4915 results
Unique Rabin-Williams Signature Scheme Decryption
Abstract. The extremely efficient Rabin-Williams signature scheme relies on decryption of a quadratic equation in order to retrieve the original message. Customarily, square roots are found using the Chinese Remainder Theorem. This can be done in polynomial time, but generally produces four options for the correct message which must be analyzed to determine the correct one. This paper resolves the problem of efficient deterministic decryption to the correct message modulo $p^2q$ by establishing conditions on the primes $p$ and $q$ as well as on any legitimate message. We do this using the CRT modulo pq to find four roots. We show that the correct root (initial message) is the only one of these four which is in our allowed message set (it is in fact the smallest of the four integers) and which satisfies a quadratic equation modulo $p^2q$; no additional work is required to eliminate the others. As a result, we propose what we believe is now the most efficient version of R-W signature scheme decryption.
Improved Security Notions for Proxy Re-Encryption to Enforce Access Control
Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) allows a ciphertext encrypted under Alice’s public key to be transformed to an encryption under Bob’s public key without revealing either the plaintext or the decryption keys. PRE schemes have clear applications to cryptographic access control by allowing outsourced data to be selectively shared to users via re-encryption to appropriate keys. One concern for this application is that the server should not be able to perform unauthorised re-encryptions. We argue that current security notions do not adequately address this concern. We revisit existing definitions for PRE, starting by challenging the concept of unidirectionality, which states that re-encryption tokens from A to B cannot be used to re-encrypt from B to A. We strengthen this definition to reflect realistic scenarios in which adversaries may try to reverse a re-encryption by retaining information about prior ciphertexts and update tokens. We then strengthen the adversarial model to consider malicious adversaries that may collude with corrupt users and attempt to perform unauthorised re-encryptions; this models a malicious cloud service provider aiming to subvert the re-encryption process to leak sensitive data. Finally, we revisit the notion of authenticated encryption for PRE. This currently assumes the same party who created the message also encrypted it, which is not necessarily the case in re-encryption. We thus introduce the notion of ciphertext origin authentication to determine which party encrypted the message (or initiated the most recent re-encryption) and show how to fufil this requirement in practice.
Timed-Release Encryption With Master Time Bound Key (Full Version)
Timed-release encryption allows senders to send a message to a receiver which cannot decrypt until a server releases a time bound key at the release time. The release time usually supposed to be known to the receiver, the ciphertext therefore cannot be decrypted if the release time is lost. We solve this problem in this paper by having a master time bound key which can replace the time bound key of any release time. We first present security models of the timed-release encryption with master time bound key. We present a provably secure construction based on the Weil pairing.
Integer Reconstruction Public-Key Encryption
In [AJPS17], Aggarwal, Joux, Prakash & Santha described
an elegant public-key cryptosystem (AJPS-1) mimicking NTRU over the
integers. This algorithm relies on the properties of Mersenne primes
instead of polynomial rings.
A later ePrint [BCGN17] by Beunardeau et al. revised AJPS-1’s initial
security estimates. While lower than initially thought, the best known
attack on AJPS-1 still seems to leave the defender with an exponential
advantage over the attacker [dBDJdW17]. However, this lower exponential
advantage implies enlarging AJPS-1’s parameters. This, plus the fact that
AJPS-1 encodes only a single plaintext bit per ciphertext, made AJPS-1
impractical. In a recent update, Aggarwal et al. overcame this limitation
by extending AJPS-1’s bandwidth. This variant (AJPS-ECC) modifies the
definition of the public-key and relies on error-correcting codes.
This paper presents a different high-bandwidth construction. By opposition
to AJPS-ECC, we do not modify the public-key, avoid using errorcorrecting
codes and use backtracking to decrypt. The new algorithm
is orthogonal to AJPS-ECC as both mechanisms may be concurrently
used in the same ciphertext and cumulate their bandwidth improvement
effects. Alternatively, we can increase AJPS-ECC’s information rate by a
factor of 26 for the parameters recommended in [AJPS17].
The obtained bandwidth improvement and the fact that encryption and
decryption are reasonably efficient, make our scheme an interesting postquantum
candidate.
Identity-Based Higncryption
Identity-based cryptography (IBC) is fundamental to security and privacy protection. Identity-based authenticated encryption (i.e., signcryption) is an important IBC primitive, which has numerous and promising applications. After two decades of research on signcryption,recently a new cryptographic primitive, named higncryption, was proposed. Higncryption can be viewed as privacy-enhanced signcryption, which integrates public key encryption, entity authentication, and identity concealment (which is not achieved in signcryption) into a monolithic primitive. Here, briefly speaking, identity concealment means that the transcript of protocol runs should not leak participants' identity information.
In this work, we propose the first identity-based higncryption (IBHigncryption). The most impressive feature of IBHigncryption, among others, is its simplicity and efficiency. The proposed IBHigncryption scheme is essentially as efficient as the fundamental CCA-secure Boneh-Franklin IBE scheme [18], while offering entity authentication and identity concealment simultaneously. Compared to the identity-based signcryption scheme [11],
which is adopted in the IEEE P1363.3 standard, our IBHigncryption scheme is much simpler, and has significant efficiency advantage in total. Besides, our IBHigncryption enjoys forward ID-privacy, receiver deniability and x-security simultaneously. In addition, the proposed IBHigncryption has a much simpler setup stage with smaller public parameters, which in particular does not have the traditional master public key.
Higncryption is itself one-pass identity-concealed authenticated key exchange without forward security for the receiver. Finally, by applying the transformation from higncryption to identity-concealed authenticated key exchange (CAKE), we get three-pass identity-based CAKE (IB-CAKE) with explicit mutual authentication and strong security (in particular, perfect forward security for both players). Specifically, the IB-CAKE protocol involves the composition of two runs of IBHigncryption, and has the following advantageous features inherited from IBHigncryption: (1) single pairing operation: each player performs only a single pairingoperation; (2) forward ID-privacy; (3) simple setup without master public key; (4) strong resilience to ephemeral state exposure, i.e., x-security; (5) reasonable deniability.
Exploring NIST LWC/PQC Synergy with R5Sneik: How SNEIK 1.1 Algorithms were Designed to Support Round5
Most NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) candidate algorithms use symmetric primitives internally for various purposes such as ``seed expansion'' and CPA to CCA transforms. Such auxiliary symmetric operations constituted only a fraction of total execution time of traditional RSA and ECC algorithms, but with faster lattice algorithms the impact of symmetric algorithm characteristics can be very significant. A choice to use a specific PQC algorithm implies that its internal symmetric components must also be implemented on all target platforms. This can be problematic for lightweight, embedded (IoT), and hardware implementations. It has been widely observed that current NIST-approved symmetric components (AES, GCM, SHA, SHAKE) form a major bottleneck on embedded and hardware implementation footprint and performance for many of the most efficient NIST PQC proposals. Meanwhile, a separate NIST effort is ongoing to standardize lightweight symmetric cryptography (LWC). Therefore it makes sense to explore which NIST LWC candidates are able to efficiently support internals of post-quantum asymmetric cryptography. We discuss R5Sneik, a variant of Round5 that internally uses SNEIK 1.1 permutation-based primitives instead of SHAKE and AES-GCM. The SNEIK family includes parameter selections specifically designed to support lattice cryptography. R5Sneik is up to 40\% faster than Round5 for some parameter sets on ARM Cortex M4, and has substantially smaller implementation footprint. We introduce the concept of a fast Entropy Distribution Function (EDF), a lightweight diffuser that we expect to have sufficient security properties for lattice seed expansion and many types of sampling, but not for plain encryption or hashing. The same SNEIK 1.1 permutation core (but with a different number of rounds) can also be used to replace AES-GCM as an AEAD when building lightweight cryptographic protocols, halving typical flash footprint on Cortex M4, while boosting performance.
Practical Attribute Based Inner Product Functional Encryption from Simple Assumptions
Functional encryption (FE) that bases on user attributes has many useful practical applications. For example, a company may only authorize department heads of other sections to query the average sale figures of the sales department from the encrypted sales amounts of all sales. However, FE schemes that can solve this problem are based on new, but not well-studied assumptions (such as indistinguishable obfuscation or multilinear maps). It is not clear if these FE schemes are secure. In this paper, we develop the first functional encryption scheme (ABFE) from simple and well-studied assumptions that can authorize a user base on the user's attributes to obtain a functional value of the encrypted data.
Comparing proofs of security for lattice-based encryption
This paper describes the limits of various "security proofs", using 36 lattice-based KEMs as case studies. This description allows the limits to be systematically compared across these KEMs; shows that some previous claims are incorrect; and provides an explicit framework for thorough security reviews of these KEMs.
A Reaction Attack against Cryptosystems based on LRPC Codes
Rank metric is a very promising research direction for code-based cryptography. In fact, thanks to the high complexity of generic decoding attacks against codes in this metric, it is possible to easily select parameters that yield very small data sizes. In this paper we analyze cryptosystems based on Low-Rank Parity-Check (LRPC) codes, one of the classes of codes that are efficiently decodable in the rank metric. We show how to exploit the decoding failure rate, which is an inherent feature
of these codes, to devise a reaction attack aimed at recovering the private key. As a case study, we cryptanalyze the recent McNie submission to NIST’s Post-Quantum Standardization process. Additionally, we provide details of a simple implementation to validate our approach.
Practical Cryptanalysis of k-ary C*
Recently, an article by Felke appeared in Cryptography and Communications discussing the security of biquadratic C* and a further generalization, k-ary C*. The article derives lower bounds for the complexity of an algebraic attack, directly inverting the public key, under an assumption that the first-fall degree is a good approximation of the solving degree, an assumption that the paper notes requires ``greater justification and clarification."
In this work, we provide a practical attack breaking all k-ary C* schemes. The attack is based on differential techniques and requires nothing but the ability to evaluate the public key and solve linear systems. In particular, the attack breaks the parameters provided in CryptoChallenge11 by constructing and solving linear systems of moderate size in a few
minutes.
PQDH: A Quantum-Safe Replacement for Diffie-Hellman based on SIDH
We present a post-quantum key agreement scheme that does not require distinguishing between the initiator and the responder. This scheme is based on elliptic curve isogenies and can be viewed as a variant of the well-known SIDH protocol. Then, we present an efficient countermeasure against a side-channel attack that applies to both static and ephemeral versions of SIDH and our scheme. Finally, we show how to obtain an isogeny-based password-authenticated key exchange protocol based on our scheme by applying a construction based on SIDH. Security and computational complexities summaries are also presented.
Faster Subgroup Checks for BLS12-381
Pairing-friendly elliptic curve constructions provide two elliptic curve groups which are both of prime order $q$ and usually each have a nontrivial cofactor $h$. Due to the way these curves are typically constructed, endomorphisms can be applied to perform fast cofactor multiplication. However, cofactor multiplication is sometimes insufficient for dealing with cofactors, such as with malleability attacks.
In this brief note, we describe efficient techniques for checking that points exist within the correct $q$-order subgroups of the BLS12-381 elliptic curve construction, which is the focus of standardization for pairing-based protocols. Instead of multiplying by $q$ and comparing the point with the identity, we use endomorphisms to eliminate the $q$-torsion while modifying (but not killing) the $h$-torsion components. The result can then be compared against the identity.
Improved Low-Memory Subset Sum and LPN Algorithms via Multiple Collisions
For enabling post-quantum cryptanalytic experiments on a meaningful scale, there is a strong need for low-memory algorithms. We show that the combination of techniques from representations, multiple collision finding, and the Schroeppel-Shamir algorithm leeds to improved low-memory algorithms.
For random subset sum instances $(a_1, \ldots, a_n,t)$ defined modulo $2^n$, our algorithms improve over the Dissection technique for small memory $M < 2^{0.02n}$ and in the mid-memory regime $2^{0.13n} < M < 2^{0.2n}$.
An application of our technique to LPN of dimension $k$ and constant error $p$ yields significant time complexity improvements over the Dissection-BKW algorithm from Crypto 2018 for all memory parameters $M< 2^{0.35 \frac{k}{\log k}}$.
