Dates are inconsistent
Dates are inconsistent

4915 results

Last updated:  2019-03-05
Password-Authenticated Public-Key Encryption
Tatiana Bradley, Jan Camenisch, Stanislaw Jarecki, Anja Lehmann, Gregory Neven, and Jiayu Xu
We introduce password-authenticated public-key encryption (PAPKE), a new cryptographic primitive. PAPKE enables secure end-to-end encryption between two entities without relying on a trusted third party or other out-of-band mechanisms for authentication. Instead, resistance to man-in-the-middle attacks is ensured in a human-friendly way by authenticating the public key with a shared password, while preventing offline dictionary attacks given the authenticated public key and/or the ciphertexts produced using this key. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we provide property-based and universally composable (UC) definitions for PAPKE, with the resulting primitive combining CCA security of public-key encryption (PKE) with password authentication. Second, we show that PAPKE implies Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), but the reverse implication does not hold, indicating that PAPKE is a strictly stronger primitive than PAKE. Indeed, PAPKE implies a two-flow PAKE which remains secure if either party re-uses its state in multiple sessions, e.g. due to communication errors, thus strengthening existing notions of PAKE security. Third, we show two highly practical UC PAPKE schemes: a generic construction built from CCA-secure and anonymous PKE and an ideal cipher, and a direct construction based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Finally, applying our PAPKE-to-PAKE compiler to the above PAPKE schemes we exhibit the first 2-round UC PAKE's with efficiency comparable to (unauthenticated) Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Function-Dependent Commitments from Homomorphic Authenticators
Lucas Schabhüser, Denis Butin, and Johannes Buchmann
In cloud computing, delegated computing raises the security issue of guaranteeing data authenticity during a remote computation. In this context, the recently introduced function-dependent commitments (FDCs) are the only approach providing both fast correctness verification, information-theoretic input-output privacy, and strong unforgeability. Homomorphic authenticators--- the established approach to this problem ---do not provide information-theoretic privacy and always reveal the computation's result upon verification, thus violating output privacy. Since many homomorphic authenticator schemes already exist, we investigate the relation between them and FDCs to clarify how existing schemes can be supplemented with information-theoretic output privacy. Specifically, we present a generic transformation turning any structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme into an FDC scheme. This facilitates the design of multi-party computation schemes with full information-theoretic privacy. We also introduce a new structure-preserving, linearly homomorphic authenticator scheme suitable for our transformation. It is the first both context hiding and structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme. Our scheme is also the first structure-preserving homomorphic authenticator scheme to achieve efficient verification.
Last updated:  2019-02-28
Robust Encryption, Extended
Rémi Géraud, David Naccache, and Răzvan Roşie
Robustness is a notion often tacitly assumed while working with encrypted data. Roughly speaking, it states that a ciphertext cannot be decrypted under different keys. Initially formalized in a public-key context, it has been further extended to key-encapsulation mechanisms, and more recently to pseudorandom functions, message authentication codes and authenticated encryption. In this work, we motivate the importance of establishing similar guarantees for functional encryption schemes, even under adversarially generated keys. Our main security notion is intended to capture the scenario where a ciphertext obtained under a master key (corresponding to Authority 1) is decrypted by functional keys issued under a different master key (Authority 2). Furthermore, we show there exist simple functional encryption schemes where robustness under adversarial key-generation is not achieved. As a secondary and independent result, we formalize robustness for digital signatures – a signature should not verify under multiple keys – and point out that certain signature schemes are not robust when the keys are adversarially generated. We present simple, generic transforms that turn a scheme into a robust one, while maintaining the original scheme’s security. For the case of public-key functional encryption, we look into ciphertext anonymity and provide a transform achieving it.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
Multi-Target Attacks on the Picnic Signature Scheme and Related Protocols
Itai Dinur and Niv Nadler
Picnic is a signature scheme that was presented at ACM CCS 2017 by Chase et al. and submitted to NIST's post-quantum standardization project. Among all submissions to NIST's project, Picnic is one of the most innovative, making use of recent progress in construction of practically efficient zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols for general circuits. In this paper, we devise multi-target attacks on Picnic and its underlying ZK protocol, ZKB++. Given access to $S$ signatures, produced by a single or by several users, our attack can (information theoretically) recover the $\kappa$-bit signing key of a user in complexity of about $2^{\kappa - 7}/S$. This is faster than Picnic's claimed $2^{\kappa}$ security against classical (non-quantum) attacks by a factor of $2^7 \cdot S$ (as each signature contains about $2^7$ attack targets). Whereas in most multi-target attacks, the attacker can easily sort and match the available targets, this is not the case in our attack on Picnic, as different bits of information are available for each target. Consequently, it is challenging to reach the information theoretic complexity in a computational model, and we had to perform cryptanalytic optimizations by carefully analyzing ZKB++ and its underlying circuit. Our best attack for $\kappa = 128$ has time complexity of $T = 2^{77}$ for $S = 2^{64}$. Alternatively, we can reach the information theoretic complexity of $T = 2^{64}$ for $S = 2^{57}$, given that all signatures are produced with the same signing key. Our attack exploits a weakness in the way that the Picnic signing algorithm uses a pseudo-random generator. The weakness is fixed in the recent Picnic 2.0 version. In addition to our attack on Picnic, we show that a recently proposed improvement of the ZKB++ protocol (due to Katz, Kolesnikov and Wang) is vulnerable to a similar multi-target attack.
Last updated:  2019-02-27
A New Variant of the Winternitz One Time Signature Scheme Based on Graded Encoding Schemes
Hossein Oraei and Massoud Hadian Dehkordi
The Winternitz one-time signature (WOTS) scheme, which can be described using a certain number of so-called ``function chains", plays an important role in the design of both stateless and stateful many-time signature schemes. This work introduces WOTS^GES, a new WOTS type signature scheme in which the need for computing all of the intermediate values of the chains is eliminated. This significantly reduces the number of required operations needed to calculate the algorithms of WOTS^GES. To achieve this results, we have used the concept of ``leveled" multilinear maps which is also referred to as graded encoding schemes. In the context of provable security, we reduce the hardness of graded discrete-logarithm (GDL) problem to the EU-CMA security of WOTS^GES in the standard model.
Last updated:  2019-02-26
Fully homomorphic encryption modulo Fermat numbers
Antoine Joux
In this paper, we recast state-of-the-art constructions for fully homomorphic encryption in the simple language of arithmetic modulo large Fermat numbers. The techniques used to construct our scheme are quite standard in the realm of (R)LWE based cryptosystems. However, the use of arithmetic in such a simple ring greatly simplifies exposition of the scheme and makes its implementation much easier. In terms of performance, our test implementation of the proposed scheme is slower than the current speed records but remains within a comparable range. We hope that the detailed study of our simplified scheme by the community can make it competitive and provide new insights into FHE constructions at large.
Last updated:  2019-02-24
Cryptanalysis of an NTRU-based Proxy Encryption Scheme from ASIACCS'15
Zhen Liu, Yanbin Pan, and Zhenfei Zhang
In ASIACCS 2015, Nuñez, Agudo, and Lopez proposed a proxy re-encryption scheme, NTRUReEncrypt, based on NTRU, which allows a proxy to translate ciphertext under the delegator's public key into a re-encrypted ciphertext that can be decrypted correctly by delegatee's private key. In addition to its potential resistance to quantum algorithm, the scheme was also considered to be efficient. However, in this paper we point out that the re-encryption process will increase the decryption error, and the increased decryption error will lead to a reaction attack that enables the proxy to recover the private key of the delegator and the delegatee. Moreover, we also propose a second attack which enables the delegatee to recover the private key of the delegator when he collects enough re-encrypted ciphertexts from a same message. We reevaluate the security of NTRUReEncrypt, and also give suggestions and discussions on potential mitigation methods.
Last updated:  2019-02-22
KDM Security for Identity-Based Encryption: Constructions and Separations
Yu Chen, Jiang Zhang, Yi Deng, and Jinyong Chang
For encryption schemes, key dependent message (KDM) security requires that ciphertexts preserve secrecy even when the messages to be encrypted depend on the secret keys. While KDM security has been extensively studied for public-key encryption (PKE), it receives much less attention in the setting of identity-based encryption (IBE). In this work, we focus on the KDM security for IBE. Our results are threefold. We first propose a generic approach to transfer the KDM security results (both positive and negative) from PKE to IBE. At the heart of our approach is a neat structure-mirroring PKE-to-IBE transformation based on indistinguishability obfuscation and puncturable PRFs, which establishes a connection between PKE and IBE in general. However, the obtained results are restricted to selective-identity sense. We then concentrate on results in adaptive-identity sense. On the positive side, we present two constructions that achieve KDM security in the adaptive-identity sense for the first time. One is built from identity-based hash proof system (IB-HPS) with homomorphic property, which indicates that the IBE schemes of Gentry (Eurocrypt 2006), Coron (DCC 2009), Chow et al. (CCS 2010) are actually KDM-secure in the single-key setting. The other is built from indistinguishability obfuscation and a new notion named puncturable unique signature, which is bounded KDM-secure in the single-key setting. On the negative side, we separate CPA/CCA security from $n$-circular security (which is a prototypical case of KDM security) for IBE by giving a counterexample based on differing-inputs obfuscation and a new notion named puncturable IBE. We further propose a general framework for generating $n$-circular security counterexamples in identity-based setting, which might be of independent interest.
Last updated:  2019-02-20
Improved Lattice-based CCA2-Secure PKE in the Standard Model
Jiang Zhang, Yu Yu, Shuqin Fan, and Zhenfeng Zhang
Based on the identity-based encryption (IBE) from lattices by Agrawal et al. (Eurocrypt'10), Micciancio and Peikert (Eurocrypt'12) presented a CCA1-secure public-key encryption (PKE), which has the best known efficiency in the standard model and can be used to obtain a CCA2-secure PKE from lattices by using the generic BCHK transform (SIAM J. Comput., 2006) with a cost of introducing extra overheads to both computation and storage for the use of other primitives such as signatures and commitments. In this paper, we propose a more efficient standard model CCA2-secure PKE from lattices by carefully combining a different message encoding (which encodes the message into the most significant bits of the LWE's ``secret term'') with several nice algebraic properties of the tag-based lattice trapdoor and the LWE problem (such as unique witness and additive homomorphism). Compared to the best known lattice-based CCA1-secure PKE in the standard model due to Micciancio and Peikert (Eurocrypt'12), we not only directly achieve the CCA2-security without using any generic transform (and thus do not use signatures or commitments), but also reduce the noise parameter roughly by a factor of 3. This improvement makes our CCA2-secure PKE more efficient in terms of both computation and storage. In particular, when encrypting a 256-bit (resp., 512-bit) message at 128-bit (resp., 256-bit) security, the ciphertext size of our CCA2-secure PKE is even 33-44% (resp., 36-46%) smaller than that of their CCA1-secure PKE.
Last updated:  2019-02-20
The impact of error dependencies on Ring/Mod-LWE/LWR based schemes
Jan-Pieter D'Anvers, Frederik Vercauteren, and Ingrid Verbauwhede
Current estimation techniques for the probability of decryption failures in Ring/Mod-LWE/LWR based schemes assume independence of the failures in individual bits of the transmitted message to calculate the full failure rate of the scheme. In this paper we disprove this assumption both theoretically and practically for schemes based on Ring/Mod-Learning with Errors/Rounding. We provide a method to estimate the decryption failure probability, taking into account the bit failure dependency. We show that the independence assumption is suitable for schemes without error correction, but that it might lead to underestimating the failure probability of algorithms using error correcting codes. In the worst case, for LAC-128, the failure rate is $2^{48}$ times bigger than estimated under the assumption of independence. This higher-than-expected failure rate could lead to more efficient cryptanalysis of the scheme through decryption failure attacks.
Last updated:  2019-02-19
A Note on Attribute-Based Group Homomorphic Encryption
Michael Clear and Ciaran McGoldrick
Group Homomorphic Encryption (GHE), formally defined by Armknecht, Katzenbeisser and Peter, is a public-key encryption primitive where the decryption algorithm is a group homomorphism. Hence it supports homomorphic evaluation of a single algebraic operation such as modular addition or modular multiplication. Most classical homomorphic encryption schemes such as as Goldwasser-Micali and Paillier are instances of GHE. In this work, we extend GHE to the attribute-based setting. We introduce and formally define the notion of Attribute-Based GHE (ABGHE) and explore its properties. We then examine the algebraic structure on attributes induced by the group operation in an ABGHE. This algebraic stricture is a bounded semilattice. We consider some possible semilattices and how they can be realized by an ABGHE supporting inner product predicates. We then examine existing schemes from the literature and show that they meet our definition of ABGHE for either an additive or multiplicative homomorphism. Some of these schemes are in fact Identity-Based Group Homomorphic Encryption (IBGHE) schemes i.e. instances of ABGHE whose class of access policies are point functions. We then present a possibility result for IBGHE from indistinguishability obfuscation for any group for which a (public-key) GHE scheme exists.
Last updated:  2019-02-18
Cryptanalysis of a New Code-based Signature Scheme with Shorter Public Key in PKC 2019
Keita Xagawa
Song, Huang, Mu, and Wu proposed a new code-based signature scheme, the Rank Quasi-Cyclic Signature (RQCS) scheme (PKC 2019, Cryptology ePrint Archive 2019/053), which is based on an IND-CCA2 KEM scheme, RQC, proposed by Aguilar Melchor et al. (NIST PQC Standardization Round 1). Their scheme is an analogue to the Schnorr signature scheme. In this short note, we investigate the security of the RQCS scheme. We report a key-recovery known-message attack by following the discussion in Aragon, Blazy, Gaborit, Hauteville, and Zémor (Cryptology ePrint Archive 2018/1192) and an experimental result. The key-recovery attack requires only one signature to retrieve a secret key and recovers a secret key within 10 seconds.
Last updated:  2019-02-15
Extracting Linearization Equations from Noisy Sources
Daniel Smith-Tone
This note was originally written under the name ``On the Security of HMFEv'' and was submitted to PQCrypto 2018. The author was informed by the referees of his oversight of an eprint work of the same name by Hashimoto, see eprint article /2017/689/, that completely breaks HMFEv, rendering the result on HMFEv obsolete. Still, the author feels that the technique used here is interesting and that, at least in principal, this method could contribute to future cryptanalysis. Thus, with a change of title indicating the direction in which this work is leading, we present the original work with all of its oversights intact and with minimal correction (only references fixed). At PQCRYPTO 2017, a new multivariate digital signature based on Multi-HFE and utilizing the vinegar modifier was proposed. The vinegar modifier increases the Q-rank of the central map, preventing a direct application of the MinRank attack that defeated Multi-HFE. The authors were, therefore, confident enough to choose aggressive parameters for the Multi-HFE component of the central map (with vinegar variables fixed). Their analysis indicated that the security of the scheme depends on the sum of the number of variables $k$ over the extension field and the number $v$ of vinegar variables with the individual values being unimportant as long as they are not ``too small.'' We analyze the consequences of this choice of parameters and derive some new attacks showing that the parameter $v$ must be chosen with care.
