4915 results
The discrete logarithm problem over prime fields: the safe prime case. The Smart attack, non-canonical lifts and logarithmic derivatives
In this brief note we connect the discrete logarithm problem over prime fields in the safe prime case to the logarithmic derivative.
A Post-Quantum Digital Signature Scheme Based on Supersingular Isogenies
We present the first general-purpose digital signature scheme based on supersingular elliptic curve isogenies secure against quantum adversaries in the quantum random oracle model with small key sizes. This scheme is an application of Unruh’s construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to an interactive zero-knowledge proof proposed by De Feo, Jao, and Plût. We implement our proposed scheme on an x86-64 PC platform as well as an ARM-powered device. We exploit the state-of-the-art techniques to speed up the computations for general C and assembly. Finally, we provide timing results for real world applications.
Speeding up detection of SHA-1 collision attacks using unavoidable attack conditions
Counter-cryptanalysis, the concept of using cryptanalytic techniques to detect cryptanalytic attacks, was first introduced by Stevens at CRYPTO 2013 with a hash collision detection algorithm. That is, an algorithm that detects whether a given single message is part of a colliding message pair constructed using a cryptanalytic collision attack on MD5 or SHA-1. The concept's utility was proven when it was used to expose the then-unknown cryptanalytic collision attack exploited by the Flame espionage supermalware.
So far there is a significant cost: to detect collision attacks against SHA-1 (respectively MD5) costs the equivalent of hashing the message 15 (respectively 224) times. In this paper we present a significant performance improvement for collision detection based on the new concept of unavoidable conditions. Unavoidable conditions are conditions that are necessary for all feasible attacks in a certain attack class. As such they can be used to quickly dismiss particular attack classes that may have been used in the construction of the message. To determine an unavoidable condition one must rule out any feasible variant attack where this condition might not be necessary, otherwise adversaries aware of counter-cryptanalysis could easily bypass this improved collision detection with a carefully chosen variant attack. We provide a formal model for unavoidable conditions for collision attacks on MD5-like compression functions.
Furthermore, based on a conjecture solidly supported by the current state of the art, we show how we can determine such unavoidable conditions for SHA-1. We have implemented the improved SHA-1 collision detection using such unavoidable conditions and which is about 16 times faster than without our unavoidable condition improvements. We have measured that overall our implemented SHA-1 with collision detection is only a factor 1.96 slower, on average, than SHA-1. Our work is very timely given the recently announced first SHA-1 collision proving that SHA-1 is now practically broken.
Frodo: Take off the ring! Practical, Quantum-Secure Key Exchange from LWE
Lattice-based cryptography offers some of the most attractive primitives
believed to be resistant to quantum computers. Following increasing
interest from both companies and government agencies in building quantum
computers, a number of works have proposed instantiations of practical post-quantum key exchange protocols based on hard problems in ideal lattices, mainly based on the Ring Learning With Errors (R-LWE) problem. While
ideal lattices facilitate major efficiency and storage benefits over their
non-ideal counterparts, the additional ring structure that enables these
advantages also raises concerns about the assumed difficulty of the underlying problems.
Thus, a question of significant interest to cryptographers, and
especially to those currently placing bets on primitives that will withstand
quantum adversaries, is how much of an advantage the additional ring structure
actually gives in practice.
Despite conventional wisdom that generic lattices might be too slow and
unwieldy, we demonstrate that LWE-based key exchange is quite practical: our
constant time implementation requires around 1.3ms computation time for each
party; compared to the recent NewHope R-LWE scheme, communication sizes
increase by a factor of 4.7$\times$, but remain under 12 KiB in each
direction. Our protocol is competitive when used for serving web pages over
TLS; when partnered with ECDSA signatures, latencies increase by less than a
factor of 1.6$\times$, and (even under heavy load) server throughput only decreases by factors of 1.5$\times$ and 1.2$\times$ when serving typical 1 KiB and
100 KiB pages, respectively. To achieve these practical results, our
protocol takes advantage of several innovations. These include techniques to
optimize communication bandwidth, dynamic generation of public parameters
(which also offers additional security against backdoors), carefully chosen
error distributions, and tight security parameters.
Augmented Learning with Errors: The Untapped Potential of the Error Term
The Learning with Errors (LWE) problem has gained a lot of attention in recent years leading to a series of new cryptographic applications. Specifically, it states that it is hard to distinguish random linear equations disguised by some small error from truly random ones. Interestingly, cryptographic primitives based on LWE often do not exploit the full potential of the error term beside of its importance for security.
To this end, we introduce a novel LWE-close assumption, namely Augmented Learning with Errors (A-LWE), which allows to hide auxiliary data injected into the error term by a technique that we call message embedding. In particular, it enables existing cryptosystems to strongly increase the message throughput per ciphertext. We show that A-LWE is for certain instantiations at least as hard as the LWE problem. This inherently leads to new cryptographic constructions providing high data load encryption and customized security properties as required, for instance, in economic environments such as stock markets resp. for financial transactions. The security of those constructions basically stems from the hardness to solve the A-LWE problem.
As an application we introduce (among others) the first lattice-based replayable chosen-ciphertext secure encryption scheme from A-LWE.
Lattice-Based Signature Schemes and their Sensitivity to Fault Attacks
Due to their high efficiency and their strong security properties, lattice-based cryptographic schemes seem to be a very promising post-quantum replacement for currently used public key cryptography. The security of lattice-based schemes has been deeply analyzed mathematically, whereas little effort has been spent on the analysis against implementation attacks.
In this paper, we start with the fault analysis of one of the most important cryptographic primitives: signature schemes. We investigate the vulnerability and resistance of the currently most efficient lattice-based signature schemes BLISS (CRYPTO 2013), ring-TESLA (AfricaCrypt 2016), and the GLP scheme (CHES 2012) and their implementations. We consider different kinds of (first-order) randomizing, zeroing, and skipping faults. For each of the signature
schemes, we found at least six effective attacks. To increase the security of lattice-based signature schemes, we propose countermeasures for each of the respective attacks.
A Practical Multivariate Blind Signature Scheme
Multivariate Cryptography is one of the main candidates for creating post-quantum cryptosystems. Especially in the area of digital signatures, there exist many practical and secure multivariate schemes. However, there is a lack of multivariate signature schemes with special properties such as blind, ring and group signatures. In this paper, we propose a generic technique to transform multivariate signature schemes into blind signature schemes and show the practicality of the construction on the example of Rainbow. The resulting scheme satisfies the usual blindness criterion and a one-more-unforgeability criterion adapted to MQ signatures, produces short blind signatures and is very efficient.
Partitioned Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange
Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange (GPAKE) allows a group of users to establish a secret key, as long as all of them share the same password. However, in existing GPAKE protocols as soon as one user runs the protocol with a non-matching password, all the others abort and no key is established.
In this paper we seek for a more flexible, yet secure, GPAKE and put forward the notion of partitioned GPAKE.
Partitioned GPAKE tolerates users that run the protocol on different passwords. Through a protocol run, any subgroup of users that indeed share a password, establish a session key, factoring out the ``noise'' of inputs by users holding different passwords. At the same time any two keys, each established by a different subgroup of users, are pair-wise independent if the corresponding subgroups hold different passwords.
We also introduce the notion of password-privacy for partitioned GPAKE, which is a kind of affiliation hiding property, ensuring that an adversary should not be able to tell whether any given set of users share a password. Finally, we propose an efficient instantiation of partitioned GPAKE building on an unforgeable symmetric encryption scheme and a PAKE by Bellare et al. Our proposal is proven secure in the random oracle/ideal cipher model, and requires only two communication rounds.
On the Power of Pair Encodings: Frameworks for Predicate Cryptographic Primitives
Recently Attrapadung (Eurocrypt 2014) proposed a generic framework for fully (adaptively) secure predicate encryption (PE) based on a new primitive, called pair encodings. The author shows that if the underlying pair encoding scheme is either perfectly secure or computationally (doubly-selectively) secure, then the PE scheme will be fully secure. Although the pair encodings were solely introduced
for PE, we show that these can also be used to construct predicate signatures, a signature analogue of PE. More precisely, we propose a generic construction for predicate signature (PS) from the pair
encoding schemes. Our construction provides the signer privacy, and unforgeability in the adaptive-predicate model. Thereafter, we instantiate many PS schemes with new results, e.g., the first practical PS schemes for regular languages, the first attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme with constant-size signatures in adaptive-predicate model, the unbounded ABS with large universes in key-policy flavor, etc.
Following the CCA conversions of Yamada et al. (PKC 2011, 2012) and Nandi et al. (ePrint Archive: 2015/457), one can have CCA-secure PE from CPA-secure PE if the primitive PE has either verifiability or delegation. We show that the fully secure CPA-construction of Attrapadung possesses the verifiability. The aforesaid approach degrades the performance of the resultant CCA-secure PE scheme. As an alternative, we provide a direct fully secure CCA-construction for PE from the pair encoding scheme. This costs an extra computation of group element in encryption and three extra pairing computations in decryption as compared to the CPA-construction of Attrapadung.
The predicate signcryption (PSC) is a super class of the existing class, the attribute-based signcryption (ABSC), where the confidentiality, unforgeability and signer privacy are well preserved. By combining the proposed frameworks for PS and PE, we provide a generic construction for PSC from the pair encodings. It achieves the perfect privacy, and the strong unforgeability and CCA security in the adaptive-predicates model. The construction has the support of combined-setup, where the distributions of public parameters and keys in the underlying signature and encryption schemes are identical. The proposed PSC provides many new results, e.g., the first PSC schemes for regular languages, the first ABSC with constant-size signcryptions and constant-size keys respectively, the unbounded ABSC with large universes in adaptive-predicates model, etc.
Twisted $\mu_4$-normal form for elliptic curves
We introduce the twisted $\mu_4$-normal form for elliptic curves,
deriving in particular addition algorithms with complexity $9M + 2S$
and doubling algorithms with complexity $2M + 5S + 2m$ over a binary field.
Every ordinary elliptic curve over a finite field of characteristic 2
is isomorphic to one in this family.
This improvement to the addition algorithm is comparable to the
$7M + 2S$ achieved for the $\mu_4$-normal form,
and replaces the previously best known complexity of $13M + 3S$
on López-Dahab models applicable to these twisted curves.
The derived doubling algorithm is essentially optimal, without any
assumption of special cases. We show moreover that the Montgomery
scalar multiplication with point recovery carries over to the twisted
models, giving symmetric scalar multiplication adapted to protect
against side channel attacks, with a cost of $4M + 4S + 1m_t + 2m_c$ per bit.
In characteristic different from 2, we establish a linear isomorphism
with the twisted Edwards model.
This work, in complement to the introduction of $\mu_4$-normal form,
fills the lacuna in the body of work on efficient arithmetic on elliptic
curves over binary fields, explained by this common framework for
elliptic curves if $\mu_4$-normal form in any characteristic.
The improvements are analogous to those which the Edwards and twisted
Edwards models achieved for elliptic curves over finite fields of odd
characteristic and extend $\mu_4$-normal form to cover the binary NIST curves.
Photonic Side Channel Attacks Against RSA
This paper describes the first attack utilizing the photonic side channel against a public-key crypto-system. We evaluated three common implementations of RSA modular exponentiation, all using the Karatsuba multiplication method. We discovered that the key length had marginal impact on resilience to the attack: attacking a 2048-bit key required only 9\% more decryption attempts than a 1024-bit key. We found that the most dominant parameter impacting the attacker's effort is the minimal block size at which the Karatsuba method reverts to naive multiplication: even for parameter values as low as 32 or 64 bits our attacks achieve 100\% success rate with under 10,000 decryption operations. Somewhat surprisingly, we discovered that Montgomery's Ladder---commonly perceived as the most resilient of the three implementations to side-channel attacks---was actually the most susceptible: for 2048-bit keys, our attack reveals 100\% of the secret key bits with as few as 4000 decryptions.
Functional Encryption: Deterministic to Randomized Functions from Simple Assumptions
Functional encryption (FE) enables fine-grained control of sensitive data by allowing users to only compute certain functions for which they have a key. The vast majority of work in FE has focused on deterministic functions, but for several applications such as privacy-aware auditing, differentially-private data release, proxy re-encryption, and more, the functionality of interest is more naturally captured by a randomized function. Recently, Goyal et al. (TCC 2015) initiated a formal study of FE for randomized functionalities with security against malicious encrypters, and gave a selectively secure construction from indistinguishability obfuscation. To date, this is the only construction of FE for randomized functionalities in the public-key setting. This stands in stark contrast to FE for deterministic functions which has been realized from a variety of assumptions.
