmetric bi-variate polynomial, where the secret shared is hidden from any set of $k$ nodes but an honest node that did not participate in the sharing phase can still recover his share with only $n-2f$ shares, hence be able to contribute in the secret reconstruction.
Another building block for ADKG is a novel \textit{Eventually Perfect} Common Coin (EPCC) abstraction and protocol that enables the participants to create a common coin that might fail to agree at most $f+1$ times (even if invoked a polynomial number of times).
Using \textit{EPCC} we implement an Eventually Efficient Asynchronous Binary Agreement (EEABA) in which each instance takes $O(n^2)$ bits and $O(1)$ rounds in expectation, except for at most $f+1$ instances which may take $O(n^4)$ bits and $O(n)$ rounds in total.
Using EEABA we construct the first fully Asynchronous Distributed Key Generation (ADKG) which has the same overhead and expected runtime as the best partially-synchronous DKG ($O(n^4)$ words, $O(n)$ rounds).
As a corollary of our ADKG we can also create the first Validated Asynchronous Byzantine Agreement (VABA) in the authenticated setting that does not need a trusted dealer to setup threshold signatures of degree $n-f$. Our VABA has an overhead of expected $O(n^2)$ words and $O(1)$ time per instance after an initial $O(n^4)$ words and $O(n)$ time bootstrap via ADKG.
Adaptively Secure Inner Product Encryption from LWE
Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is an advanced form of encryption scheme allowing for access policies to be embedded within the secret keys and ciphertexts.
By now, we have ABEs supporting numerous types of policies based on hardness assumptions over bilinear maps and lattices.
However, one of the distinguishing differences between ABEs based on these two breeds of assumptions is that the former can achieve adaptive security for quite expressible policies (e.g., inner-products, boolean formula) while the latter can not.
Recently, two adaptively secure lattice-based ABEs have appeared and changed the state of affairs:
a non-zero inner-product (NIPE) encryption by Katsumata and Yamada (PKC'19) and an ABE for $t$-CNF policies by Tsabary (CRYPTO'19).
However, the policies supported by these ABEs are still quite limited and do not embrace the more interesting policies that have been studied in the literature.
Notably, constructing an adaptively secure inner-product encryption (IPE) based on lattices still remains open.
In this work, we propose the first adaptively secure IPE based on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption with sub-exponential modulus size (without resorting to complexity leveraging).
Concretely, our IPE supports inner-products over the integers $\mathbb{Z}$ with polynomial sized entries and satisfies adaptively weakly-attribute-hiding security.
We also show how to convert such an IPE to an IPE supporting inner-products over $\mathbb{Z}_p$ for a polynomial-sized $p$ and a fuzzy identity-based encryption (FIBE) for small and large universes.
Our result builds on the ideas presented in Tsabary (CRYPTO'19), which uses constrained pseudorandom functions (CPRF) in a semi-generic way to achieve adaptively secure ABEs, and the recent lattice-based adaptively secure CPRF for inner-products by Davidson et al. (CRYPTO'20).
Our main observation is realizing how to weaken the conforming CPRF property introduced in Tsabary (CRYPTO'19) by taking advantage of the specific linearity property enjoyed by the lattice evaluation algorithms by Boneh et al. (EUROCRYPT'14).
On the security of Diene-Thabet-Yusuf's cubic multivariate signature scheme
Diene, Thabet and Yusuf recently proposed a new multivariate signature scheme whose public key is a set of multivariate cubic polynomials over a finite field. This paper studies its security.
Extended Galbraith's Test on the Anonymity of IBEs from Higher Residuosity
At PKC 2019, Clear and McGoldrick presented the first identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme that supports homomorphic addition modulo a poly-sized prime $e$. Assuming that deciding solvability of a special system of multivariate polynomial equations is hard, they proved that their scheme for $e>2$ is anonymous. In this paper, we review the classical Galbraith's test on the anonymity of the first pairing-free IBE scheme due to Cocks. With the eye of the reciprocity law over $\mathbb{F}_\mathtt{q}[x]$, we can have a profound understanding of the test and naturally extend it to give a practical attack on the anonymity of the Clear-McGoldrick IBE scheme. Furthermore, we believe that our technique plays a crucial role in anonymizing IBE schemes from higher residuosity.
Quantum algorithms for computing general discrete logarithms and orders with tradeoffs
We generalize our earlier works on computing short discrete logarithms with tradeoffs, and bridge them with Seifert's work on computing orders with tradeoffs, and with Shor's groundbreaking works on computing orders and general discrete logarithms. In particular, we enable tradeoffs when computing general discrete logarithms.