Towards a Hybrid Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): A Review
Traditional Certificate-based public key infrastructure (PKI) suffers from the problem of certificate overhead like its storage, verification, revocation etc. To overcome these problems, the idea of certificate less identity-based public key cryptography (ID-PKC) was proposed by Shamir. This is suitable for closed trusted group only. Also, this concept has some inherent problems like key escrow problem, secure key channel problem, identity management overhead etc. Later on, there had been several works which tried to combine both the cryptographic techniques such that the resulting hybrid PKI framework is built upon the best features of both the cryptographic techniques. It had been shown that this approach solves many problems associated with an individual cryptosystem.
In this paper, we have reviewed and compared such hybrid schemes which tried to combine both the certificate based PKC and ID-based PKC. Also, the summary of the comparison, based on various features, is presented in a table.
Post-quantum key exchange - a new hope
In 2015, Bos, Costello, Naehrig, and Stebila (IEEE Security & Privacy 2015)
proposed an instantiation of Ding's ring-learning-with-errors (Ring-LWE) based
key-exchange protocol (also including the tweaks proposed by Peikert from
PQCrypto 2014), together with an implementation integrated into OpenSSL, with
the affirmed goal of providing post-quantum security for TLS.
In this work we revisit their instantiation and stand-alone implementation.
Specifically, we propose new parameters and a better suited error distribution,
analyze the scheme's hardness against attacks by quantum computers in a
conservative way, introduce a new and more efficient error-reconciliation
mechanism, and propose a defense against backdoors and all-for-the-price-of-one
attacks. By these measures and for the same lattice dimension, we more than
double the security parameter, halve the communication overhead, and speed up
computation by more than a factor of 8 in a portable C implementation and by
more than a factor of 27 in an optimized implementation targeting current Intel
CPUs. These speedups are achieved with comprehensive protection against timing
attacks.
Flexible Signatures: Towards Making Authentication Suitable for Real-Time Environments
This work introduces the concept of flexible signatures. In a flexible signature scheme, the verification algorithm quantifies the validity of a signature based on the number of computations performed such that the signature's validation (or confidence) level in $[0,1]$ improves as the algorithm performs more computations. Importantly, the definition of flexible signatures does not assume the resource restriction to be known in advance until the verification process is hard stopped by a system interrupt. Although prominent traditional signature schemes such as RSA, (EC)DSA, EdDSA seem unfit towards building flexible signatures, we find updated versions of the Lamport-Diffie one-time signature and Merkle authentication tree to be suitable for building flexible signatures. We present a flexible signature construction based on these hash-based primitives and prove its security with a concrete security analysis. We also perform a thorough validity-level analysis demonstrating an attractive computation-vs-validity trade-off offered by our construction: a security level of $80$ bits can be ensured by performing only around $\frac{2}{3}$rd of the total hash computations for our flexible signature construction with a Merkle tree of height $20$.
We see this work as the first step towards realizing flexible-security cryptographic primitives. Beyond flexible signatures, our flexible-security conceptualization offers an interesting opportunity to build similar primitives in the asymmetric as well as symmetric cryptographic domains. Apart from being theoretically interesting, these flexible security primitives can be of particular interest to real-time systems as well as the Internet of things: rigid all-or-nothing guarantees offered by the traditional cryptographic primitives have been particularly unattractive to these unpredictably resource-constrained
BBQ: Using AES in Picnic Signatures
This works studies the use of the AES block-cipher for Picnic-style signatures, which work in the multiparty-computation-in-the-head model. It applies advancements to arithmetic circuits for the computation of the AES S-box over multiparty computation in the preprocessing model to obtain an improvement of signature sizes of 40\% on average compared to using binary circuits for AES-128, AES-192 and AES-256 in combination with previous techniques. This work also discusses other methods for the computation of the S-box and provides insights into the reaches and limits of the multiparty-computation-in-the-head paradigm.
Sonic: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs from Linear-Size Universal and Updateable Structured Reference Strings
Zero-knowledge proofs have become an important tool for addressing privacy and scalability concerns in cryptocurrencies and other applications. In many systems each client downloads and verifies every new proof, and so proofs must be small and cheap to verify. The most practical schemes require either a trusted setup, as in (pre-processing) zk-SNARKs, or verification complexity that scales linearly with the complexity of the relation, as in Bulletproofs. The structured reference strings required by most zk-SNARK schemes can be constructed with multi-party computation protocols, but the resulting parameters are specific to an individual relation. Groth et al. discovered a zk-SNARK protocol with a universal and updateable structured reference string, however the string scales quadratically in the size of the supported relations.
Here we describe a zero-knowledge SNARK, Sonic, which supports a universal and continually updateable structured reference string that scales linearly in size. Sonic proofs are constant size, and in the batch verification context the marginal cost of verification is comparable with the most efficient SNARKs in the literature. We also describe a generally useful technique in which untrusted ``helpers'' can compute advice which allows batches of proofs to be verified more efficiently.
Compact Adaptively Secure ABE for NC1 from k-Lin
We present compact attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes for NC1 that are adaptively secure under the k-Lin assumption with polynomial security loss. Our KP-ABE scheme achieves ciphertext size that is linear in the atttribute length and independent of the policy size even in the many-use setting, and we achieve an analogous efficiency guarantee for CP-ABE. This resolves the central open problem posed by Lewko and Waters (CRYPTO 2011). Previous adaptively secure constructions either impose an attribute ``one-use restriction'' (or the ciphertext size grows with the policy size), or require q-type assumptions.
Proper Usage of the Group Signature Scheme in ISO/IEC 20008-2
In ISO/IEC 20008-2, several anonymous digital signature schemes are specified. Among these, the scheme denoted as Mechanism 6, is the only plain group signature scheme that does not aim at providing additional functionalities. The Intel Enhanced Privacy Identification (EPID) scheme, which has many applications in connection with Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), is in practice derived from Mechanism 6. In this paper, we firstly show that Mechanism 6 does not satisfy anonymity in the standard security model, i.e., the Bellare-Shi-Zhang model [CT-RSA 2005]. We then provide a detailed analysis of the security properties offered by Mechanism 6 and characterize the conditions under which its anonymity is preserved. Consequently, it is seen that Mechanism 6 is secure under the condition that the issuer, who generates user signing keys, does not join the attack. We also derive a simple patch for Mechanism 6 from the analysis.
IND-CCA-secure Key Encapsulation Mechanism in the Quantum Random Oracle Model, Revisited
With the gradual progress of NIST's post-quantum cryptography standardization, the Round-1 KEM proposals have been posted for public to discuss and evaluate.
Among the IND-CCA-secure KEM constructions, mostly, an IND-CPA-secure (or OW-CPA-secure) public-key encryption (PKE) scheme is first introduced, then some generic transformations are applied to it.
All these generic transformations are constructed in the random oracle model (ROM).
To fully assess the post-quantum security, security analysis in the quantum random oracle model (QROM) is preferred.
However, current works either lacked a QROM security proof or just followed Targhi and Unruh's proof technique (TCC-B 2016) and modified the original transformations by adding an additional hash to the ciphertext to achieve the QROM security.
In this paper, by using a novel proof technique, we present QROM security reductions for two widely used generic transformations without suffering any ciphertext overhead.
Meanwhile, the security bounds are much tighter than the ones derived by utilizing Targhi and Unruh's proof technique.
Thus, our QROM security proofs not only provide a solid post-quantum security guarantee for NIST Round-1 KEM schemes, but also
simplify the constructions and reduce the ciphertext sizes.
We also provide QROM security reductions for Hofheinz-Hoevelmanns-Kiltz modular transformations (TCC 2017), which can help to obtain a variety of combined transformations with different requirements and properties.
Decentralized Evaluation of Quadratic Polynomials on Encrypted Data
Since the seminal paper on Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) by Gentry in 2009, a lot of work and improvements have been proposed, with an amazing number of possible applications. It allows outsourcing any kind of computations on encrypted data, and thus without leaking any information to the provider who performs the computations. This is quite useful for many sensitive data (finance, medical, etc.).
Unfortunately, FHE fails at providing some computation on private inputs to a third party, in cleartext: the user that can decrypt the result is able to decrypt the inputs. A classical approach to allow limited decryption power is distributed decryption. But none of the actual FHE schemes allows distributed decryption, at least with an efficient protocol.
In this paper, we revisit the Boneh-Goh-Nissim (BGN) cryptosystem, and the Freeman's variant, that allow evaluation of quadratic polynomials, or any 2-DNF formula. Whereas the BGN scheme relies on integer factoring for the trapdoor in the composite-order group, and thus possesses one public/secret key only, the Freeman's scheme can handle multiple users with one general setup that just needs to define a pairing-based algebraic structure.
We show that it can be efficiently decentralized, with an efficient distributed key generation algorithm, without any trusted dealer, but also efficient distributed decryption and distributed re-encryption, in a threshold setting.
We then provide some applications of computations on encrypted data, without central authority.
Exploiting Determinism in Lattice-based Signatures - Practical Fault Attacks on pqm4 Implementations of NIST candidates
In this paper, we analyze the implementation level fault vulnerabilities of deterministic lattice-based
signature schemes. In particular, we extend the practicality of skip-addition fault
attacks through exploitation of determinism in certain variants of Dilithium (Deterministic variant) and qTESLA signature scheme (originally submitted deterministic version), which are two leading candidates for the NIST standardization of post-quantum cryptography. We show that single targeted faults injected in the signing procedure allow to recover an important portion of the secret key. Though faults injected in the signing procedure do not recover all the secret key elements, we propose a novel forgery algorithm that allows the attacker to sign any given message with only the extracted portion of the secret key. We perform experimental validation of our attack using Electromagnetic fault injection on reference implementations taken from the pqm4 library, a benchmarking and testing framework for post quantum cryptographic implementations for the ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller. We also show that our attacks break two well known countermeasures known to protect against skip-addition fault attacks. We further propose an efficient mitigation strategy against our attack that exponentially increases the attacker's complexity at almost zero increase in computational complexity.
Floppy-Sized Group Signatures from Lattices
We present the first lattice-based group signature scheme whose cryptographic artifacts are of size small enough to be usable in practice: for a group of $2^{25}$ users, signatures take 910 kB and public keys are 501 kB. Our scheme builds upon two recently proposed lattice-based primitives: the verifiable encryption scheme by Lyubashevsky and Neven (Eurocrypt 2017) and the signature scheme by Boschini, Camenisch, and Neven (IACR ePrint 2017). To achieve such short signatures and keys, we first re-define verifiable encryption to allow one to encrypt a function of the witness, rather than the full witness. This definition enables more efficient realizations of verifiable encryption and is of independent interest. Second, to minimize the size of the signatures and public keys of our group signature scheme, we revisit the proof of knowledge of a signature and the proofs in the verifiable encryption scheme provided in the respective papers.
Algebraic Techniques for Short(er) Exact Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge Proofs
A key component of many lattice-based protocols is a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge of a vector $\vec{s}$ with small coefficients satisfying $A\vec{s}=\vec{u}\bmod\,q$. While there exist fairly efficient proofs for a relaxed version of this equation which prove the knowledge of $\vec{s}'$ and $c$ satisfying $A\vec{s}'=\vec{u}c$ where $\|\vec{s}'\|\gg\|\vec{s}\|$ and $c$ is some small element in the ring over which the proof is performed, the proofs for the exact version of the equation are considerably less practical. The best such proof technique is an adaptation of Stern's protocol (Crypto '93), for proving knowledge of nearby codewords, to larger moduli. The scheme is a $\Sigma$-protocol, each of whose iterations has soundness error $2/3$, and thus requires over $200$ repetitions to obtain soundness error of $2^{-128}$, which is the main culprit behind the large size of the proofs produced.
In this paper, we propose the first lattice-based proof system that significantly outperforms Stern-type proofs for proving knowledge of a short $\vec{s}$ satisfying $A\vec{s}=\vec{u}\bmod\,q$. Unlike Stern's proof, which is combinatorial in nature, our proof is more algebraic and uses various relaxed zero-knowledge proofs as sub-routines. The main savings in our proof system comes from the fact that each round has soundness error of $1/n$, where $n$ is the number of columns of $A$. For typical applications, $n$ is a few thousand, and therefore our proof needs to be repeated around $10$ times to achieve a soundness error of $2^{-128}$. For concrete parameters, it produces proofs that are around an order of magnitude smaller than those produced using Stern's approach.
Efficient Lattice-Based Zero-Knowledge Arguments with Standard Soundness: Construction and Applications
We provide new zero-knowledge argument of knowledge systems that work directly for a wide class of language, namely, ones involving the satisfiability of matrix-vector relations and integer relations commonly found in constructions of lattice-based cryptography. Prior to this work, practical arguments for lattice-based relations either have a constant soundness error ( 2/3 ), or consider a weaker form of soundness, namely, extraction only guarantees that the prover is in possession of a witness that “approximates” the actual witness. Our systems do not suffer from these limitations.