Our key contribution in this work is a generic transformation that converts any general-purpose, public-key FE scheme for deterministic functionalities into one that supports randomized functionalities. Our transformation uses the underlying FE scheme in a black-box way and can be instantiated using very standard number-theoretic assumptions (for instance, the DDH and RSA assumptions suffice). When applied to existing FE constructions, we obtain several adaptively-secure, public-key functional encryption schemes for randomized functionalities with security against malicious encrypters from many different assumptions such as concrete assumptions on multilinear maps, indistinguishability obfuscation, and in the bounded-collusion setting, the existence of public-key encryption, together with standard number-theoretic assumptions.
Additionally, we introduce a new, stronger definition for malicious security as the existing one falls short of capturing an important class of correlation attacks. In realizing this definition, our compiler combines ideas from disparate domains like related-key security for pseudorandom functions and deterministic encryption in a novel way. We believe that our techniques could be useful in expanding the scope of new variants of functional encryption (e.g., multi-input, hierarchical, and others) to support randomized functionalities.
On new multivariate cryptosystems based on hidden Eulerian equations over finite fields
We propose new multivariate cryptosystems over $n$-dimensional vector space over a finite field $F_q$ based on idea of hidden discrete logarithm problem for ${F^*}_q$. These cryptosystems are based on hidden eulerian equations $x^{\alpha}=a$, $(\alpha, q-1)=1$. The method is based on the idea of Eulerian transformations, which allow us to use asymmetric algorithms based on families of nonlinear multiplicatively injective maps of prescribed polynomial density and flexible degree.
Homomorphic Proxy Re-Authenticators and Applications to Verifiable Multi-User Data Aggregation
We introduce the notion of homomorphic proxy re-authenticators, a tool that adds security and verifiability guarantees to multi-user data aggregation scenarios. It allows distinct sources to authenticate their data under their own keys, and a proxy can transform these single signatures or message authentication codes (MACs) to a MAC under a receiver's key without having access to it. In addition, the proxy can evaluate arithmetic circuits (functions) on the inputs so that the resulting MAC corresponds to the evaluation of the respective function. As the messages authenticated by the sources may represent sensitive information, we also consider hiding them from the proxy and other parties in the system, except from the receiver.
We provide a general model and two modular constructions of our novel primitive, supporting the class of linear functions. On our way, we establish various novel building blocks. Most interestingly, we formally define the notion and present a construction of homomorphic proxy re-encryption, which may be of independent interest. The latter allows users to encrypt messages under their own public keys, and a proxy can re-encrypt them to a receiver's public key (without knowing any secret key), while also being able to evaluate functions on the ciphertexts. The resulting re-encrypted ciphertext then holds an evaluation of the function on the input messages.
Shor's Algorithm and Factoring: Don't Throw Away the Odd Orders
Shor's algorithm factors an integer $N$ in two steps.
The quantum step computes the order of $a\bmod{N}$ where $a$ is relatively prime to $N$.
The classical step uses this order to factor $N$.
Descriptions of the classical step require the order, $s$, to be even and that $a^{s/2}\not\equiv -1\bmod{N}$. If $s$ is odd or $a^{s/2}\equiv -1\bmod{N}$, then the quantum step is repeated.
This paper describes how each prime divisor of the order $s$, not just $2$, can be used to factor $N$.
Faster Bootstrapping of FHE over the Integers
Bootstrapping in fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) over the integers is a homomorphic evaluation of the squashed decryption function suggested by van Dijk et al.
The typical approach for the bootstrapping is representing the decryption function as a binary circuit with a fixed message space. All bootstrapping methods in FHEs over the integers use this approach; however, these methods require too many homomorphic multiplications, slowing down the whole procedure. In this paper, we propose an efficient bootstrapping method using various message spaces. Our bootstrapping method requires only $O(\log^{2}\lambda)$ number of homomorphic multiplications, which is significantly lower than $\tilde{O}(\lambda^{4})$ of the previous methods. We implement our bootstrapping method on the scale-invariant FHE over the integers; the CLT scheme introduced by Coron, Lepoint and Tibouchi. It takes 6 seconds for a 500-bit message space and a 72-bit security in PC. This is the fastest result among the bootstrapping methods on FHEs over the integers. We also apply our bootstrapping method to evaluate an AES-128 circuit homomorphically. As a result, it takes about 8 seconds per 128-bit block and is faster than the previous result of homomorphic evaluation of AES circuit using FHEs over the integers without bootstrapping.
Quantum algorithms for computing short discrete logarithms and factoring RSA integers
In this paper we generalize the quantum algorithm for computing short discrete logarithms previously introduced by Ekerå so as to allow for various tradeoffs between the number of times that the algorithm need be executed on the one hand, and the complexity of the algorithm and the requirements it imposes on the quantum computer on the other hand.
Furthermore, we describe applications of algorithms for computing short discrete logarithms. In particular, we show how other important problems such as those of factoring RSA integers and of finding the order of groups under side information may be recast as short discrete logarithm problems. This immediately gives rise to an algorithm for factoring RSA integers that is less complex than Shor’s general factoring algorithm in the sense that it imposes smaller requirements on the quantum computer.
In both our algorithm and Shor’s algorithm, the main hurdle is to compute a modular exponentiation in superposition. When factoring an n bit integer, the exponent is of length 2n bits in Shor’s algorithm, compared to slightly more than n/2 bits in our algorithm.
FHE Over the Integers: Decomposed and Batched in the Post-Quantum Regime
Fully homomorphic encryption over the integers (FHE-OI) is currently the only alternative to lattice-based FHE. FHE-OI includes a family of schemes whose security is based on the hardness of different variants of the approximate greatest common divisor (AGCD) problem. The majority of these works is based on the noise-free variant of AGCD which is potentially weaker than the general one. In particular, the noise-free variant relies on the hardness of factoring and is thus vulnerable to quantum attacks.
A lot of effort was made to port techniques from second generation lattice-based FHE (using tensoring) to FHE-OI. Gentry, Sahai and Waters (Crypto 13) showed that third generation techniques (which were later formalized using the ``gadget matrix'') can also be ported. In this work, we propose a comprehensive study of applying third generation FHE techniques to the regime of FHE-OI. We present and analyze a third generation FHE-OI based on decisional AGCD without the noise-free assumption. We proceed to showing a batch version of our scheme where each ciphertext can encode a vector of messages and operations are performed coordinate-wise. We use a similar AGCD variant to Cheon et al.~(Eurocrypt 13) who suggested the batch approach for second generation FHE, but we do not require the noise-free component or a subset sum assumption. However, like Cheon et al., we do require circular security for our scheme, even for bounded homomorphism.
Lastly, we discuss some of the obstacles towards efficient implementation of our schemes and discuss a number of possible optimizations.
Faster Homomorphic Evaluation of Discrete Fourier Transforms
We present a methodology to achieve low latency homomorphic operations on approximations to complex numbers, by encoding a complex number as an evaluation of a polynomial at a root of unity. We then use this encoding to evaluate a Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) on data which has been encrypted using a Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE) scheme, with up to three orders of magnitude improvement in latency over previous methods. We are also able to deal with much larger input sizes than previous methods. Due to the fact that the entire DFT algorithm is an algebraic operation over the underlying ring of the SHE scheme (for a suitably chosen ring), our method for the DFT utilizes exact arithmetic over the complex numbers, as opposed to approximations.
Adaptively Secure Recipient Revocable Broadcast Encryption with Constant size Ciphertext
In this paper, we put forward the first adaptively secure recipient revocable broadcast encryption (RR-BE) scheme in the standard model. The scheme is adaptively secure against chosen plaintext attack (CPA) under the q-weaker Decisional Augmented Bilinear Diffie-Hellman Exponent (q-wDABDHE) assumption. Our scheme compares well with the only existing RR-BE scheme of Susilo et al. which is selectively secure in the random oracle model. More interestingly, achieving adaptive security in the standard model does not blow up the communication cost in our construction. To be more precise, the size of the ciphertext which is broadcasted by the broadcaster is constant.
A Probabilistic Baby-Step Giant-Step Algorithm
In this paper, a new algorithm to solve the discrete logarithm problem is presented which is similar to the usual baby-step giant-step algorithm. Our algorithm exploits the order of the discrete logarithm in the multiplicative group of a finite field. Using randomization with parallelized collision search, our algorithm indicates some weakness in NIST curves over prime fields which are considered to be the most conservative and safest curves among all NIST curves.
On the Security of Supersingular Isogeny Cryptosystems
We study cryptosystems based on supersingular isogenies. This is an active area of research in post-quantum cryptography. Our first contribution is to give a very powerful active attack on the supersingular isogeny encryption scheme. This attack can only be prevented by using a (relatively expensive) countermeasure. Our second contribution is to show that the security of all schemes of this type depends on the difficulty of computing the endomorphism ring of a supersingular elliptic curve. This result gives significant insight into the difficulty of the isogeny problem that underlies the security of these schemes. Our third contribution is to give a reduction that uses partial knowledge of shared keys to determine an entire shared key. This can be used to retrieve the secret key, given information leaked from a side-channel attack on the key exchange protocol. A corollary of this work is the first bit security result for the supersingular isogeny key exchange: Computing any component of the $j$-invariant is as hard as computing the whole $j$-invariant.
Our paper therefore provides an improved understanding of the security of these cryptosystems. We stress that our work does not imply that these systems are insecure, or that they should not be used. However, it highlights that implementations of these schemes will need to take account of the risks associated with various active and side-channel attacks.
This is the full version of the paper: Steven D. Galbraith, Christophe Petit, Barak Shani and Yan Bo Ti, On the Security of Supersingular Isogeny Cryptosystems, in J. H. Cheon and T. Takagi (eds.), Proceedings of ASIACRYPT 2016, Part I, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10031 (2016) 63--91.
LARA - A Design Concept for Lattice-based Encryption
Lattice-based encryption schemes still suffer from a low message throughput per ciphertext and inefficient solutions towards realizing enhanced security characteristics such as CCA1- or CCA2-security. This is mainly due to the fact that the underlying schemes still follow a traditional design concept and do not tap the full potentials of LWE. In particular, many constructions still encrypt data in an one-time-pad manner considering LWE instances as random vectors added to a message, most often encoded bit vectors. The desired security features are also often achieved by costly approaches or less efficient generic transformations.\\
Recently, a novel encryption scheme based on the A-LWE assumption (relying on the hardness of LWE) has been proposed, where data is embedded into the error term without changing its target distributions. By this novelty it is possible to encrypt much more data as compared to the classical approach. Combinations of both concepts are also possible. In this paper we revisit this approach and propose amongst others a standard model variant of the scheme as well as several techniques in order to improve the message throughput per ciphertext. Furthermore, we introduce a new discrete Gaussian sampler, that is inherently induced by the encryption scheme itself, and present a very efficient trapdoor construction of reduced storage size. More precisely, the secret and public key sizes are reduced to just 1 polynomial, as opposed to $O( \log q)$ polynomials following previous constructions. Finally, we give a security analysis as well as an efficient implementation of the scheme instantiated with the new trapdoor construction. In particular, we attest high message throughputs (message expansion factors close to 1-2) at running times comparable to the CPA-secure encryption scheme from Lindner and Peikert (CT-RSA 2011). Our scheme even ensures CCA (or RCCA) security, while entailing a great deal of flexibility to encrypt arbitrary large messages or signatures by use of the same secret key. This feature is naturally induced by the characteristics of LWE.
Adaptive partitioning
We present a new strategy for partitioning proofs, and use it to obtain new tightly secure encryption schemes. Specifically, we provide the following two conceptual contributions:
- A new strategy for tight security reductions that leads to compact public keys and ciphertexts.
- A relaxed definition of non-interactive proof systems for non-linear (``OR-type'') languages. Our definition is strong enough to act as a central tool in our new strategy to obtain tight security, and is achievable both in pairing-friendly and DCR groups.
We apply these concepts in a generic construction of a tightly secure public-key encryption scheme. When instantiated in different concrete
settings, we obtain the following:
- A public-key encryption scheme whose chosen-ciphertext security can be tightly reduced to the DLIN assumption in a pairing-friendly group.
Ciphertexts, public keys, and system parameters contain 6, 24, and 2 group elements, respectively. This improves heavily upon a recent scheme of Gay et al. (Eurocrypt 2016) in terms of public key size, at the cost of using a symmetric pairing.
- The first public-key encryption scheme that is tightly chosen-ciphertext secure under the DCR assumption. While the scheme is not very practical (ciphertexts carry 29 group elements), it enjoys constant-size parameters, public keys, and ciphertexts.