Compared to Shor's algorithm, this yields a reduction by up to a factor of two in the number of group operations evaluated quantumly in each run, at the expense of having to perform multiple runs. Unlike Shor's algorithm, our algorithm does not require the group order to be known. It simultaneously computes both the order and the logarithm.
We analyze the probability distributions induced by our algorithm, and by Shor's and Seifert's order finding algorithms, describe how these algorithms may be simulated when the solution is known, and estimate the number of runs required for a given minimum success probability when making different tradeoffs.
Anonymous IBE From Quadratic Residuosity With Fast Encryption
We develop two variants of Cocks' identity-based encryption. One variant has faster encryption, where the most time-consuming part only requires several modular multiplications. The other variant makes the first variant anonymous under suitable complexity assumptions, while its decryption efficiency is about twice lower than the first one. Both the variants have ciphertext expansion twice more extensive than the original Cocks' identity-based encryption. To alleviate the issue of the second variant's large ciphertext expansion, we consider using it to construct a public-key encryption with keyword search scheme with a fast encryption algorithm.
Unbounded HIBE with Tight Security
We propose the first tightly secure and unbounded hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE) scheme based on standard assumptions. Our main technical contribution is a novel proof strategy that allows us to tightly randomize user secret keys for identities with arbitrary hierarchy depths using low entropy hidden in a small and hierarchy-independent master public key.
The notion of unbounded HIBE is proposed by Lewko and Waters (Eurocrypt 2011). In contrast to most HIBE schemes, an unbounded scheme does not require any maximum depth to be specified in the setup phase, and user secret keys or ciphertexts can be generated for identities of arbitrary depths with hierarchy-independent system parameters.
While all the previous unbounded HIBE schemes have security loss that grows at least linearly in the number of user secret key queries, the security loss of our scheme is only dependent on the security parameter, even in the multi-challenge setting, where an adversary can ask for multiple challenge ciphertexts. We prove the adaptive security of our scheme based on the Matrix Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in prime-order pairing groups, which generalizes a family of standard Diffie-Hellman assumptions such as k-Linear.
Estimating quantum speedups for lattice sieves
Quantum variants of lattice sieve algorithms are routinely used to assess the security of lattice based cryptographic constructions. In this work we provide a heuristic, non-asymptotic, analysis of the cost of several algorithms for near neighbour search on high dimensional spheres. These algorithms are key components of lattice sieves. We design quantum circuits for near neighbour search algorithms and provide software that numerically optimises algorithm parameters according to various cost metrics. Using this software we estimate the cost of classical and quantum near neighbour search on spheres. For the most performant near neighbour search algorithm that we analyse we find a small quantum speedup in dimensions of cryptanalytic interest. Achieving this speedup requires several optimistic physical and algorithmic assumptions.
Circular Security Is Complete for KDM Security
Circular security is the most elementary form of key-dependent message (KDM) security, which allows us to securely encrypt only a copy of secret key bits. In this work, we show that circular security is complete for KDM security in the sense that an encryption scheme satisfying this security notion can be transformed into one satisfying KDM security with respect to all functions computable by a-priori bounded-size circuits (bounded-KDM security). This result holds in the presence of any number of keys and in any of secret-key/public-key and CPA/CCA settings. Such a completeness result was previously shown by Applebaum (EUROCRYPT 2011) for KDM security with respect to projection functions (projection-KDM security) that allows us to securely encrypt both a copy and a negation of secret key bits.
Besides amplifying the strength of KDM security, our transformation in fact can start from an encryption scheme satisfying circular security against CPA attacks and results in one satisfying bounded-KDM security against CCA attacks.
This result improves the recent result by Kitagawa and Matsuda (TCC 2019) showing a CPA-to-CCA transformation for KDM secure public-key encryption schemes.
Incrementally Aggregatable Vector Commitments and Applications to Verifiable Decentralized Storage
Vector commitments with subvector openings (SVC) [Lai-Malavolta, Boneh-Bunz-Fisch; CRYPTO'19] allow one to open a committed vector at a set of positions with an opening of size independent of both the vector's length and the number of opened positions.
We continue the study of SVC with two goals in mind: improving their efficiency and making them more suitable to decentralized settings.
We address both problems by proposing a new notion for VC that we call incremental aggregation and that allows
one to merge openings in a succinct way an unbounded number of times. We show two applications of this property. The first one is immediate and is a method to generate openings in a distributed way. For the second one, we use incremental aggregation to design an algorithm for faster generation of openings via preprocessing.
We then proceed to realize SVC with incremental aggregation. We provide two constructions in groups of unknown order that, similarly to that of Boneh et al. (which supports only one-hop aggregation), have constant-size public parameters, commitments and openings. As an additional feature, for the first construction we propose efficient arguments of knowledge of subvector openings which immediately yields a keyless proof of storage with compact proofs.