Last updated:  2019-02-14
Tighter security proofs for generic key encapsulation mechanism in the quantum random oracle model
Haodong Jiang, Zhenfeng Zhang, and Zhi Ma
In (TCC 2017), Hofheinz, Hoevelmanns and Kiltz provided a fine-grained and modular toolkit of generic key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) constructions, which were widely used among KEM submissions to NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization project. The security of these generic constructions in the quantum random oracle model (QROM) has been analyzed by Hofheinz, Hoevelmanns and Kiltz (TCC 2017), Saito, Xagawa and Yamakawa (Eurocrypt 2018), and Jiang et al. (Crypto 2018). However, the security proofs from standard assumptions are far from tight. In particular, the factor of security loss is $q$ and the degree of security loss is 2, where $q$ is the total number of adversarial queries to various oracles. In this paper, using semi-classical oracle technique recently introduced by Ambainis, Hamburg and Unruh (ePrint 2018/904), we improve the results in (Eurocrypt 2018, Crypto 2018) and provide tighter security proofs for generic KEM constructions from standard assumptions. More precisely, the factor of security loss $q$ is reduced to be $\sqrt{q}$. In addition, for transformation T that turns a probabilistic public-key encryption (PKE) into a determined one by derandomization and re-encryption, the degree of security loss 2 is reduced to be 1. Our tighter security proofs can give more confidence to NIST KEM submissions where these generic transformations are used, e.g., CRYSTALS-Kyber etc.
Last updated:  2019-02-10
On post-processing in the quantum algorithm for computing short discrete logarithms
Martin Ekerå
We revisit the quantum algorithm for computing short discrete logarithms that was recently introduced by Ekerå and Håstad. By carefully analyzing the probability distribution induced by the algorithm, we show its success probability to be higher than previously reported. Inspired by our improved understanding of the distribution, we propose an improved post-processing algorithm that is practical, enables better tradeoffs to be achieved, and requires fewer runs, than the original post-processing algorithm. To prove these claims, we construct a classical simulator for the quantum algorithm by sampling the probability distribution it induces for given logarithms. This simulator is in itself a key contribution. We use it to demonstrate that our quantum algorithm achieves an advantage over Shor's algorithms, not only in each individual run, but also overall, when targeting cryptographically relevant instances of RSA and Diffie-Hellman with short exponents.
Last updated:  2019-02-07
BADGER - Blockchain Auditable Distributed (RSA) key GEneRation
Naomi Farley, Robert Fitzpatrick, and Duncan Jones
Migration of security applications to the cloud poses unique challenges in key management and protection: asymmetric keys which would previously have resided in tamper-resistant, on-premise Hardware Security Modules (HSM) now must either continue to reside in non-cloud HSMs (with attendant communication and integration issues) or must be removed from HSMs and exposed to cloud-based threats beyond an organization's control, e.g. accidental loss, warranted seizure, theft etc. Threshold schemes offer a halfway house between traditional HSM-based key protection and native cloud-based usage. Threshold signature schemes allow a set of actors to share a common public key, generate fragments of the private key and to collaboratively sign messages, such that as long as a sufficient quorum of actors sign a message, the partial signatures can be combined into a valid signature. However, threshold schemes, while being a mature idea, suffer from large protocol transcripts and complex communication-based requirements. This consequently makes it a more difficult task for a user to verify that a public key is, in fact, a genuine product of the protocol and that the protocol has been executed validly. In this work, we propose a solution to these auditability and verication problems, reporting on a prototype cloud-based implementation of a threshold RSA key generation and signing system tightly integrated with modern distributed ledger and consensus techniques.
Last updated:  2019-01-30
Towards Practical Lattice-Based One-Time Linkable Ring Signatures
Carsten Baum, Huang Lin, and Sabine Oechsner
Ring signatures, as introduced by Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman (Asiacrypt ’01), allow to generate a signature for a message on be half of an ad-hoc set of parties. To sign a message, only the public keys must be known and these can be generated independently. It is furthermore not possible to identify the actual signer based on the signature. Ring signatures have recently gained attention due to their applicability in the construction of practical anonymous cryptocurrencies, where they are used to secure transactions while hiding the identity of the actual spender. To be applicable in that setting, ring signatures must allow to determine when a party signed multiple transactions, which is done using a property called linkability. This work presents a linkable ring signature scheme constructed from a lattice-based collision-resistant hash function. We follow the idea of existing schemes which are secure based on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem, but adapt and optimize ours to the lattice setting. In comparison to other designs for (lattice-based) linkable ring signatures, our approach avoids the standard solution for achieving linkability, which involves proofs about correct evaluation of a pseudorandom function using heavy zero-knowledge machinery.
Last updated:  2019-01-28
The General Sieve Kernel and New Records in Lattice Reduction
Martin R. Albrecht, Léo Ducas, Gottfried Herold, Elena Kirshanova, Eamonn W. Postlethwaite, and Marc Stevens
We propose the General Sieve Kernel (G6K, pronounced /ʒe.si.ka/), an abstract stateful machine supporting a wide variety of lattice reduction strategies based on sieving algorithms. Using the basic instruction set of this abstract stateful machine, we first give concise formulations of previous sieving strategies from the literature and then propose new ones. We then also give a light variant of BKZ exploiting the features of our abstract stateful machine. This encapsulates several recent suggestions (Ducas at Eurocrypt 2018; Laarhoven and Mariano at PQCrypto 2018) to move beyond treating sieving as a blackbox SVP oracle and to utilise strong lattice reduction as preprocessing for sieving. Furthermore, we propose new tricks to minimise the sieving computation required for a given reduction quality with mechanisms such as recycling vectors between sieves, on-the-fly lifting and flexible insertions akin to Deep LLL and recent variants of Random Sampling Reduction. Moreover, we provide a highly optimised, multi-threaded and tweakable implementation of this machine which we make open-source. We then illustrate the performance of this implementation of our sieving strategies by applying G6K to various lattice challenges. In particular, our approach allows us to solve previously unsolved instances of the Darmstadt SVP (151, 153, 155) and LWE (e.g. (75, 0.005)) challenges. Our solution for the SVP-151 challenge was found 400 times faster than the time reported for the SVP-150 challenge, the previous record. For exact SVP, we observe a performance crossover between G6K and FPLLL's state of the art implementation of enumeration at dimension 70.
Last updated:  2019-01-28
Arithmetic Garbling from Bilinear Maps
Nils Fleischhacker, Giulio Malavolta, and Dominique Schröder
We consider the problem of garbling arithmetic circuits and present a garbling scheme for inner-product predicates over exponentially large fields. Our construction stems from a generic transformation from predicate encryption which makes only blackbox calls to the underlying primitive. The resulting garbling scheme has practical efficiency and can be used as a garbling gadget to securely compute common arithmetic subroutines. We also show that inner-product predicates are complete by generically bootstrapping our construction to arithmetic garbling for polynomial-size circuits, albeit with a loss of concrete efficiency. In the process of instantiating our construction we propose two new predicate encryption schemes, which might be of independent interest. More specifically, we construct (i) the first pairing-free (weakly) attribute-hiding non-zero inner-product predicate encryption scheme, and (ii) a key-homomorphic encryption scheme for linear functions from bilinear maps. Both schemes feature constant-size keys and practical efficiency.
Last updated:  2019-01-28
On the impact of decryption failures on the security of LWE/LWR based schemes
Jan-Pieter D'Anvers, Frederik Vercauteren, and Ingrid Verbauwhede
In this paper we investigate the impact of decryption failures on the chosen-ciphertext security of (Ring/Module)-Learning With Errors and (Ring/Module)-Learning with Rounding based primitives. Our analysis is split in three parts: First, we use a technique to increase the failure rate of these schemes called failure boosting. Based on this technique we investigate the minimal effort for an adversary to obtain a failure in 3 cases: when he has access to a quantum computer, when he mounts a multi-target attack and when he can only perform a limited number of oracle queries. Secondly, we examine the amount of information that an adversary can derive from failing ciphertexts. Finally, these techniques are combined in an attack on (Ring/Module)-LWE and (Ring/Module)-LWR based schemes with decryption failures. We provide both a theoretical analysis as well as an implementation to calculate the security impact and show that an attacker can significantly reduce the security of (Ring/Module)-LWE/LWR based schemes that have a relatively high failure rate. However, for the candidates of the NIST post-quantum standardization process that we assessed, the number of required oracle queries is above practical limits due to their conservative parameter choices.
Last updated:  2019-01-26
Public-Key Encryption with Simulation-Based Selective-Opening Security and Compact Ciphertexts
Dennis Hofheinz, Tibor Jager, and Andy Rupp
In a selective-opening (SO) attack on an encryption scheme, an adversary A gets a number of ciphertexts (with possibly related plaintexts), and can then adaptively select a subset of those ciphertexts. The selected ciphertexts are then opened for A (which means that A gets to see the plaintexts and the corresponding encryption random coins), and A tries to break the security of the unopened ciphertexts. Two main flavors of SO security notions exist: indistinguishability-based (IND-SO) and simulation-based (SIM-SO) ones. Whereas IND-SO security allows for simple and efficient instantiations, its usefulness in larger constructions is somewhat limited, since it is restricted to special types of plaintext distributions. On the other hand, SIM-SO security does not suffer from this restriction, but turns out to be significantly harder to achieve. In fact, all known SIM-SO secure encryption schemes either require O(|m|) group elements in the ciphertext to encrypt |m|-bit plaintexts, or use specific algebraic properties available in the DCR setting. In this work, we present the first SIM-SO secure PKE schemes in the discrete-log setting with compact ciphertexts (whose size is O(1) group elements plus plaintext size). The SIM-SO security of our constructions can be based on, e.g., the k-linear assumption for any k. Technically, our schemes extend previous IND-SO secure schemes by the property that simulated ciphertexts can be efficiently opened to arbitrary plaintexts. We do so by encrypting the plaintext in a bitwise fashion, but such that each encrypted bit leads only to a single ciphertext bit (plus O(1) group elements that can be shared across many bit encryptions). Our approach leads to rather large public keys (of O(|m|2) group elements), but we also show how this public key size can be reduced (to O(|m|) group elements) in pairing-friendly groups.
Last updated:  2019-01-26
Round5: KEM and PKE based on GLWR
Sauvik Bhattacharya, Oscar Garcia-Morchon, Thijs Laarhoven, Ronald Rietman, Markku-Juhani O. Saarinen, Ludo Tolhuizen, and Zhenfei Zhang
Standardization bodies such as NIST and ETSI are currently seeking quantum resistant alternatives to vulnerable RSA and elliptic curve-based public-key algorithms. In this context, we present Round5, a lattice-based cryptosystem providing a key encapsulation mechanism and a public-key encryption scheme. Round5 is based on the General Learning with Rounding problem, unifying non-ring and ring lattice rounding problems into one. Usage of rounding combined with a tight analysis leads to significantly reduced bandwidth and randomness requirements. Round5's reliance on prime-order cyclotomic rings offers a large design space allowing fine-grained parameter optimization. The use of sparse-ternary secret keys improves performance and significantly reduces decryption failure rates at minimal additional cost. The use of error-correcting codes, in combination with ring multiplications in $\mathbb{Z}[x]/(x^{n+1}-1)$ that ensures non-correlated errors, further improves the latter. Round5 parameters have been carefully optimized for bandwidth, while the design facilitates efficient implementation. As a result, Round5 has leading performance characteristics among all NIST post-quantum candidates, and at the same time attains conservative security levels that fully fit NIST's security categories. Round5's schemes share common building blocks, simplifying (security and operational) analysis and code review. Finally, Round5 proposes various approaches of refreshing the system public parameter A, which efficiently prevent precomputation and back-door attacks. Disclaimer: This is a draft version, not all sections are included.
Last updated:  2019-01-25
Efficient Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Cross-Domains without Trusted Setup
Michael Backes, Lucjan Hanzlik, Amir Herzberg, Aniket Kate, and Ivan Pryvalov
With the recent emergence of efficient zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs for general circuits, while efficient zero-knowledge proofs of algebraic statements have existed for decades, a natural challenge arose to combine algebraic and non-algebraic statements. Chase et al. (CRYPTO 2016) proposed an interactive ZK proof system for this cross-domain problem. As a use case they show that their system can be used to prove knowledge of a RSA/DSA signature on a message m with respect to a publicly known Pedersen commitment g^m h^r . One drawback of their system is that it requires interaction between the prover and the verifier. This is due to the interactive nature of garbled circuits, which are used in their construction. Subsequently, Agrawal et al. (CRYPTO 2018) proposed an efficient non-interactive ZK (NIZK) proof system for cross-domains based on SNARKs, which however require a trusted setup assumption. In this paper, we propose a NIZK proof system for cross-domains that requires no trusted setup and is efficient both for the prover and the verifier. Our system constitutes a combination of Schnorr based ZK proofs and ZK proofs for general circuits by Giacomelli et al. (USENIX 2016). The proof size and the running time of our system are comparable to the approach by Chase et al. Compared to Bulletproofs (SP 2018), a recent NIZK proofs system on committed inputs, our techniques achieve asymptotically better performance on prover and verifier, thus presenting a different trade-off between the proof size and the running time.
Last updated:  2019-01-25
Deterministic Identity-Based Encryption from Lattice-Based Programmable Hash Functions with High Min-Entropy
Daode Zhang, Jie Li, Bao Li, Xianhui Lu, Haiyang Xue, Dingding Jia, and Yamin Liu
There only exists one deterministic identity-based encryption (DIBE) scheme which is adaptively secure in the auxiliary-input setting, under the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. However, the master public key consists of $\mathcal{O}(\lambda)$ basic matrices. In this paper, we consider to construct adaptively secure DIBE schemes with more compact public parameters from the LWE problem. On the one hand, we gave a generic DIBE construction from lattice-based programmable hash functions with high min-entropy. On the other hand, when instantiating our generic DIBE construction with four LPHFs with high min-entropy, we can get four adaptively secure DIBE schemes with more compact public parameters. In one of our DIBE schemes, the master public key only consists of $\omega(\log \lambda)$ basic matrices.