CARIBE: Cascaded IBE for Maximum Flexibility and User-side Control
Mass surveillance and a lack of end-user encryption, coupled with a growing demand for key escrow under legal oversight and certificate authority security concerns, raise the question of the appropriateness of continued general dependency on PKI. Under this context, we examine Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) as an alternative to public-key encryption. Cascade encryption, or sequential multiple encryption, is the concept of layering encryption such that the ciphertext from one encryption step is the plaintext of the next. We describe CARIBE, a cascaded IBE scheme, for which we also provide a cascaded CCA security experiment, IND-ID-C.CCA, and prove its security in the computational model. CARIBE combines the ease-of-use of IBE with key escrow, limited to the case when the entire set of participating PKGs collaborate. Furthermore, we describe a particular CARIBE scheme, CARIBE-S, where the receiver is a self-PKG – one of the several PKGs included in the cascade. CARIBE-S inherits IND-ID-C.CCA from CARIBE, and avoids key escrow entirely. In essence, CARIBE-S offers the maximum flexibility of the IBE paradigm and gives the users complete control without the key escrow problem.
CCA-Secure Inner-Product Functional Encryption from Projective Hash Functions
In an inner-product functional encryption scheme, the plaintexts are vectors and the owner of the secret key can delegate the ability to compute weighted sums of the coefficients of the plaintext of any ciphertext. Recently, many inner-product functional encryption schemes were proposed. However, none of the known schemes are secure against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-FE-CCA).
We present a generic construction of IND-FE-CCA inner-product functional encryption from projective hash functions with homomorphic properties. We show concrete instantiations based on the DCR assumption, the DDH assumption, and more generally, any Matrix DDH assumption.
Privacy-friendly Forecasting for the Smart Grid using Homomorphic Encryption and the Group Method of Data Handling
While the smart grid has the potential to have a positive impact on the sustainability and efficiency of the electricity market, it also poses some serious challenges with respect to the privacy of the consumer. One of the traditional use-cases of this privacy sensitive data is the usage for forecast prediction. In this paper we show how to compute the forecast prediction such that the supplier does not learn any individual consumer usage information. This is achieved by using the Fan-Vercauteren somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme. Typical prediction algorithms are based on artificial neural networks that require the computation of an activation function which is complicated to compute homomorphically. We investigate a different approach and show that Ivakhnenko's group method of data handling is suitable for homomorphic computation.
Our results show this approach is practical: prediction for a small apartment complex of $10$ households can be computed homomorphically in less than four seconds using a parallel implementation or in about half a minute using a sequential implementation. Expressed in terms of the mean average percentage error, the prediction accuracy is roughly 21\%.
Partitioning via Non-Linear Polynomial Functions: More Compact IBEs from Ideal Lattices and Bilinear Maps
In this paper, we present new adaptively secure identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes. One of the distinguishing property of the schemes is that it achieves shorter public parameters than previous schemes. Both of our schemes follow the general framework presented in the recent IBE scheme of Yamada (Eurocrypt 2016), employed with novel techniques tailored to meet the underlying algebraic structure to overcome the difficulties arising in our specific setting. Specifically, we obtain the following:
- Our first scheme is proven secure under the ring learning with errors (RLWE) assumption and achieves the best asymptotic space efficiency among existing schemes from the same assumption.
The main technical contribution is in our new security proof that exploits the ring structure in a crucial way. Our technique allows us to greatly weaken the underlying hardness assumption (e.g., we assume the hardness of RLWE with a fixed polynomial approximation factor whereas Yamada's scheme requires a super-polynomial approximation factor) while improving the overall efficiency.
- Our second IBE scheme is constructed on bilinear maps and is secure under the $3$-computational bilinear Diffie-Hellman exponent assumption. This is the first IBE scheme based on the hardness of a computational/search problem, rather than a decisional problem such as DDH and DLIN on bilinear maps with sub-linear public parameter size.
Circuit-Private Multi-Key FHE
Multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (MFHE) schemes allow polynomially many users without trusted setup assumptions to send their data (encrypted under different FHE keys chosen by users independently of each other) to an honest-but-curious server that can compute the output of an arbitrary polynomial-time computable function on this joint data and issue it back to all participating users for decryption. One of the main open problems left in MFHE was dealing with malicious users without trusted setup assumptions. We show how this can be done, generalizing previous results of circuit-private FHE. Just like standard circuit-private FHE, our security model shows that even if both ciphertexts and public keys of individual users are not well-formed, no information is revealed regarding the server computation--- other than that gained from the output on some well-formed inputs of all users. MFHE schemes have direct applications to server-assisted multiparty computation (MPC), called on-the-fly MPC, introduced by López-Alt et al. (STOC '12), where the number of users is not known in advance. In this setting, a poly-time server wants to evaluate a circuit $C$ on data uploaded by multiple clients and encrypted under different keys. Circuit privacy requires that users' work is independent of $|C|$ held by the server, while each client learns nothing about $C$ other than its output. We present a framework for transforming MFHE schemes with no circuit privacy into maliciously circuit-private schemes. We then construct 3-round on-the-fly MPC with circuit privacy against malicious clients in the plain model.
A New Approach for Practical Function-Private Inner Product Encryption
Functional Encryption (FE) is a new paradigm supporting restricted decryption keys of function $f$ that allows one to learn $f(x_j)$ from encryptions of messages $x_j$. A natural and practical security requirements for FE is to keep not only messages $x_1,\ldots,x_q$ but also functions $f_1,\ldots f_q$ confidential from encryptions and decryptions keys, except inevitable information $\{f_i(x_j)\}_{i,j\in[q]}$, for any polynomial a-priori unknown number $q$, where $f_i$'s and $x_j$'s are adaptively chosen by adversaries. Such the security requirement is called {\em full function privacy}. In this paper, we particularly focus on function-private FE for inner product functionality in the {\em private key setting} (simply called Inner Product Encryption (IPE)). To the best of our knowledge, there are two approaches for fully function-private IPE schemes in the private key setting. One of which is to employ a general transformation from (non-function-private) FE for general circuits (Brakerski and Segev, TCC 2015). This approach requires heavy crypto tools such as indistinguishability obfuscation (for non-function-private FE for general circuits) and therefore inefficient. The other approach is relatively practical; it directly constructs IPE scheme by using {\em dual pairing vector spaces (DPVS)} (Bishop et al. ASIACRYPT 2015, Datta et al. PKC 2016, and Tomida et al. ISC 2016).
\quad
We present a new approach for practical function-private IPE schemes that does not employ DPVS but generalizations of Brakerski-Segev transformation. Our generalizations of Brakerski-Segev transformation are easily combinable with existing (non-function-private) IPE schemes as well as (non-function-private) FE schemes for general circuits in several levels of security. Our resulting IPE schemes achieve better performance in comparison with Bishop et al. IPE scheme as well as Datta et al. IPE scheme while preserving the same security notion under the same complexity assumption. In comparison with Tomida et al. IPE scheme, ours have comparable performance in the size of both ciphertext and decryption key, but better performance in the size of master key.
Identity-based Hierarchical Key-insulated Encryption without Random Oracles
Key-insulated encryption is one of the effective solutions to a key exposure problem. At Asiacrypt'05, Hanaoka et al. proposed an identity-based hierarchical key-insulated encryption (hierarchical IKE) scheme. Although their scheme is secure in the random oracle model, it has a ``hierarchical key-updating structure,'' which is attractive functionality that enhances key exposure resistance.
In this paper, we first propose the hierarchical IKE scheme without random oracles. Our hierarchical IKE scheme is secure under the symmetric external Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumption, which is known as the simple and static one. Particularly, in the non-hierarchical case, our construction is the first IKE scheme that achieves constant-size parameters including public parameters, secret keys, and ciphertexts.
Furthermore, we also propose the first public-key-based key-insulated encryption (PK-KIE) in the hierarchical setting by using our technique.
Efficient Encryption from Random Quasi-Cyclic Codes
We propose a framework for constructing efficient code-based encryption schemes from codes that do not hide any structure in their public matrix. The framework is in the spirit of the schemes first proposed by Alekhnovich in 2003 and based on the difficulty of decoding random linear codes from random errors of low weight. We depart somewhat from Aleknovich's approach and propose an encryption scheme based on the difficulty of decoding random quasi-cyclic codes.
We propose two new cryptosystems instantiated within our framework: the Hamming Quasi-Cyclic cryptosystem (HQC), based on the Hamming metric, and the Rank Quasi-Cyclic cryptosystem (RQC), based on the rank metric. We give a security proof, which reduces the IND-CPA security of our systems to a decisional version of the well known
problem of decoding random families of quasi-cyclic codes for the Hamming and rank metrics (the respective QCSD and RQCSD problems). We also provide an analysis of the decryption failure probability of our scheme in the Hamming metric case: for the rank metric there is no decryption failure. Our schemes benefit from a very fast decryption algorithm together with small key sizes of only a few thousand bits. The cryptosystems are very efficient for low encryption rates and are very well suited to key exchange and authentication. Asymptotically, for $\lambda$ the security parameter, the public key sizes are respectively in $\mathcal{O}({\lambda}^2)$ for HQC and in $\mathcal{O}(\lambda^{\frac{4}{3}})$ for RQC.
Practical parameter compares well to systems based on ring-LPN or the recent MDPC system.
Public Key Encryption with Equality Test in the Standard Model
Public key encryption with equality test (PKEET) is a cryptosystem that allows a tester who has trapdoors issued by one or more users $U_i$ to perform equality tests on ciphertexts encrypted using public key(s) of $U_i$. Since this feature has a lot of practical applications including search on encrypted data, several PKEET schemes have been proposed so far. However, to the best of our knowledge, all the existing proposals are proven secure only under the hardness of number-theoretic problems and the random oracle heuristics.
In this paper, we show that this primitive can be achieved not only generically from well-established other primitives but also even without relying on the random oracle heuristics. More precisely, our generic construction for PKEET employs a two-level hierarchical identity-based encryption scheme, which is selectively secure against chosen plaintext attacks, a strongly unforgeable one-time signature scheme and a cryptographic hash function. Our generic approach toward PKEET has several advantages over all the previous works; it directly leads the first standard model construction and also directly implies the first lattice-based construction. Finally, we show how to extend our approach to the identity-based setting.
Updatable Functional Encryption
Functional encryption (FE) allows an authority to issue tokens associated with various functions, allowing the holder of some token for function f to learn only f(D) from a ciphertext that encrypts D. The standard approach is to model f as a circuit, which yields inefficient evaluations over large inputs. Here, we propose a new primitive that we call updatable functional encryption (UFE), where instead of circuits we deal with RAM programs, which are closer to how programs are expressed in von Neumann architecture. We impose strict efficiency constrains in that the run-time of a token P' on ciphertext CT is proportional to the run-time of its clear-form counterpart (program P on memory D) up to a polylogarithmic factor in the size of D, and we envision tokens that are capable to update the ciphertext, over which other tokens can be subsequently executed. We define a security notion for our primitive and propose a candidate construction from obfuscation, which serves as a starting point towards the realization of other schemes and contributes to the study on how to compute RAM programs over public-key encrypted data.
On the Security Notions for Homomorphic Signatures
Homomorphic signature schemes allow anyone to perform computation on signed data in such a way that the correctness of computation’s results is publicly certified. In this work we analyze the security notions for this powerful primitive considered in previous work, with a special focus on adaptive security. Motivated by the complications of existing security models in the adaptive setting, we consider a simpler and (at the same time) stronger security definition inspired to that proposed by Gennaro and Wichs (ASIACRYPT’13) for homomorphic MACs. In addition to strength and simplicity, this definition has the advantage to enable the adoption of homomorphic signatures in dynamic data outsourcing scenarios, such as delegation of computation on data streams. Then, since no existing homomorphic signature satisfies this stronger notion, our main technical contribution are general compilers which turn a homomorphic signature scheme secure under a weak definition into one secure under the new stronger notion. Our compilers are totally generic with respect to the underlying scheme. Moreover, they preserve two important properties of homomorphic signatures: context-hiding (i.e. signatures on computation’s output do not reveal information about the input) and efficient verification (i.e. verifying a signature against a program P can be made faster, in an amortized, asymptotic sense, than recomputing P from scratch).
How to Backdoor Diffie-Hellman
Lately, several backdoors in cryptographic constructions, protocols and implementations have been surfacing in the wild: Dual-EC in RSA's B-Safe product, a modified Dual-EC in Juniper's operating system ScreenOS and a non-prime modulus in the open-source tool socat. Many papers have already discussed the fragility of cryptographic constructions not using nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers, as well as how such numbers can be safely picked. However, the question of how to introduce a backdoor in an already secure, safe and easy to audit implementation has so far rarely been researched (in the public). We present a new way of building a Nobody-But-Us (NOBUS) Diffie-Hellman backdoor by using a composite modulus with a smooth order. We then explain how we were able to implement a proof of concept with Socat and OpenSSL in order to exploit our backdoor on the TLS protocol.