Finally, we address a problem closely related to that of SVC: storing a file efficiently in completely decentralized networks. We introduce and construct verifiable decentralized storage (VDS), a cryptographic primitive that allows to check the integrity of a file stored by a network of nodes in a distributed and decentralized way. Our VDS constructions rely on our new vector commitment techniques.
Possibility and Impossibility Results for Receiver Selective Opening Secure PKE in the Multi-Challenge Setting
Public key encryption (PKE) schemes are usually deployed in an open system with numerous users. In practice, it is common that some users are corrupted. A PKE scheme is said to be receiver selective opening (RSO) secure if it can still protect messages transmitted to uncorrupted receivers after the adversary corrupts some receivers and learns their secret keys. This is usually defined by requiring the existence of a simulator that can simulate the view of the adversary given only the opened messages. Existing works construct RSO secure PKE schemes in a single-challenge setting, where the adversary can only obtain one challenge ciphertext for each public key. However, in practice, it is preferable to have a PKE scheme with RSO security in the multi-challenge setting, where public keys can be used to encrypt multiple messages.
In this work, we explore the possibility of achieving PKE schemes with receiver selective opening security in the multi-challenge setting. Our contributions are threefold. First, we demonstrate that PKE schemes with RSO security in the single-challenge setting are not necessarily RSO secure in the multi-challenge setting. Then, we show that it is impossible to achieve RSO security for PKE schemes if the number of challenge ciphertexts under each public key is a priori unbounded. In particular, we prove that no PKE scheme can be RSO secure in the k-challenge setting (i.e., the adversary can obtain k challenge ciphertexts for each public key) if its secret key contains less than k bits. On the positive side, we give a concrete construction of PKE scheme with RSO security in the k-challenge setting, where the ratio of the secret key length to k approaches the lower bound 1.
Subvert KEM to Break DEM: Practical Algorithm-Substitution Attacks on Public-Key Encryption
Motivated by the currently widespread concern about mass surveillance of encrypted communications, Bellare \emph{et al.} introduced at CRYPTO 2014 the notion of Algorithm-Substitution Attack (ASA) where the legitimate encryption algorithm is replaced by a subverted one that aims to undetectably exfiltrate the secret key via ciphertexts. Practically implementable ASAs on various cryptographic primitives (Bellare \emph{et al.}, CRYPTO'14 \& ACM CCS'15; Ateniese \emph{et al.}, ACM CCS'15; Berndt and Liśkiewicz, ACM CCS'17) have been constructed and analyzed, leaking the secret key successfully. Nevertheless, in spite of much progress, the practical impact of ASAs (formulated originally for symmetric key cryptography) on public-key (PKE) encryption operations remains unclear, primarily since the encryption operation of PKE does not involve the secret key, and also previously known ASAs become relatively inefficient for leaking the plaintext due to the logarithmic upper bound of exfiltration rate (Berndt and Liśkiewicz, ACM CCS'17).
In this work, we formulate a practical ASA on PKE encryption algorithm which, perhaps surprisingly, turns out to be much more efficient and robust than existing ones, showing that ASAs on PKE schemes are far more effective and dangerous than previously believed. We mainly target PKE of hybrid encryption which is the most prevalent way to employ PKE in the literature and in practice. The main strategy of our ASA is to subvert the underlying key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) so that the session key encapsulated could be efficiently extracted, which, in turn, breaks the data encapsulation mechanism (DEM) enabling us to learn the plaintext itself. Concretely, our non-black-box yet quite general attack enables recovering the plaintext from only two successive ciphertexts and minimally depends on a short state of previous internal randomness. A widely used class of KEMs is shown to be subvertible by our powerful attack.
Our attack relies on a novel identification and formalization of certain properties that yield practical ASAs on KEMs. More broadly, it points at and may shed some light on exploring structural weaknesses of other ``composed cryptographic primitives,'' which may make them susceptible to more dangerous ASAs with effectiveness that surpasses the known logarithmic upper bound (i.e., reviewing composition as an attack enabler).
Random Self-reducibility of Ideal-SVP via Arakelov Random Walks
Fixing a number field, the space of all ideal lattices, up to isometry, is naturally an Abelian group, called the *Arakelov class group*. This fact, well known to number theorists, has so far not been explicitly used in the literature on lattice-based cryptography. Remarkably, the Arakelov class group is a combination of two groups that have already led to significant cryptanalytic advances: the class group and the unit torus.