Last updated:  2019-01-25
Solving a $6120$-bit DLP on a Desktop Computer
Faruk Golouglu, Robert Granger, Gary McGuire, and Jens Zumbragel
In this paper we show how some recent ideas regarding the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in finite fields of small characteristic may be applied to compute logarithms in some very large fields extremely efficiently. By combining the polynomial time relation generation from the authors' CRYPTO 2013 paper, an improved degree two elimination technique, and an analogue of Joux's recent small-degree elimination method, we solved a DLP in the record-sized finite field of $2^{6120}$ elements, using just a single core-month. Relative to the previous record set by Joux in the field of $2^{4080}$ elements, this represents a $50\%$ increase in the bitlength, using just $5\%$ of the core-hours. We also show that for the fields considered, the parameters for Joux's $L_Q(1/4 + o(1))$ algorithm may be optimised to produce an $L_Q(1/4)$ algorithm.
Last updated:  2019-01-22
A Universally Composable Framework for the Privacy of Email Ecosystems
Pyrros Chaidos, Olga Fourtounelli, Aggelos Kiayias, and Thomas Zacharias
Email communication is amongst the most prominent online activities, and as such, can put sensitive information at risk. It is thus of high importance that internet email applications are designed in a privacy-aware manner and analyzed under a rigorous threat model. The Snowden revelations (2013) suggest that such a model should feature a global adversary, in light of the observational tools available. Furthermore, the fact that protecting metadata can be of equal importance as protecting the communication context implies that end-to-end encryption may be necessary, but it is not sufficient. With this in mind, we utilize the Universal Composability framework [Canetti, 2001] to introduce an expressive cryptographic model for email ``ecosystems'' that can formally and precisely capture various well-known privacy notions (unobservability, anonymity, unlinkability, etc.), by parameterizing the amount of leakage an ideal-world adversary (simulator) obtains from the email functionality. Equipped with our framework, we present and analyze the security of two email constructions that follow different directions in terms of the efficiency vs. privacy tradeoff. The first one achieves optimal security (only the online/offline mode of the users is leaked), but it is mainly of theoretical interest; the second one is based on parallel mixing [Golle and Juels, 2004] and is more practical, while it achieves anonymity with respect to users that have similar amount of sending and receiving activity.
Last updated:  2019-01-19
Non-Malleable Encryption: Simpler, Shorter, Stronger
Sandro Coretti, Yevgeniy Dodis, Björn Tackmann, and Daniele Venturi
In a seminal paper, Dolev et al. (STOC'91) introduced the notion of non-malleable encryption (NM-CPA). This notion is very intriguing since it suffices for many applications of chosen-ciphertext secure encryption (IND-CCA), and, yet, can be generically built from semantically secure (IND-CPA) encryption, as was shown in the seminal works by Pass et al. (CRYPTO'06) and by Choi et al. (TCC'08), the latter of which provided a black-box construction. In this paper we investigate three questions related to NM-CPA security: - Can the rate of the construction by Choi et al. of NM-CPA from IND-CPA be improved? - Is it possible to achieve multi-bit NM-CPA security more efficiently from a single-bit NM-CPA scheme than from IND-CPA? - Is there a notion stronger than NM-CPA that has natural applications and can be achieved from IND-CPA security? We answer all three questions in the positive. First, we improve the rate in the construction of Choi et al. by a factor O(k), where k is the security parameter. Still, encrypting a message of size O(k) would require ciphertext and keys of size O(k^2) times that of the IND-CPA scheme, even in our improved scheme. Therefore, we show a more efficient domain extension technique for building a k-bit NM-CPA scheme from a single-bit NM-CPA scheme with keys and ciphertext of size O(k) times that of the NM-CPA one-bit scheme. To achieve our goal, we define and construct a novel type of continuous non-malleable code (NMC), called secret-state NMC, as we show that standard continuous NMCs are not enough for the natural "encode-then-encrypt-bit-by-bit" approach to work. Finally, we introduce a new security notion for public-key encryption (PKE) that we dub non-malleability under (chosen-ciphertext) self-destruct attacks (NM-SDA). After showing that NM-SDA is a strict strengthening of NM-CPA and allows for more applications, we nevertheless show that both of our results---(faster) construction from IND-CPA and domain extension from one-bit scheme---also hold for our stronger NM-SDA security. In particular, the notions of IND-CPA, NM-CPA, and NM-SDA security are all equivalent, lying (plausibly, strictly?) below IND-CCA security.
Last updated:  2019-01-18
Factoring Products of Braids via Garside Normal Form
Simon-Philipp Merz and Christophe Petit
Braid groups are infinite non-abelian groups naturally arising from geometric braids. For two decades they have been proposed for cryptographic use. In braid group cryptography public braids often contain secret braids as factors and it is hoped that rewriting the product of braid words hides individual factors. We provide experimental evidence that this is in general not the case and argue that under certain conditions parts of the Garside normal form of factors can be found in the Garside normal form of their product. This observation can be exploited to decompose products of braids of the form $ABC$ when only $B$ is known. Our decomposition algorithm yields a universal forgery attack on WalnutDSA, which is one of the 20 proposed signature schemes that are being considered by NIST for standardization of quantum-resistant public-key cryptography. Our attack on WalnutDSA can universally forge signatures within seconds for both the 128-bit and 256-bit security level, given one random message-signature pair. The attack worked on 99.8% and 100% of signatures for the 128-bit and 256-bit security levels in our experiments. Furthermore, we show that the decomposition algorithm can be used to solve instances of the conjugacy search problem and decomposition search problem in braid groups. These problems are at the heart of other cryptographic schemes based on braid groups.
Last updated:  2019-01-18
A Generic Attack on Lattice-based Schemes using Decryption Errors with Application to ss-ntru-pke
Qian Guo, Thomas Johansson, and Alexander Nilsson
Hard learning problems are central topics in recent cryptographic research. Many cryptographic primitives relate their security to difficult problems in lattices, such as the shortest vector problem. Such schemes include the possibility of decryption errors with some very small probability. In this paper we propose and discuss a generic attack for secret key recovery based on generating decryption errors. In a standard PKC setting, the model first consists of a precomputation phase where special messages and their corresponding error vectors are generated. Secondly, the messages are submitted for decryption and some decryption errors are observed. Finally, a phase with a statistical analysis of the messages/errors causing the decryption errors reveals the secret key. The idea is that conditioned on certain secret keys, the decryption error probability is significantly higher than the average case used in the error probability estimation. The attack is demonstrated in detail on one NIST Post-Quantum Proposal, ss-ntru-pke, that is attacked with complexity below the claimed security level.
Last updated:  2019-01-17
Collusion Resistant Broadcast and Trace from Positional Witness Encryption
Rishab Goyal, Satyanarayana Vusirikala, and Brent Waters
An emerging trend is for researchers to identify cryptography primitives for which feasibility was first established under obfuscation and then move the realization to a different setting. In this work we explore a new such avenue — to move obfuscation-based cryptography to the assumption of (positional) witness encryption. Our goal is to develop techniques and tools, which we will dub “witness encryption friendly” primitives and use these to develop a methodology for building advanced cryptography from positional witness encryption. We take a bottom up approach and pursue our general agenda by attacking the specific problem of building collusion-resistant broadcast systems with tracing from positional witness encryption. We achieve a system where the size of ciphertexts, public key and private key are polynomial in the security parameter $\lambda$ and independent of the number of users N in the broadcast system. Currently, systems with such parameters are only known from indistinguishability obfuscation.
Last updated:  2019-01-17
Shorter Ring Signatures from Standard Assumptions
Alonso González
Ring signatures, introduced by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (ASIACRYPT 2001), allow to sign a message on behalf of a set of users while guaranteeing authenticity and anonymity. Groth and Kohlweiss (EUROCRYPT 2015) and Libert et al. (EUROCRYPT 2016) constructed schemes with signatures of size logarithmic in the number of users. An even shorter ring signature, of size independent from the number of users, was recently proposed by Malavolta and Schroder (ASIACRYPT 2017). However, all these short signatures are obtained relying on strong and controversial assumptions. Namely, the former schemes are both proven secure in the random oracle model while the later requires non-falsifiable assumptions. The most efficient construction under mild assumptions remains the construction of Chandran et al. (ICALP 2007) with a signature of size $\Theta(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of users, and security is based on the Diffie-Hellman assumption in bilinear groups (the SXDH assumption in asymmetric bilinear groups). In this work we construct an asymptotically shorter ring signature from the hardness of the Diffie-Hellman assumption in bilinear groups. Each signature comprises $\Theta(\sqrt[3]{n})$ group elements, signing a message requires computing $\Theta(\sqrt[3]{n})$ exponentiations, and verifying a signature requires $\Theta(n^{2/3})$ pairing operations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ring signature based on bilinear groups with $o(\sqrt{n})$ signatures and sublinear verification complexity.
Last updated:  2019-01-15
Group Signatures with Selective Linkability
Lydia Garms and Anja Lehmann
Group signatures allow members of a group to anonymously produce signatures on behalf of the group. They are an important building block for privacy-enhancing applications, e.g., enabling user data to be collected in authenticated form while preserving the user’s privacy. The linkability between the signatures thereby plays a crucial role for balancing utility and privacy: knowing the correlation of events significantly increases the utility of the data but also severely harms the user’s privacy. Therefore group signatures are unlinkable per default, but either support linking or identity escrow through a dedicated central party or offer user-controlled linkability. However, both approaches have significant limitations. The former relies on a fully trusted entity and reveals too much information, and the latter requires exact knowledge of the needed linkability at the moment when the signatures are created. However, often the exact purpose of the data might not be clear at the point of data collection. In fact, data collectors tend to gather large amounts of data at first, but will need linkability only for selected, small subsets of the data. We introduce a new type of group signatures that provide a more flexible and privacy-friendly access to such selective linkability. When created, all signatures are fully unlinkable. Only when strictly needed or desired, should the required pieces be made linkable with the help of a central entity. For privacy, this linkability is established in an oblivious and non-transitive manner. We formally define the requirements for this new type of group signatures and provide an efficient instantiation that provably satisfies these requirements under discrete-logarithm based assumptions.
Last updated:  2019-01-09
On the Asymptotics of Solving the LWE Problem Using Coded-BKW with Sieving
Qian Guo, Thomas Johansson, Erik Mårtensson, and Paul Stankovski Wagner
The Learning with Errors problem (LWE) has become a central topic in recent cryptographic research. In this paper, we present a new solving algorithm combining important ideas from previous work on improving the Blum-Kalai-Wasserman (BKW) algorithm and ideas from sieving in lattices. The new algorithm is analyzed and demonstrates an improved asymptotic performance. For the Regev parameters $q=n^2$ and noise level $\sigma = n^{1.5}/(\sqrt{2\pi}\log_{2}^{2}n)$, the asymptotic complexity is $2^{0.893n}$ in the standard setting, improving on the previously best known complexity of roughly $2^{0.930n}$. The newly proposed algorithm also provides asymptotic improvements when a quantum computer is assumed or when the number of samples is limited.
Last updated:  2019-01-09
Leakage-Resilient Group Signature: Definitions and Constructions
Jianye Huang and Qiong Huang
Group signature scheme provides group members a way to sign messages without revealing their identities. Anonymity and traceability are two essential properties in a group signature system. However, these two security properties hold based on the assumption that all the signing keys are perfectly secret and leakage-free. On the another hand, on account of the physical imperfection of cryptosystems in practice, malicious attackers can learn fraction of secret state (including secret keys and intermediate randomness) of the cryptosystem via side-channel attacks, and thus breaking the security of whole system. To address this issue, Ono et al. introduced a new security model of group signature, which captures randomness exposure attacks. They proved that their proposed construction satisfies the security require-ments of group signature scheme. Nevertheless, their scheme is only provably secure against randomness exposure and supposes the secret keys remains leakage-free. In this work, we focus on the security model of leakage-resilient group signature based on bounded leakage setting and propose three new black-box constructions of leakage-resilient group signature secure under the proposed security models.
Last updated:  2019-01-08
Characterizing overstretched NTRU attacks
Gabrielle De Micheli, Nadia Heninger, and Barak Shani
Overstretched NTRU, an NTRU variant with a large modulus, has been used as a building block for several cryptographic schemes in recent years. Recently, two lattice \emph{subfield attacks} and a \emph{subring attack} were proposed that broke some suggested parameters for overstretched NTRU. These attacks work by decreasing the dimension of the lattice to be reduced, which improves the performance of the lattice basis reduction algorithm. However, there are a number of conflicting claims in the literature over which of these attacks has the best performance. These claims are typically based on experiments more than analysis. Furthermore, the metric for comparison has been unclear in some prior work. In this paper, we argue that the correct metric should be the lattice dimension. We show both analytically and experimentally that the subring attack succeeds on a smaller dimension lattice than the subfield attack for the same problem parameters, and also succeeds with a smaller modulus when the lattice dimension is fixed.
Last updated:  2019-01-07
Forward Secure Efficient Group Signature in Dynamic Setting using Lattices
Meenakshi Kansal, Ratna Dutta, and Sourav Mukhopadhyay
Secret key exposure is at high risk in the computing infrastructure due to the increase in use of harmful devices. As a result, achieving forward secrecy is a preferable feature for any cryptosystem where the lifetime of a user is divided into discrete time periods. Forward secrecy preserves the security of past periods even if the secret key is exposed. In this work, we introduce the first lattice based forward secure dynamic group signature scheme. The existing forward secure group signature schemes are secure in the bilinear setting, and becomes insecure in the quantum computer period. We employ a complete binary tree whose leaves are associated with discrete time periods and label the nodes in a unique way that enables each node of the same depth to have different hamming weight. This helps the group manager to produce distinct certificates to distinct users. Our scheme withstand framing attacks, mis-identification attack and preserves anonymity under the learning with errors (LWE) and short integer solution (SIS) assumptions.