Update (December 2016): Dorey et al. have pointed an attack on our first contribution, as well as an improvement for the exploitation of our second contribution. This work has been updated to reflect these advances.
Challenges with Assessing the Impact of NFS Advances on the Security of Pairing-based Cryptography
In the past two years there have been several advances in Number Field Sieve (NFS) algorithms for computing discrete logarithms in finite fields $\mathbb{F}_{p^n}$ where $p$ is prime and $n > 1$ is a small integer. This article presents a concise overview of these algorithms and discusses some of the challenges with assessing their impact on keylengths for pairing-based cryptosystems.
Encryption Switching Protocols
We put forth a novel cryptographic primitive: encryption switching protocol (ESP), allowing to switch between two encryption schemes. Intuitively, this two-party protocol converts given ciphertexts from one scheme into ciphertexts of the same messages in the other scheme, for any polynomial number of switches, in any direction. Although ESP is a special kind of two-party computation protocol, it turns out that ESP implies general two-party computation under natural conditions. In particular, our new paradigm is tailored to the evaluation of functions over rings. Indeed, assuming the compatibility of two additively and multiplicatively homomorphic encryption schemes, switching ciphertexts makes it possible to efficiently reconcile the two internal laws. Since no such pair of schemes appeared in the literature, except for the non-interactive case of fully homomorphic encryption which still remains prohibitive in practice, we build the first ElGamal-like encryption scheme over (Zn;x) as a complement to the Paillier encryption scheme over (Zn;+), where n is a strong RSA modulus. Eventually, we also instantiate secure ESP between the two schemes, in front of malicious adversaries. Thanks to a pre-processing step, we manage to get an online communication in terms of group elements which neither depends on the security parameter nor on the modulus n. This makes use of a new technique called refreshable twin-ciphertext pool that is of independent interest.
Cryptanalysis of a certificateless aggregate signature scheme
Recently, Nie et al. proposed a certificateless aggregate signature scheme. In the standard security model considered in certificateless
cryptography, we are dealing with two types of adversaries. In this paper, we show that Nie et al.'s scheme is insecure against the
adversary of the first type. In other words, although they claimed that their proposed scheme is existentially unforgeable against
adaptive chosen message attack considering the adversaries in certificateless settings, we prove that such a forgery can be done.
Preventing Adaptive Key Recovery Attacks on the Gentry-Sahai-Waters Leveled Homomorphic Encryption Scheme
A major open problem is to protect leveled homomorphic encryption from adaptive attacks that allow an adversary to learn the private key. The only positive results in this area are by Loftus, May, Smart and Vercauteren. They use a notion of "valid ciphertexts" and obtain an IND-CCA1 scheme under a strong knowledge assumption, but they also show their scheme is not secure under a natural adaptive attack based on a "ciphertext validity oracle". However, due to recent cryptanalysis their scheme is no longer considered secure.
The main contribution of this paper is to explore a new approach to achieving this goal, which does not rely on a notion of "valid ciphertexts". The idea is to generate a "one-time" private key every time the decryption algorithm is run, so that even if an attacker can learn some bits of the one-time private key from each decryption query, this does not allow them to compute a valid private key.
This is the full version of the paper. The short version, which appeared in Provsec 2016, presented a variant of the Gentry-Sahai-Waters (GSW) levelled homomorphic encryption scheme. Damien Stehle pointed out an attack on our variant of this scheme that had not been anticipated in the Provsec paper; we explain the attack in this full version. This version of the paper also contains a new "dual" version of the GSW scheme. We give an explanation of why the known attacks no longer break the system. It remains an open problem to develop a scheme for which one can prove IND-CCA1 security.
Pairing Cryptography Meets Isogeny: A New Framework of Isogenous Pairing Groups
We put forth a new mathematical framework called Isogenous Pairing Groups (IPG) and new intractable assumptions in the framework, the Isogenous DBDH (Isog-DBDH) assumption and its variants. Three operations, i.e., exponentiation, pairing and isogeny on elliptic curves are treated under a unified notion of trapdoor homomorphisms, and combinations of the operations have potential new cryptographic applications, in which the compatibility of pairing and isogeny is a main ingredient in IPG. As an example, we present constructions of (small and large universe) key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE) schemes secure against pre-challenge quantum adversaries in the quantum random oracle model (QROM). Note that our small universe KP-ABE has asymptotically the same efficiency as Goyal et al.'s small universe KP-ABE, which has only classical security. As a by-product, we also propose practical (hierarchical) identity-based encryption ((H)IBE) schemes secure against pre-challenge quantum adversaries in the QROM from isogenies, which are based on the Boneh-Franklin IBE and the Gentry-Silverberg HIBE, respectively.
From 5-pass MQ-based identification to MQ-based signatures
This paper presents MQDSS, the first signature scheme with a security reduction based on the problem of solving a multivariate system of quadratic equations (MQ problem). In order to construct this scheme we give a new security reduction for the Fiat-Shamir transform from a large
class of $5$-pass identification schemes and show that a previous attempt from the literature to obtain such a proof does not achieve the desired goal. We give concrete parameters for MQDSS and provide a detailed security analysis showing that the resulting instantiation MQDSS-31-64 achieves $128$ bits of post-quantum security. Finally, we describe an optimized implementation of MQDSS-31-64 for recent Intel processors with full protection against timing attacks and report benchmarks of this implementation.
A Code-Based Group Signature Scheme
This work is the extended version of [1] which proposed the first code-based group sig-
nature. The new group signature scheme we present here has numerous advantages over all
existing post-quantum constructions and even competes (in terms of properties) with pairing
based constructions: it allows to add new members during the lifetime of the group (dynamic).
Plus, it appears that our scheme might be extended into a traceable signature according to the
definition of Kiayias, Tsiounis and Yung [2] (KTY model) while handling membership revo-
cation. Our security is based on a relaxation of the model of Bellare, Shi and Zhang [3] (BSZ
model) verifying the properties of anonymity, traceability and non-frameability. The main idea
of our scheme consists in building an offset collision of two syndromes associated to two dif-
ferent matrices: a random one which enables to build a random syndrome from a chosen small
weight vector; and a trapdoor matrix for the syndrome decoding problem, which permits to find
a small weight preimage of the previous random syndrome to which a fixed syndrome is added.
These two small weight vectors will constitute the group member’s secret signing key whose
knowledge will be proved thanks to a variation of Stern’s authentication protocol. For appli-
cations, we consider the case of the code-based CFS signature scheme [4] of Courtois, Finiasz
and Sendrier. If one denotes by N the number of group members, CFS leads to signatures and
public keys sizes in $N^{1/\sqrt{\log N}}$. Along with this work, we also introduce a new kind of proof of knowledge, Testable weak Zero Knowledge (TwZK), implicitly covered in the short version of this paper [1]. TwZK proofs appear particularly well fitted in the context of group signature schemes: it allows a verifier to test whether a specific witness is used without learning anything more from the proof. Under the Random Oracle Model (ROM), we ensure the security of our scheme by defining the One More Syndrome Decoding problem, a new code-based problem related to the Syndrome Decoding problem [5].
Sharper Ring-LWE Signatures
We present Tesla# (pronounced "Tesla Sharp"), a digital signature scheme based on the RLWE assumption that continues a recent line of proposals of lattice-based digital signature schemes originating in work by Lyubashevsky as well as by Bai and Galbraith. It improves upon all of its predecessors in that it attains much faster key pair generation, signing, and verification, outperforming most (conventional or lattice-based) signature schemes on modern processors.
We propose a selection of concrete parameter sets, including a high-security instance that aims at achieving post-quantum security. Based on these parameters, we present a full-fledged software implementation protected against timing and cache attacks that supports two scheme variants: one providing 128 bits of classical security and another providing 128 bits of post-quantum security.
Signer-Anonymous Designated-Verifier Redactable Signatures for Cloud-Based Data Sharing
Redactable signature schemes allow to black out predefined parts of a signed message without affecting the validity of the signature, and are therefore an important building block in privacy-enhancing cryptography. However, a second look shows, that for many practical applications, they cannot be used in their vanilla form. On the one hand, already the identity of the signer may often reveal sensitive information to the receiver of a redacted message; on the other hand, if data leaks or is sold, everyone getting hold of (redacted versions of) a signed message will be convinced of its authenticity.
We overcome these issues by providing a definitional framework and practically efficient instantiations of so called signer-anonymous designated-verifier redactable signatures (AD-RS). As a byproduct we also obtain the first group redactable signatures, which may be of independent interest. AD-RS are motivated by a real world use-case in the field of health care and complement existing health information sharing platforms with additional important privacy features. Moreover, our results are not limited to the proposed application, but can also be directly applied to various other contexts such as notary authorities or e-government services.
Efficient Post-Quantum Zero-Knowledge and Signatures
In this paper, we present a new post-quantum digital signature algorithm that derives its security entirely from assumptions about symmetric-key primitives, which are very well studied and believed to be quantum-secure (with increased parameter sizes). We present our new scheme with a complete post-quantum security analysis, and benchmark results from a prototype implementation.
Our construction is an efficient instantiation of the following design: the public key is $y=f(x)$ for preimage-resistant function $f$, and $x$ is the private key. A signature is a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof of $x$, that incorporates a message to be signed. Our security analysis uses recent results of Unruh (EUROCRYPT'12,'15,'16) that show how to securely convert an
interactive sigma protocol to a non-interactive one in the quantum random oracle model (QROM). The Unruh construction is generic, and does not immediately yield compact proofs. However, when we specialize the construction to our application, we can reduce the size overhead of the QROM-secure construction to 1.6x, when compared to the Fiat-Shamir transform, which does not have a rigorous post-quantum security analysis. Our implementation results compare both instantiations, with multiple choices of $f$ for comparison. Our signature scheme proposal uses the block cipher LowMC for $f$, as it gives the shortest signatures.
In addition to reducing the size of signatures with Unruh's construction, we also improve the size of proofs in the underlying sigma protocol (of Giacomelli et al., USENIX'16) by a factor of two. This is of independent interest as it yields more compact proofs for arbitrary choices of $f$ in the classical case as well. Further, this reduction in size comes at no additional computational
cost.
Practical Functional Encryption for Bilinear Forms
We present a practically efficient functional encryption scheme for the class of functionalities that can be expressed via bilinear forms over the integers. Bilinear forms are a general class of quadratic functions that includes, for instance, multivariate quadratic polynomials. Our realization works over asymmetric bilinear groups and is surprisingly simple, efficient and easy to implement. For instance, in our scheme the public key and each ciphertext consist of $2n+1$ and $4n+2$ group elements respectively, where $n$ is the dimension of the encrypted vectors, while secret keys are only two group elements.
The scheme is proved secure under the standard (adaptive) indistinguishability based security notion of Boneh, Sahai and Waters (TCC 2011). The proof is rather convoluted and relies on the so-called generic bilinear group model. Specifically, our proof comes in two main stages. In a preliminary step, we put forward and prove a new master theorem to argue hardness in the generic bilinear group model of a broad family of interactive decisional problems, which includes the indistinguishability-based security game for our functional encryption scheme. Next, the more technically involved part of the proof consists in showing that our scheme actually fits the requirements of our master theorem.
Access Control Encryption: Enforcing Information Flow with Cryptography
We initiate the study of Access Control Encryption (ACE), a novel cryptographic primitive that allows fine-grained access control, by giving different rights to different users not only in terms of which messages they are allowed to receive, but also which messages they are allowed to send.
Classical examples of security policies for information flow are the well known Bell-Lapadula [BL73] or Biba [Bib75] model: in a nutshell, the Bell-Lapadula model assigns roles to every user in the system (e.g., public, secret and top-secret). A users' role specifies which messages the user is allowed to receive (i.e., the no read-up rule, meaning that users with public clearance should not be able to read messages marked as secret or top-secret) but also which messages the user is allowed to send (i.e., the no write-down rule, meaning that a user with top-secret clearance should not be able to write messages marked as secret or public).
To the best of our knowledge, no existing cryptographic primitive allows for even this simple form of access control, since no existing cryptographic primitive enforces any restriction on what kind of messages one should be able to encrypt.
Our contributions are:
- Introducing and formally defining access control encryption (ACE);
- A construction of ACE with complexity linear in the number of the roles based on classic number theoretic assumptions (DDH, Paillier);
- A construction of ACE with complexity polylogarithmic in the number of roles based on recent results on cryptographic obfuscation;
Thrifty Zero-Knowledge - When Linear Programming Meets Cryptography
We introduce “thrifty” zero-knowledge protocols, or TZK.