In the present article, we show that the Arakelov class group has more to offer. We start with the development of a new versatile tool: we prove that, subject to the Riemann Hypothesis for Hecke $L$-functions, certain random walks on the Arakelov class group have a rapid mixing property. We then exploit this result to relate the average-case and the worst-case of the Shortest Vector Problem in ideal lattices. Our reduction appears particularly sharp: for Hermite-SVP in ideal lattices of certain cyclotomic number fields, it loses no more than a $\tilde O(\sqrt n)$ factor on the Hermite approximation factor.
Furthermore, we suggest that this rapid-mixing theorem should find other applications in cryptography and in algorithmic number theory.
Dynamic Decentralized Functional Encryption
We introduce Dynamic Decentralized Functional Encryption (DDFE), a generalization of Functional Encryption which allows multiple users to join the system dynamically, without relying on a trusted third party or on expensive and interactive Multi-Party Computation protocols.
This notion subsumes existing multi-user extensions of Functional Encryption, such as Multi-Input, Multi-Client, and Ad Hoc Multi-Input Functional Encryption.
We define and construct schemes for various functionalities which serve as building-blocks for latter primitives and may be useful in their own right, such as a scheme for dynamically computing sums in any Abelian group. These constructions build upon simple primitives in a modular way, and have instantiations from well-studied assumptions, such as DDH or LWE.
Our constructions culminate in an Inner-Product scheme for computing weighted sums on aggregated encrypted data, from standard assumptions in prime-order groups in the Random Oracle Model.
An Adaptive Attack on 2-SIDH
We present a polynomial-time adaptive attack on the 2-SIDH protocol. The 2-SIDH protocol is a special instance of the countermeasure proposed by Azarderakhsh, Jao and Leonardi to perform isogeny-based key exchange with static keys in the presence of an adaptive attack. This countermeasure has also been recently explicitly proposed by Kayacan.
Our attack extends the adaptive attack by Galbraith, Petit, Shani and Ti (GPST) to recover a static secret key using malformed points. The extension of GPST is non-trivial and requires learning additional information. In particular, the attack needs to recover intermediate elliptic curves in the isogeny path, and points on them. We also discuss how to extend the attack to k-SIDH when k > 2 and explain that the attack complexity is exponential in k.
Certificateless Public Key Signature Schemes from Standard Algorithms
Certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) is designed to have succinct public key management without using certificates at the same time avoid the key-escrow attribute in the identity-based cryptography. However, it appears difficult to construct CL-PKC schemes from standard algorithms. Security mechanisms employing self-certified key (also known as implicit certificate) can achieve same goals. But there still lacks rigorous security definitions for implicit-certificate-based mechanisms and such type of schemes were not analyzed formally and often found vulnerable to attacks later. In this work, we first unify the security notions of these two types of mechanisms within an extended CL-PKC formulation. We then present a general
key-pair generation algorithm for CL-PKC schemes and use it with the key prefixing technique to construct certificateless public key signature (CL-PKS) schemes from standard algorithms. The security of the schemes is analyzed within the new model, and it shows that the applied technique helps defeat known-attacks against existing constructions. The resulting schemes could be quickly deployed based on the existing standard algorithm implementations. They are particularly useful in the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide security services such as entity authentication, data integrity and non-repudiation because of their low computation cost, bandwidth consumption and storage requirement.
An Efficient NIZK Scheme for Privacy-Preserving Transactions over Account-Model Blockchain
We introduce the abstract framework of decentralized smart contracts system with balance and transaction amount hiding property under the ACCOUNT architecture. To build a concrete system with such properties, we utilize a homomorphic public key encryption scheme and construct a highly efficient non-interactive zero knowledge (NIZK) argument based upon the encryption scheme to ensure the validity of the transactions. Our NIZK scheme is perfect zero knowledge in the common reference string model, while its soundness holds in the random oracle model. Compared to previous similar constructions, our proposed NIZK argument dramatically improves the time efficiency in generating a proof, at the cost of relatively longer proof size.
Machine-Learning assisted Side-Channel Attacks on RNS-based Elliptic Curve Implementations using Hybrid Feature Engineering
Side-channel attacks based on machine learning have recently been introduced to recover the secret information from software and hardware implementations of mathematically secure algorithms. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have proven to outperform the template attacks due to their ability of handling misalignment in the symmetric algorithms leakage data traces. However, one of the limitations of deep learning algorithms is the requirement of huge datasets for model training. For evaluation scenarios, where limited leakage trace instances are available, simple machine learning with the selection of proper feature engineering, data splitting, and validation techniques, can be more effective. Moreover, limited analysis exists for public-key algorithms, especially on non-traditional implementations like those using Residue Number System (RNS). Template attacks are successful on RNS-based Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), only if the aligned portion is used in templates. In this study, we present a systematic methodology for the evaluation of ECC cryptosystems with and without countermeasures against machine learning side-channel attacks using two attack models. RNS-based ECC datasets have been evaluated using four machine learning classifiers and comparison is provided with existing state-of-the-art template attacks. Moreover, we analyze the impact of raw features and advanced hybrid feature engineering techniques, along with the effect of splitting ratio. We discuss the metrics and procedures that can be used for accurate classification on the imbalance datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, for ECC RNS datasets, the efficiency of simple machine learning algorithms is better than the complex deep learning techniques when such datasets are not so huge.