Last updated:  2019-01-03
Accountable Tracing Signatures from Lattices
San Ling, Khoa Nguyen, Huaxiong Wang, and Yanhong Xu
Group signatures allow users of a group to sign messages anonymously in the name of the group, while incorporating a tracing mechanism to revoke anonymity and identify the signer of any message. Since its introduction by Chaum and van Heyst (EUROCRYPT 1991), numerous proposals have been put forward, yielding various improvements on security, efficiency and functionality. However, a drawback of traditional group signatures is that the opening authority is given too much power, i.e., he can indiscriminately revoke anonymity and there is no mechanism to keep him accountable. To overcome this problem, Kohlweiss and Miers (PoPET 2015) introduced the notion of accountable tracing signatures ($\mathsf{ATS}$) - an enhanced group signature variant in which the opening authority is kept accountable for his actions. Kohlweiss and Miers demonstrated a generic construction of $\mathsf{ATS}$ and put forward a concrete instantiation based on number-theoretic assumptions. To the best of our knowledge, no other $\mathsf{ATS}$ scheme has been known, and the problem of instantiating $\mathsf{ATS}$ under post-quantum assumptions, e.g., lattices, remains open to date. ~~In this work, we provide the first lattice-based accountable tracing signature scheme. The scheme satisfies the security requirements suggested by Kohlweiss and Miers, assuming the hardness of the Ring Short Integer Solution ($\mathsf{RSIS}$) and the Ring Learning With Errors ($\mathsf{RLWE}$) problems. At the heart of our construction are a lattice-based key-oblivious encryption scheme and a zero-knowledge argument system allowing to prove that a given ciphertext is a valid $\mathsf{RLWE}$ encryption under some hidden yet certified key. These technical building blocks may be of independent interest, e.g., they can be useful for the design of other lattice-based privacy-preserving protocols.
Last updated:  2019-01-03
Function Private Predicate Encryption for Low Min-Entropy Predicates
Sikhar Patranabis, Debdeep Mukhopadhyay, and Somindu C. Ramanna
In this work, we propose new predicate encryption schemes for zero inner-product encryption (ZIPE) and non-zero inner-product encryption (NIPE) predicates from prime-order bilinear pairings, which are both attribute and function private in the public-key setting. Our ZIPE scheme is adaptively attribute private under the standard Matrix DDH assumption for unbounded collusions. It is additionally computationally function private under a min-entropy variant of the Matrix DDH assumption for predicates sampled from distributions with superlogarithmic min-entropy. Existing (statistically) function private ZIPE schemes due to Boneh et al. [Crypto’13, Asiacrypt’13] necessarily require predicate distributions with significantly larger min-entropy in the public-key setting. Our NIPE scheme is adaptively attribute private under the standard Matrix DDH assumption, albeit for bounded collusions. It is also computationally function private under a min-entropy variant of the Matrix DDH assumption for predicates sampled from distributions with super-logarithmic min-entropy. To the best of our knowledge, existing NIPE schemes from bilinear pairings were neither attribute private nor function private. Our constructions are inspired by the linear FE constructions of Agrawal et al. [Crypto’16] and the simulation secure ZIPE of Wee [TCC’17]. In our ZIPE scheme, we show a novel way of embedding two different hard problem instances in a single secret key - one for unbounded collusion-resistance and the other for function privacy. With respect to NIPE, we introduce new techniques for simultaneously achieving attribute and function privacy. We also show natural generalizations of our ZIPE and NIPE constructions to a wider class of subspace membership, subspace non-membership and hidden-vector encryption predicates.
Last updated:  2019-01-03
Error Amplification in Code-based Cryptography
Alexander Nilsson, Thomas Johansson, and Paul Stankovski Wagner
Code-based cryptography is one of the main techniques enabling cryptographic primitives in a post-quantum scenario. In particular, the MDPC scheme is a basic scheme from which many other schemes have been derived. These schemes rely on iterative decoding in the decryption process and thus have a certain small probability $p$ of having a decryption (decoding) error. In this paper we show a very fundamental and important property of code-based encryption schemes. Given one initial error pattern that fails to decode, the time needed to generate another message that fails to decode is strictly much less than $1/p$. We show this by developing a method for fast generation of undecodable error patterns (error pattern chaining), which additionally proves that a measure of closeness in ciphertext space can be exploited through its strong linkage to the difficulty of decoding these messages. Furthermore, if side-channel information is also available (time to decode), then the initial error pattern no longer needs to be given since one can be easily generated in this case. These observations are fundamentally important because they show that a, say, $128$-bit encryption scheme is not inherently safe from reaction attacks even if it employs a decoder with a failure rate of $2^{-128}$. In fact, unless explicit protective measures are taken, having a failure rate at all -- of any magnitude -- can pose a security problem because of the error amplification effect of our method. A key-recovery reaction attack was recently shown on the MDPC scheme as well as similar schemes, taking advantage of decoding errors in order to recover the secret key. It was also shown that knowing the number of iterations in the iterative decoding step, which could be received in a timing attack, would also enable and enhance such an attack. In this paper we apply our error pattern chaining method to show how to improve the performance of such reaction attacks in the CPA case. We show that after identifying a single decoding error (or a decoding step taking more time than expected in a timing attack), we can adaptively create new error patterns that have a much higher decoding error probability than for a random error. This leads to a significant improvement of the attack based on decoding errors in the CPA case and it also gives the strongest known attack on MDPC-like schemes, both with and without using side-channel information.
Last updated:  2018-12-30
On Some Computational Problems in Local Fields
Yingpu Deng, Lixia Luo, and Guanju Xiao
Lattices in Euclidean spaces are important research objects in geometric number theory, and they have important applications in many areas, such as cryptology. The shortest vector problem (SVP) and the closest vector problem (CVP) are two famous computational problems about lattices. In this paper, we define so-called p-adic lattices, and consider the p-adic analogues of SVP and CVP in local fields. We find that, in contrast with lattices in Euclidean spaces, the situation is completely different and interesting. We also develop relevant algorithms, indicating that these problems are computable.
Last updated:  2018-12-26
What about Bob? The Inadequacy of CPA Security for Proxy Reencryption
Aloni Cohen
In the simplest setting of proxy reencryption, there are three parties: Alice, Bob, and Polly (the proxy). Alice keeps some encrypted data that she can decrypt with a secret key known only to her. She wants to communicate the data to Bob, but not to Polly (nor anybody else). Using proxy reencryption, Alice can create a reencryption key that will enable Polly to reencrypt the data for Bob's use, but which will not help Polly learn anything about the data. There are two well-studied notions of security for proxy reencryption schemes: security under chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) and security under chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA). Both definitions aim to formalize the security that Alice enjoys against both Polly and Bob. In this work, we demonstrate that CPA security guarantees much less security against Bob than was previously understood. In particular, CPA security does not prevent Bob from learning Alice's secret key after receiving a single honestly reencrypted ciphertext. We also show that an existing construction of CPA secure proxy reencryption suffers from this type of weakness. As a result, CPA security provides scant guarantees in common applications. We propose security under honest reencryption attacks (HRA), a strengthening of CPA security that better captures the goals of proxy reencryption. In applications, HRA security provides much more robust security. We identify a property of proxy reencryption schemes that suffices to amplify CPA security to HRA security and show that two existing proxy reencryption schemes are in fact HRA secure.
Last updated:  2018-12-21
Side-Channel Analysis of SM2: A Late-Stage Featurization Case Study
Nicola Tuveri, Sohaib ul Hassan, Cesar Pereida García, and Billy Brumley
SM2 is a public key cryptography suite originating from Chinese standards, including digital signatures and public key encryption. Ahead of schedule, code for this functionality was recently mainlined in OpenSSL, marked for the upcoming 1.1.1 release. We perform a security review of this implementation, uncovering various deficiencies ranging from traditional software quality issues to side-channel risks. To assess the latter, we carry out a side-channel security evaluation and discover that the implementation hits every pitfall seen for OpenSSL's ECDSA code in the past decade. We carry out remote timings, cache timings, and EM analysis, with accompanying empirical data to demonstrate secret information leakage during execution of both digital signature generation and public key decryption. Finally, we propose, implement, and empirically evaluate countermeasures.
Last updated:  2018-12-19
Revisiting Orthogonal Lattice Attacks on Approximate Common Divisor Problems and their Applications
Jun Xu, Santanu Sarkar, and Lei Hu
In this paper, we revisit three existing types of orthogonal lattice (OL) attacks and propose optimized cases to solve approximate common divisor (ACD) problems. In order to reduce both space and time costs, we also make an improved lattice using the rounding technique. Further, we present asymptotic formulas of the time complexities on our optimizations as well as three known OL attacks. Besides, we give specific conditions that the optimized OL attacks can work and show how the attack ability depends on the blocksize $\beta$ in the BKZ-$\beta$ algorithm. Therefore, we put forward a method to estimate the concrete cost of solving the random ACD instances. It can be used in the choice of practical parameters in ACD problems. Finally, we give the security estimates of some ACD-based FHE constructions from the literature and also analyze the implicit factorization problem with sufficient number of samples. In the above situations, our optimized OL attack using the rounding technique performs fastest in practice.
Last updated:  2018-12-19
On the Decoding Failure Rate of QC-MDPC Bit-Flipping Decoders
Nicolas Sendrier and Valentin Vasseur
Quasi-cyclic moderate density parity check codes allow the design of McEliece-like public-key encryption schemes with compact keys and a security that provably reduces to hard decoding problems for quasi-cyclic codes. In particular, QC-MDPC are among the most promising code-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) that are proposed to the NIST call for standardization of quantum safe cryptography (two proposals, BIKE and QC-MDPC KEM). The first generation of decoding algorithms suffers from a small, but not negligible, decoding failure rate (DFR in the order of $10^{-7}$ to $10^{-10}$). This allows a key recovery attack presented by Guo, Johansson, and Stankovski (GJS attack) at Asiacrypt 2016 which exploits a small correlation between the faulty message patterns and the secret key of the scheme, and limits the usage of the scheme to KEMs using ephemeral public keys. It does not impact the interactive establishment of secure communications (e.g. TLS), but the use of static public keys for asynchronous applications (e.g. email) is rendered dangerous. Understanding and improving the decoding of QCMDPC is thus of interest for cryptographic applications. In particular, finding parameters for which the failure rate is provably negligible (typically as low as $2^{-64}$ or $2^{-128}$) would allow static keys and increase the applicability of the mentioned cryptosystems. We study here a simple variant of bit-flipping decoding, which we call step-by-step decoding. It has a higher DFR but its evolution can be modelled by a Markov chain, within the theoretical framework of Julia Chaulet's PhD thesis. We study two other, more efficient, decoders. One is the textbook algorithm. The other is (close to) the BIKE decoder. For all those algorithms we provide simulation results, and, assuming an evolution similar to the step-by-step decoder, we extrapolate the value of the DFR as a function of the block length. This will give an indication of how much the code parameters must be increased to ensure resistance to the GJS attack.
Last updated:  2018-12-19
Ramanujan graphs in cryptography
Anamaria Costache, Brooke Feigon, Kristin Lauter, Maike Massierer, and Anna Puskas
In this paper we study the security of a proposal for Post-Quantum Cryptography from both a number theoretic and cryptographic perspective. Charles-Goren-Lauter in 2006 proposed two hash functions based on the hardness of finding paths in Ramanujan graphs. One is based on Lubotzky--Phillips--Sarnak (LPS) graphs and the other one is based on Supersingular Isogeny Graphs. A 2008 paper by Petit-Lauter-Quisquater breaks the hash function based on LPS graphs. On the Supersingular Isogeny Graphs proposal, recent work has continued to build cryptographic applications on the hardness of finding isogenies between supersingular elliptic curves. A 2011 paper by De Feo-Jao-Plût proposed a cryptographic system based on Supersingular Isogeny Diffie--Hellman as well as a set of five hard problems. In this paper we show that the security of the SIDH proposal relies on the hardness of the SIG path-finding problem introduced in [CGL06]. In addition, similarities between the number theoretic ingredients in the LPS and Pizer constructions suggest that the hardness of the path-finding problem in the two graphs may be linked. By viewing both graphs from a number theoretic perspective, we identify the similarities and differences between the Pizer and LPS graphs.
Last updated:  2018-12-18
Subversion in Practice: How to Efficiently Undermine Signatures
Joonsang Baek, Willy Susilo, Jongkil Kim, and Yang-Wai Chow
Algorithm substitution attack (ASA) on signatures should be treated seriously as the authentication services of numerous systems and applications rely on signature schemes and compromising them has a significant impact on the security of users. We present a somewhat alarming result in this regard: a highly efficient ASA on the Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) and its implementation. Compared with the generic ASAs on signature schemes proposed in the literature, our attack provides fast and undetectable subversion, which will extract the user's private signing key by collecting maximum three signatures arbitrarily. Moreover, our ASA is proven to be robust against state reset. We implemented the proposed ASA by replacing the original DSA in Libgcrypt (a popular cryptographic library used in many applications) with our subverted DSA. Experiment shows that the user's private key can readily be recovered once the subverted DSA is used to sign messages. In our implementation, various measures have been considered to significantly reduce the possibility of detection through comparing the running time of the original DSA and the subverted one (i.e. timing analysis). To our knowledge, this is the first implementation of ASA in practice, which shows that ASA is a real threat rather than only a theoretical speculation.
Last updated:  2018-12-18
On a Rank-Metric Code-Based Cryptosystem with Small Key Size
Julian Renner, Sven Puchinger, and Antonia Wachter-Zeh
A repair of the Faure-Loidreau (FL) public-key code-based cryptosystem is proposed.The FL cryptosystem is based on the hardness of list decoding Gabidulin codes which are special rank-metric codes. We prove that the recent structural attack on the system by Gaborit et al. is equivalent to decoding an interleaved Gabidulin code. Since all known polynomial-time decoders for these codes fail for a large constructive class of error patterns, we are able to construct public keys that resist the attack. It is also shown that all other known attacks fail for our repair and parameter choices. Compared to other code-based cryptosystems, we obtain significantly smaller key sizes for the same security level.
Last updated:  2018-12-14
Matrioska: A Compiler for Multi-Key Homomorphic Signatures
Dario Fiore and Elena Pagnin
Multi-Key Homomorphic Signatures (MKHS) enable clients in a system to sign and upload messages to an untrusted server. At any later point in time, the server can perform a computation $C$ on data provided by $t$ different clients, and return the output $y$ and a short signature $\sigma{C, y}$ vouching for the correctness of $y$ as the output of the function $f$ on the signed data. Interestingly, MKHS enable verifiers to check the validity of the signature using solely the public keys of the signers whose messages were used in the computation. Moreover, the signatures $\sigma{C, y}$ are succinct, namely their size depends at most linearly in the number of clients, and only logarithmically in the total number of inputs of $C$. Existing MKHS are constructed based either on standard assumptions over lattices (Fiore et al., ASIACRYPT'16), or on non-falsifiable assumptions (SNARKs) (Lai et al., ePrint'16). In this paper, we investigate connections between single-key and multi-key homomorphic signatures. We propose a generic compiler, called \matrioska, which turns any (sufficiently expressive) single-key homomorphic signature scheme into a multi-key scheme. Matrioska establishes a formal connection between these two primitives and is the first alternative to the only known construction under standard falsifiable assumptions. Our result relies on a novel technique that exploits the homomorphic property of a single-key HS scheme to compress an arbitrary number of signatures from $t$ different users into only $t$ signatures.