These protocols are constructed by introducing a bias in the challenge send by the prover. This bias is chosen so as to maximize the security versus effort trade-off. We illustrate the benefits of this approach on several well-known zero-knowledge protocols.
Homomorphic-Policy Attribute-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanisms
Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) allows to target the recipients of a message according to a policy expressed as a predicate among some attributes. Ciphertext-policy ABE schemes can choose the policy at the encryption time.
In this paper, we define a new property for ABE: homomorphic-policy. A combiner is able to (publicly) combine ciphertexts under different policies into a ciphertext under a combined policy (AND or OR). More precisely, using linear secret sharing schemes, we design Attribute-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (ABKEM) with the Homomorphic-Policy property: given several encapsulations of the same keys under various policies, anyone can derive an encapsulation of the same key under any combination of the policies.
As an application, in Pay-TV, this allows to separate the content providers that can generate the encapsulations of a session key under every attributes, this key being used to encrypt the payload, and the service providers that build the decryption policies according to the subscriptions. The advantage is that the aggregation of the encapsulations by the service providers does not contain any secret information.
Constructions Secure against Receiver Selective Opening and Chosen Ciphertext Attacks
In this paper we study public key encryption schemes of indistinguishability security against receiver selective opening (IND-RSO) attacks, where the attacker can corrupt some receivers and get the corresponding secret keys in the multi-party setting. Concretely:
-We present a general construction of RSO security against chosen ciphertext attacks (RSO-CCA) by combining any RSO secure scheme against chosen plaintext attacks (RSO-CPA) with any regular CCA secure scheme, along with an appropriate non-interactive zero-knowledge proof.
-We show that the leakage-resistant construction given by Hazay \emph{et al.} in Eurocrypt 2013 from weak hash proof system (wHPS) is RSO-CPA secure.
-We further show that the CCA secure construction given by Cramer and Shoup in Eurocrypt 2002 based on the universal HPS is RSO-CCA secure, hence obtain a more efficient paradigm for RSO-CCA security.
Self-Updatable Encryption: Time Constrained Access Control with Hidden Attributes and Better Efficiency
Revocation and key evolving paradigms are central issues in cryptography, and in PKI in particular. A novel concern related to these areas was raised in the recent work of Sahai, Seyalioglu, and Waters (Crypto 2012) who noticed that revoking past keys should at times (e.g., the scenario of cloud storage) be accompanied by revocation of past ciphertexts (to prevent unread ciphertexts from being read by revoked users). They introduced revocable-storage attribute-based encryption (RS-ABE) as a good access control mechanism for cloud storage. RS-ABE protects against the revoked users not only the future data by supporting key-revocation but also the past data by supporting ciphertext-update, through which a ciphertext at time $T$ can be updated to a new ciphertext at time $T+1$ using only the public key.
Motivated by this pioneering work, we ask whether it is possible to have a modular approach, which includes a primitive for time managed ciphertext update as a primitive. We call encryption which supports this primitive a ``self-updatable encryption'' (SUE). We then suggest a modular cryptosystems design methodology based on three sub-components: a primary encryption scheme, a key-revocation mechanism, and a time-evolution mechanism which controls the ciphertext self-updating via an SUE method, coordinated with the revocation (when needed). Our goal in this is to allow the self-updating ciphertext component to take part in the design of new and improved cryptosystems and protocols in a flexible fashion. Specifically, we achieve the following results:
- We first introduce a new cryptographic primitive called self-updatable encryption (SUE), realizing a time-evolution mechanism. In SUE, a ciphertext and a private key are associated with time. A user can decrypt a ciphertext if its time is earlier than that of his private key. Additionally, anyone (e.g., a cloud server) can update the ciphertext to a ciphertext with a newer time. We also construct an SUE scheme and prove its full security under static assumptions.
- Following our modular approach, we present a new RS-ABE scheme with shorter ciphertexts than that of Sahai et al. and prove its security. The length efficiency is mainly due to our SUE scheme and the underlying modularity.
- We apply our approach to predicate encryption (PE) supporting attribute-hiding property, and obtain a revocable-storage PE (RS-PE) scheme that is selectively-secure.
- We further demonstrate that SUE is of independent interest, by showing it can be used for timed-release encryption (and its applications), and for augmenting key-insulated encryption with forward-secure storage.
Lattice-Based Fully Dynamic Multi-Key FHE with Short Ciphertexts
We present a multi-key fully homomorphic encryption scheme that supports an unbounded number of homomorphic operations for an unbounded number of parties. Namely, it allows to perform arbitrarily many computational steps on inputs encrypted by an a-priori unbounded (polynomial) number of parties. Inputs from new parties can be introduced into the computation dynamically, so the final set of parties needs not be known ahead of time. Furthermore, the length of the ciphertexts, as well as the space complexity of an atomic homomorphic operation, grow only linearly with the current number of parties.
Prior works either supported only an a-priori bounded number of parties (Lopez-Alt, Tromer and Vaikuntanthan, STOC '12), or only supported single-hop evaluation where all inputs need to be known before the computation starts (Clear and McGoldrick, Crypto '15, Mukherjee and Wichs, Eurocrypt '16). In all aforementioned works, the ciphertext length grew at least quadratically with the number of parties.
Technically, our starting point is the LWE-based approach of previous works. Our result is achieved via a careful use of Gentry's bootstrapping technique, tailored to the specific scheme. Our hardness assumption is that the scheme of Mukherjee and Wichs is circular secure (and thus bootstrappable). A leveled scheme can be achieved under standard LWE.
Cryptographic decoding of the Leech lattice
Advancements in quantum computing have spurred the development of new asymmetric cryptographic primitives that are conjectured to be secure against quantum attackers. One promising class of these primitives is based on lattices, leading to encryption protocols based on the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem. Key exchange algorithms based on this problem are computationally efficient and enjoy on a strong worst-case hardness guarantee. However, despite recent improvements, the resulting handshake sizes are still significantly larger than those in use today. This thesis looks at the possibility of applying the Leech lattice code to one such scheme, with the goal of decreasing the size of the resulting handshake. We also look at the feasibility of a cryptographically safe implementation of a Leech lattice decoder (available at https://github.com/avanpo/leech-decoding), and the resulting impact on efficiency.
Optimization of Bootstrapping in Circuits
In 2009, Gentry proposed the first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, an extremely powerful cryptographic primitive that enables to perform computations, i.e., to evaluate circuits, on encrypted data without decrypting them first. This has many applications, in particular in cloud computing.
In all currently known FHE schemes, encryptions are associated to some (non-negative integer) noise level, and at each evaluation of an AND gate, the noise level increases. This is problematic because decryption can only work if the noise level stays below some maximum level $L$ at every gate of the circuit. To ensure that property, it is possible to perform an operation called _bootstrapping_ to reduce the noise level. However, bootstrapping is time-consuming and has been identified as a critical operation. This motivates a new problem in discrete optimization, that of choosing where in the circuit to perform bootstrapping operations so as to control the noise level; the goal is to minimize the number of bootstrappings in circuits.
In this paper, we formally define the _bootstrap problem_, we design a polynomial-time $L$-approximation algorithm using a novel method of rounding of a linear program, and we show a matching hardness result: $(L-\epsilon)$-inapproximability for any $\epsilon>0$.
An Efficient Lattice-Based Signature Scheme with Provably Secure Instantiation
In view of the expected progress in cryptanalysis it is important to find alternatives for currently used signature schemes such as RSA and ECDSA. The most promising lattice-based signature schemes to replace these schemes are BLISS (CRYPTO 2013) and GLP (CHES 2012). Both come with a security reduction from a lattice problem and have high performance. However, their parameters are not chosen according to their provided security reduction, i.e., the instantiation is not provably secure.
In this paper, we present the first lattice-based signature scheme with good performance when provably secure instantiated. To this end, we provide a tight security reduction for the new scheme from the ring learning with errors problem which allows for provably secure and efficient instantiations. We present experimental results obtained from a software implementation of our scheme. They show that our scheme, when provably secure instantiated, performs comparably with BLISS and the GLP scheme.
Obfuscation without the Vulnerabilities of Multilinear Maps
Indistinguishability obfuscation is a central primitive in cryptography. Security of existing multilinear maps constructions on which current obfuscation candidates are based is poorly understood. In a few words, multilinear maps allow for checking if an arbitrary bounded degree polynomial on hidden values evaluates to zero or not. All known attacks on multilinear maps depend on the information revealed on computations that result in encodings of zero. This includes the recent annihilation attacks of Miles, Sahai and Zhandry [EPRINT 2016/147] on obfuscation candidates as a special case.
Building on a modification of the Garg, Gentry and Halevi [EUROCRYPT 2013] multilinear maps (GGH for short), we present a new obfuscation candidate that is resilient to these vulnerabilities. Specifically, in our construction the results of all computations yielding a zero provably hide all the secret system parameters. This is the first obfuscation candidate that weakens the security needed from the zero-test.
Formally, we prove security of our construction in a weakening of the idealized graded encoding model that accounts for all known vulnerabilities on GGH maps.
Revisiting the Efficient Key Generation of ZHFE
ZHFE, proposed by Porras at el. at PQCrypto'14, is one of the very few existing multivariate encryption schemes and a very promising candidate for post-quantum cryptosystems. The only one drawback is its slow key generation.
At PQCrypto'16, Baena et al. proposed an algorithm to construct the private ZHFE keys, which is much faster than the original algorithm, but still inefficient for practical parameters.
Recently, Zhang and Tan proposed another private key generation algorithm, which is very fast but not necessarily able to generate all the private ZHFE keys.
In this paper we propose a new efficient algorithm for the private key generation of the ZHFE scheme. Our algorithm reduces the complexity from $O(n^{2¥omega+1})$ by Baena et al. to $O(n^{¥omega+3})$, where $n$ is the number of variables and $2<¥omega<3$ is a linear algebra constant. We also estimate the number of possible keys generated by all existing private key generation algorithms for ZHFE. Our algorithm generates as many private ZHFE keys as the original and Baena et al.'s ones. This makes our algorithm is the best appropriate for the ZHFE scheme.
A Tool Kit for Partial Key Exposure Attacks on RSA
Thus far, partial key exposure attacks on RSA have been intensively studied using lattice based Coppersmith's methods. In the context, attackers are given partial information of a secret exponent and prime factors of (Multi-Prime) RSA where the partial information is exposed in various ways. Although these attack scenarios are worth studying, there are several known attacks whose constructions have similar flavor. In this paper, we try to formulate general attack scenarios to capture several existing ones and propose attacks for the scenarios. Our attacks contain all the state-of-the-art partial key exposure attacks, e.g., due to Ernst et al. (Eurocrypt'05) and Takayasu-Kunihiro (SAC'14, ICISC'14), as special cases. As a result, our attacks offer better results than previous best attacks in some special cases, e.g., Sarkar-Maitra's partial key exposure attacks on RSA with the most significant bits of a prime factor (ICISC'08) and Hinek's partial key exposure attacks on Multi-Prime RSA (J. Math. Cryptology '08). We claim that our contribution is not only generalizations or improvements of the existing results. Since our attacks capture general exposure scenarios, the results can be used as a tool kit; the security of some future variants of RSA can be examined without any knowledge of Coppersmith's methods.
On Instantiating Pairing-Based Protocols with Elliptic Curves of Embedding Degree One
Since the discovery of identity-based encryption schemes in 2000, bilinear pairings have been used in the design of hundreds of cryptographic protocols. The most commonly used pairings are constructed from elliptic curves over finite fields with small embedding degree. These pairings can have different security, performance, and functionality characteristics, and were therefore classified into Types 1, 2, 3 and 4. In this paper, we observe that this conventional classification is not applicable to pairings
from elliptic curves with embedding degree one. It is important to understand the security, efficiency, and functionality of these pairings in light of recent attacks on certain pairings constructed from elliptic curves with embedding degree greater than one. We define three kinds of pairings from elliptic curves with embedding degree one, discuss some subtleties with using them to implement pairing-based protocols, and provide an estimated cost of implementing them on modern processors.
Efficient Finite field multiplication for isogeny based post quantum cryptography
Isogeny based post-quantum cryptography is one of the most
recent addition to the family of quantum resistant cryptosystems. In
this paper, we propose an efficient modular multiplication algorithm for
primes of the form $p = 2 \cdot 2^a \cdot 3^b - 1$ with b even, typically used in such
cryptosystem. Our modular multiplication algorithm exploits the special structure present in such primes. We compare the efficiency of our
technique with Barrett reduction and Montgomery multiplication. Our
C implementation shows that our algorithm is approximately 3 times
faster than the normal Barrett reduction.