RISQ-V: Tightly Coupled RISC-V Accelerators for Post-Quantum Cryptography
Empowering electronic devices to support Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a challenging task. PQC introduces new mathematical elements and operations which are usually not easy to implement on standard processors. Especially for low cost and resource constraint devices, hardware acceleration is usually required. In addition, as the standardization process of PQC is still ongoing, a focus on maintaining flexibility is mandatory. To cope with such requirements, hardware/software co-design techniques have been recently used for developing complex and highly customized PQC solutions. However, while most of the previous works have developed loosely coupled PQC accelerators, the design of tightly coupled accelerators and Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extensions for PQC have been barely explored. To this end, we present RISQ-V, an enhanced RISC-V architecture that integrates a set of powerful tightly coupled accelerators to speed up lattice-based PQC. RISQ-V efficiently reuses processor resources and reduces the amount of memory accesses. This significantly increases the performance while keeping the silicon area overhead low. We present three contributions. First, we propose a set of powerful hardware accelerators deeply integrated into the RISC-V pipeline. Second, we extended the RISC-V ISA with 29 new instructions to efficiently perform operations for lattice-based cryptography. Third, we implemented our RISQ-V in ASIC technology and on FPGA. We evaluated the performance of NewHope, Kyber, and Saber on RISQ-V. Compared to the pure software implementation on RISC-V, our co-design implementations show a speedup factor of up to 11.4 for NewHope, 9.6 for Kyber, and 2.7 for Saber. For the ASIC implementation, the energy consumption was reduced by factors of up to 9.5 for NewHope, 7.7 for Kyber, and 2.1 for Saber. The cell count of the CPU was increased by a factor of 1.6 compared to the original RISC-V design, which can be considered as a moderate increase for the achieved performance gain.
RLWE-based Zero-Knowledge Proofs for linear and multiplicative relations
We present efficient Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge (ZKPoK) for linear and multiplicative relations among secret messages hidden as Ring Learning With Errors (RLWE) samples. Messages are polynomials in $\mathbb{Z}_q[x]/\left<x^{n}+1\right>$ and our proposed protocols for a ZKPoK are based on the celebrated paper by Stern on identification schemes using coding problems (Crypto'93). Our $5$-move protocol achieves a soundness error slightly above $1/2$ and perfect Zero-Knowledge.
As an application we present Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Knowledge of relations between committed messages. The resulting commitment scheme is perfectly binding with overwhelming probability over the choice of the public key, and computationally hiding under the RLWE assumption. Compared with previous Stern-based commitment scheme proofs we decrease computational complexity, improve the size of the parameters and reduce the soundness error of each round.
Incorrectly Generated RSA Keys: How To Recover Lost Plaintexts
When generating primes $p$ and $q$ for an RSA key, the algorithm specifies that they should be checked to see that $p-1$ and $q-1$ are relatively prime to the public exponent $e$, and regenerated if this is not the case.
If this is not done, then the calculation of the decrypt exponent will fail.
However, what if a software bug allows the generation of public parameters $N$ and $e$ of an RSA key with this property and then it is subsequently used for encryption?
Though this may seem like a purely academic question, a software bug in the RSA key generation implementation in the CNG API of a preview release of the Windows 10 operating system makes this question of more than purely hypothetical value.
Without a well defined decrypt exponent, plaintexts encrypted to such keys will be undecryptable thus potentially losing user data, a serious software defect.
Though the decrypt exponent is no longer well defined, it is in fact possible to recover the plaintext, or a small number of potential plaintexts if the prime factors $p$ and $q$ of the public modulus $N$ are known.
This paper presents an analysis of what steps fail in the RSA algorithm and use this to give a plaintext recovery algorithm.
The runtime of the algorithm scales linearly in the magnitude of the public exponent, in practice this is manageable as there are only a few small public exponents that are used.
This algorithm has been implemented in a publicly available python script.
We further discuss the software bug that lead to this and derive lessons that can be used while testing randomized functions in cryptographic software.
Specifically, we derive an explicit formula that describes the trade off between number of iterations of tests of a randomized cryptographic functions and the potential number of users affected by a bug dependent on the random values.