The core of our new argument systems is an efficient zero-knowledge argument of knowledge of a solution to a system of linear equations, where variables of this solution satisfy a set of quadratic constraints. This argument enjoys standard soundness, a small soundness error ( 1/poly ), and a complexity linear in the size of the solution. Using our core argument system, we construct highly efficient argument systems for a variety of statements relevant to lattices, including linear equations with short solutions and matrix-vector relations with hidden matrices.
Based on our argument systems, we present several new constructions of common privacy-preserving primitives in the standard lattice setting, including a group signature, a ring signature, an electronic cash system, and a range proof protocol. Our new constructions are one to three orders of magnitude more efficient than the state of the art (in standard lattice). This illustrates the efficiency and expressiveness of our argument system.
Public-Key Function-Private Hidden Vector Encryption (and More)
We construct public-key function-private predicate encryption for the ``small superset functionality,'' recently introduced by Beullens and Wee (PKC 2019). This functionality captures several important classes of predicates:
- Point functions. For point function predicates, our construction is equivalent to public-key function-private anonymous identity-based encryption.
- Conjunctions. If the predicate computes a conjunction, our construction is a public-key function-private hidden vector encryption scheme. This addresses an open problem posed by Boneh, Raghunathan, and Segev (ASIACRYPT 2013).
- $d$-CNFs and read-once conjunctions of $d$-disjunctions for constant-size $d$.
Our construction extends the group-based obfuscation schemes of Bishop et al. (CRYPTO 2018), Beullens and Wee (PKC 2019), and Bartusek et al. (EUROCRYPT 2019) to the setting of public-key function-private predicate encryption. We achieve an average-case notion of function privacy, which guarantees that a decryption key $sk_f$ reveals nothing about $f$ as long as $f$ is drawn from a distribution with sufficient entropy. We formalize this security notion as a generalization of the (enhanced) real-or-random function privacy definition of Boneh, Raghunathan, and Segev (CRYPTO 2013). Our construction relies on bilinear groups, and we prove security in the generic bilinear group model.
Efficient Multi-key FHE with short extended ciphertexts and less public parameters
Multi-Key Full Homomorphic Encryption (MKFHE) can perform arbitrary operations on encrypted data under different public keys (users), and the final ciphertext can be jointly decrypted by all involved users. Therefore, MKFHE has natural advantages and application value in security multi-party computation (MPC). The MKFHE scheme based on Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV) inherits the advantages of BGV FHE scheme in aspects of encrypting a ring element, the ciphertext/plaintext ratio, and supporting the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT)-based ciphertexts packing technique. However some weaknesses also exist such as large ciphertexts and keys, and complicated process of generating evaluation keys. In this paper, we present an efficient BGV-type MKFHE scheme. Firstly, we construct a nested ciphertext extension for BGV and separable ciphertext extension for Gentry-Sahai-Waters (GSW), which can reduce the size of the extended ciphertexts about a half. Secondly, we apply the hybrid homomorphic multiplication between RBGV ciphertext and RGSW ciphertext to the generation process of evaluation keys, which can significantly reduce the amount of input/output ciphertexts and improve the efficiency. Finally, we construct a directed decryption protocol which allows the evaluated ciphertext to be decrypted by any target user, thereby enhancing the ability of data owner to control their own plaintext, and abolish the limitation in current MKFHE schemes that the evaluated ciphertext can only be decrypted by users involved in homomorphic evaluation.
Block-Anti-Circulant Unbalanced Oil and Vinegar
We introduce a new technique for compressing the public keys of the UOV signature scheme that makes use of block-anti-circulant matrices. These matrices admit a compact representation as for every block, the remaining elements can be inferred from the first row. This space saving translates to the public key, which as a result of this technique can be shrunk by a small integer factor. We propose parameters sets that take into account several important attacks.
Leveraging Linear Decryption: Rate-1 Fully-Homomorphic Encryption and Time-Lock Puzzles
We show how to combine a fully-homomorphic encryption scheme with linear decryption and a linearly-homomorphic encryption schemes to obtain constructions with new properties. Specifically, we present the following new results.
(1) Rate-1 Fully-Homomorphic Encryption: We construct the first scheme with message-to-ciphertext length ratio (i.e., rate) $1-\sigma$ for $\sigma = o(1)$. Our scheme is based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem and $\sigma$ is proportional to the noise-to-modulus ratio of the assumption. Our building block is a construction of a new high-rate linearly-homomorphic encryption.
One application of this result is the first general-purpose secure function evaluation protocol in the preprocessing model where the communication complexity is within additive factor of the optimal insecure protocol.
(2) Fully-Homomorphic Time-Lock Puzzles: We construct the first time-lock puzzle where one can evaluate any function over a set of puzzles without solving them, from standard assumptions. Prior work required the existence of sub-exponentially hard indistinguishability obfuscation.
Post-Quantum UC-Secure Oblivious Transfer in the Standard Model with Adaptive Corruptions
Since the seminal result of Kilian, Oblivious Transfer has proven to be a
fundamental primitive in cryptography. In such a scheme, a user is able
to gain access to an element owned by a server, without learning more than
this single element, and without the server learning which element the user
has accessed. This primitive has received a lot of study in the literature,
among which very few schemes are based on lattices.
The recent NIST call for post-quantum encryption and signature
schemes has revived the interest for cryptographic protocols based on
post-quantum assumptions and the need for a secure post-quantum
oblivious transfer scheme.
In this paper, we show how to construct an oblivious transfer
scheme based on lattices, from a collision-resistant chameleon hash
scheme (CH) and a CCA encryption scheme accepting a smooth projective
hash function (SPHF). Note that our scheme does not rely on random
oracles and provides UC security against adaptive corruptions assuming
reliable erasures.
Ternary Syndrome Decoding with Large Weight
The Syndrome Decoding problem is at the core of many code-based
cryptosystems. In this paper, we study ternary Syndrome Decoding in
large weight. This problem has been introduced in the Wave signature
scheme but has never been thoroughly studied. We perform an
algorithmic study of this problem which results in an update of the
Wave parameters. On a more fundamental level, we show that ternary
Syndrome Decoding with large weight is a really harder problem than
the binary Syndrome Decoding problem, which could have several
applications for the design of code-based cryptosystems.
Black-Box Language Extension of Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments
Highly efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (NIZK) are often constructed for limited languages and it is not known how to extend them to cover wider classes of languages in general. In this paper we initiate a study on black-box language extensions for conjunctive and disjunctive relations, that is, building a NIZK system for ${\cal L} \diamond \hat{{\cal L}}$ (with $\diamond \in \{\land, \lor\}$) based on NIZK systems for languages ${\cal L}$ and $\hat{{\cal L}}$. While the conjunctive extension of NIZKs is straightforward by simply executing the given NIZKs in parallel, it is not known how disjunctive extensions could be achieved in a black-box manner. Besides, observe that the simple conjunctive extension does not work in the case of simulation-sound NIZKs (SS-NIZKs), as pointed out by Sahai (Sahai, FOCS 1999). Our main contribution is an impossibility result that negates the existence of the above extensions and implies other non-trivial separations among NIZKs, SS-NIZKs, and labelled SS-NIZKs.
Motivated by the difficulty of such transformations, we additionally present an efficient construction of signature schemes based on unbounded simulation-sound NIZKs (USS-NIZKs) for any language without language extensions.
Lattice-based Cryptography for IoT in A Quantum World: Are We Ready?
The impending realization of scalable quantum computers has led to active research in Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC). The challenge is harder for embedded IoT (edge) devices, due to their pervasive diffusion in today's world as well as their stricter resources (tight area and energy budgets). Amongst various classes of quantum-resistant cryptography schemes, Lattice-based Cryptography (LBC) is emerging as one of the most viable, almost half of the `survivors' of second round of the NIST's PQC competition are lattice-based in construction. This paper surveys the practicality of deployment of these schemes. In this context, the state-of-the-art LBC implementations on the constrained devices (including low-power FPGAs and embedded microprocessors), leading in terms of low-power footprint, small area, compact bandwidth requirements and high performance is fairly evaluated and bench-marked. The work concludes by identifying a suite of some favorite LBC schemes in terms of various IoT critical performance bench-marks.
A Modified pqsigRM: RM Code-Based Signature Scheme
We propose a novel signature scheme based on a modified Reed--Muller (RM) code, which reduces the signing complexity and key size compared to existing code-based signature schemes. This cheme is called as the modified pqsigRM, and corresponds to an improvement of pqsigRM, the proposal submitted to NIST. Courtois, Finiasz, and Sendrier (CFS) proposed a code-based signature scheme using the Goppa codes based on a full domain hash approach. However, owing to the properties of Goppa codes, the CFS signature scheme has drawbacks such as signing complexity and large key size. We overcome these disadvantages of the CFS signature scheme using partially permuted RM code and its decoding, which finds a near codeword for any received vector. Using a partially permuted RM code, the signature scheme resists various known attacks on the RM code-based cryptography. Additionally, we further modify the RM codes by row insertion/deletion of the generator matrix and thereafter resolve the problems reported in the post-quantum cryptography forum by NIST, such as the Hamming weight distribution of the public code.
A Note on Lower Digits Extraction Polynomial for Bootstrapping
Bootstrapping is a crucial but computationally expensive step for realizing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Recently, Chen and Han (Eurocrypt 2018) introduced a family of low-degree polynomials to extract the lowest digit with respect to a certain congruence, which helps improve the bootstrapping for both FV and BGV schemes.
In this note, we present the following relevant findings about the work of Chen and Han (referred to as CH18):
1. We provide a simpler construction of the low-degree polynomials that serve the same purpose and match the asymptotic bound achieved in CH18;
2. We show the optimality and limit of our approach by solving a minimal polynomial degree problem;
3. We consider the problem of extracting other low-order digits using polynomials and provide negative results.
Key Exchange and Authenticated Key Exchange with Reusable Keys Based on RLWE Assumption
Key Exchange (KE) is, undoubtedly, one of the most used cryptographic primitives in practice. Its authenticated version, Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE), avoids man-in-the-middle-based attacks by providing authentication for both parties involved. It is widely used on the Internet, in protocols such as TLS or SSH. In this work, we provide new constructions for KE and AKE based on ideal lattices in the Random Oracle Model (ROM). The contributions of this work can be summarized as follows:
1) It is well-known that RLWE-based KE protocols are not robust for key reuses since the signal function leaks information about the secret key. We modify the design of previous RLWE-based KE schemes to allow key reuse in the ROM. Our construction makes use of a new technique called pasteurization which enforces a supposedly RLWE sample sent by the other party to be indeed indistinguishable from a uniform sample and, therefore, ensures no information leakage in the whole KE process.
2) We build a new AKE scheme based on the construction above. The scheme provides implicit authentication (that is, it does not require the use of any other authentication mechanism, like a signature scheme) and it is proven secure in the Bellare-Rogaway model with weak Perfect Forward Secrecy in the ROM. It improves previous designs for AKE schemes based on lattices in several aspects. Our construction just requires sampling from only one discrete Gaussian distribution and avoids rejection sampling and noise flooding techniques, unlike previous proposals (Zhang et al., EUROCRYPT 2015). Thus, the scheme is much more efficient than previous constructions in terms of computational and communication complexity.
Since our constructions are provably secure assuming the hardness of the RLWE problem, they are considered to be robust against quantum adversaries and, thus, suitable for post-quantum applications.
A Faster Constant-time Algorithm of CSIDH keeping Two Points
At ASIACRYPT 2018, Castryck, Lange, Martindale, Panny and Renes proposed CSIDH, which is a key-exchange protocol based on isogenies between elliptic curves, and a candidate for post-quantum cryptography. However, the implementation by Castryck et al. is not constant-time. Specifically, a part of the secret key could be recovered by the side-channel Attacks. Recently, Meyer, Campos and Reith proposed a constant-time implementation of CSIDH by introducing dummy isogenies and taking secret exponents only from intervals of non-negative integers. Their non-negative intervals make the calculation cost of their implementation of CSIDH twice that of the worst case of the standard (variable-time) implementation of CSIDH. In this paper, we propose a more efficient constant-time algorithm that takes secret exponents from intervals symmetric with respect to the zero. For using these intervals, we need to keep two torsion points in an elliptic curve and calculation for these points. We evaluate the costs of our implementation and that of Meyer et al. in terms of the number of operations on a finite prime field. Our evaluation shows that our constant-time implementation of CSIDH reduces the calculation cost by 28.23% compared with the implementation by Mayer et al. We also implemented our algorithm by extending the implementation in C of Meyer et al. (originally from Castryck et al.). Then our implementation achieved 152.8 million clock cycles, which is about 29.03% faster than that of Meyer et al. and confirms the above reduction ratio in our cost evaluation.