Novel Inner Product Encryption Resistant to Partial Collusion Attacks
Inner product encryption (IPE) is a new cryptographic primitive initially
proposed by Abdalla et al. in 2015. IPE can be classified into public-key
IPE and secret-key IPE. The currently proposed PK-IPE schemes can-not
resist the following collusion attack: an invalid user that holds no private
key can ”buy” a combined key generated from multiple collusion adversaries,
and the user can use this private key to decrypt a ciphertext. Furthermore,
the user should not let the collusion adversaries know the ciphertext, and
the collusion adversaries should not let the user learn their private keys.
We present a new PK-IPE to resist such collusion attack. Our PK-IPE is
proven secure under the selective-vector chosen-plaintext attack model. We
formalize a selective vector collusion attack model to prove that our scheme
is secure under this model.
Scalable Attribute-Based Encryption Under the Strictly Weaker Assumption Family
Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is a special type of public key encryption that allows users to share sensitive data efficiently through fine-grained access control. The security involved in existing ABE systems is currently insufficient. These systems are usually built on the Decisional Bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) assumption or the q-type DBDH assumption, which is stronger than the DBDH assumption. However, once the DBDH assumption is unsecure, all concerned ABEs become vulnerable to threats. To address this problem, the $k$-BDH assumption family proposed by Benson et al. is adopted. Any assumption in the $k$-BDH assumption family is associated with parameter $k$ and becomes strictly weaker as $k$ increased. We propose a framework to implement Ciphertext-Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE) under the arbitrary assumption in the $k$-BDH assumption family. When the $k'$-BDH assumption in the $k$-BDH assumption family becomes unsecure, where $k'$-BDH is the assumption on which our ABE relies, the scheme can be shifted to rely on the $l'$-BDH assumption instead, where $l'>k'$. This condition guarantees security as the underlying assumption of our scheme becomes weaker. In addition, we define the formal security model of our schemes and prove the security of CP-ABE in the selective attribute model.
Deterring Certificate Subversion: Efficient Double-Authentication-Preventing Signatures
This paper presents highly efficient designs of double authentication preventing signatures (DAPS). In a DAPS, signing two messages with the same first part and differing second parts reveals the signing key. In the context of PKIs we suggest that CAs who use DAPS to create certificates have a court-convincing argument to deny big-brother requests to create rogue certificates, thus deterring certificate subversion. We give two general methods for obtaining DAPS. Both start from trapdoor identification schemes. We instantiate our transforms to obtain numerous specific DAPS that, in addition to being efficient, are proven with tight security reductions to standard assumptions. We implement our DAPS schemes to show that they are not only several orders of magnitude more efficient than prior DAPS but competitive with in-use signature schemes that lack the double authentication preventing property.
Comment on "Attribute-Based Signatures for Supporting Anonymous Certification" by N. Kaaniche and M. Laurent (ESORICS 2016)
Anonymous credential systems enable users to authenticate themselves in a privacy-preserving manner. At the conference ESORICS 2016, Kaaniche and Laurent presented an anonymous certification scheme based on a new attribute based signature. In this note, we provide several attacks on their scheme.
Fully Leakage-Resilient Signatures Revisited: Graceful Degradation, Noisy Leakage, and Construction in the Bounded-Retrieval Model
We construct new leakage-resilient signature schemes. Our schemes remain unforgeable against an adversary leaking arbitrary (yet bounded) information on the entire state of the signer (sometimes known as *fully* leakage resilience), including the random coin tosses of the signing algorithm.
The main feature of our constructions is that they offer a graceful degradation of security in situations where standard existential unforgeability is impossible. This property was recently put forward by Nielsen, Venturi, and Zottarel (PKC 2014) to deal with settings in which the secret key is much larger than the size of a signature. One remarkable such case is the so-called Bounded-Retrieval Model (BRM), where one intentionally inflates the size of the secret key while keeping constant the signature size and the computational complexity of the scheme.
Our main constructions have leakage rate $1-o(1)$, and are proven secure in the standard model. We additionally give a construction in the BRM, relying on a random oracle. All of our schemes are described in terms of generic building blocks, but also admit efficient instantiations under fairly standard number-theoretic assumptions. Finally, we explain how to extend some of our schemes to the setting of noisy leakage, where the only restriction on the leakage functions is that the output does not decrease the min-entropy of the secret key by too much.
Reproducible Circularly-Secure Bit Encryption: Applications and Realizations
We give generic constructions of several fundamental cryptographic primitives based on a new encryption primitive that combines circular security for bit encryption with the so-called reproducibility property (Bellare et al. PKC 2003). At the heart of our constructions is a novel technique which gives a way of de-randomizing reproducible public-key bit-encryption schemes and also a way of reducing one-wayness conditions of a constructed trapdoor-function family (TDF) to circular security of the base scheme. The main primitives that we build from our encryption primitive include k-wise one- way TDFs (Rosen and Segev TCC 2009), CCA2-secure encryption and deterministic encryption. Our results demonstrate a new set of applications of circularly-secure encryption beyond fully-homomorphic encryption and symbolic soundness. Finally, we show the plausibility of our assumptions by showing that the DDH-based circularly-secure scheme of Boneh et al. (Crypto 2008) and the subgroup indistinguishability based scheme of Brakerski and Goldwasser (Crypto 2010) are both reproducible.
Indiscreet Logs: Persistent Diffie-Hellman Backdoors in TLS
Software implementations of discrete logarithm based cryptosystems over finite fields typically make the assumption that any domain parameters they are presented with are trustworthy, i.e., the parameters implement cyclic groups where the discrete logarithm problem is assumed to be hard. An informal and widespread justification for this seemingly exists that says validating parameters at run time is too computationally expensive relative to the perceived risk of a server sabotaging the privacy of its own connection. In this paper we explore this trust assumption and examine situations where it may not always be justified.
We conducted an investigation of discrete logarithm domain parameters in use across the Internet and discovered evidence of a multitude of potentially backdoored moduli of unknown order in TLS and STARTTLS spanning numerous countries, organizations, and protocols. Although our disclosures resulted in a number of organizations taking down suspicious parameters, we argue the potential for TLS backdoors is systematic and will persist until either until better parameter hygiene is taken up by the community, or finite field based cryptography is eliminated altogether.
Server-Aided Revocable Identity-Based Encryption from Lattices
Server-aided revocable identity-based encryption (SR-IBE), recently proposed by Qin et al. at ESORICS 2015, offers significant advantages over previous user revocation mechanisms in the scope of IBE. In this new system model, almost all the workloads on users are delegated to an untrusted server, and users can compute decryption keys at any time period without having to communicate with either the key generation center or the server.
In this paper, inspired by Qin et al.’s work, we design the first SR-IBE scheme from lattice assumptions. Our scheme is more efficient than existing constructions of lattice-based revocable IBE. We prove that the scheme is selectively secure in the standard model, based on the hardness of the Learning with Errors problem. At the heart of our design is a “double encryption” mechanism that enables smooth interactions between the message sender and the server, as well as between the server and the recipient, while ensuring the confidentiality of messages.
Compact Identity Based Encryption from LWE
We construct an identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme from the standard Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption that has \emph{compact} public-key and achieves adaptive security in the standard model. In particular, our scheme only needs 2 public matrices to support $O(\log^2 \secparam)$-bit length identity, and $O(\secparam / \log^2 \secparam)$ public matrices to support $\secparam$-bit length identity. This improves over previous IBE schemes from lattices substantially.
Additionally, our techniques from IBE can be adapted to construct a compact digital signature scheme, which achieves existential unforgeability under the standard Short Integer Solution (SIS) assumption with small polynomial parameters.
Short and Adjustable Signatures
Motivated by the problem of one-time password generation with security against server breaches, we introduce the notion of {\em adjustable signature schemes} that allow the length of a signature to be adjusted---at the setup, signing or verification stages, depending on the application. Defining security for such schemes poses several challenges, such as: (i) different signature lengths should provide different levels of security, and (ii) the effort required for forging a very short signature (e.g., 6 bytes) should not be reusable for
forging additional signatures. We provide security definitions that concretely
capture the trade-off between signature length, number of forgeries and level
of security provided by the scheme.
The above requirements rule out all existing solutions for short signatures.
In this paper, as a feasibility result, we provide the first instantiation of
all variants of adjustable signatures based on indistinguishability
obfuscation. Our starting point is the state-of-the-art construction by
Ramchen and Waters [ACM CCS 2014]. We observe that their scheme fails to meet our requirements for an adjustable signature scheme, and enhance it to obtain adjustable signatures with {\em shorter} signatures, {\em faster} signing and {\em strong} unforgeability. We also employ new proof techniques in order toobtain the above-mentioned notions of security.
For the simpler case where adversarial effort does not grow with the number of forgeries, we also provide a concrete construction based on the BLS signature scheme, by instantiating it using smaller group sizes that yield shorter signature lengths while providing reasonable security. We implement this scheme for various signature sizes an report on its efficiency.
Short Randomizable Signatures
Digital signature is a fundamental primitive with numerous applications. Following the development of pairing-based cryptography, several taking advantage of this setting have been proposed. Among them, the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya (CL) signature scheme is one of the most flexible and has been used as a building block for many other protocols. Unfortunately, this scheme suffers from a linear size in the number of messages to be signed which limits its use in many situations.
In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme with the same features as CL-signatures but without the linear-size drawback: our signature consists of only two elements, whatever the message length, and our algorithms are more efficient. This construction takes advantage of using type 3 pairings, that are already widely used for security and efficiency reasons.
We prove the security of our scheme without random oracles but in the generic group model. Finally, we show that protocols using CL-signatures can easily be instantiated with ours, leading to much more efficient constructions.
New directions in nearest neighbor searching with applications to lattice sieving
To solve the approximate nearest neighbor search problem (NNS) on the sphere, we propose a method using locality-sensitive filters (LSF), with the property that nearby vectors have a higher probability of surviving the same filter than vectors which are far apart. We instantiate the filters using spherical caps of height 1 - A, where a vector survives a filter if it is contained in the corresponding spherical cap, and where ideally each filter has an independent, uniformly random direction.
For small A, these filters are very similar to the spherical locality-sensitive hash (LSH) family previously studied by Andoni et al. For larger A bounded away from 0, these filters potentially achieve a superior performance, provided we have access to an efficient oracle for finding relevant filters. Whereas existing LSH schemes are limited by a performance parameter of P \geq 1/(2c^2 - 1) to solve approximate NNS with approximation factor c, with spherical LSF we potentially achieve smaller asymptotic values of P, depending on the density of the data set. For sparse data sets where the dimension is super-logarithmic in the size of the data set, we asymptotically obtain P = 1/(2c^2 - 1), while for a logarithmic dimensionality with density constant K we obtain asymptotics of P \sim 1/(4 K c^2).
To instantiate the filters and prove the existence of an efficient decoding oracle, we replace the independent filters by filters taken from certain structured random product codes. We show that the additional structure in these concatenation codes allows us to decode efficiently using techniques similar to lattice enumeration, and we can find the relevant filters with low overhead, while at the same time not significantly changing the collision probabilities of the filters.
We finally apply spherical LSF to sieving algorithms for solving the shortest vector problem (SVP) on lattices, and show that this leads to a heuristic time complexity for solving SVP in dimension n of (3/2)^{n/2 + o(n)} ~ 2^{0.292 n + o(n)}. This asymptotically improves upon the previous best algorithms for solving SVP which use spherical LSH and cross-polytope LSH and run in time 2^{0.298 n + o(n)}. Experiments with the GaussSieve validate the claimed speedup and show that this method may be practical as well, as the polynomial overhead is small. Our implementation is available under an open-source license.
Functional Encryption for Computational Hiding in Prime Order Groups via Pair Encodings
Lewko and Waters introduced the computational hiding technique in Crypto'12. In their technique, two computational assumptions that achieve selective and co-selective security proofs lead to adaptive security of an encryption scheme. Later, pair encoding framework was introduced by Attrapadung in Eurocrypt'14. The pair encoding framework generalises the computational hiding technique for functional encryption (FE). It has been used to achieve a number of new FE schemes such as FE for regular languages and unbounded attribute based encryption allowing multi-use of attributes.
Nevertheless, the generalised construction of Attrapadung's pair encoding for those schemes is adaptively secure only in composite order groups, which leads to efficiency loss.
It remains a challenging task to explore constructions in prime order
groups for gaining efficiency improvement, which leaves the research gap in the existing literature.
In this work, we aim to address this drawback by proposing a new generalised construction for pair encodings in prime order groups. Our construction will lead to a number of new FE schemes in prime order groups, which have been previously introduced only in composite order groups by Attrapadung.