Synced Hash-Based Signatures: Post-Quantum Authentication in a Blockchain
A new post-quantum, hash-based signature (HBS) scheme is introduced. In known HBS, the size and cost of each signature increase as the total number of messages one wishes to authenticate increase. In real-world applications, requiring large volumes of signatures, they can become impractical. This paper studies HBS in a blockchain: a public, decentralized database. The proposed HBS scheme shows that, when all signatures are known, quite the opposite is possible: the signatures can become more efficient as the number of signatures grows. Authenticating large volumes of messages results less costly on average than authenticating only a few.
Certificate-Based Parallel Key-Insulated Aggregate Signature Against Fully Chosen-Key Attacks for Industrial Internet of Things
With the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), numerous operations based on smart devices contribute to producing convenience and comfortable applications for individuals and organizations. Considering the untrusted feature of the communication channels in IIoT, it is essential to ensure the authentication and incontestableness of the messages transmitted in the IIoT. In this paper, we firstly proposed a certificate-based parallel key-insulated aggregate signature (CB-PKIAS), which can resist the fully chosen-key attacks. Concretely, the adversary who can obtain the private keys of all signers in the system is able to forge a valid aggregate signature by using the invalid single signature. Furthermore, our scheme inherits the merits of certificate-based and key-insulated to avoid the certificate management problem, key escrow problems as well as the key exposures simultaneously. In addition, the rigorous analysis and the concrete simulation experiment demonstrated that our proposed scheme is secure under the random oracle and more suitable for the IIoT environment.
Simple and Efficient FE for Quadratic Functions
This paper presents the first functional encryption schemes for quadratic functions (or degree-2 polynomials) achieving simulation-based security in the semi-adaptive model with constant-size secret key. The unique prior construction with the same security guarantee by Gay [PKC 20] has secret keys of size linear in the message size. They also enjoy shorter ciphertexts:
- our first scheme is based on bilateral DLIN (decisional linear) assumption as Gay's scheme and the ciphertext is 15% shorter;
- our second scheme based on SXDH assumption and bilateral DLIN assumption is more efficient; it has 67% shorter ciphertext than previous SXDH-based scheme with selective indistinguishability security by Baltico et al. [CRYPTO 17]; the efficiency is comparable to their second scheme in the generic group model.
Technically, we roughly combine Wee's ``secret-key-to-public-key'' compiler [TCC 17] with Gay's paradigm [PKC 20]. We avoid (partial) function-hiding inner-product functional encryption used in Gay's work and make our schemes conceptually simpler.
Collusion Resistant Trace-and-Revoke for Arbitrary Identities from Standard Assumptions
A traitor tracing scheme is a multi-user public-key encryption scheme where each user in the system holds a decryption key that is associated with the user's identity. Using the public key, a content distributor can encrypt a message to all of the users in the system. At the same time, if a malicious group of users combine their respective decryption keys to build a "pirate decoder," there is an efficient tracing algorithm that the content distributor can use to identify at least one of the keys used to construct the decoder. A trace-and-revoke scheme is an extension of a standard traitor tracing scheme where there is an additional key-revocation mechanism that the content distributor can use to disable the decryption capabilities of compromised keys. Namely, during encryption, the content distributor can encrypt a message with respect to a list of revoked users such that only non-revoked users can decrypt the resulting ciphertext.
Trace-and-revoke schemes are challenging to construct. Existing constructions from standard assumptions can only tolerate bounded collusions (i.e., there is an a priori bound on the number of keys an adversary obtains), have system parameters that scale exponentially in the bit-length of the identities, or satisfy weaker notions of traceability that are vulnerable to certain types of "pirate evolution" attacks. In this work, we provide the first construction of a trace-and-revoke scheme that is fully collusion resistant and capable of supporting arbitrary identities (i.e., the identities can be drawn from an exponential-size space). Our scheme supports public encryption and secret tracing, and can be based on the sub-exponential hardness of the LWE problem (with a super-polynomial modulus-to-noise ratio). The ciphertext size in our construction scales logarithmically in the size of the identity space and linearly in the size of the revocation list. Our scheme leverages techniques from both combinatorial and algebraic constructions for traitor tracing.
Short Threshold Dynamic Group Signatures
Traditional group signatures feature a single issuer who can add users to the group of signers and a single opening authority who can reveal the identity of the group member who computed a signature. Interestingly, despite being designed for privacy-preserving applications, they require strong trust in these central authorities who constitute single points of failure for critical security properties. To reduce the trust placed on authorities, we introduce dynamic group signatures which distribute the role of issuer and opener over several entities, and support t_I-out-of-n_I issuance and t_O-out-of-n_O opening. We first define threshold dynamic group signatures and formalize their security. We then give an efficient construction relying on the pairing-based Pointcheval–Sanders (PS) signature scheme (CT-RSA 2018), which yields very short group signatures of two first-group elements and three exponents. We also give a simpler variant of our scheme in which issuance requires the participation of all n_I issuers, but still supports t_O-out-of-n_O opening. It is based on a new multi-signature variant of the PS scheme which allows for efficient proofs of knowledge and is a result of independent inter- est. We prove our schemes secure in the random-oracle model under a non-interactive q-type of assumption.