Constant-Round Group Key Exchange from the Ring-LWE Assumption
Group key-exchange protocols allow a set of N parties to agree on a shared, secret key by communicating over a public network. A number of solutions to this problem have been proposed over the years, mostly based on variants of Diffie-Hellman (two-party) key exchange. There has been relatively little work, however, looking at candidate post-quantum group key-exchange protocols.
Here, we propose a constant-round protocol for unauthenticated group key exchange (i.e., with security against a passive eavesdropper) based on the hardness of the Ring-LWE problem. By applying the Katz-Yung compiler using any post-quantum signature scheme, we obtain a (scalable) protocol for authenticated group key exchange with post-quantum security. Our protocol is constructed by generalizing the Burmester-Desmedt protocol to the Ring-LWE setting, which requires addressing several technical challenges.
Visualizing size-security tradeoffs for lattice-based encryption
There are many proposed lattice-based encryption systems. How do these systems compare in the security that they provide against known attacks, under various limits on communication volume? There are several reasons to be skeptical of graphs that claim to answer this question. Part of the problem is with the underlying data points, and part of the problem is with how the data points are converted into graphs.
Efficient Invisible and Unlinkable Sanitizable Signatures
Sanitizable signatures allow designated parties (the sanitizers) to apply arbitrary modifications to some restricted parts of signed messages. A secure scheme should not only be unforgeable, but also protect privacy and hold both the signer and the sanitizer accountable. Two important security properties that are seemingly difficult to achieve simultaneously and efficiently are invisibility and unlinkability. While invisibility ensures that the admissible modifications are hidden from external parties, unlinkability says that sanitized signatures cannot be linked to their sources. Achieving both properties simultaneously is crucial for applications where sensitive personal data is signed with respect to data-dependent admissible modifications. The existence of an efficient construction achieving both properties was recently posed as an open question by Camenisch et al. (PKC’17).
In this work, we propose a solution to this problem with a two-step construction. First, we construct (non-accountable) invisible and unlinkable sanitizable signatures from signatures on equivalence classes and other basic primitives. Second, we put forth a generic transformation using verifiable ring signatures to turn any non-accountable sanitizable signature into an accountable one while preserving all other properties. When instantiating in the generic group and random oracle model, the efficiency of our construction is comparable to that of prior constructions, while providing stronger security guarantees.
Homomorphic Time-Lock Puzzles and Applications
Time-lock puzzles allow one to encrypt messages for the future, by efficiently generating a puzzle with a solution $s$ that remains hidden until time $T$ has elapsed. The solution is required to be concealed from the eyes of any algorithm running in (parallel) time less than $T$.
We put forth the concept of \emph{homomorphic time-lock puzzles}, where one can evaluate functions over puzzles without solving them, i.e., one can manipulate a set of puzzles with solutions $(s_1, \dots, s_n)$ to obtain a puzzle that solves to $f(s_1, \ldots, s_n)$, for any function $f$.
We propose candidate constructions under concrete cryptographic assumptions for different classes of functions. Then we show how homomorphic time-lock puzzles overcome the limitations of classical time-lock puzzles by proposing new protocols for applications of interest, such as e-voting, multi-party coin flipping, and fair contract signing.
Fully Secure Attribute-Based Encryption for $t$-CNF from LWE
Attribute-based Encryption (ABE), first introduced by [SW05,GPSW06], is a public key encryption system that can support multiple users with varying decryption permissions. One of the main properties of such schemes is the supported function class of policies. While there are fully secure constructions from bilinear maps for a fairly large class of policies, the situation with lattice-based constructions is less satisfactory and many efforts were made to close this gap. Prior to this work the only known fully secure lattice construction was for the class of point functions (also known as IBE).
In this work we construct for the first time a lattice-based (ciphertext-policy) ABE scheme for the function class $t$-CNF, which consists of CNF formulas where each clause depends on at most $t$ bits of the input, for any constant $t$. This class includes NP-verification policies, bit-fixing policies and $t$-threshold policies. Towards this goal we also construct a fully secure single-key constrained PRF from OWF for the same function class, which might be of independent interest.
(Linkable) Ring Signature from Hash-Then-One-Way Signature
In this paper, we revisit the generic construction of ring signatures from hash-then-one-way type ($\mathsf{Type-H}$) signatures proposed by Abe et al. (AOS) in 2004 and made the following contributions. First, we give a proof for the generic construction, in a strengthened security model. Previously, this was only done for concrete instantiations, in a weaker model. Second, we extend AOS's framework to generically construct one-time linkable ring signatures from $\mathsf{Type-H}$ signatures and one-time signatures. Lastly, we instantiate the generic construction with an NTRU-based $\mathsf{Type-H}$ signature: Falcon~and obtain a post-quantum linkable ring signature scheme. Our analysis shows that the resulting linkable
signature is more efficient than any existing lattice based solutions for small to moderate number of users.
Asymmetric Message Franking: Content Moderation for Metadata-Private End-to-End Encryption
Content moderation is crucial for stopping abuse and harassment via messaging on online platforms. Existing moderation mechanisms, such as message franking, require platform providers to see user identifiers on encrypted traffic. These mechanisms cannot be used in messaging systems in which users can hide their identities, such as Signal. The key technical challenge preventing moderation is in simultaneously achieving cryptographic accountability while preserving deniability. In this work, we resolve this tension with a new cryptographic primitive: asymmetric message franking schemes (AMFs). We define strong security notions for AMFs, including the first formal treatment of deniability in moderation settings. We then construct, analyze, and implement an AMF scheme that is fast enough for deployment. We detail how to use AMFs to build content moderation for metadata-private messaging.
Faster Bootstrapping of FHE over the integers with large prime message space
Bootstrapping of FHE over the integer with large message is a open problem, which is to evaluate double modulo $(c ~\text{mod}~ p )~\mod~ Q$ arithmetic homomorphically for large $Q$. In this paper, we express this double modulo reduction circuit as a arithmetic circuit of degree at most $\theta^2 \log^2\theta/2$, with $O(\theta \log^2\theta)$ multiplication gates, where $\theta= \frac{\lambda}{\log \lambda}$ and $\lambda$ is the security parameter. The complexity of decryption circuit is independent of the message space size $Q$ with a constraint $Q> \theta \log^2\theta/2$.
How to not break SIDH
We give a number of approaches which, to a newcomer, may seem like natural ways to attack the SIDH/SIKE protocol, and explain why each of these approaches seems to fail, at least with the specific setup and parameters of SIKE.
Our aim is to save some time for others who are looking to assess the security of SIDH/SIKE.
We include methods that fail to attack the pure isogeny problem, namely: looking at the $\mathbb F_p$-subgraph, lifting to characteristic zero, and using Weil restrictions.
We also include methods that fail to make use of the public 2-power and 3-power torsion points, namely: interpolation techniques, any purely group-theoretic approaches, and constructing an endomorphism à la Petit to exploit the auxiliary points, but with balanced parameters.
Defeating the Hart et al, Beullens-Blackburn, Kotov-Menshov-Ushakov, and Merz-Petit Attacks on WalnutDSA(TM)
The Walnut Digital Signature Algorithm (WalnutDSA) brings together methods in group theory, representation theory, and number theory, to yield a public-key method that provides a means for messages to be signed and signatures to be verified, on platforms where traditional approaches cannot be executed. After briefly reviewing the various heuristic/practical attacks that have be posited by Hart et al, Beullens-Blackburn, Kotov-Menshov-Ushakov, and Merz-Petit, we detail the parameter choices that defeat each attack, ensure the security of the of the method, and demonstrate its continued utility.
Hierarchical Attribute-based Signatures: Short Keys and Optimal Signature Length
With Attribute-based Signatures (ABS) users can simultaneously sign messages and prove compliance of their attributes, issued by designated attribute authorities, with some verification policy. Neither signer's identity nor possessed attributes are leaked during the verification process, making ABS schemes a handy tool for applications requiring privacy-preserving authentication. Earlier ABS schemes lacked support for hierarchical delegation of attributes (across tiers of attribute authorities down to the signers), a distinct property that has made traditional PKIs more scalable and widely adoptable.
This changed recently with the introduction of Hierarchical ABS (HABS) schemes, where support for attribute delegation was proposed in combination with stronger privacy guarantees for the delegation paths (path anonymity) and new accountability mechanisms allowing a dedicated tracing authority to identify these paths (path traceability) and the signer, along with delegated attributes, if needed. Yet, current HABS construction is generic with inefficient delegation process resulting in sub-optimal signature lengths of order $O(k^{2}|\Psi|)$ where $\Psi$ is the policy size and $k$ the height of the hierarchy.
This paper proposes a direct HABS construction in bilinear groups that significantly improves on these bounds and satisfies the original security and privacy requirements. At the core of our HABS scheme is a new delegation process based on the length-reducing homomorphic trapdoor commitments to group elements for which we introduce a new delegation technique allowing step-wise commitments to additional elements without changing the length of the original commitment and its opening. While also being of independent interest, this technique results in shorter HABS keys and achieves the signature-length growth of $O(k|\Psi|)$ which is optimal due to the path-traceability requirement.
Tight Leakage-Resilient CCA-Security from Quasi-Adaptive Hash Proof System
We propose the concept of quasi-adaptive hash proof system (QAHPS), where the projection key is allowed to depend on the specific language for which hash values are computed. We formalize leakage-resilient(LR)-ardency for QAHPS by defining two statistical properties, including LR-<L_0,L_1>-universal and LR-<L_0,L_1>-key-switching.
We provide a generic approach to tightly leakage-resilient CCA (LR-CCA) secure public-key encryption (PKE) from LR-ardent QAHPS. Our approach is reminiscent of the seminal work of Cramer and Shoup (Eurocrypt'02), and employ three QAHPS schemes, one for generating a uniform string to hide the plaintext, and the other two for proving the well-formedness of the ciphertext. The LR-ardency of QAHPS makes possible the tight LR-CCA security. We give instantiations based on the standard k-Linear (k-LIN) assumptions over asymmetric and symmetric pairing groups, respectively, and obtain fully compact PKE with tight LR-CCA security. The security loss is O(log Q_e) where Q_e denotes the number of encryption queries. Specifically, our tightly LR-CCA secure PKE instantiation from SXDH has only 4 group elements in the public key and 7 group elements in the ciphertext, thus is the most efficient one.
Evaluation of Code-based Signature Schemes
Code-based cryptographic schemes recently raised to prominence as quantum-safe alternatives to the currently employed number-theoretic constructions, which do not resist quantum attacks.
In this article, we discuss the Courtois-Finiasz-Sendrier signature scheme and derive code-based signature schemes using the Fiat-Shamir transformation from code-based zero-knowledge identification schemes, namely the Stern scheme, the Jain-Krenn-Pietrzak-Tentes scheme, and the Cayrel-Veron-El Yousfi scheme. We analyze the security of these code-based signature schemes and derive the security parameters to achieve the 80-bit and 128-bit level of classical security. To derive the secure parameters, we have studied the hardness of Syndrome Decoding Problem.
Furthermore, we implement the signature schemes, based on the Fiat-Shamir transform, which were mentioned above, and compare their performance on a PC.
Misuse Attacks on Post-Quantum Cryptosystems
Many post-quantum cryptosystems which have been proposed in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) standardization process follow the same meta-algorithm, but in different algebras or different encoding methods. They usually propose two constructions, one being weaker and the other requiring a random oracle. We focus on the weak version of nine submissions to NIST. Submitters claim no security when the secret key is used several times. In this paper, we analyze how easy it is to run a key recovery under multiple key reuse. We mount a classical key recovery under plaintext checking attacks (i.e., with a plaintext checking oracle saying if a given ciphertext decrypts well to a given plaintext) and a quantum key recovery under chosen ciphertext attacks. In the latter case, we assume quantum access to the decryption oracle.