Efficient Revocable Identity-Based Encryption via Subset Difference Methods
Providing an efficient revocation mechanism for identity-based encryption (IBE) is very important since a user's credential (or private key) can be expired or revealed. Revocable IBE (RIBE) is an extension of IBE that provides an efficient revocation mechanism. Previous RIBE schemes essentially use the complete subtree (CS) scheme of Naor, Naor and Lotspiech (CRYPTO 2001) for key revocation. In this paper, we present a new technique for RIBE that uses the efficient subset difference (SD) scheme of Naor et al. instead of using the CS scheme to improve the size of update keys.
Following our new technique, we first propose an efficient RIBE scheme in prime-order bilinear groups by combining the IBE scheme of Boneh and Boyen and the SD scheme and prove its selective security under the standard assumption. Our RIBE scheme is the first RIBE scheme in bilinear groups that has $O(r)$ number of group elements in an update key where $r$ is the number of revoked users. Next, we also propose another RIBE scheme in composite-order bilinear groups and prove its full security under static assumptions. Our RIBE schemes also can be integrated with the layered subset difference (LSD) scheme of Halevy and Shamir (CRYPTO 2002) to reduce the size of a private key.
A Comparative S-Index in Factoring RSA Modulus via Lucas Sequences
General Lucas sequences are practically useful in cryptography. In the past quarter century, factoring large RSA modulo into its primes is one of the most important and most challenging problems in computational number theory. A factoring technique on RSA modulo is mainly hindered by the strong prime properties. The success of factoring few large RSA modulo within the last few decades has been due to computing prowess overcoming one strong prime of RSA modulo. In this paper, some useful properties of Lucas sequences shall be explored in factoring RSA modulo. This paper introduces the S-index formation in solving quadratic equation modulo N. The S-index pattern is very useful in designing an algorithm to factor RSA modulo. At any instance in the factoring algorithm, the accumulative result stands independently. In effect, there is no clear direction to maneuver whether to go left or right. The S-index will add another comparative tool to better maneuver in a factoring process. On one hand, it shall remain a theoretical challenge to overcome the strong prime properties. On the other hand, it shall remain a computational challenge to achieve a running time within polynomial time to factor RSA modulo. This paper will propose an avenue to do both using general Lucas sequences.
The closest vector problem in tensored root lattices of type A and in their duals
In this work we consider the closest vector problem (CVP) ---a problem also known as maximum-likelihood decoding--- in the tensor of two root lattices of type A ($A_m \otimes A_n$), as well as in their duals ($A^*_m \otimes A^*_n$). This problem is mainly motivated by {\em lattice based cryptography}, where the cyclotomic rings $\mathbb Z[\zeta_c]$ (resp. its co-different $\mathbb Z[\zeta_c]^\vee$) play a central role, and turn out to be isomorphic as lattices to tensors of $A^*$ lattices (resp. $A$ root lattices). In particular, our results lead to solving CVP in $\mathbb Z[\zeta_c]$ and in $\mathbb Z[\zeta_c]^\vee$ for conductors of the form $c = 2^\alpha p^\beta q^\gamma$ for any two odd primes $p,q$.
For the primal case $A_m \otimes A_n$, we provide a full characterization of the Voronoi region in terms of simple cycles in the complete directed bipartite graph $K_{m+1,n+1}$. This leads ---relying on the Bellman-Ford algorithm for negative cycle detection--- to a CVP algorithm running in *polynomial time*. Precisely, our algorithm performs $O(l\ m^2 n^2 \min\{m,n\})$ operations on reals, where $l$ is the number of bits per coordinate of the input target. For the dual case, we use a gluing-construction to solve CVP in sub-exponential time $O(n m^{n+1})$.
The Shortest Signatures Ever
Multivariate Cryptography is one of the main candidates for creating post quantum public key cryptosystems. Especially in the area of digital signatures, there exist many practical and secure multivariate schemes. In this paper we present a general technique to reduce the signature size of multivariate schemes. Our technique enables us to reduce the signature size of nearly all multivariate signature schemes by 10 to 15 % without slowing down the scheme significantly. We can prove that the security of the underlying scheme is not weakened by this modification. Furthermore, the technique enables a further reduction of the signature size when accepting a slightly more costly verification process. This trade off between signature size and complexity of the verification process can not be observed for any other class of digital signature schemes. By applying our technique to the Gui signature scheme, we obtain the shortest signatures of all existing digital signature schemes.
Succinct Predicate and Online-Offline Multi-Input Inner Product Encryptions under Standard Static Assumptions
This paper presents expressive predicate encryption (PE) systems, namely non-zero
inner-product-predicate encryption (NIPPE) and attribute-based encryption (ABE) supporting monotone
span programs achieving best known parameters among existing similar schemes under well-studied
static complexity assumptions. Both the constructions are built in composite order bilinear
group setting and involve only 2 group elements in the ciphertexts. More interestingly, our NIPPE
scheme, which additionally features only 1 group element in the decryption keys, is the first to
attain succinct ciphertexts and decryption keys simultaneously. For proving selective security of
these constructions under the Subgroup Decision assumptions, which are the most standard static
assumptions in composite order bilinear group setting, we apply the extended version of the elegant
D´ej`a Q framework, which was originally proposed as a general technique for reducing the q-type
complexity assumptions to their static counter parts. Our work thus demonstrates the power of this
framework in overcoming the need of q-type assumptions, which are vulnerable to serious practical
attacks, for deriving security of highly expressive PE systems with compact parameters. We further
introduce the concept of online-offline multi-input functional encryption (OO-MIFE), which is a
crucial advancement towards realizing this highly promising but computationally intensive cryptographic
primitive in resource bounded and power constrained devices. We also instantiate our
notion of OO-MIFE by constructing such a scheme for the multi-input analog of the inner product
functionality, which has a wide range of application in practice. Our OO-MIFE scheme for multiinput
inner products is built in asymmetric bilinear groups of prime order and is proven selectively
secure under the well-studied k-Linear (k-LIN) assumption.
Hierarchical Functional Encryption
Functional encryption provides fine-grained access control for encrypted data, allowing each user to learn only specific functions of the encrypted data. We study the notion of \emph{hierarchical} functional encryption, which augments functional encryption with \emph{delegation} capabilities, offering significantly more expressive access control.
We present a {\em generic transformation} that converts any general-purpose public-key functional encryption scheme into a hierarchical one without relying on any additional assumptions. This significantly refines our understanding of the power of functional encryption, showing (somewhat surprisingly) that the existence of functional encryption is equivalent to that of its hierarchical generalization.
Instantiating our transformation with the existing functional encryption schemes yields a variety of hierarchical schemes offering various trade-offs between their delegation capabilities (i.e., the depth and width of their hierarchical structures) and underlying assumptions. When starting with a scheme secure against an unbounded number of collusions, we can support \emph{arbitrary} hierarchical structures. In addition, even when starting with schemes that are secure against a bounded number of collusions (which are known to exist under rather minimal assumptions such as the existence of public-key encryption and shallow pseudorandom generators), we can support hierarchical structures of bounded depth and width.
A Guide to Fully Homomorphic Encryption
Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) has been dubbed the holy grail of cryptography, an elusive goal which could solve the IT world's problems of security and trust. Research in the area exploded after 2009 when Craig Gentry showed that FHE can be realised in principle. Since that time considerable progress has been made in finding more practical and more efficient solutions. Whilst research quickly developed, terminology and concepts became diverse and confusing so that today it can be difficult to understand what the achievements of different works actually are. The purpose of this paper is to address three fundamental questions: What is FHE? What can FHE be used for? What is the state of FHE today? As well as surveying the field, we clarify different terminology in use and prove connections between different FHE notions.
An efficient somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme based on factorization
Surprisingly, most of existing provably secure FHE or SWHE schemes are lattice-based constructions. It is legitimate to question whether there is a mysterious link between homomorphic encryptions and lattices. This paper can be seen as a first (partial) negative answer to this question.
We propose a very simple private-key (partially) homomorphic encryption scheme whose security relies on factorization. This encryption scheme deals with a secret multivariate rational function $\phi_D$ defined over $\mathbb{Z}_n$, $n$ being an RSA-modulus. An encryption of $x$ is simply a vector $c$ such that $\phi_D(c)=x+\textsf{noise}$. To get homomorphic properties, nonlinear operators are specifically developed. We first prove IND-CPA security in the generic ring model assuming the hardness of factoring. We then extend this model in order to integrate lattice-based cryptanalysis and we reduce the security of our scheme (in this extended model) to an algebraic condition. This condition is extensively discussed for several choices of parameters. Some of these choices lead to competitive performance with respect to other existing homomorphic encryptions. While quantum computers are not only dreams anymore, designing factorization-based cryptographic schemes might appear as irrelevant. But, it is important to notice that, in our scheme, the factorization of $n$ is not required to decrypt. The factoring assumption simply ensures that solving nonlinear equations or finding non-null polynomials with many roots is difficult. Consequently, the ideas behind our construction could be re-used in rings satisfying these properties.
Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Matrix-Vector Relations and Lattice-Based Group Encryption
Group encryption (GE) is the natural encryption analogue of group signatures in that it allows verifiably encrypting messages for some anonymous member of a group while providing evidence that the receiver is a properly certified group member. Should the need arise, an opening authority is capable of identifying the receiver of any ciphertext. As introduced by Kiayias, Tsiounis and Yung (Asiacrypt'07), GE is motivated by applications in the context of oblivious retriever storage systems, anonymous third parties and hierarchical group signatures. This paper provides the first realization of group encryption under lattice assumptions. Our construction is proved secure in the standard model (assuming interaction in the proving phase) under the Learning-With-Errors (LWE) and Short-Integer-Solution (SIS) assumptions. As a crucial component of our system, we describe a new zero-knowledge argument system allowing to demonstrate that a given ciphertext is a valid encryption under some hidden but certified public key, which incurs to prove quadratic statements about LWE relations. Specifically, our protocol allows arguing knowledge of witnesses consisting of $\mathbf{X} \in \mathbb{Z}_q^{m \times n}$, $\mathbf{s}
\in \mathbb{Z}_q^n$ and a small-norm $\mathbf{e} \in \mathbb{Z}^m$ which underlie a public
vector $\mathbf{b}=\mathbf{X} \cdot \mathbf{s} + \mathbf{e} \in \mathbb{Z}_q^m$ while simultaneously proving that the matrix $\mathbf{X} \in \mathbb{Z}_q^{m \times n}$ has been correctly certified. We believe our proof system to be useful in other applications involving zero-knowledge proofs in the lattice setting.
Efficient KDM-CCA Secure Public-Key Encryption for Polynomial Functions
KDM$[\mathcal{F}]$-CCA secure public-key encryption (PKE) protects the security of message $f(sk)$, with $f \in \mathcal{F}$, that is computed directly from the secret key, even if the adversary has access to a decryption oracle. An efficient KDM$[\mathcal{F}_{\text{aff}}]$-CCA secure PKE scheme for affine functions was proposed by Lu, Li and Jia (LLJ, EuroCrypt2015). We point out that their security proof cannot go through based on the DDH assumption.
In this paper, we introduce a new concept _Authenticated Encryption with Auxiliary-Input_ $\mathsf{AIAE}$ and define for it new security notions dealing with related-key attacks, namely _IND-RKA security_ and _weak INT-RKA security_. We also construct such an $\mathsf{AIAE}$ w.r.t. a set of restricted affine functions from the DDH assumption. With our $\mathsf{AIAE}$,
-- we construct the first efficient KDM$[\mathcal{F}_{\text{aff}}]$-CCA secure PKE w.r.t. affine functions with compact ciphertexts, which consist only of a constant number of group elements;
-- we construct the first efficient KDM$[\mathcal{F}_{\text{poly}}^d]$-CCA secure PKE w.r.t. polynomial functions of bounded degree $d$ with almost compact ciphertexts, and the number of group elements in a ciphertext is polynomial in $d$, independent of the security parameter.
Our PKEs are both based on the DDH & DCR assumptions, free of NIZK and free of pairing.
More Efficient Constructions for Inner-Product Encryption
We propose new constructions for inner product encryption -- $\mathcal{IPE}_1$ and $\mathcal{IPE}_2$, both secure under the eXternal Diffie-Hellman assumption (SXDH) in asymmetric pairing groups.
The first scheme has constant-size ciphertexts whereas the second one is weakly attribute hiding. $\mathcal{IPE}_2$ is derived from the identity-based encryption scheme of Jutla Roy (Asiacrypt 2013),
that was extended from tag-based quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge (QA-NIZK) proofs for linear subspaces of vector spaces over bilinear groups. The verifier common reference string (CRS) in these tag-based systems are split into two parts, that are combined during verification. We consider an alternate form of the tag-based QA-NIZK proof with a single verifier CRS that already includes a tag, different from the one defining the language. The verification succeeds as long as the two tags are unequal. Essentially, we embed a two-equation revocation mechanism in the verification.