Isochronous Gaussian Sampling: From Inception to Implementation
Gaussian sampling over the integers is a crucial tool in lattice-based cryptography, but has proven over the recent years to be surprisingly challenging to perform in a generic, efficient and provable secure manner. In this work, we present a modular framework for generating discrete Gaussians with arbitrary center and standard deviation. Our framework is extremely simple, and it is precisely this simplicity that allowed us to make it easy to implement, provably secure, portable, efficient, and provably resistant against timing attacks. Our sampler is a good candidate for any trapdoor sampling and it is actually the one that has been recently implemented in the Falcon signature scheme. Our second contribution aims at systematizing the detection of implementation errors in Gaussian samplers. We provide a statistical testing suite for discrete Gaussians called SAGA (Statistically Acceptable GAussian). In a nutshell, our two contributions take a step towards trustable and robust Gaussian sampling real-world implementations.
The Existence of Cycles in the Supersingular Isogeny Graphs Used in SIKE
In this paper, we consider the structure of isogeny graphs in SIDH, that is an isogeny-based key-exchange protocol. SIDH is the underlying protocol of SIKE, which is one of the candidates for NIST post quantum cryptography standardization. Since the security of SIDH is based on the hardness of the path-finding problem in isogeny graphs, it is important to study those structure. The existence of cycles in isogeny graph is related to the path-finding problem, so we investigate cycles in the graphs used in SIKE. In particular, we focus on SIKEp434 and SIKEp503, which are the parameter sets of SIKE claimed to satisfy the NIST security level 1 and 2, respectively. We show that there are two cycles in the 3-isogeny graph in SIKEp434, and there is no cycles in the other graphs in SIKEp434 and SIKEp503.
On Multivariate Algorithms of Digital Signatures of Linear Degree and Low Density.
Multivariate cryptography studies applications of endomorphisms of K[x_1, x_2, …, x_n] where K is a finite commutative ring. The importance of this direction for the construction of multivariate digital signature systems is well known. We suggest modification of the known digital signature systems for which some of cryptanalytic instruments were found . This modification prevents possibility to use recently developed attacks on classical schemes such as rainbow oil and vinegar system, and LUOV. Modification does not change the size of hashed messages and
size of signatures. Basic idea is the usage of multivariate messages of unbounded degree and polynomial density for the construction of public rules. Modified algorithms are presented for standardization and certification studies.
Attacks on Integer-RLWE
In 2019, Gu Chunsheng introduced Integer-RLWE, a variant of RLWE devoid of some of its efficiency flaws. Most notably, he proposes a setting where $n$ can be an arbitrary positive integer, contrarily to the typical construction $n = 2^k$. In this paper, we analyze the new problem and implement the classical meet-in-the-middle and lattice-based attacks. We then use the peculiarity of the construction of $n$ to build an improved lattice-based attack in cases where $n$ is composite with an odd divisor. For example, for parameters $n = 2000$ and $q = 2^{33}$, we reduce the estimated complexity of the attack from $2^{288}$ to $2^{164}$. We also present reproducible experiments confirming our theoretical results.
Asynchronous Remote Key Generation: An Analysis of Yubico's Proposal for W3C WebAuthn
WebAuthn, forming part of FIDO2, is a W3C standard for strong authentication, which employs digital signatures to authenticate web users whilst preserving their privacy. Owned by users, WebAuthn authenticators generate attested and unlinkable public-key credentials for each web service to authenticate users. Since the loss of authenticators prevents users from accessing web services, usable recovery solutions preserving the original WebAuthn design choices and security objectives are urgently needed.
We examine Yubico's recent proposal for recovering from the loss of a WebAuthn authenticator by using a secondary backup authenticator. We analyse the cryptographic core of their proposal by modelling a new primitive, called Asynchronous Remote Key Generation (ARKG), which allows some primary authenticator to generate unlinkable public keys for which the backup authenticator may later recover corresponding private keys. Both processes occur asynchronously without the need for authenticators to export or share secrets, adhering to WebAuthn's attestation requirements. We prove that Yubico's proposal achieves our ARKG security properties under the discrete logarithm and PRF-ODH assumptions in the random oracle model. To prove that recovered private keys can be used securely by other cryptographic schemes, such as digital signatures or encryption schemes, we model compositional security of ARKG using composable games by Brzuska et al. (ACM CCS 2011), extended to the case of arbitrary public-key protocols.