Fully Homomorphic Encryption with k-bit Arithmetic Operations
We present a fully homomorphic encryption scheme continuing the line of works
of Ducas and Micciancio (2015, [DM15]), Chillotti et al. (2016, [CGGI16a]; 2017,
[CGGI17]; 2018, [CGGI18a]), and Gao (2018,[Gao18]). Ducas and Micciancio (2015)
show that homomorphic computation of one bit operation on LWE ciphers can be done
in less than a second, which is then reduced by Chillotti et al. (2016, 2017, 2018) to
13ms. According to Chillotti et al. (2018, [CGGI18b]), the cipher expansion for TFHE
is still 8000. The ciphertext expansion problem was greatly reduced by Gao (2018) to
6 with private-key encryption and 20 for public key encryption. The bootstrapping in
Gao (2018) is only done one bit at a time, and the bootstrapping design matches the
previous two works in efficiency.
Our contribution is to present a fully homomorphic encryption scheme based on
these preceding schemes that generalizes the Gao (2018) scheme to perform operations
on k-bit encrypted data and also removes the need for the Independence Heuristic of
the Chillotti et al. papers. The amortized cost of computing k-bits at a time improves
the efficiency. Operations supported include addition and multiplication modulo $2^k$,
addition and multiplication in the integers as well as exponentiation, field inversion
and the machine learning activation function RELU. The ciphertext expansion factor
is also further improved, for $k = 4$ our scheme achieves a ciphertext expansion factor of
2.5 under secret key and 6.5 under public key. Asymptotically as k increases, our scheme
achieves the optimal ciphertext expansion factor of 1 under private key encryption and
2 under public key encryption. We also introduces techniques for reducing the size of
the bootstrapping key.
Keywords. FHE, lattices, learning with errors (LWE), ring learning with errors
(RLWE), TFHE, data security, RELU, machine learning
SeaSign: Compact isogeny signatures from class group actions
We give a new signature scheme for isogenies that combines the class group actions of CSIDH with the notion of Fiat-Shamir with aborts. Our techniques allow to have signatures of size less than one kilobyte at the 128-bit security level, even with tight security reduction (to a non-standard problem) in the quantum random oracle model. Hence our signatures are potentially shorter than lattice signatures, but signing and verification are currently very expensive.
Digital Signatures for Consensus
We present a pairing-based signature scheme for use in
blockchains
that achieves substantial savings in bandwidth and storage requirements
while providing strong security guarantees.
Our signature scheme supports aggregation on the same message, which
allows us to compress multiple signatures on the same block during
consensus, and achieves forward security, which prevents adaptive
attacks on the blockchain.
Our signature scheme can be applied to all blockchains that rely on multi-party consensus protocols to agree on blocks of transactions (such as proof-of-stake or permissioned blockchains).
Tweaking the Asymmetry of Asymmetric-Key Cryptography on Lattices: KEMs and Signatures of Smaller Sizes
Lattice-based cryptosystems are less efficient than their number-theoretic counterparts (based on RSA, discrete logarithm, etc.) in terms of key and ciphertext (signature) sizes. For adequate security the former typically needs thousands of bytes while in contrast the latter only requires at most hundreds of bytes.
This significant difference has become one of the main concerns in replacing currently deployed public-key cryptosystems with lattice-based ones.
Observing the inherent asymmetries in existing lattice-based cryptosystems, we propose asymmetric variants of the (module-)LWE
and (module-)SIS assumptions, which yield further size-optimized KEM and signature schemes than those from standard counterparts.
Following the framework of Lindner and Peikert (CT-RSA 2011) and the Crystals-Kyber proposal (EuroS&P 2018), we propose an IND-CCA secure KEM scheme from the hardness of the asymmetric module-LWE (AMLWE), whose asymmetry is fully exploited to obtain shorter public keys and ciphertexts.
To target at a 128-bit security, the public key (resp., ciphertext) of our KEM only has 896 bytes (resp., 992 bytes), which gives an improvement of 192 bytes (resp.,160 bytes) over Kyber.
Our signature scheme bears most resemblance to
and improves upon the Crystals-Dilithium scheme (ToCHES 2018). By making full use of the underlying asymmetric module-LWE and module-SIS assumptions and carefully selecting the parameters, we obtain better compromise between computational costs, storage overheads and security and therefore construct an SUF-CMA secure signature scheme with shorter public keys and signatures. For a 128-bit security, the public key (resp., signature) of our signature scheme only has 1312 bytes (resp., 2445 bytes), which gives an improvement of 160 bytes (resp, 256 bytes) over Dilithium.
We adapt the best
known attacks and their variants to our AMLWE and AMSIS problems and conduct a comprehensive and thorough analysis of several parameter choices (aiming at different security strengths) and their impacts on the sizes, security and error probability of lattice-based cryptosystems.
Our analysis demonstrates that AMLWE and AMSIS problems admit more flexible and size-efficient choices of parameters than the respective standard versions. Furthermore, implementations of our proposed schemes appear to be (slightly) more computationally efficient than their counterparts.
A refined analysis of the cost for solving LWE via uSVP
The learning with errors (LWE) problem (STOC'05) introduced by Regev is one of the fundamental problems in lattice-based cryptography. One standard strategy to solve the LWE problem is to reduce it to a unique SVP (uSVP) problem via Kannan's embedding and then apply a lattice reduction to solve the uSVP problem. There are two methods for estimating the cost for solving LWE via this strategy: the first method considers the largeness of the gap in the uSVP problem (Gama-Nguyen, Eurocrypt'08) and the second method (Alkim et al., USENIX'16) considers the shortness of the projection of the shortest vector to the Gram-Schmidt vectors. These two estimates have been investigated by Albrecht et al. (Asiacrypt'16) who present a sound analysis and show that the lattice reduction experiments fit more consistently with the second estimate. They also observe that in some cases the lattice reduction even behaves better than the second estimate perhaps due to the second intersection of the projected vector with the Gram-Schmidt vectors. In this work, we revisit the work of Alkim et al. and Albrecht et al. We first report further experiments providing more comparisons and suggest that
the second estimate leads to a more accurate prediction in practice. We also present empirical evidence confirming the assumptions used in the second estimate. Furthermore, we examine the gaps in uSVP derived from the embedded lattice and explain why it is preferable to use embedding height equal to 1 for the embedded lattice. This shows there is a coherent relation between the second estimate and the gaps in uSVP. Finally, it has been conjectured by Albrecht et al. that the second intersection will not happen for large parameters. We will show that this is indeed the case: there is no second intersection as the block size goes to infinity.
An HPR variant of the FV scheme: Computationally Cheaper, Asymptotically Faster
State-of-the-art implementations of homomorphic encryption exploit the Fan and Vercauteren (FV) scheme and the Residue Number System (RNS). While the RNS breaks down large integer arithmetic into smaller independent channels, its non-positional nature makes operations such as division and rounding hard to implement, and makes the representation of small values inefficient. In this work, we propose the application of the Hybrid Position-Residues Number System representation to the FV scheme. This is a positional representation of large radix where the digits are represented in RNS. It inherits the benefits from RNS and allows to accelerate the critical division and rounding operations while also making the representation of smaller values more compact. This directly benefits the decryption and the homomorphic multiplication procedures, reducing their asymptotic complexity, in dimension $n$, from $\mathcal{O} (n^2 \log n)$ to $\mathcal{O} (n \log n)$ and from $\mathcal{O}(n^3 \log n)$ to $\mathcal{O} (n^{3})$, respectively. This has also resulted in noticeable speedups when experimentally compared to related art RNS implementations.
CSI-FiSh: Efficient Isogeny based Signatures through Class Group Computations
In this paper we report on a new record class group computation of an imaginary quadratic field having 154-digit discriminant, surpassing the previous record of 130 digits. This class group is central to the CSIDH-512 isogeny based cryptosystem, and knowing the class group structure and relation lattice implies efficient uniform sampling and a canonical representation of its elements. Both operations were impossible before and allow us to instantiate an isogeny based signature scheme first sketched by Stolbunov, which we further optimize using multiple public keys and Merkle trees. We also show that including quadratic twists allows to cut the public key size in half for free. Optimizing for signature size, our implementation takes 390ms to sign/verify and results in signatures of $263$ bytes, at the expense of a large public key. This is 300 times faster and over 3 times smaller than an optimized version of SeaSign for the same parameter set. Optimizing for public key and signature size combined, results in a total size of 1468 bytes, which is smaller than any other post-quantum signature scheme at the 128-bit security level.
Non-malleability for quantum public-key encryption
Non-malleability is an important security property for public-key encryption (PKE). Its significance is due to the fundamental unachievability of integrity and authenticity guarantees in this setting, rendering it the strongest integrity-like property achievable using only PKE, without digital signatures. In this work, we generalize this notion to the setting of quantum public-key encryption. Overcoming the notorious "recording barrier" known from generalizing other integrity-like security notions to quantum encryption, we generalize one of the equivalent classical definitions, comparison-based non-malleability, and show how it can be fulfilled. In addition, we explore one-time non-malleability notions for symmetric-key encryption from the literature by defining plaintext and ciphertext variants and by characterizing their relation.
BEARZ Attack FALCON: Implementation Attacks with Countermeasures on the FALCON signature scheme
Post-quantum cryptography is an important and growing area of research due to the threat of quantum computers, as recognised by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recent call for standardisation. Lattice-based signatures have been shown in the past to be susceptible to side-channel attacks. Falcon is a lattice-based signature candidate submitted to NIST, which has good performance but lacks in research with respect to implementation attacks and resistance. This research proposes the first fault attack analysis on Falcon and finds its lattice trapdoor sampler is as vulnerable to fault attacks as the GPV sampler used in alternative signature schemes. We simulate the post-processing component of this fault attack and achieve a 100% success rate at retrieving the private-key. This research then proposes an evaluation of countermeasures to prevent this fault attack and timing attacks on Falcon. We provide cost evaluations on the overheads of the proposed countermeasures which shows that Falcon has only up to 30% deterioration in performance of its key generation, and only 5% in its signing, compared to without countermeasures.
Succinct Garbled RAM
We construct the first fully succinct garbling scheme for RAM programs, assuming the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation for circuits and one-way functions. That is, the size, space requirements, and runtime of the garbled program are the same as those of the input program, up to poly-logarithmic factors and a polynomial in the security parameter. The scheme can be used to construct indistinguishability obfuscators for RAM programs with comparable efficiency, at the price of requiring sub-exponential security of the underlying primitives.
In particular, this opens the door to obfuscated computations that are sublinear in the length of their inputs.
The scheme builds on the recent schemes of Koppula-Lewko-Waters and Canetti-Holmgren-Jain-Vaikuntanathan [STOC 15]. A key technical challenge here is how to combine the fixed-prefix technique of KLW, which was developed for deterministic programs, with randomized Oblivious RAM techniques. To overcome that, we develop a method for arguing about the indistinguishability of two obfuscated randomized programs that use correlated randomness. Along the way, we also define and construct garbling schemes that offer only partial protection. These may be of independent interest.
Faster Homomorphic Linear Transformations in HElib
HElib is a software library that implements homomorphic encryption (HE), with a focus on effective use of "packed" ciphertexts. An important operation (which is used in bootstrapping, as well as in other applications) is applying a known linear map to a vector of encrypted data. In this paper, we describe several algorithmic improvements that significantly speed up this operation: in our experiments, our new algorithms were 30-75 times faster than those currently implemented in HElib for typical parameters.
Our techniques also reduce the size of the large public evaluation key, often using 33%-50% less space than the previous HElib implementation. We also implemented a new tradeoff that enables a drastic reduction in size, maybe a 25x factor or more for some parameters, paying only a 2-4x factor in runtime (and giving up some parallelization opportunities).
Further Lower Bounds for Structure-Preserving Signatures in Asymmetric Bilinear Groups
Structure-Preserving Signatures (SPSs) are a useful tool for the design of modular cryptographic protocols. Recent series of works have shown that by limiting the message space of those schemes to the set of Diffie-Hellman (DH) pairs, it is possible to circumvent the known lower bounds in the Type-3 bilinear group setting thus obtaining the shortest signatures consisting of only 2 elements from the shorter source group. It has been shown that such a variant yields efficiency gains for some cryptographic constructions, including attribute-based signatures and direct anonymous attestation. Only the cases of signing a single DH pair or a DH pair and a vector from $\Z_p$ have been considered. Signing a vector of group elements is required for various applications of SPSs, especially if the aim is to forgo relying on heuristic assumptions.