Last updated:  2018-12-13
Finding Significant Fourier Coefficients: Clarifications, Simplifications, Applications and Limitations
Steven D. Galbraith, Joel Laity, and Barak Shani
Ideas from Fourier analysis have been used in cryptography for the last three decades. Akavia, Goldwasser and Safra unified some of these ideas to give a complete algorithm that finds significant Fourier coefficients of functions on any finite abelian group. Their algorithm stimulated a lot of interest in the cryptography community, especially in the context of ``bit security''. This manuscript attempts to be a friendly and comprehensive guide to the tools and results in this field. The intended readership is cryptographers who have heard about these tools and seek an understanding of their mechanics and their usefulness and limitations. A compact overview of the algorithm is presented with emphasis on the ideas behind it. We show how these ideas can be extended to a ``modulus-switching'' variant of the algorithm. We survey some applications of this algorithm, and explain that several results should be taken in the right context. In particular, we point out that some of the most important bit security problems are still open. Our original contributions include: a discussion of the limitations on the usefulness of these tools; an answer to an open question about the modular inversion hidden number problem.
Last updated:  2018-12-12
TACHYON: Fast Signatures from Compact Knapsack
Rouzbeh Behnia, Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Attila A. Yavuz, and Mike Rosulek
We introduce a simple, yet efficient digital signature scheme which offers post-quantum security promise. Our scheme, named $\texttt{TACHYON}$, is based on a novel approach for extending one-time hash-based signatures to (polynomially bounded) many-time signatures, using the additively homomorphic properties of generalized compact knapsack functions. Our design permits $\texttt{TACHYON}$ to achieve several key properties. First, its signing and verification algorithms are the fastest among its current counterparts with a higher level of security. This allows $\texttt{TACHYON}$ to achieve the lowest end-to-end delay among its counterparts, while also making it suitable for resource-limited signers. Second, its private keys can be as small as $\kappa$ bits, where $\kappa$ is the desired security level. Third, unlike most of its lattice-based counterparts, $\texttt{TACHYON}$ does not require any Gaussian sampling during signing, and therefore, is free from side-channel attacks targeting this process. We also explore various speed and storage trade-offs for $\texttt{TACHYON}$, thanks to its highly tunable parameters. Some of these trade-offs can speed up $\texttt{TACHYON}$ signing in exchange for larger keys, thereby permitting $\texttt{TACHYON}$ to further improve its end-to-end delay.
Last updated:  2018-12-10
On Quantum Chosen-Ciphertext Attacks and Learning with Errors
Gorjan Alagic, Stacey Jeffery, Maris Ozols, and Alexander Poremba
Large-scale quantum computing is a significant threat to classical public-key cryptography. In strong “quantum access” security models, numerous symmetric-key cryptosystems are also vulnerable. We consider classical encryption in a model which grants the adversary quantum oracle access to encryption and decryption, but where the latter is restricted to non-adaptive (i.e., pre-challenge) queries only. We define this model formally using appropriate notions of ciphertext indistinguishability and semantic security (which are equivalent by standard arguments) and call it QCCA1 in analogy to the classical CCA1 security model. Using a bound on quantum random-access codes, we show that the standard PRF- and PRP-based encryption schemes are QCCA1-secure when instantiated with quantum-secure primitives. We then revisit standard IND-CPA-secure Learning with Errors (LWE) encryption and show that leaking just one quantum decryption query (and no other queries or leakage of any kind) allows the adversary to recover the full secret key with constant success probability. In the classical setting, by contrast, recovering the key uses a linear number of decryption queries, and this is optimal. The algorithm at the core of our attack is a (large-modulus version of) the well-known Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm. We emphasize that our results should not be interpreted as a weakness of these cryptosystems in their stated security setting (i.e., post-quantum chosen-plaintext secrecy). Rather, our results mean that, if these cryptosystems are exposed to chosen-ciphertext attacks (e.g., as a result of deployment in an inappropriate real-world setting) then quantum attacks are even more devastating than classical ones.
Last updated:  2018-12-03
A Comparison of NTRU Variants
John M. Schanck
We analyze the size vs. security trade-offs that are available when selecting parameters for perfectly correct key encapsulation mechanisms based on NTRU.
Last updated:  2018-12-03
Can you sign a quantum state
Gorjan Alagic, Tommaso Gagliardoni, and Christian Majenz
Cryptography with quantum states exhibits a number of surprising and counterintuitive features. In a 2002 work, Barnum et al. argued informally that these strange features should imply that digital signatures for quantum states are impossible (Barnum et al., FOCS 2002). In this work, we perform the first rigorous study of the problem of signing quantum states. We first show that the intuition of Barnum et al. was correct, by proving an impossibility result which rules out even very weak forms of signing quantum states. Essentially, we show that any non-trivial combination of correctness and security requirements results in negligible security. This rules out all quantum signature schemes except those which simply measure the state and then sign the outcome using a classical scheme. In other words, only classical signature schemes exist. We then show a positive result: it is possible to sign quantum states, provided that they are also encrypted with the public key of the intended recipient. Following classical nomenclature, we call this notion quantum signcryption. Classically, signcryption is only interesting if it provides superior efficiency to simultaneous encryption and signing. Our results imply that, quantumly, it is far more interesting: by the laws of quantum mechanics, it is the only signing method available. We develop security definitions for quantum signcryption, ranging from a simple one-time two-user setting, to a chosen-ciphertext-secure many-time multi-user setting. We also give secure constructions based on post-quantum public-key primitives. Along the way, we show that a natural hybrid method of combining classical and quantum schemes can be used to "upgrade" a secure classical scheme to the fully-quantum setting, in a wide range of cryptographic settings including signcryption, authenticated encryption, and chosen-ciphertext security.
Last updated:  2018-11-29
Fast Authentication from Aggregate Signatures with Improved Security
Muslum Ozgur Ozmen, Rouzbeh Behnia, and Attila A. Yavuz
An attempt to derive signer-efficient digital signatures from aggregate signatures was made in a signature scheme referred to as Structure-free Compact Rapid Authentication (SCRA) (IEEE TIFS 2017). In this paper, we first mount a practical universal forgery attack against the NTRU instantiation of SCRA by observing only 8161 signatures. Second, we propose a new signature scheme (FAAS), which transforms any single-signer aggregate signature scheme into a signer-efficient scheme. We show two efficient instantiations of FAAS, namely, FAAS-NTRU and FAAS-RSA, both of which achieve high computational efficiency. Our experiments confirmed that FAAS schemes achieve up to 100x faster signature generation compared to their underlying schemes. Moreover, FAAS schemes eliminate some of the costly operations such as Gaussian sampling, rejection sampling, and exponentiation at the signature generation that are shown to be susceptible to side-channel attacks. This enables FAAS schemes to enhance the security and efficiency of their underlying schemes. Finally, we prove that FAAS schemes are secure (in random oracle model), and open-source both our attack and FAAS implementations for public testing purposes.
Last updated:  2018-11-29
A Constructive Perspective on Signcryption Security
Christian Badertscher, Fabio Banfi, and Ueli Maurer
Signcryption is a public-key cryptographic primitive, originally introduced by Zheng (Crypto '97), that allows parties to establish secure communication without the need of prior key agreement. Instead, a party registers its public key at a certificate authority (CA), and only needs to retrieve the public key of the intended partner from the CA before being able to protect the communication. Signcryption schemes provide both authenticity and confidentiality of sent messages and can offer a simpler interface to applications and better performance compared to generic compositions of signature and encryption schemes. Although introduced two decades ago, the question which security notions of signcryption are adequate in which applications has still not reached a fully satisfactory answer. To resolve this question, we conduct a constructive analysis of this public-key primitive. Similar to previous constructive studies for other important primitives, this treatment allows to identify the natural goal that signcryption schemes should achieve and to formalize this goal in a composable framework. More specifically, we capture the goal of signcryption as a gracefully-degrading secure network, which is basically a network of independent parties that allows secure communication between any two parties. However, when a party is compromised, its respective security guarantees are lost, while all guarantees for the remaining users remain unaffected. We show which security notions for signcryption are sufficient to construct this kind of secure network from a certificate authority (or key registration resource) and insecure communication. Our study does not only unveil that it is the so-called insider-security notion that enables this construction, but also that a weaker version thereof would already be sufficient. This may be of interest in the context of practical signcryption schemes that do not achieve the stronger notions. Last but not least, we observe that the graceful-degradation property is actually an essential feature of signcryption that stands out in comparison to alternative and more standard constructions that achieve secure communication from the same assumptions. This underlines the vital importance of the insider security notion for signcryption and strongly supports, in contrast to the initial belief, the recent trend to consider the insider security notion as the standard notion for signcryption.
Last updated:  2018-11-29
A Public Key Exchange Cryptosystem Based on Ideal Secrecy
Vamshi Krishna Kammadanam, Virendra R. Sule, and Yi Hong
This paper proposes two closely related asymmetric key (or a public key) schemes for key exchange whose security is based on the notion of ideal secrecy. In the first scheme, the private key consists of two singular matrices, a polar code matrix and a random permutation matrix all over the binary field. The sender transmits addition of two messages over a public channel using the public key of the receiver. The receiver can decrypt individual messages using the private key. An adversary, without the knowledge of the private key, can only compute multiple equiprobable solutions in a space of sufficiently large size related to the dimension of the kernel of the singular matrices. This achieves security in the sense of ideal secrecy. The next scheme extends over general matrices. The two schemes are cryptanalyzed against various attacks.
Last updated:  2018-11-24
Regular Lossy Functions and Their Applications in Leakage-Resilient Cryptography
Yu Chen, Baodong Qin, and Haiyang Xue
In STOC 2008, Peikert and Waters introduced a powerful primitive called lossy trapdoor functions (LTFs). In a nutshell, LTFs are functions that behave in one of two modes. In the normal mode, functions are injective and invertible with a trapdoor. In the lossy mode, functions statistically lose information about their inputs. Moreover, the two modes are computationally indistinguishable. In this work, we put forward a relaxation of LTFs, namely, regular lossy functions (RLFs). Compared to LTFs, the functions in the normal mode are not required to be efficiently invertible or even unnecessary to be injective. Instead, they could also be lossy, but in a regular manner. We also put forward richer abstractions of RLFs, namely all-but-one regular lossy functions (ABO-RLFs) and one-time regular lossy filters (OT-RLFs). We show that (ABO)-RLFs admit efficient constructions from both a variety of number- theoretic assumptions and hash proof system (HPS) for subset membership problems satisfying natural algebraic properties. Thanks to the relaxations on functionality, the constructions enjoy much compact key size and better computational efficiency than that of (ABO)-LTFs. We demonstrate the utility of RLFs and their extensions in the leakage-resilient cryptography. As a special case of RLFs, lossy functions imply leakage-resilient injective one-way functions with optimal leakage rate $1 - o(1)$. ABO-RLFs (or OT-RLFs) immediately imply leakage-resilient one-time message authentication code (MAC) with optimal leakage rate $1 - o(1)$. ABO-RLFs together with HPS give rise to leakage-resilient chosen-ciphertext (CCA) secure key encapsulation mechanisms (KEM) (this approach extends naturally to the identity-based setting). Combining the construction of ABO-RLFs from HPS, this gives the first leakage-resilient CCA-secure public-key encryption (PKE) with optimal leakage rate based solely on HPS, and thus goes beyond the barrier posed by Dodis et al. (Asiacrypt 2010). Our construction also applies to the identity-based setting, yielding LR-CCA secure IB-KEM with higher leakage rate than previous works.
Last updated:  2018-11-23
Computing Discrete Logarithms in an Interval
Steven D. Galbraith, John M. Pollard, and Raminder S. Ruprai
The discrete logarithm problem in an interval of size $N$ in a group $G$ is: Given $g, h \in G$ and an integer $ N$ to find an integer $0 \le n \le N$, if it exists, such that $h = g^n$. Previously the best low-storage algorithm to solve this problem was the van Oorschot and Wiener version of the Pollard kangaroo method. The heuristic average case running time of this method is $(2 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. We present two new low-storage algorithms for the discrete logarithm problem in an interval of size $N$. The first algorithm is based on the Pollard kangaroo method, but uses 4 kangaroos instead of the usual two. We explain why this algorithm has heuristic average case expected running time of $(1.715 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. The second algorithm is based on the Gaudry-Schost algorithm and the ideas of our first algorithm. We explain why this algorithm has heuristic average case expected running time of $(1.661 + o(1)) \sqrt{N}$ group operations. We give experimental results that show that the methods do work close to that predicted by the theoretical analysis. This is a revised version since the published paper that contains a corrected proof of Theorem 6 (the statement of Theorem 6 is unchanged). We thank Ravi Montenegro for pointing out the errors.
Last updated:  2018-11-23
CSIDH: An Efficient Post-Quantum Commutative Group Action
Wouter Castryck, Tanja Lange, Chloe Martindale, Lorenz Panny, and Joost Renes
We propose an efficient commutative group action suitable for non-interactive key exchange in a post-quantum setting. Our construction follows the layout of the Couveignes-Rostovtsev-Stolbunov cryptosystem, but we apply it to supersingular elliptic curves defined over a large prime field $\mathbb F_p$, rather than to ordinary elliptic curves. The Diffie-Hellman scheme resulting from the group action allows for public-key validation at very little cost, runs reasonably fast in practice, and has public keys of only 64 bytes at a conjectured AES-128 security level, matching NIST's post-quantum security category I.