As well as being more general, our results show that private keys generated by ARKG may be used securely to produce unforgeable signatures for challenge-response protocols, as used in WebAuthn. We conclude our analysis by discussing concrete instantiations behind Yubico's ARKG protocol, its integration with the WebAuthn standard, performance, and usability aspects.
Deep Learning based analysis of Key Scheduling Algorithm of PRESENT cipher
The lightweight block cipher PRESENT has become viable for areas like IoT (Internet of Things) and RFID tags, due to its compact design and low power consumption, while providing a sufficient level of security for the aforementioned applications. However, the key scheduling algorithm of a cipher plays a major role in deciding how secure it is. In this paper we test the strength of the key scheduling algorithm (KSA) of the 80-bit key length variant of PRESENT by attempting to retrieve the main key register from the final round key register, using deep learning.
QuantumHammer: A Practical Hybrid Attack on the LUOV Signature Scheme
Post-quantum schemes are expected to replace existing public-key schemes within a decade in billions of devices. To facilitate the transition, the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is running a standardization process. Multivariate signatures is one of the main categories in NIST's post-quantum cryptography competition. Among the four candidates in this category, the LUOV and Rainbow schemes are based on the Oil and Vinegar scheme, first introduced in 1997 which has withstood over two decades of cryptanalysis. Beyond mathematical security and efficiency, security against side-channel attacks is a major concern in the competition. The current sentiment is that post-quantum schemes may be more resistant to fault-injection attacks due to their large key sizes and the lack of algebraic structure. We show that this is not true.
We introduce a novel hybrid attack, QuantumHammer, and demonstrate it on the constant-time implementation of LUOV currently in Round 2 of the NIST post-quantum competition. The QuantumHammer attack is a combination of two attacks, a bit-tracing attack enabled via Rowhammer fault injection and a divide and conquer attack that uses bit-tracing as an oracle. Using bit-tracing, an attacker with access to faulty signatures collected using Rowhammer attack, can recover secret key bits albeit slowly. We employ a divide and conquer attack which exploits the structure in the key generation part of LUOV and solves the system of equations for the secret key more efficiently with few key bits recovered via bit-tracing.
We have demonstrated the first successful in-the-wild attack on LUOV recovering all 11K key bits with less than 4 hours of an active Rowhammer attack. The post-processing part is highly parallel and thus can be trivially sped up using modest resources. QuantumHammer does not make any unrealistic assumptions, only requires software co-location (no physical access), and therefore can be used to target shared cloud servers or in other sandboxed environments.
Comparing the difficulty of factorization and discrete logarithm: a 240-digit experiment
We report on two new records: the factorization of RSA-240, a 795-bit number, and a discrete logarithm computation over a 795-bit prime field. Previous records were the factorization of RSA-768 in 2009 and a 768-bit discrete logarithm computation in 2016. Our two computations at the 795-bit level were done using the same hardware and software, and show that computing a discrete logarithm is not much harder than a factorization of the same size. Moreover, thanks to algorithmic variants and well-chosen parameters, our computations were significantly less expensive than anticipated based on previous records.
The last page of this paper also reports on the factorization of RSA-250.
Computation of a 30750-Bit Binary Field Discrete Logarithm
This paper reports on the computation of a discrete logarithm in the finite field $\mathbb{F}_{2^{30750}}$, breaking by a large margin the previous record, which was set in January 2014 by a computation in $\mathbb{F}_{2^{9234}}$. The present computation made essential use of the elimination step of the quasi-polynomial algorithm due to Granger, Kleinjung and Zumbrägel, and is the first large-scale experiment to truly test and successfully demonstrate its potential when applied recursively, which is when it leads to the stated complexity. It required the equivalent of about $2900$ core years on a single core of an Intel Xeon Ivy Bridge processor running at 2.6 GHz, which is comparable to the approximately $3100$ core years expended for the discrete logarithm record for prime fields, set in a field of bit-length $795$, and demonstrates just how much easier the problem is for this level of computational effort. In order to make the computation feasible we introduced several innovative techniques for the elimination of small degree irreducible elements, which meant that we avoided performing any costly Gröbner basis computations, in contrast to all previous records since early 2013. While such computations are crucial to the $L(\frac{1}{4} + o(1))$ complexity algorithms, they were simply too slow for our purposes.
Finally, this computation should serve as a serious deterrent to cryptographers who are still proposing to rely on the discrete logarithm security of such finite fields in applications, despite the existence of two quasi-polynomial algorithms and the prospect of even faster algorithms being developed.