An open question is whether such an improved lower bound also applies to signing a vector of $\ell > 1$ messages. We answer this question negatively for schemes existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen-message attack (EUF-CMA) whereas we answer it positively for schemes existentially unforgeable under a random-message attack (EUF-RMA) and those which are existentially unforgeable under a combined chosen-random-message attack (EUF-CMA-RMA). The latter notion is a leeway between the two former notions where it allows the adversary to adaptively choose part of the message to be signed whereas the remaining part of the message is chosen uniformly at random by the signer.
Another open question is whether strongly existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen-message attack (sEUF-CMA) schemes with 2-element signatures exist. We answer this question negatively, proving it is impossible to construct sEUF-CMA schemes with 2-element signatures even if the signature consists of elements from both source groups. On the other hand, we prove that sEUF-RMA and sEUF-CMA-RMA schemes with 2-element (unilateral) signatures are possible by giving constructions for those notions.
Among other things, our findings show a gap between random-message/combined chosen-random-message security and chosen-message security in this setting.
An Attack on Small Private Keys of RSA Based on Euclidean Algorithm
In this paper, we describe an attack on RSA cryptosystem which is based on Euclid's algorithm.
Given a public key $(n,e)$ with corresponding private key $d$ such that $e$ has the same order of magnitude as $n$ and
one of the integers $k = (ed-1)/\phi(n)$ and $e-k$ has at most one-quarter as many bits as $e$,
it computes the factorization of $n$ in deterministic time $O((\log n)^2)$ bit operations.
Revocable Hierarchical Identity-Based Encryption with Shorter Private Keys and Update Keys
Revocable hierarchical identity-based encryption (RHIBE) is an extension of HIBE that supports the revocation of user's private keys to manage the dynamic credentials of users in a system. Many different RHIBE schemes were proposed previously, but they are not efficient in terms of the private key size and the update key size since the depth of a hierarchical identity is included as a multiplicative factor. In this paper, we propose efficient RHIBE schemes with shorter private keys and update keys and small public parameters by removing this multiplicative factor. To achieve our goals, we first present a new HIBE scheme with the different generation of private keys such that a private key can be simply derived from a short intermediate private key. Next, we show that two efficient RHIBE schemes can be built by combining our HIBE scheme, an IBE scheme, and a tree based broadcast encryption scheme in a modular way.
Two-Input Functional Encryption for Inner Products from Bilinear Maps
Functional encryption is a new paradigm of public-key encryption that allows a user to compute $f(x)$ on encrypted data $CT(x)$ with a private key $SK_f$ to finely control the revealed information. Multi-input functional encryption is an important extension of (single-input) functional encryption that allows the computation $f(x_1, \ldots, x_n)$ on multiple ciphertexts $CT(x_1), \ldots, CT(x_n)$ with a private key $SK_f$. Although multi-input functional encryption has many interesting applications like running SQL queries on encrypted database and computation on encrypted stream, current candidates are not yet practical since many of them are built on indistinguishability obfuscation. To solve this unsatisfactory situation, we show that practical two-input functional encryption schemes for inner products can be built based on bilinear maps. In this paper, we first propose a two-input functional encryption scheme for inner products in composite-order bilinear groups and prove its selective IND-security under simple assumptions. Next, we propose a two-client functional encryption scheme for inner products where each ciphertext can be associated with a time period and prove its selective IND-security. Furthermore, we show that our two-input functional encryption schemes in composite-order bilinear groups can be converted into schemes in prime-order asymmetric bilinear groups by using the asymmetric property of asymmetric bilinear groups.
Identity-Based Revocation from Subset Difference Methods under Simple Assumptions
Identity-based revocation (IBR) is a specific kind of broadcast encryption that can effectively send a ciphertext to a set of receivers. In IBR, a ciphertext is associated with a set of revoked users instead of a set of receivers and the maximum number of users in the system can be an exponential value in the security parameter. In this paper, we reconsider the general method of Lee, Koo, Lee, and Park (ESORICS 2014) that constructs a public-key revocation (PKR) scheme by combining the subset difference (SD) method of Naor, Naor, and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) and a single revocation encryption (SRE) scheme. Lee et al. left it as an open problem to construct an SRE scheme under the standard assumption without random oracles. In this work, we first propose a selectively secure SRE scheme under the standard assumption without random oracles. We also propose a fully secure SRE scheme under simple static assumptions without random oracles. Next, we present an efficient IBR scheme derived from the SD method and our SRE scheme. The security of our IBR scheme depends on that of the underlying SRE scheme. Finally, we implemented our SRE and IBR schemes and measured the performance.
Round5: Compact and Fast Post-Quantum Public-Key Encryption
We present the ring-based configuration of the NIST submission Round5, a Ring Learning with Rounding (RLWR)- based
IND-CPA secure public-key encryption scheme. It combines elements of the NIST candidates Round2 (use of RLWR as underlying problem, having $1+x+\ldots +x^n$ with $n+1$ prime as reduction polynomial, allowing for a large design space) and HILA5 (the constant-time error-correction code XEf). Round5 performs part of encryption, and
decryption via multiplication in $\mathbb{Z}_{p}[x]/(x^{n+1}-1)$, and uses secret-key polynomials that have a factor $(x-1)$.
This technique reduces the failure probability and makes correlation in the decryption error negligibly low. The latter allows the effective application of error correction through XEf to further reduce the failure rate and shrink parameters, improving both security and performance. We argue for the security of Round5, both formal and concrete. We further analyze the
decryption error, and give analytical as well as experimental results arguing that the decryption failure rate is lower than in Round2, with negligible correlation in errors. IND-CCA secure parameters constructed using Round5 and offering more than 232 and 256 bits of quantum and classical security respectively, under the conservative core sieving model, require only 2144 B of bandwidth. For comparison, similar, competing proposals require over 30% more bandwidth. Furthermore, the high flexibility of Round5's design allows choosing finely tuned parameters fitting the needs of diverse applications -- ranging from the IoT to high-security levels.
Achieving secure and efficient lattice-based public-key encryption: the impact of the secret-key distribution
Lattice-based public-key encryption has a large
number of design choices that can be combined in
diverse ways to obtain different tradeoffs. One of these choices is
the distribution from which secret keys are sampled.
Numerous secret-key distributions exist in the state of the
art, including (discrete) Gaussian, binomial, ternary, and fixed-weight ternary.
Although the secret-key distribution
impacts both the concrete security and the performance of
the schemes, it has not been compared in a detailed way how
the choice of secret-key distribution affects this tradeoff.
In this paper, we compare different aspects of
secret-key distributions from submissions to the NIST
post-quantum standardization effort.
We consider their impact on
concrete security (influenced by the entropy and
variance of the distribution), and
on decryption
failures and
IND-CCA2 security
(influenced by the probability of sampling keys
with ``non average, large'' norm).
Next, we select concrete parameters of an
encryption
scheme instantiated with the above
distributions
%optimized for key sizes,
to identify which distribution(s) offer the
best tradeoffs between security and key sizes.
The conclusions of the paper are:
first, the above optimization shows that
fixed-weight
ternary secret keys result in the smallest key sizes in the analyzed scheme.
The reason is that such secret keys
reduce the decryption failure rate
and hence allow for a higher
noise-to-modulus ratio, alleviating the slight increase in
lattice dimension required for countering specialized attacks that
apply in this case.
Second, compared to secret keys
with independently sampled components,
secret keys with a fixed composition
(i.e., the number of secret key components equal to any possible
value is fixed)
result in the scheme becoming more secure against
active attacks based on decryption failures.
Pushing the speed limit of constant-time discrete Gaussian sampling. A case study on Falcon.
Sampling from discrete Gaussian distribution has applications in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography. Several efficient solutions have been proposed in recent years. However, making a Gaussian sampler secure against timing attacks turned out to be a challenging research problem. In this work, we observed an important property of the input random bit strings that generate samples in Knuth-Yao sampling. We delineate a generic step-by-step method to instantiate a discrete Gaussian sampler of arbitrary standard deviation and precision by efficiently minimizing the Boolean expressions by exploiting this prop-
erty. Discrete Gaussian samplers generated in this method can be up to 37% faster than the state of the art method. Finally, we show that the signing algorithm of post-quantum signature scheme Falcon using our constant-time sampler is at most 33% slower than the fastest non-constant time sampler.
Biased Nonce Sense: Lattice Attacks against Weak ECDSA Signatures in Cryptocurrencies
In this paper, we compute hundreds of Bitcoin private keys and dozens of Ethereum, Ripple, SSH, and HTTPS private keys by carrying out cryptanalytic attacks against digital signatures contained in public blockchains and Internet-wide scans. The ECDSA signature algorithm requires the generation of a per-message secret nonce. If this nonce is not generated uniformly at random, an attacker can potentially exploit this bias to compute the long-term signing key. We use a lattice-based algorithm for solving the hidden number problem to efficiently compute private ECDSA keys that were used with biased signature nonces due to multiple apparent implementation vulnerabilities.
Attack on Kayawood Protocol: Uncloaking Private Keys
We analyze security properties of a two-party key-agreement protocol recently proposed by I. Anshel, D. Atkins, D. Goldfeld, and P. Gunnels, called Kayawood protocol. At the core of the protocol is an action (called E-multiplication) of a braid group on some finite set. The protocol assigns a secret element of a braid group to each party (private key). To disguise those elements, the protocol uses a so-called cloaking method that multiplies private keys on the left and on the right by specially designed elements (stabilizers for E-multiplication).
We present a heuristic algorithm that allows a passive eavesdropper to recover Alice's private key by removing cloaking elements. Our attack has 100% success rate on randomly generated instances of the protocol for the originally proposed parameter values and for recent proposals that suggest to insert many cloaking elements at random positions of the private key. Our implementation of the attack is available on GitHub.
Sharing of Encrypted files in Blockchain Made Simpler
Recently, blockchain technology has attracted much attention of the research community in several domains requiring transparency of data accountability, due to the removal of intermediate trust assumptions from third parties. One such application is enabling file sharing in blockchain enabled distributed cloud storage. Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic primitive that allows such file sharing by re-encrypting ciphertexts towards legitimate users via semi-trusted proxies, without them learning any information about the underlying message. To facilitate secure data sharing in the distributed cloud, it is essential to construct efficient proxy re-encryption protocols. In this paper, we introduce the notion of proxy self re-encryption (SE-PRE) that is highly efficient, as compared to the existing PRE schemes in the literature. We show that our self encryption scheme is provably CCA secure based on the DLP assumption and our proxy re-encryption scheme with self encryption is CCA secure under the hardness of the Computational Diffie Hellman (CDH) and Discrete Logarithm (DLP) assumption. Our novel encryption scheme, called self encryption, has no exponentiation or costly pairing operation. Even the re-encryption in SE-PRE does not have such operations and this facilitates the service provider with efficiency gain.
CCA Security for Self-Updatable Encryption: Protecting Cloud Data When Clients Read/Write Ciphertexts
Self-updatable encryption (SUE) is a new kind of public-key encryption, motivated by cloud computing, which enables anyone (i.e. cloud server with no access to private keys) to update a past ciphertext to a future ciphertext by using a public key. The main applications of SUE is revocable-storage attribute-based encryption (RS-ABE) that provides an efficient and secure access control to encrypted data stored in cloud storage. In this setting, there is a new threat such that a revoked user still can access past ciphertexts given to him by a storage server. RS-ABE solves this problem by combining user revocation and ciphertext updating functionalities. The mechanism was designed with semantic security (CPA).
Here, we propose the first SUE and RS-ABE schemes, secure against a relevant form of CCA, which allows ciphertexts submitted by attackers to decryption servers. Due to the fact that some ciphertexts are easily derived from others, we employ a different notion of CCA which avoids easy challenge related messages (we note that this type of idea was employed in other contexts before). Specifically, we define "time extended challenge" (TEC) CCA security for SUE which excludes ciphertexts that are easily derived from the challenge (over time periods) from being queried on (namely, once a challenge is decided by an adversary, no easy modification of this challenge to future and past time periods is allowed to be queried upon). We then propose an efficient SUE scheme with such CCA security, and we also define similar CCA security for RS-ABE and present an RS-ABE scheme with this CCA security.