Last updated:  2018-11-20
Tighter Security Proofs for GPV-IBE in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
Shuichi Katsumata, Shota Yamada, and Takashi Yamakawa
In (STOC, 2008), Gentry, Peikert, and Vaikuntanathan proposed the first identity-based encryption (GPV-IBE) scheme based on a post-quantum assumption, namely, the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Since their proof was only made in the random oracle model (ROM) instead of the quantum random oracle model (QROM), it remained unclear whether the scheme was truly post-quantum or not. In (CRYPTO, 2012), Zhandry developed new techniques to be used in the QROM and proved the security of GPV-IBE in the QROM, hence answering in the affirmative that GPV-IBE is indeed post-quantum. However, since the general technique developed by Zhandry incurred a large reduction loss, there was a wide gap between the concrete efficiency and security level provided by GPV-IBE in the ROM and QROM. Furthermore, regardless of being in the ROM or QROM, GPV-IBE is not known to have a tight reduction in the multi-challenge setting. Considering that in the real-world an adversary can obtain many ciphertexts, it is desirable to have a security proof that does not degrade with the number of challenge ciphertext. In this paper, we provide a much tighter proof for the GPV-IBE in the QROM in the single-challenge setting. In addition, we also show that a slight variant of the GPV-IBE has an almost tight reduction in the multi-challenge setting both in the ROM and QROM, where the reduction loss is independent of the number of challenge ciphertext. Our proof departs from the traditional partitioning technique and resembles the approach used in the public key encryption scheme of Cramer and Shoup (CRYPTO, 1998). Our proof strategy allows the reduction algorithm to program the random oracle the same way for all identities and naturally fits the QROM setting where an adversary may query a superposition of all identities in one random oracle query. Notably, our proofs are much simpler than the one by Zhandry and conceptually much easier to follow for cryptographers not familiar with quantum computation. Although at a high level, the techniques used for the single and multi-challenge setting are similar, the technical details are quite different. For the multi-challenge setting, we rely on the Katz-Wang technique (CCS, 2003) to overcome some obstacles regarding the leftover hash lemma.
Last updated:  2018-11-20
Organizational Cryptography for Access Control
Masahito Gotaishi and Shigeo Tsujii
A cryptosystem for granting/rescinding access permission is proposed, based on elliptic curve cryptography. The `Organizational Cryptosystem' grants access permission not by giving secret (decription) key to the corresponding user but by converting the ciphertext so that the user can decript with their secret key. The `conversion key' for the document, which is created from the secret key which the ciphertext has been originally encrypted for, the public key of the member who shall be permitted to read the ciphertext, and a part of the ciphertext. Therefore it is not possible to decrypt the ciphertext with the conversion key. Nor, for the administrator who issues the conversion key, to obtain any information about the plaintext.
Last updated:  2018-11-16
Tropical cryptography II: extensions by homomorphisms
Dima Grigoriev and Vladimir Shpilrain
We use extensions of tropical algebras as platforms for very efficient public key exchange protocols.
Last updated:  2018-11-16
A fully distributed revocable ciphertext-policy hierarchical attribute-based encryption without pairing
Mohammad Ali, Javad Mohajeri, and Mohammad-Reza Sadeghi
Several appealing features of cloud computing such as cost-effectiveness and user-friendliness have made many users and enterprises interested to outsource their sensitive data for sharing via cloud. However, it causes many new challenges toward data confidentiality, access control , scalability, and flexibility. Ciphertext-policy Hierarchical attribute-based encryption (CP-HABE) can be a promising solution to the mentioned problems. But, the existing HABE schemes have several limitations in their key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. In this work, to solve these problems, we introduce the concept of \textit{fully distributed revocable } CP-HABE (FDR-CP-HABE) system and propose the first FDR-CP-HABE scheme. The proposed scheme provides a high level of flexibility and scalability in the key delegation and user revocation mechanisms. Moreover, our proposed system is pairing-free and realizes lightweight computing in decryption phase. Indeed, by exploiting the computational operation outsourcing technique, most of the operations have been done by the powerful cloud service provider and very few computations have been leaved to the data user. Also, in our scheme the storage cost on the data user side has been decreased, compared to the other similar works. Moreover, using the hardness assumption of Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problem, we show that the proposed scheme is adaptively semantically secure in the standard model.
Last updated:  2018-11-16
Insecurity of a provably secure and lightweight certificateless signature scheme for IIoT environments
Lunzhi Deng
Recently, Karati et al. presented a lightweight certificateless signature scheme for industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, and claimed the scheme was provably secure in the standard model. In this paper, it is indicated that the scheme is not secure by showing two concrete attacks.
Last updated:  2018-11-13
Adaptively Simulation-Secure Attribute-Hiding Predicate Encryption
Pratish Datta, Tatsuaki Okamoto, and Katsuyuki Takashima
This paper demonstrates how to achieve simulation-based strong attribute hiding against adaptive adversaries for predicate encryption (PE) schemes supporting expressive predicate families under standard computational assumptions in bilinear groups. Our main result is a simulation-based adaptively strongly partially-hiding PE (PHPE) scheme for predicates computing arithmetic branching programs (ABP) on public attributes, followed by an inner-product predicate on private attributes. This simultaneously generalizes attribute-based encryption (ABE) for boolean formulas and ABP’s as well as strongly attribute-hiding PE schemes for inner products. The proposed scheme is proven secure for any a priori bounded number of ciphertexts and an unbounded (polynomial) number of decryption keys, which is the best possible in the simulation-based adaptive security framework. This directly implies that our construction also achieves indistinguishability-based strongly partially-hiding security against adversaries requesting an unbounded (polynomial) number of ciphertexts and decryption keys. The security of the proposed scheme is derived under (asymmetric version of) the well-studied decisional linear (DLIN) assumption. Our work resolves an open problem posed by Wee in TCC 2017, where his result was limited to the semi-adaptive setting. Moreover, our result advances the current state of the art in both the fields of simulation-based and indistinguishability-based strongly attribute-hiding PE schemes. Our main technical contribution lies in extending the strong attribute hiding methodology of Okamoto and Takashima [EUROCRYPT 2012, ASIACRYPT 2012] to the framework of simulation-based security and beyond inner products.
Last updated:  2018-11-12
Simulation-based Receiver Selective Opening CCA Secure PKE from Standard Computational Assumptions
Keisuke Hara, Fuyuki Kitagawa, Takahiro Matsuda, Goichiro Hanaoka, and Keisuke Tanaka
In the situation where there are one sender and multiple receivers, a receiver selective opening (RSO) attack for a public key encryption (PKE) scheme considers adversaries that can corrupt some of the receivers and get their secret keys and plaintexts. Security against RSO attacks for a PKE scheme ensures confidentiality of ciphertexts of uncorrupted receivers. Simulation-based RSO security against chosen ciphertext attacks (SIM-RSO-CCA) is the strongest security notion in all RSO attack scenarios. Jia, Lu, and Li (INDOCRYPT 2016) proposed the first SIM-RSO-CCA secure PKE scheme. However, their scheme used indistinguishablility obfuscation, which is not known to be constructed from any standard computational assumption. In this paper, we give two contributions for constructing SIM-RSO-CCA secure PKE from standard computational assumptions. Firstly, we propose a generic construction of SIM-RSO-CCA secure PKE using an IND-CPA secure PKE scheme and a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof system satisfying one-time simulation soundness. Secondly, we propose an efficient and concrete construction of SIM-RSO-CCA secure PKE based on the decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption. Moreover, we give a method for efficiently expanding the plaintext space of the DDH-based construction. By applying this method to the construction, we obtain the first DDH-based SIM-RSO-CCA secure PKE scheme supporting a super-polynomially large plaintext space with compact ciphertexts.
Last updated:  2018-11-09
Faster Homomorphic Discrete Fourier Transforms and Improved FHE Bootstrapping
Jung Hee Cheon, Kyoohyung Han, and Minki Hhan
In this work, we propose a faster homomorphic linear transform algorithm for structured matrices such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and linear transformations in bootstrapping. First, we proposed new method to evaluate the DFT homomorphically for a given packed ciphertext from the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm. While the previous method requires $O(\sqrt n)$ rotations and $O(n)$ constant vector multiplications, our method only needs $O(\log n)$ rotations/multiplications by consuming $O(\log n)$ depth for the length of input vector $n$. Second, we apply the same method to the linear transform of bootstrapping for $\textsf{HEAAN}$. To achieve this, we construct a recursive relation of matrices in those linear transformations. Accordingly, we can highly accelerate the linear transformation part of bootstrapping: the number of homomorphic operations becomes logarithmic to the number of slots, as in homomorphic DFT. We also implement both algorithms. Our homomorphic DFT with length $2^{14}$ only takes about 8 seconds which is about 150 times faster result than previous one. The bootstrapping for $\textsf{HEAAN}$ with our linear transform algorithm takes about 2 minutes for $\mathbb{C}^{32768}$ plaintext space with 8 bit precision, which takes 26 hours using the previous method.
Last updated:  2018-11-09
A New Batch FHE Scheme over the Integers
Kwak Wi Song and Kim Chol Un
The FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) schemes [7, 13] based on the modified AGCD problem (noise-free AGCD problem) are vulnerable to quantum attacks, because its security relies partly on the hardness of factoring, and some FHE schemes based on the decisional AGCD without the noise-free assumption, for example [1], has a drawback that its ciphertexts are very large. In this paper, we construct a new batch FHE scheme based on the decisional AGCD problem to overcome these weaknesses and prove its security.
Last updated:  2018-11-09
Partial Key Exposure in Ring-LWE-Based Cryptosystems: Attacks and Resilience
Dana Dachman-Soled, Huijing Gong, Mukul Kulkarni, and Aria Shahverdi
We initiate the study of partial key exposure in ring-LWE-based cryptosystems. Specifically, we - Introduce the search and decision Leaky-RLWE assumptions (Leaky-SRLWE, Leaky-DRLWE), to formalize the hardness of search/decision RLWE under leakage of some fraction of coordinates of the NTT transform of the RLWE secret and/or error. - Present and implement an efficient key exposure attack that, given certain $1/4$-fraction of the coordinates of the NTT transform of the RLWE secret, along with RLWE instances, recovers the full RLWE secret for standard parameter settings. - Present a search-to-decision reduction for Leaky-RLWE for certain types of key exposure. - Analyze the security of NewHope key exchange under partial key exposure of $1/8$-fraction of the secrets and error. We show that, assuming that Leaky-DRLWE is hard for these parameters, the shared key $v$ (which is then hashed using a random oracle) is computationally indistinguishable from a random variable with average min-entropy $238$, conditioned on transcript and leakage, whereas without leakage the min-entropy is $256$.
Last updated:  2018-11-03
Subversion-Resilient Signatures: Definitions, Constructions and Applications
Giuseppe Ateniese, Bernardo Magri, and Daniele Venturi
We provide a formal treatment of security of digital signatures against subversion attacks (SAs). Our model of subversion generalizes previous work in several directions, and is inspired by the proliferation of software attacks (e.g., malware and buffer overflow attacks), and by the recent revelations of Edward Snowden about intelligence agencies trying to surreptitiously sabotage cryptographic algorithms. The main security requirement we put forward demands that a signature scheme should remain unforgeable even in the presence of an attacker applying SAs (within a certain class of allowed attacks) in a fully-adaptive and continuous fashion. Previous notions---e.g., the notion of security against algorithm-substitution attacks introduced by Bellare et al. (CRYPTO '14) for symmetric encryption---were non-adaptive and non-continuous. In this vein, we show both positive and negative results for the goal of constructing subversion-resilient signature schemes. Negative results. As our main negative result, we show that a broad class of randomized signature schemes is unavoidably insecure against SAs, even if using just a single bit of randomness. This improves upon earlier work that was only able to attack schemes with larger randomness space. When designing our new attack we consider undetectability as an explicit adversarial goal, meaning that the end-users (even the ones knowing the signing key) should not be able to detect that the signature scheme was subverted. Positive results. We complement the above negative results by showing that signature schemes with unique signatures are subversion-resilient against all attacks that meet a basic undetectability requirement. A similar result was shown by Bellare et al. for symmetric encryption, who proved the necessity to rely on stateful schemes; in contrast unique signatures are stateless, and in fact they are among the fastest and most established digital signatures available. As our second positive result, we show how to construct subversion-resilient identification schemes from subversion-resilient signature schemes. We finally show that it is possible to devise signature schemes secure against arbitrary tampering with the computation, by making use of an un-tamperable cryptographic reverse firewall (Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz, EUROCRYPT '15), i.e., an algorithm that "sanitizes" any signature given as input (using only public information). The firewall we design allows to successfully protect so-called re-randomizable signature schemes (which include unique signatures as special case). As an additional contribution, we extend our model to consider multiple users and show implications and separations among the various notions we introduced. While our study is mainly theoretical, due to its strong practical motivation, we believe that our results have important implications in practice and might influence the way digital signature schemes are selected or adopted in standards and protocols.
Last updated:  2018-11-02
On the Leakage Resilience of Ring-LWE Based Public Key Encryption
Dana Dachman-Soled, Huijing Gong, Mukul Kulkarni, and Aria Shahverdi
We consider the leakage resilience of the Ring-LWE analogue of the Dual-Regev encryption scheme (R-Dual-Regev for short), originally presented by Lyubashevsky et al.~(Eurocrypt '13). Specifically, we would like to determine whether the R-Dual-Regev encryption scheme remains IND-CPA secure, even in the case where an attacker leaks information about the secret key. We consider the setting where $R$ is the ring of integers of the $m$-th cyclotomic number field, for $m$ which is a power-of-two, and the Ring-LWE modulus is set to $q \equiv 1 \mod m$. This is the common setting used in practice and is desirable in terms of the efficiency and simplicity of the scheme. Unfortunately, in this setting $R_q$ is very far from being a field so standard techniques for proving leakage resilience in the general lattice setting, which rely on the leftover hash lemma, do not apply. Therefore, new techniques must be developed. In this work, we put forth a high-level approach for proving the leakage resilience of the R-Dual-Regev scheme, by generalizing the original proof of Lyubashevsky et al.~(Eurocrypt '13). We then give three instantiations of our approach, proving that the R-Dual-Regev remains IND-CPA secure in the presence of three natural, non-adaptive leakage classes.
Last updated:  2018-11-02
Supersingular Isogeny Diffie-Hellman Authenticated Key Exchange
Atsushi Fujioka, Katsuyuki Takashima, Shintaro Terada, and Kazuki Yoneyama
We propose two authenticated key exchange protocols from supersingular isogenies. Our protocols are the first post-quantum one-round Diffie-Hellman type authenticated key exchange ones in the following points: one is secure under the quantum random oracle model and the other resists against maximum exposure where a non-trivial combination of secret keys is revealed. The security of the former and the latter is proven under isogeny versions of the decisional and gap Diffie-Hellman assumptions, respectively. We also propose a new approach for invalidating the Galbraith-Vercauteren-type attack for the gap problem.
Last updated:  2018-11-02
Strongly Unforgeable Signatures Resilient to Polynomially Hard-to-Invert Leakage under Standard Assumptions
Masahito Ishizaka and Kanta Matsuura
A signature scheme is said to be weakly unforgeable, if it is hard to forge a signature on a message not signed before. A signature scheme is said to be strongly unforgeable, if it is hard to forge a signature on any message. In some applications, the weak unforgeability is not enough and the strong unforgeability is required, e.g., the Canetti, Halevi and Katz transformation. Leakage-resilience is a property which guarantees that even if secret information such as the secret-key is partially leaked, the security is maintained. Some security models with leakage-resilience have been proposed. The hard-to-invert leakage model, a.k.a. auxiliary (input) leakage model, proposed by Dodis et al. at STOC'09 is especially meaningful one, since the leakage caused by a function which information-theoretically reveals the secret-key, e.g., one-way permutation, is considered. In this work, we propose a generic construction of digital signature strongly unforgeable and resilient to polynomially hard-to-invert leakage which can be instantiated under standard assumptions such as the decisional linear assumption. We emphasize that our instantiated signature is not only the first one resilient to polynomially hard-to-invert leakage under standard assumptions, but also the first one which is strongly unforgeable and has hard-to-invert leakage-resilience.
Last updated:  2018-10-30
Prime and Prejudice: Primality Testing Under Adversarial Conditions
Martin R. Albrecht, Jake Massimo, Kenneth G. Paterson, and Juraj Somorovsky
This work provides a systematic analysis of primality testing under adversarial conditions, where the numbers being tested for primality are not generated randomly, but instead provided by a possibly malicious party. Such a situation can arise in secure messaging protocols where a server supplies Diffie-Hellman parameters to the peers, or in a secure communications protocol like TLS where a developer can insert such a number to be able to later passively spy on client-server data. We study a broad range of cryptographic libraries and assess their performance in this adversarial setting. As examples of our findings, we are able to construct 2048-bit composites that are declared prime with probability \(1/16\) by OpenSSL's primality testing in its default configuration; the advertised performance is \(2^{-80}\). We can also construct 1024-bit composites that always pass the primality testing routine in GNU GMP when configured with the recommended minimum number of rounds. And, for a number of libraries (Cryptlib, LibTomCrypt, JavaScript Big Number, WolfSSL), we can construct composites that always pass the supplied primality tests. We explore the implications of these security failures in applications, focusing on the construction of malicious Diffie-Hellman parameters. We show that, unless careful primality testing is performed, an adversary can supply parameters $(p,q,g)$ which on the surface look secure, but where the discrete logarithm problem in the subgroup of order $q$ generated by $g$ is easy. We close by making recommendations for users and developers. In particular, we promote the Baillie-PSW primality test which is both efficient and conjectured to be robust even in the adversarial setting for numbers up to a few thousand bits.
Last updated:  2018-10-27
Pairing-Friendly Twisted Hessian Curves
Chitchanok Chuengsatiansup and Chloe Martindale
This paper presents efficient formulas to compute Miller doubling and Miller addition utilizing degree-3 twists on curves with j-invariant 0 written in Hessian form. We give the formulas for both odd and even embedding degrees and for pairings on both $\mathbb{G}_1\times\mathbb{G}_2$ and $\mathbb{G}_2\times\mathbb{G}_1$. We propose the use of embedding degrees 15 and 21 for 128-bit and 192-bit security respectively in light of the NFS attacks and their variants. We give a comprehensive comparison with other curve models; our formulas give the fastest known pairing computation for embedding degrees 15, 21, and 24.
Last updated:  2018-10-26
Registration-Based Encryption from Standard Assumptions
Sanjam Garg, Mohammad Hajiabadi, Mohammad Mahmoody, Ahmadreza Rahimi, and Sruthi Sekar
The notion of Registration-Based Encryption (RBE) was recently introduced by Garg, Hajiabadi, Mahmoody, and Rahimi [TCC'18] with the goal of removing the private-key generator (PKG) from IBE. Specifically, RBE allows encrypting to identities using a (compact) master public key, like how IBE is used, with the benefit that the PKG is substituted with a weaker entity called "key curator" who has no knowledge of any secret keys. Here individuals generate their secret keys on their own and then publicly register their identities and their corresponding public keys to the key curator. Finally, individuals obtain "rare" decryption-key updates from the key curator as the population grows. In their work, they gave a construction of RBE schemes based on the combination of indistinguishability obfuscation and somewhere statistically binding hash functions. However, they left open the problem of constructing RBE schemes based on standard assumptions. In this work, we resolve the above problem and construct RBE schemes based on standard assumptions (e.g., CDH or LWE). Furthermore, we show a new application of RBE in a novel context. In particular, we show that anonymous variants of RBE (which we also construct under standard assumptions) can be used for realizing abstracts forms of anonymous messaging tasks in simple scenarios in which the parties communicate by writing messages on a shared board in a synchronized way.
Last updated:  2018-10-24
TNFS Resistant Families of Pairing-Friendly Elliptic Curves
Georgios Fotiadis and Elisavet Konstantinou
Recently there has been a significant progress on the tower number field sieve (TNFS) method, reducing the complexity of the discrete logarithm problem (DLP) in finite field extensions of composite degree. These new variants of the TNFS attacks have a major impact on pairing-based cryptography and particularly on the selection of the underlying elliptic curve groups and extension fields. In this paper we revise the criteria for selecting pairing-friendly elliptic curves considering these new TNFS attacks in finite extensions of composite embedding degree. Additionally we update the criteria for finite extensions of prime degree in order to meet today’s security requirements.
Last updated:  2018-10-18
Fast Scalar Multiplication for Elliptic Curves over Prime Fields by Efficiently Computable Formulas
Saud Al Musa and Guangwu Xu
This paper addresses fast scalar multiplication for elliptic curves over finite fields. In the first part of the paper, we obtain several efficiently computable formulas for basic elliptic curves arithmetic in the family of twisted Edwards curves over prime fields. Our $2Q+P$ formula saves about $2.8$ field multiplications, and our $5P$ formula saves about $4.2$ field multiplications in standard projective coordinate systems, compared to the latest existing results. In the second part of the paper, we formulate bucket methods for the DAG-based and the tree-based abstract ideas. We propose systematically finding a near optimal chain for multi-base number systems (MBNS). These proposed bucket methods take significantly less time to find a near optimal chain, compared to an optimal chain. We conducted extensive experiments to compare the performance of the MBNS methods (e.g., greedy, ternary/binary, multi-base NAF, tree-based, rDAG-based, and bucket). Our proposed formulas were integrated in these methods. Our results show our work had an important role in advancing the efficiency of scalar multiplication.
Last updated:  2018-10-16
Hierarchical Attribute-based Signatures
Constantin-Catalin Dragan, Daniel Gardham, and Mark Manulis
Attribute-based Signatures (ABS) are a powerful tool allowing users with attributes issued by authorities to sign messages while also proving that their attributes satisfy some policy. ABS schemes provide a flexible and privacy-preserving approach to authentication since the signer's identity and attributes remain hidden within the anonymity set of users sharing policy-conform attributes. Current ABS schemes exhibit some limitations when it comes to the management and issue of attributes. In this paper we address the lack of support for hierarchical attribute management, a property that is prevalent in traditional PKIs where certification authorities are organised into hierarchies and signatures are verified along roots of trust. Hierarchical Attribute-based Signatures (HABS) introduced in this work support delegation of attributes along paths from the top-level authority down to the users while also ensuring that signatures produced by these users do not leak their delegation paths, thus extending the original privacy guarantees of ABS schemes. Our generic HABS construction also ensures unforgeability of signatures in the presence of collusion attacks and contains an extended traceability property allowing a dedicated tracing authority to identify the signer and reveal its attribute delegation paths. We include a public verification procedure for the accountability of the tracing authority. We anticipate that HABS will be useful for privacy-preserving authentication in applications requiring hierarchical delegation of attribute-issuing rights and where knowledge of delegation paths might leak information about signers and their attributes, e.g., in intelligent transport systems where vehicles may require certain attributes to authenticate themselves to the infrastructure but remain untrackable by the latter.
Last updated:  2018-10-15
Lattice-Based zk-SNARKs from Square Span Programs
Rosario Gennaro, Michele Minelli, Anca Nitulescu, and Michele Orrù
Zero-knowledge SNARKs (zk-SNARKs) are non-interactive proof systems with short (i.e., independent of the size of the witness) and efficiently verifiable proofs. They elegantly resolve the juxtaposition of individual privacy and public trust, by providing an efficient way of demonstrating knowledge of secret information without actually revealing it. To this day, zk-SNARKs are widely deployed all over the planet and are used to keep alive a system worth billion of euros, namely the cryptocurrency Zcash. However, all current SNARKs implementations rely on so-called pre-quantum assumptions and, for this reason, are not expected to withstand cryptanalitic efforts over the next few decades. In this work, we introduce a new zk-SNARK that can be instantiated from lattice-based assumptions, and which is thus believed to be post-quantum secure. We provide a generalization in the spirit of Gennaro et al. (Eurocrypt'13) to the SNARK of Danezis et al. (Asiacrypt'14) that is based on Square Span Programs (SSP) and relies on weaker computational assumptions. We focus on designated-verifier proofs and propose a protocol in which a proof consists of just 5 LWE encodings. We provide a concrete choice of parameters, showing that our construction is practically instantiable.
Last updated:  2018-10-15
Practical Fault Injection Attacks on SPHINCS
Aymeric Genêt, Matthias J. Kannwischer, Hervé Pelletier, and Andrew McLauchlan
The majority of currently deployed cryptographic public-key schemes are at risk of becoming insecure once large scale quantum computers become practical. Therefore, substitutes resistant to quantum attacks楊nown as post-quantum cryptography預re required. In particular, hash-based signature schemes appear to be the most conservative choice for post-quantum digital signatures. In this work, we mount the first practical fault attack against hash-based cryptography. The attack was originally proposed by Castelnovi, Martinelli, and Prest [9] and allows the creation of a universal signature forgery that applies to all current standardisation candidates (XMSS, LMS, SPHINCS+, and Gravity-SPHINCS). We perform the attack on an Arduino Due board featuring an ARM Cortex-M3 microprocessor running the original stateless scheme SPHINCS with a focus on practicality. We describe how the attack is mountable with a simple voltage glitch injection on the targeted platform, which allowed us to collect enough faulty signatures to create a universal forgery within seconds. As the attack also applies to stateful schemes, we show how caching one-time signatures can entirely prevent the attack for stateful schemes, such as XMSS and LMS. However, we discuss how protecting stateless schemes, like SPHINCS, SPHINCS+, and Gravity-SPHINCS, is more challenging, as this countermeasure does not apply as efficiently as in stateful schemes.
Last updated:  2018-10-15
Protean Signature Schemes
Stephan Krenn, Henrich C. Pöhls, Kai Samelin, and Daniel Slamanig
We introduce the notion of Protean Signature schemes. This novel type of signature scheme allows to remove and edit signer-chosen parts of signed messages by a semi-trusted third party simultaneously. In existing work, one is either allowed to remove or edit parts of signed messages, but not both at the same time. Which and how parts of the signed messages can be modified is chosen by the signer. Thus, our new primitive generalizes both redactable (Steinfeld et al., ICISC '01, Johnson et al., CT-RSA '02 & Brzuska et al., ACNS'10) and sanitizable signatures schemes (Ateniese et al., ESORICS '05 & Brzuska et al., PKC'09). We showcase a scenario where either primitive alone is not sufficient. Our provably secure construction (offering both strong notions of transparency and invisibility) makes only black-box access to sanitizable and redactable signature schemes, which can be considered standard tools nowadays. Finally, we have implemented our scheme; Our evaluation shows that the performance is reasonable.
Last updated:  2018-10-15
Optimal TNFS-secure pairings on elliptic curves with even embedding degree
Georgios Fotiadis and Chloe Martindale
In this paper we give a comprehensive comparison between pairing-friendly elliptic curves in Jacobi Quartic and Edwards form with quadratic, quartic, and sextic twists. Our comparison looks at the best choices to date for pairings on elliptic curves with even embedding degree on both $\mathbb{G}_1 \times \mathbb{G}_2$ and $\mathbb{G}_2 \times \mathbb{G}_1$ (these are the twisted Ate pairing and the optimal Ate pairing respectively). We apply this comparison to each of the nine possible 128-bit TNFS-secure families of elliptic curves computed by Fotiadis and Konstantinou; we compute the optimal choice for each family together with the fastest curve shape/pairing combination. Comparing the nine best choices from the nine families gives a optimal choice of elliptic curve, shape and pairing (given current knowledge of TNFS-secure families). We also present a proof-of-concept MAGMA implementation for each case. Additionally, we give the first analysis, to our knowledge, of the use of quadratic twists of both Jacobi Quartic and Edwards curves for pairings on $\mathbb{G}_2 \times \mathbb{G}_1$, and of the use of sextic twists on Jacobi Quartic curves on $\mathbb{G}_1 \times \mathbb{G}_2$.
Last updated:  2018-10-14
Higher dimensional sieving for the number field sieve algorithms
Laurent Grémy
Since 2016 and the introduction of the exTNFS (extended Tower Number Field Sieve) algorithm, the security of cryptosystems based on non- prime finite fields, mainly the paring and torus-based one, is being reassessed. The feasibility of the relation collection, a crucial step of the NFS variants, is especially investigated. It usually involves polynomials of degree one, i.e., a search space of dimension two. However, exTNFS uses bivariate polynomials of at least four coefficients. If sieving in dimension two is well described in the literature, sieving in higher dimension received significantly less attention. We describe and analyze three different generic algorithms to sieve in any dimension for the NFS algorithms. Our implementation shows the practicability of dimension four sieving, but the hardness of dimension six sieving.
Last updated:  2018-10-14
On the Security of the Multivariate Ring Learning with Errors Problem
Carl Bootland, Wouter Castryck, and Frederik Vercauteren
The Multivariate Ring Learning with Errors ($m$-RLWE) problem was introduced in 2015 by Pedrouzo-Ulloa, Troncoso-Pastoriza and Pérez-González. Instead of working over a polynomial residue ring with one variable as in RLWE, it works over a polynomial residue ring in several variables. However, care must be taken when choosing the multivariate rings for use in cryptographic applications as they can be either weak or simply equivalent to univariate RLWE. For example, Pedrouzo-Ulloa et al.\ suggest using tensor products of cyclotomic rings, in particular power-of-two cyclotomic rings. They claim incorrectly that the security increases with the product of the individual degrees. In this paper, we present simple methods to solve the search $m$-RLWE problem far more efficiently than is stated in the current literature by reducing the problem to the RLWE problem in dimension equal to the maximal degree of its components (and not the product) and where the noise increases with the square-root of the degree of the other components. Our methods utilise the fact that the defining cyclotomic polynomials share algebraically related roots. We use these methods to successfully attack the search variant of the $m$-RLWE problem for a set of parameters estimated to offer more than 2600 bits of security, and being equivalent to solving the bounded distance decoding problem in a highly structured lattice of dimension 16384, in less than two weeks of computation time or just a few hours if parallelized on 128 cores. Finally, we also show that optimizing module-LWE cryptosystems by introducing an extra ring structure as is common practice to optimize LWE, often results in a total breakdown of security.