Quantum FHE (Almost) As Secure As Classical
Fully homomorphic encryption schemes (FHE) allow to apply arbitrary efficient computation to encrypted data without decrypting it first. In Quantum FHE (QFHE) we may want to apply an arbitrary quantumly efficient computation to (classical or quantum) encrypted data.
We present a QFHE scheme with classical key generation (and classical encryption and decryption if the encrypted message is itself classical) with comparable properties to classical FHE. Security relies on the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem with polynomial modulus, which translates to the worst case hardness of approximating short vector problems in lattices to within a polynomial factor. Up to polynomial factors, this matches the best known assumption for classical FHE. Similarly to the classical setting, relying on LWE alone only implies leveled QFHE (where the public key length depends linearly on the maximal allowed evaluation depth). An additional circular security assumption is required to support completely unbounded depth. Interestingly, our circular security assumption is the same assumption that is made to achieve unbounded depth multi-key classical FHE.
Technically, we rely on the outline of Mahadev (arXiv 2017) which achieves this functionality by relying on super-polynomial LWE modulus and on a new circular security assumption. We observe a connection between the functionality of evaluating quantum gates and the circuit privacy property of classical homomorphic encryption. While this connection is not sufficient to imply QFHE by itself, it leads us to a path that ultimately allows using classical FHE schemes with polynomial modulus towards constructing QFHE with the same modulus.
Degenerate Fault Attacks on Elliptic Curve Parameters in OpenSSL
In this paper, we describe several practically exploitable fault attacks against OpenSSL's implementation of elliptic curve cryptography, related to the singular curve point decompression attacks of Blömer and Günther (FDTC2015) and the degenerate curve attacks of Neves and Tibouchi (PKC 2016).
In particular, we show that OpenSSL allows to construct EC key files containing explicit curve parameters with a compressed base point. A simple single fault injection upon loading such a file yields a full key recovery attack when the key file is used for signing with ECDSA, and a complete recovery of the plaintext when the file is used for encryption using an algorithm like ECIES. The attack is especially devastating against curves with $j$-invariant equal to 0 such as the Bitcoin curve secp256k1, for which key recovery reduces to a single division in the base field.
Additionally, we apply the present fault attack technique to OpenSSL's implementation of ECDH, by combining it with Neves and Tibouchi's degenerate curve attack. This version of the attack applies to usual named curve parameters with nonzero $j$-invariant, such as P192 and P256. Although it is typically more computationally expensive than the one against signatures and encryption, and requires multiple faulty outputs from the server, it can recover the entire static secret key of the server even in the presence of point validation.
These various attacks can be mounted with only a single instruction skipping fault, and therefore can be easily injected using low-cost voltage glitches on embedded devices. We validated them in practice using concrete fault injection experiments on a Rapsberry Pi single board computer running the up to date OpenSSL command line tools---a setting where the threat of fault attacks is quite significant.
Constant-time BCH Error-Correcting Code
Error-correcting codes can be useful in reducing decryption failure rate of several lattice-based and code-based public-key encryption schemes. Two schemes, namely LAC and HQC, in NIST’s round 2 phase of its post-quantum cryptography standardisation project use the strong error-correcting BCH code. However, direct application of the BCH code in decryption algorithms of public-key schemes could open new avenues to the attacks. For example, a recent attack exploited non-constant-time execution of BCH code to reduce the security of LAC.
In this paper we analyse the BCH error-correcting code, identify computation steps that cause timing variations and design the first constant-time BCH algorithm. We implement our algorithm in software and evaluate its resistance against timing attacks by performing leakage detection tests. To study the computational overhead of the countermeasures, we integrated our constant-time BCH code in the reference and optimised implementations of the LAC scheme as a case study, and observed nearly 1.1 and 1.4 factor slowdown respectively for the CCA-secure primitives
Short Lattice-based One-out-of-Many Proofs and Applications to Ring Signatures
In this work, we construct a short one-out-of-many proof from (module) lattices, allowing one to prove knowledge of a secret associated with one of the public values in a set. The proof system builds on a combination of ideas from the efficient proposals in the discrete logarithm setting by Groth and Kohlweiss (EUROCRYPT '15) and Bootle et al. (ESORICS '15), can have logarithmic communication complexity in the set size and does not require a trusted setup.
Our work resolves an open problem mentioned by Libert et al. (EUROCRYPT '16) of how to efficiently extend the above discrete logarithm proof techniques to the lattice setting. To achieve our result, we introduce new technical tools for design and analysis of algebraic lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs, which may be of independent interest.
Using our proof system as a building block, we design a short ring signature scheme, whose security relies on ``post-quantum'' lattice assumptions. Even for a very large ring size such as 1 billion, our ring signature size is only 3 MB for 128-bit security level compared to 216 MB in the best existing lattice-based result by Libert et al. (EUROCRYPT '16).
A Generic Construction of Revocable Identity-Based Encryption
Revocable identity-based encryption (RIBE) is an extension of IBE that supports a key revocation mechanism, which is important when deployed an IBE system in practice. Boneh and Franklin presented the first generic construction of RIBE, however, their scheme is not scalable where the size of key update is linear in the number of users in the system. Then, Boldyreva, Goyal and Kumar presented the first scalable RIBE where the size of key update is logarithmic in the number of users and linear in the number of revoked users.
In this paper, we present a generic construction of scalable RIBE from any IBE in a black-box way. Our construction has some merits both in theory and in practice. We obtain the first RIBE scheme based on quadratic residuosity problem and the first adaptively secure RIBE scheme based on lattices if we instantiate the underlying IBE with IBE schemes from quadratic residuosity assumption and adaptively secure IBE from lattices, respectively.
In addition, the size of public parameters and secret keys are the same as that of the underlying IBE schemes. In server-aided model, the overheads of communication and computation for receivers are the same as those of underlying IBE schemes. Furthermore, the storage overhead for key update in our scheme is constant (in the number of users) while it was linear in the number of users in previous works.
Efficient Attribute-Based Signatures for Unbounded Arithmetic Branching Programs
This paper presents the first attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme in which the correspondence between
signers and signatures is captured in an arithmetic model of computation. Specifically, we design a fully
secure, i.e., adaptively unforgeable and perfectly signer-private ABS scheme for signing policies realizable
by arithmetic branching programs (ABP), which are a quite expressive model of arithmetic computations.
On a more positive note, the proposed scheme places no bound on the size and input length of the
supported signing policy ABP’s, and at the same time, supports the use of an input attribute for an
arbitrary number of times inside a signing policy ABP, i.e., the so called unbounded multi-use of attributes.
The size of our public parameters is constant with respect to the sizes of the signing attribute vectors
and signing policies available in the system. The construction is built in (asymmetric) bilinear groups
of prime order, and its unforgeability is derived in the standard model under (asymmetric version of)
the well-studied decisional linear (DLIN) assumption coupled with the existence of standard collision
resistant hash functions. Due to the use of the arithmetic model as opposed to the boolean one, our ABS
scheme not only excels significantly over the existing state-of-the-art constructions in terms of concrete
efficiency, but also achieves improved applicability in various practical scenarios. Our principal technical
contributions are (a) extending the techniques of Okamoto and Takashima [PKC 2011, PKC 2013], which
were originally developed in the context of boolean span programs, to the arithmetic setting; and (b)
innovating new ideas to allow unbounded multi-use of attributes inside ABP’s, which themselves are of
unbounded size and input length.
On a Relation between the Ate Pairing and the Weil Pairing for Supersingular Elliptic Curves
The hyperelliptic curve Ate pairing provides an efficient way to compute a
bilinear pairing on the Jacobian variety of a hyperelliptic curve.
We prove that, for supersingular elliptic curves with embedding degree
two, square of the Ate pairing is nothing but the Weil pairing.
Using the formula, we develop an X-coordinate only pairing inversion method.
However, the algorithm is still infeasible for cryptographic size problems.
Yet Another Side Channel Cryptanalysis on SM3 Hash Algorithm
SM3, the Chinese standard hash algorithm inspired from SHA2, can be
attacker by similar means than SHA2 up to an adaptation to its differences. But this
kind of attack is based on targeting point of interest of different kinds, some are end
of computation results, that are stored when others are in intermediate computational
data. The leakage effectiveness of the later could be subject to implementation choices,
device type or device type of leakage. In this paper, we propose a new approach that
targets only the first kind of intermediate data that are more susceptible to appear.
As an example, we targeted the HMAC construction using SM3, where our method
allows to recover the first half of the secret information. reducing the security of the
HMAC protocol.
Optimized Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation on ARMv8 Processors
In this work, we present highly-optimized constant-time software libraries for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE) protocol on ARMv8 processors. Our optimized hand-crafted assembly libraries provide the most efficient timing results on 64-bit ARM-powered devices. Moreover, the presented libraries can be integrated into any other cryptography primitives targeting the same finite field size. We design a new mixed implementation of field arithmetic on 64-bit ARM processors by exploiting the A64 and Advanced SIMD processing units working in parallel. Using these techniques, we are able to improve the performance of the entire protocol by the factor of 5 times compared to optimized C implementations on 64-bit ARM high-performance cores, providing 83-, 124-, and 159-bit quantum-security levels. Furthermore, we compare the performance of our proposed library with the previous highly-optimized ARMv8 assembly library available in the literature. The implementation results illustrate the overall 10% performance improvement in comparison with previous work, highlighting the benefit of using mixed implementation over relatively-large finite field size.
Key Encapsulation from Noisy Key Agreement in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
A multitude of post-quantum key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and public key encryption (PKE) schemes implicitly rely on a protocol by which Alice and Bob exchange public messages and converge on secret values that are identical up to some small noise. By our count, 24 out of 49 KEM or PKE submissions to the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project follow this strategy. Yet the notion of a noisy key agreement (NKA) protocol lacks a formal definition as a primitive in its own right. We provide such a formalization by defining the syntax and security for an NKA protocol. This formalization brings out four generic problems, called A and B State Recovery, Noisy Key Search and Noisy Key Distinguishing, whose solutions must be hard in the quantum computing model. Informally speaking, these can be viewed as noisy, quantum-resistant counterparts of the problems arising from the classical Diffie-Hellman type protocols. We show that many existing proposals contain an NKA component that fits our formalization and we reveal the induced concrete hardness assumptions. The question arises whether considering NKA as an independent primitive can help provide modular designs with improved efficiency and/or proofs. As the second contribution of this paper, we answer this question positively by presenting a generic transform from a secure NKA protocol to an IND-CCA secure KEM in the quantum random oracle model, with a security bound tightly related to the NKD problem. This transformation is essentially the same as that of the NIST candidate Ramstake. While establishing the security of Ramstake was our initial objective, the collection of tools that came about as a result of this journey is of independent interest.
Assessment of the Key-Reuse Resilience of NewHope
NewHope is a suite of two efficient Ring-Learning-With-Error based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) that has been proposed to the NIST call for proposals for post-quantum standardization. In this paper, we study the security of NewHope when an active adversary accesses a key establishment and is given access to an oracle, called key mismatch oracle, which indicates whether her guess of the shared key value derived by the party targeted by the attack is correct or not. This attack model turns out to be relevant in key reuse situations since an attacker may then be able to access such an oracle repeatedly with the same key either directly or using faults or side channels, depending on the considered instance of NewHope. Following this model we show that, by using NewHope recommended parameters, several thousands of queries are sufficient to recover the full private key with high probability. This result has been experimentally confirmed using Magma CAS implementation. While the presented key mismatch oracle attacks do not break any of the designers’ security claims for the NewHope KEMs, they provide better insight into the resilience of these KEMs against key reuse. In the case of the CPA-KEM instance of NewHope, they confirm that key reuse (e.g. key caching at server side) should be strictly avoided, even for an extremely short duration. In the case of the CCA-KEM instance of NewHope, they allow to point out critical steps inside the CCA transform that should be carefully protected against faults or side channels in case of potential key reuse.
Faster Initial Splitting for Small Characteristic Composite Extension Degree Fields
Let $p$ be a small prime and $n=n_1n_2>1$ be a composite integer.
For the function field sieve algorithm applied to $\mathbb{F}_{p^n}$, Guillevic (2019) had proposed an algorithm for initial
splitting of the target in the individual logarithm phase. This algorithm generates polynomials and tests them for $B$-smoothness
for some appropriate value of $B$. The amortised cost of generating each polynomial is $O(n_2^2)$ multiplications over $\mathbb{F}_{p^{n_1}}$.