Last updated:  2018-10-09
On the security of Circulant UOV/Rainbow
Yasufumi Hashimoto
Circulant UOV and Circulant Rainbow are new variants of UOV (unbalanced oil and vinegar signature scheme) and Rainbow respectively. In this short report, we study the security of these new variants Circulant UOV and Circulant Rainbow.
Last updated:  2018-10-02
A study on the fast ElGamal encryption
Kim Gyu-Chol and Li Su-Chol
ElGamal cryptosystem is typically developed in the multiplicative group $\mathbb{Z}_p^*$ ($p$ is a prime number), but it can be applied to the other groups in which discrete logarithm problem should be computationally infeasible. Practically, instead of ElGamal in $\mathbb Z_p^*$, various variants such as ECElGamal (ElGamal in elliptic curve group), CRTElGamal (ElGamal in subgroup of $\mathbb Z_n^*$ where $n=pq$ and $p,q,(p-1)/2,(q-1)/2$ are primes) have already been used for the semantic security. In this paper, for the fast decryption, we reduced the private CRT exponent $x_p$ ($= x mod (p - 1)$) and $x_q$ ($= x mod (q-1)$)maintaining full sized private exponent $x$ ($0<x<n$) in CRTElGamal as reducing $d_p$ ($= d mod (p - 1)$) and $d_q$ ($= d mod (q-1)$) in RSA for the fast decryption. (i.e. as in rebalanced RSA). In this case, unlike rebalanced RSA, decryption of CRTElGamal can be done faster without losing of encryption speed. As a result, it is possible to propose the fast public key cryptosystem that has fast encryption and fast decryption.
Last updated:  2018-10-02
Forward Secure Signatures on Smart Cards
Andreas Hülsing, Christoph Busold, and Johannes Buchmann
We introduce the forward secure signature scheme XMSS$^{+}$ and present an implementation for smart cards. It is based on the hash-based signature scheme XMSS. In contrast to the only previous implementation of a hash-based signature scheme on smart cards by Rohde et al., we solve the problem of on-card key generation. Compared to XMSS, we reduce the key generation time from $\mathcal{O}(n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{n})$, where $n$ is the number of signatures that can be created with one key pair. To the best of our knowledge this is the first implementation of a forward secure signature scheme and the first full implementation of a hash-based signature scheme on smart cards. The resulting runtimes are comparable to those of RSA and ECDSA on the same device. This shows the practicality of forward secure signature schemes, even on constrained devices.
Last updated:  2018-10-02
Registration-Based Encryption: Removing Private-Key Generator from IBE
Sanjam Garg, Mohammad Hajiabadi, Mohammad Mahmoody, and Ahmadreza Rahimi
In this work, we introduce the notion of registration-based encryption (RBE for short) with the goal of removing the trust parties need to place in the private-key generator in an IBE scheme. In an RBE scheme, users sample their own public and secret keys. There will also be a ``key curator'' whose job is only to aggregate the public keys of all the registered users and update the short public parameter whenever a new user joins the system. Encryption can still be performed to a particular ecipient using the recipient's identity and any public parameters released subsequent to the recipient's registration. Decryption requires some auxiliary information connecting users' public (and secret) keys to the public parameters. Because of this, as the public parameters get updated, a decryptor may need to obtain a few additional auxiliary information for decryption. More formally, if $n$ is the total number of identities and $\kappa$ is the security parameter, we require the following. Efficiency requirements: (1) A decryptor only needs to obtain updated auxiliary information for decryption at most $O(\log n)$ times in its lifetime, (2) each of these updates are computed by the key curator in time $poly(\kappa,\log n)$, and (3) the key curator updates the public parameter upon the registration of a new party in time $poly(\kappa,\log n)$. Properties (2) and (3) require the key curator to have \emph{random} access to its data. Compactness requirements: (1) Public parameters are always at most $poly(\kappa,\log n)$ bit, and (2) the total size of updates a user ever needs for decryption is also at most $poly(\kappa,\log n)$ bits. We present feasibility results for constructions of RBE based on indistinguishably obfuscation. We further provide constructions of \emph{weakly efficient} RBE, in which the registration step is done in $poly(\kappa, n)$, based on CDH, Factoring or LWE assumptions. Note that registration is done only once per identity, and the more frequent operation of generating updates for a user, which can happen more times, still runs in time $poly(\kappa,\log n)$. We leave open the problem of obtaining standard RBE (with $poly(\kappa,\log n)$ registration time) from standard assumptions.
Last updated:  2018-10-01
Faster cofactorization with ECM using mixed representations
Cyril Bouvier and Laurent Imbert
This paper introduces a novel implementation of the elliptic curve factoring method specifically designed for medium-size integers such as those arising by billions in the cofactorization step of the number field sieve. In this context, our algorithm requires fewer modular multiplications than any other publicly available implementation. The main ingredients are: the use of batches of primes, fast point tripling, optimal double-base decompositions and Lucas chains, and a good mix of Edwards and Montgomery representations.
Last updated:  2018-10-01
Asymptotically Efficient Lattice-Based Digital Signatures
Vadim Lyubashevsky and Daniele Micciancio
We present a general framework that converts certain types of linear collision-resistant hash functions into one-time signatures. Our generic construction can be instantiated based on both general and ideal (e.g. cyclic) lattices, and the resulting signature schemes are provably secure based on the worst-case hardness of approximating the shortest vector (and other standard lattice problems) in the corresponding class of lattices to within a polynomial factor. When instantiated with ideal lattices, the time complexity of the signing and verification algorithms, as well as key and signature size is almost linear (up to poly-logarithmic factors) in the dimension n of the underlying lattice. Since no sub-exponential (in n) time algorithm is known to solve lattice problems in the worst case, even when restricted to ideal lattices, our construction gives a digital signature scheme with an essentially optimal performance/security trade-off.
Last updated:  2018-09-26
On the Security of a Certificateless Strong Designated Verifier Signature Scheme
Nasrollah Pakniat
Recently, Chen et al. proposed the first non-delegatable certificateless strong designated verifier signature scheme and claimed that their scheme achieves all security requirements. However, in this paper, we disprove their claim and present a concrete attack which shows that their proposed scheme is forgeable. More precisely, we show that there exist adversaries who are able to forge any signer's signature for any designated verifier on any message of his choice.
Last updated:  2018-09-24
Efficient One-Time Signatures from Quasi-Cyclic Codes: a Full Treatment
Edoardo Persichetti
The design of a practical code-based signature scheme is an open problem in post-quantum cryptography. This paper is the full version of a work appeared at SIN'18 as a short paper, which introduced a simple and efficient one-time secure signature scheme based on quasi-cyclic codes. As such, this paper features, in a fully self-contained way, an accurate description of the scheme setting and related previous work, a detailed security analysis, and an extensive comparison and performance discussion.
Last updated:  2018-09-24
On the CCA2 Security of McEliece in the Standard Model
Edoardo Persichetti
In this paper we study public-key encryption schemes based on error-correcting codes that are IND-CCA2 secure in the standard model. In particular, we analyze a protocol due to Dowsley, Muller-Quade and Nascimento, based on a work of Rosen and Segev. The original formulation of the protocol contained some ambiguities and incongruences, which we point out and correct; moreover, the protocol deviates substantially from the work it is based on. We then present a construction which resembles more closely the original Rosen-Segev framework, and show how this can be instantiated with the McEliece scheme.
Last updated:  2018-09-23
Energy-Efficient ARM64 Cluster with Cryptanalytic Applications: 80 Cores That Do Not Cost You an ARM and a Leg
Thom Wiggers
Servers with many cores cost a lot of money and consume large amounts of energy. The developments in hardware for mobile devices has resulted in a surge in relatively cheap, powerful, and low-energy CPUs. In this paper we show how to build a low-energy, eighty-core cluster built around twenty ODROID-C2 development boards for under 1500 USD. The ODROID-C2 is a 46 USD microcomputer that provides a 1.536 GHz quad-core Cortex-A53-based CPU and 2 GB of RAM. We investigate the cluster's application to cryptanalysis by implementing Pollard's Rho method to tackle the Certicom ECC2K-130 elliptic curve challenge. We optimise software from the "Breaking ECC2K-130" technical report for the Cortex-A53. To do so, we show how to use microbenchmarking to derive the needed instruction characteristics which ARM neglected to document for the public. The implementation of the ECC2K-130 attack finally allows us to compare the proposed platform to various other platforms, including “classical” desktop CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. Although it may still be slower than for example FPGAs, our cluster still provides a lot of value for money.
Last updated:  2018-09-23
Public Key Encryption Resilient to Post-Challenge Leakage and Tampering Attacks
Suvradip Chakraborty and C. Pandu Rangan
In this paper, we introduce a new framework for constructing public-key encryption (PKE) schemes resilient to joint post-challenge/after-the-fact leakage and tampering attacks in the bounded leakage and tampering (BLT) model, introduced by Damgård et al. (Asiacrypt 2013). All the prior formulations of PKE schemes considered leakage and tampering attacks only before the challenge ciphertext is made available to the adversary. However, this restriction seems necessary, since achieving security against post-challenge leakage and tampering attacks in its full generality is impossible as shown in previous works. In this paper, we study the post-challenge/after-the-fact security for PKE schemes against bounded leakage and tampering under a restricted yet meaningful and reasonable notion of security, namely, the split-state leakage and tampering model. We show that it is possible to construct secure PKE schemes in this model, tolerating arbitrary (but bounded) leakage and tampering queries; thus overcoming the previous impossibility results. To this end, we formulate a new notion of security, which we call entropic post-challenge IND-CCA-BLT secure PKE. We first define a weaker notion called entropic restricted post-challenge IND-CCA-BLT secure PKE, which can be instantiated using the (standard) DDH assumption. We then show a generic compiler from our entropic restricted notion to the entropic notion of security using a simulation-extractable non-interactive zero-knowledge argument system. This requires an untamperable common reference string as in previous works. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of our entropic notion of security by giving a simple and generic construction of post-challenge IND-CCA-BLT secure PKE scheme in the split-state leakage and tampering model. This also settles the open problem posed by Faonio and Venturi (Asiacrypt 2016).
Last updated:  2018-09-23
Pre- and post-quantum Diffie--Hellman from groups, actions, and isogenies
Benjamin Smith
Diffie--Hellman key exchange is at the foundations of public-key cryptography, but conventional group-based Diffie--Hellman is vulnerable to Shor's quantum algorithm. A range of ``post-quantum Diffie--Hellman'' protocols have been proposed to mitigate this threat, including the Couveignes, Rostovtsev--Stolbunov, SIDH, and CSIDH schemes, all based on the combinatorial and number-theoretic structures formed by isogenies of elliptic curves. Pre- and post-quantum Diffie--Hellman schemes resemble each other at the highest level, but the further down we dive, the more differences emerge---differences that are critical when we use Diffie--Hellman as a basic component in more complicated constructions. In this survey we compare and contrast pre- and post-quantum Diffie--Hellman algorithms, highlighting some important subtleties.
Last updated:  2018-09-23
Efficient Group Signature Scheme without Pairings
Ke Gu and Bo Yin
Group signature is a useful cryptographic primitive, which makes every group member sign messages on behalf of a group they belong to. Namely group signature allows that group member anonymously signs any message without revealing his/her specific identity. However, group signature may make the signers abuse their signing rights if there are no measures of keeping them from abusing signing rights in the group signature schemes. So, group manager must be able to trace (or reveal) the identity of the signer by the signature when the result of the signature needs to be arbitrated, and some revoked group members must fully lose their capability of signing a message on behalf of the group they belong to. A practical model meeting the requirement is verifier-local revocation, which supports the revocation of group member. In this model, the verifiers receive the group member revocation messages from the trusted authority when the relevant signatures need to be verified. Although currently many group signature schemes have been proposed, most of them are constructed on pairings. In this paper, we present an efficient group signature scheme without pairings under the model of verifier-local revocation, which is based on the modified EDL signature (first proposed by D. Chaum et al. in Crypto 92). Compared with other group signature schemes, the proposed scheme does not employ pairing computation and has the constant signing time and signature size, whose security can be reduced to the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption in the random oracle model. Also, we give a formal security model for group signature and prove that the proposed scheme has the properties of traceability and anonymity.
Last updated:  2018-09-23
RSA Signatures Under Hardware Restrictions
Marc Joye and Yan Michalevsky
We would like to compute RSA signatures with the help of a Hardware Security Module (HSM). But what can we do when we want to use a certain public exponent that the HSM does not allow or support? Surprisingly, this scenario comes up in real-world settings such as code-signing of Intel SGX enclaves. Intel SGX enclaves have to be signed in order to execute in release mode, using 3072-bit RSA signature scheme with a particular public exponent. However, we encountered commercial hardware security modules that do not support storing RSA keys corresponding to this exponent. We ask whether it is possible to overcome such a limitation of an HSM and answer it in the affirmative (under stated assumptions). We show how to convert RSA signatures corresponding to one public exponent, to valid RSA signatures corresponding to another exponent. We define security and show that it is not compromised by the additional public knowledge available to an adversary in this setting.
Last updated:  2018-09-18
The Fiat-Shamir Zoo: Relating the Security of Different Signature Variants
Matilda Backendal, Mihir Bellare, Jessica Sorrell, and Jiahao Sun
The Fiat-Shamir paradigm encompasses many different ways of turning a given identification scheme into a signature scheme. Security proofs pertain sometimes to one variant, sometimes to another. We systematically study three variants that we call the challenge (signature is challenge and response), commit (signature is commitment and response) and transcript (signature is challenge, commitment and response) variants. Our framework captures the variants via transforms that determine the signature scheme as a function of not only the identification scheme and hash function (to cover both standard and random oracle model hashing), but also what we call a signing algorithm, to cover both classical and with-abort signing. We relate the security of the signature schemes produced by these transforms, giving minimal conditions under which uf-security of one transfers to the other. To apply this comprehensively, we formalize linear identification schemes, show that many schemes in the literature are linear, and show that any linear scheme meets our conditions for the signature schemes given by the three transforms to have equivalent uf-security. Our results give a comprehensive picture of the Fiat-Shamir zoo and allow proofs of security in the literature to be transferred automatically from one variant to another.
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, this archive does not use cookies or embedded third party content.