In this work, we propose a new algorithm for performing the initial splitting which also generates and tests polynomials
for $B$-smoothness. The advantage over Guillevic splitting is that in the new algorithm, the cost of generating a polynomial
is $O(n\log(1/\pi))$ multiplications in $\mathbb{F}_p$, where $\pi$ is the relevant smoothness probability.
Analysis of TPL Signature Scheme
Tan et al. proposed a rank metric code-based signature (TPL) in the 2018 International Symposium on Information Theory and Its Application [3]. Their proposal has compact key size ($8.29$KB, $1.97$KB and $2.90$KB for public key, private key and signature respectively) compared to other code-based signature submitted to the NIST call for Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization at $128$-bit post-quantum security level. This short paper aims to discuss the practical security of the TPL signature. In particular, we describes how to recover the private key in TPL with practical simulations. Our experimental results show that we are able to recover the private key of TPL in less than $23$ milliseconds for all the proposed schemes at $82$-bit, $98$-bit and $129$-bit post-quantum security level.
Towards Optimized and Constant-Time CSIDH on Embedded Devices
We present an optimized, constant-time software library for commutative supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman key exchange (CSIDH) proposed by Castryck et al. which targets 64-bit ARM processors. The proposed library is implemented based on highly-optimized field arithmetic operations and computes the entire key exchange in constant-time. The proposed implementation is resistant to timing attacks. We adopt optimization techniques to evaluate the highest performance CSIDH on ARM-powered embedded devices such as cellphones, analyzing the possibility of using such a scheme in the quantum era.
To the best of our knowledge, the proposed implementation is the first constant-time implementation of CSIDH and the first evaluation of this scheme on embedded devices. The benchmark result on a Google Pixel 2 smartphone equipped with 64-bit high-performance ARM Cortex-A72 core shows that it takes almost 12 seconds for each party to compute a commutative action operation in constant-time over the 511-bit finite field proposed by Castryck et al. However, using uniform but variable-time Montgomery ladder with security considerations improves these results significantly.
Cryptanalysis of a code-based one-time signature
In 2012, Lyubashevsky introduced a new framework for building lattice-based signature schemes without resorting to any trapdoor (such as GPV [6] or NTRU [7]). The idea is to sample a set of short lattice elements and construct the public key as a Short Integer Solution (SIS for short) instance. Signatures are obtained using a small subset sum of the secret key, hidden by a (large) Gaussian mask. (Information leakage is dealt with using rejection sampling.) Recently, Persichetti proposed an efficient adaptation of this framework to coding theory [12]. In this paper, we show that this adaptation cannot be secure, even for one-time signatures (OTS), due to an inherent difference between bounds in Hamming and Euclidean metrics. The attack consists in rewriting a signature as a noisy syndrome decoding problem, which can be handled efficiently using the extended bit flipping
decoding algorithm. We illustrate our results by breaking Persichetti’s OTS scheme built upon this approach [12]: using a single signature, we recover the secret (signing) key in about the same amount of time as required for a couple of signature verifications.
Saber: Module-LWR based key exchange, CPA-secure encryption and CCA-secure KEM
In this paper, we introduce Saber, a package of cryptographic primitives whose security relies on the hardness of the Module Learning With Rounding problem (Mod-LWR). We first describe a secure Diffie-Hellman type key exchange protocol, which is then transformed into an IND-CPA encryption scheme and finally into an IND-CCA secure key encapsulation mechanism using a post-quantum version of the Fujisaki-Okamoto transform. The design goals of this package were simplicity, efficiency and flexibility resulting in the following choices: all integer moduli are powers of $2$ avoiding modular reduction and rejection sampling entirely; the use of LWR halves the amount of randomness required compared to LWE-based schemes and reduces bandwidth; the module structure provides flexibility by reusing one core component for multiple security levels. A constant-time AVX2 optimized software implementation of the KEM with parameters providing more than 128 bits of post-quantum security, requires only 101K, 125K and 129K cycles for key generation, encapsulation and decapsulation respectively on a Dell laptop with an Intel i7-Haswell processor.
Raptor: A Practical Lattice-Based (Linkable) Ring Signature
We present Raptor, the first practical lattice-based
(linkable) ring signature scheme with implementation.
Raptor is
as fast as classical solutions; while the size
of the signature is roughly $1.3$ KB per user.
Prior to our work, all existing lattice-based solutions are analogues of their discrete-log
or pairing-based
counterparts.
We develop a generic construction of (linkable) ring signatures based on the well-known generic construction from Rivest et al., which is not fully compatible with lattices. We show that our generic construction is provably secure in random oracle model.
We also give instantiations from both standard lattice,
as a proof of concept,
and NTRU lattice, as an efficient instantiation. We showed that the latter construction, called Raptor, is almost as efficient as the classical RST ring signatures and thus may be of practical interest.
Number "Not Used" Once - Practical fault attack on pqm4 implementations of NIST candidates
In this paper, we demonstrate practical fault attacks over a number of lattice based schemes, in particular NewHope, Kyber, Frodo, Dilithium which are based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. One of the common traits of all the considered LWE schemes is the use of nonces as domain separators to sample the secret components of the LWE instance. We show that simple faults targeting the usage of nonce can result in a nonce-reuse scenario which allows key recovery and message recovery attacks. To the best of our knowledge, we propose the first practical fault attack on lattice-based Key encapsulation schemes secure in the CCA model. We perform experimental validation of our attack using Electromagnetic fault injection on reference implementations of the aforementioned schemes taken from the pqm4 library, a benchmarking and testing framework for post quantum cryptographic implementations for the ARM Cortex-M4. We use the instruction skip fault model, which is very practical and popular in microcontroller based implementations. Our attack requires to inject a very few number of faults (numbering less than 10 for recommended parameter sets) and can be repeated with a 100% accuracy with our Electromagnetic fault injection setup.
A Framework for Cryptographic Problems from Linear Algebra
We introduce a general framework encompassing the main hard problems emerging in lattice-based cryptography, which naturally includes the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystem, but also code-based cryptography. The framework allows to easily instantiate new hard problems and to automatically construct post-quantum secure primitives from them. As a first basic application, we introduce two new hard problems and the corresponding encryption schemes.
Concretely, we study generalizations of hard problems such as SIS, LWE and NTRU to free modules over quotients of \(\mathbb{Z}[X]\) by ideals of the form \((f,g)\), where \(f\) is a monic polynomial and \(g \in \mathbb{Z}[X]\) is a ciphertext modulus coprime to \(f\). For trivial modules (i.e. of rank one) the case \(f=X^n+1\) and \(g = q \in \mathbb{Z}_{>0}\) corresponds to ring-LWE, ring-SIS and NTRU, while the choices \(f = X^n- 1\) and \(g = X - 2\) essentially cover the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystems. At the other extreme, when considering modules of large rank and letting \(\deg f = 1\) one recovers the framework of LWE and SIS.
Multi-Authority Attribute-Based Encryption from LWE in the OT Model
In a (ciphertext policy) attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme, a ciphertext is associated with a predicate $\phi$ and a secret key is associated with a string $x$ such that a key decrypts a ciphertext if and only of $\phi(x) = 1$. Moreover, the scheme should be collusion-resistant meaning that no colluding set of users can learn about the message if none of their secret keys can individually decrypt the ciphertext. Traditionally, in an ABE scheme, there exists a central authority that generates the keys for each users. In a multi-authority attribute-based encryption (MA-ABE) scheme, individual components of the secret keys are generated by different key-generating authorities.
Although the notion of MA-ABE is a natural extension of the standard ABE, its realization has so far been limited. Indeed, all existing MA-ABE constructions rely solely on bilinear maps and can only support predicates that are computable by monotone boolean formulas. In this work, we construct the first collusion-resistant MA-ABE scheme that can support circuit predicates from the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. Our construction works in a new model that we call the OT model, which can be viewed as a direct relaxation of the traditional GID model that previous MA-ABE constructions consider. We believe that the new OT model is a compelling alternative to the traditional GID model as it captures the core requirements for an MA-ABE scheme. The techniques that are used to construct MA-ABE in this model can also be used as a stepping stone towards constructing MA-ABE in the stronger GID model in the future.
A Simple Key Reuse Attack on LWE and Ring LWE Encryption Schemes as Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs)
In this paper, we present a simple attack on LWE and Ring LWE encryption schemes used directly as Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs). This attack could work due to the fact that a key mismatch in a KEM is accessible to an adversary. Our method clearly indicates that any LWE or RLWE (or any similar type of construction) encryption directly used as KEM can be broken by modifying our attack method according to the respective cases.
New techniques for Multi-value input Homomorphic Evaluation and Applications
In this paper, we propose a new technique to perform several homomorphic operations in one bootstrapping call over a multi-value plaintext space. Our construction relies on the FHEW-based gate bootstrapping; we analyze its structure and propose a strategy we call multi-value bootstrapping which allows to bootstrap an arbitrary function in an efficient way.
The security of our scheme relies on the LWE assumption over the torus. We give three possible applications: we first describe how to efficiently evaluate an arbitrary boolean function (LUT) and combine LUTs in circuits. We also explain how to apply our procedure to optimize the circuit bootstrapping from (Asiacrypt'2017) which allows to compose circuits in a leveled mode. And we finally present a simple method which makes use of the multi-value bootstrapping to evaluate a encrypted neural network.
We have implemented the proposed method and were able to evaluate an arbitrary 6-to-6 LUTs under 1.6 seconds. Our implementation is based on the TFHE library but can be easily integrated into other homomorphic libraries based on the same structure, such as FHEW (Eurocrypt'2015). The number of LUT outputs does not influence the execution time by a lot, e.g. evaluation of additional 128 outputs on the same 6 input bits takes only 0.05 more seconds.
Forward-Secure Multi-Signatures
Multi-signatures allow a group of signers to jointly sign a message in a compact and efficiently verifiable signature, ideally independent of the number of signers in the group. We present the first provably secure forward-secure multi-signature scheme by deriving a forward-secure signature scheme from the hierarchical identity-based encryption of Boneh, Boyen, and Goh (Eurocrypt 2005) and showing how the signatures in that scheme can be securely composed. Multi-signatures in our scheme contain just two group elements (one from each of the base groups) and require one exponentation and three pairing computations to verify.
New Techniques for Obfuscating Conjunctions
A conjunction is a function $f(x_1,\dots,x_n) = \bigwedge_{i \in S} l_i$ where $S \subseteq [n]$ and each $l_i$ is $x_i$ or $\neg x_i$. Bishop et al. (CRYPTO 2018) recently proposed obfuscating conjunctions by embedding them in the error positions of a noisy Reed-Solomon codeword and encoding the codeword in a group exponent. They prove distributional virtual black box (VBB) security in the generic group model for random conjunctions where $|S| \geq 0.226n$. While conjunction obfuscation was known from LWE due to Wichs and Zirdelis (FOCS 2017) and Goyal et al. (FOCS 2017), these constructions rely on substantial technical machinery.
In this work, we conduct an extensive study of simple conjunction obfuscation techniques.
- We abstract the Bishop et al. scheme to obtain an equivalent yet more efficient "dual'' scheme that can handle conjunctions over exponential size alphabets. This scheme admits a straightforward proof of generic group security, which we combine with a novel combinatorial argument to obtain distributional VBB security for $|S|$ of any size.
- If we replace the Reed-Solomon code with a random binary linear code, we can prove security from standard LPN and avoid encoding in a group. This addresses an open problem posed by Bishop et al. to prove security of this simple approach in the standard model.
- We give a new construction that achieves information theoretic distributional VBB security and weak functionality preservation for $|S| \geq n - n^\delta$ and $\delta < 1$. Assuming discrete log and $\delta < 1/2$, we satisfy a stronger notion of functionality preservation for computationally bounded adversaries while still achieving information theoretic security.
Quantum circuits for the CSIDH: optimizing quantum evaluation of isogenies
Choosing safe post-quantum parameters for the new CSIDH isogeny-based key-exchange system requires concrete analysis of the cost of quantum attacks. The two main contributions to attack cost are the number of queries in hidden-shift algorithms and the cost of each query. This paper analyzes algorithms for each query, introducing several new speedups while showing that some previous claims were too optimistic for the attacker. This paper includes a full computer-verified simulation of its main algorithm down to the bit-operation level.