The new QA-NIZK proof system leads to $\mathcal{IPE}_1$, a constant-sized ciphertext IPE scheme with very short ciphertexts.
Both the IPE schemes are obtained by applying the $n$-equation revocation technique of Attrapadung and Libert (PKC 2010) to the corresponding identity based encryption schemes and proved
secure under SXDH assumption. As an application, we show how our schemes can be specialised to obtain the first fully secure identity-based broadcast encryption based on SXDH with a trade-off
among the public parameters, ciphertext and key sizes, all of them being sub-linear in the maximum number of recipients of a broadcast.
Signature Schemes with Efficient Protocols and Dynamic Group Signatures from Lattice Assumptions
A recent line of works - initiated by Gordon, Katz and Vaikuntanathan (Asiacrypt 2010) - gave lattice-based constructions allowing users to authenticate while remaining hidden in a crowd. Despite five years of efforts, known constructions are still limited to static sets of users, which cannot be dynamically updated. This work provides new tools enabling the design of anonymous authentication systems whereby new users can join the system at any time.
Our first contribution is a signature scheme with efficient protocols, which allows users to obtain a signature on a committed value and subsequently prove knowledge of a signature on a committed message. This construction is well-suited to the design of anonymous credentials and group signatures. It indeed provides the first lattice-based group signature supporting dynamically growing populations of users.
As a critical component of our group signature, we provide a simple joining mechanism of introducing new group members using our signature scheme. This technique is combined with zero-knowledge arguments allowing registered group members to prove knowledge of a secret short vector of which the corresponding public syndrome was certified by the group manager. These tools provide similar advantages to those of structure-preserving signatures in the realm of bilinear groups. Namely, they allow group members to generate their own public key without having to prove knowledge of the underlying secret key. This results in a two-message joining protocol supporting concurrent enrollments, which can be used in other settings such as group encryption.
Our zero-knowledge arguments are presented in a unified framework where: (i) The involved statements reduce to arguing possession of a $\{-1,0,1\}$-vector $\mathbf{x}$ with a particular structure and satisfying $\mathbf{P}\cdot \mathbf{x} = \mathbf{v} \bmod q$ for some public matrix $\mathbf{P}$ and vector $\mathbf{v}$; (ii) The reduced statements can be handled using permuting techniques for Stern-like protocols. Our framework can serve as a blueprint for proving many other relations in lattice-based cryptography.
Selective Opening Security from Simulatable Data Encapsulation
The confidentiality notion of security against selective opening attacks considers adver- saries that obtain challenge ciphertexts and are allowed to adaptively open them, thereby revealing the encrypted message and the randomness used to encrypt. The SO notion is stronger than that of CCA security and is often required when formally arguing towards the security of multi-user applications. While different ways of achieving correspondingly secure schemes are known, as they generally employ expensive asymmetric building blocks like lossy trapdoor functions or lossy en- cryption, such constructions are routinely left aside by practitioners and standardization bodies. So far, formal arguments towards the SO security of schemes used in practice (e.g., for email encryption) are not known.
In this work we shift the focus from the asymmetric to the symmetric building blocks of PKE and prove the following statement: If a PKE scheme is composed of a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and a blockcipher-based data encapsulation mechanism (DEM), and the DEM meets spe- cific combinatorial properties, then the PKE scheme offers SO security, in the ideal cipher model. Fortunately, as we show, the required properties hold for popular modes of operation like CTR, CBC, CCM, and GCM. This paper not only establishes the corresponding theoretical framework of analysis, but also contributes very concretely to practical cryptography by concluding that selective opening security is given for many real-world schemes.
Secure and Efficient Construction of Broadcast Encryption with Dealership
Broadcast encryption with dealership (BED) has been proposed to achieve more innovative and scalable business models for broadcast services. It has an extensive application future. However, designing secure BED is a challenging task. The only known BED construction sofar is by Gritti et al. We aim to raise the profile of BED primitives which has not received much attention despite of its importance. This paper presents a selectively chosen plaintext attack (CPA) secure BED scheme supporting maximum number of accountability and privacy (hides the group of users from broadcaster). Our scheme is a key encapsulation mechanism and practically more efficient. It reduces the parameter sizes and computation cost compared to Gritti et al. More interestingly, the broadcaster does not need to rely on users to detect the dishonest dealer. We provide concrete security analysis of our design under reasonable assumptions.
Programmable Hash Functions from Lattices: Short Signatures and IBEs with Small Key Sizes
Driven by the open problem raised by Hofheinz and Kiltz (Journal of Cryptology, 2012), we study the formalization of lattice-based programmable hash function (PHF), and give two types of constructions by using several techniques such as a novel combination of cover-free sets and lattice trapdoors. Under the Inhomogeneous Small Integer Solution (ISIS) assumption, we show that any (non-trivial) lattice-based PHF is collision-resistant, which gives a direct application of this new primitive. We further demonstrate the power of lattice-based PHF by giving generic constructions of signature and identity-based encryption (IBE) in the standard model, which not only provide a way to unify several previous lattice-based schemes using the partitioning proof techniques, but also allow us to obtain a new short signature scheme and a new fully secure IBE scheme with keys consisting of a logarithmic number of matrices/vectors in the security parameter $\kappa$. Besides, we also give a refined way of combining two concrete PHFs to construct an improved short signature scheme with short verification keys from weaker assumptions. In particular, our methods depart from the confined guessing technique of Böhl et al. (Eurocrypt'13) that was used to construct previous standard model short signature schemes with short verification keys by Ducas and Micciancio (Crypto'14) and by Alperin-Sheriff (PKC'15), and allow us to achieve existential unforgeability against chosen message attacks (EUF-CMA) without resorting to chameleon hash functions.
The Discrete Logarithm Problem over Prime Fields can be transformed to a Linear Multivariable Chinese Remainder Theorem
The Discrete Logarithm Problem over Prime Fields can be transformed to a Linear Multivariable Chinese Remainder Theorem.
State Management for Hash-Based Signatures
The unavoidable transition to post-quantum cryptography
requires dependable quantum-safe digital signature schemes. Hash-based
signatures are well-understood and promising candidates, and the object
of current standardization efforts. In the scope of this standardization
process, the most commonly raised concern is statefulness, due to the use
of one-time signature schemes. While the theory of hash-based signatures
is mature, a discussion of the system security issues arising from the
concrete management of their state has been lacking. In this paper,
we analyze state management in N -time hash-based signature schemes,
considering both security and performance, and categorize the security
issues that can occur due to state synchronization failures. We describe
a state reservation approach that loosens the coupling between volatile
and nonvolatile storage, and show that it can be naturally realized in a
hierarchical signature scheme. To protect against unintentional copying
of the private key state, we consider a hybrid stateless/stateful scheme,
which provides a graceful security degradation in the face of unintentional
copying, at the cost of increased signature size. Compared to a completely
stateless scheme, the hybrid approach realizes the essential benefits, with
smaller signatures and faster signing.
Semi-Adaptive Security and Bundling Functionalities Made Generic and Easy
Semi-adaptive security is a notion of security that lies between selective and adaptive security for Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) and Functional Encryption (FE) systems. In the semi-adaptive model the attacker is forced to disclose the challenge messages before it makes any key queries, but is allowed to see the public parameters.
We show how to generically transform any selectively secure ABE or FE scheme into one that is semi-adaptively secure with the only additional assumption being public key encryption, which is already naturally included in almost any scheme of interest. Our technique utilizes a fairly simple application of garbled circuits where instead of encrypting directly, the encryptor creates a garbled circuit that takes as input the public parameters and outputs a ciphertext in the underlying selective scheme. Essentially, the encryption algorithm encrypts without knowing the `real' public parameters. This allows one to delay giving out the underlying selective parameters until a private key is issued, which connects the semi-adaptive to selective security. The methods used to achieve this result suggest that the moral gap between selective and semi-adaptive security is in general much smaller than that between semi-adaptive and full security.
Finally, we show how to extend the above idea to generically bundle a family of functionalities under one set of public parameters. For example, suppose we had an inner product predicate encryption scheme where the length of the vectors was specified at setup and therefore fixed to the public parameters. Using our transformation one could create a system where for a single set of public parameters the vector length is not apriori bounded, but instead is specified by the encryption algorithm. The resulting ciphertext would be compatible with any private key generated to work on the same input length.
Efficient Public-Key Cryptography with Bounded Leakage and Tamper Resilience
We revisit the question of constructing public-key encryption and signature schemes with security in the presence of bounded leakage and tampering memory attacks.
For signatures we obtain the first construction in the standard model; for public-key encryption we obtain the first construction free of pairing (avoiding non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs).
Our constructions are based on generic building blocks, and, as we show, also admit efficient instantiations under fairly standard number-theoretic assumptions.
The model of bounded tamper resistance was recently put forward by Damgård {\em et al.} (Asiacrypt 2013) as an attractive path to achieve security against arbitrary memory tampering attacks without making hardware assumptions (such as the existence of a protected self-destruct or key-update mechanism), the only restriction being on the number of allowed tampering attempts (which is a parameter of the scheme).
This allows to circumvent known impossibility results for unrestricted tampering (Gennaro {\em et al.}, TCC 2010), while still being able to capture realistic tampering attacks.
Single-Key to Multi-Key Functional Encryption with Polynomial Loss
Functional encryption (FE) enables fine-grained access to encrypted data. In a FE scheme, the holder of a secret key $\SK_f$ (associated with a function $f$) and a ciphertext $c$ (encrypting plaintext $x$) can learn $f(x)$ but nothing more.
An important parameter in the security model for FE is the number of secret keys that adversary has access to. In this work, we give a transformation from a FE scheme for which the adversary gets access to a single secret key (with ciphertext size sub-linear in the circuit for which this secret key is issued) to one that is secure even if adversary gets access to an {unbounded} number of secret keys. A novel feature of our transformation is that its security proof incurs only a {\em polynomial} loss.
Digital Signatures Based on the Hardness of Ideal Lattice Problems in all Rings
Many practical lattice-based schemes are built upon the Ring-SIS or Ring-LWE problems, which are problems that are based on the presumed difficulty of finding low-weight solutions to linear equations over polynomial rings $Z_q[x]/\langle f(x) \rangle$. Our belief in the asymptotic computational hardness of these problems rests in part on the fact that there are reduction showing that solving them is as hard as finding short vectors in all lattices that correspond to ideals of the polynomial ring $Z[x]/\langle f(x) \rangle$. These reductions, however, do not give us an indication as to the effect that the polynomial $f(x)$, which defines the ring, has on the average-case or worst-case problems. \\
As of today, there haven't been any weaknesses found in Ring-SIS or Ring-LWE problems when one uses an $f(x)$ which leads to a meaningful worst-case to average-case reduction, but there have been some recent algorithms for related problems that heavily use the algebraic structures of the underlying rings. It is thus conceivable that some rings could give rise to more difficult instances of Ring-SIS and Ring-LWE than other rings. A more ideal scenario would therefore be if there would be an average-case problem, allowing for efficient cryptographic constructions, that is based on the hardness of finding short vectors in ideals of $Z[x]/\langle f(x)\rangle$ for \emph{every} $f(x)$.\\
In this work, we show that the above may actually be possible. We construct a digital signature scheme based (in the random oracle model) on a simple adaptation of the Ring-SIS problem which is as hard to break as worst-case problems in every $f(x)$ whose degree is bounded by the parameters of the scheme. Up to constant factors, our scheme is as efficient as the highly practical schemes that work over the ring $Z[x]/\langle x^n+1\rangle$.
On the security of new vinegar-like variant of multivariate signature scheme
In IMACC 2015 and Inscrypt 2015, Zhang and Tan proposed new vinegar-like variants of multivariate signature schemes. While their aims were to enhance the security of broken schemes, the security is much less than expected. In this note, we describe how to recover a public key of the original scheme.
Efficient and Provable Secure Anonymous Hierarchical Identity-based Broadcast Encryption (HIBBE) Scheme without Random Oracle
Hierarchical identity-based broadcast encryption (HIBBE) organizes the users in a tree-like structure in which they can delegate the decryption ability to their subordinates. In addition, the trusted third party (TTP) can reduce its burden because the users' secret keys can be generated in a distributed mechanism by users' supervisors. HIBBE enables encrypting a message for any arbitrary set of receivers, and only the chosen users and their supervisors are able to decrypt. To preserving the anonymity of the intended receivers, in this paper, for the first time, we propose an anonymous HIBBE scheme. The proposed scheme is constructed based on composite order bilinear maps. We formally define the anonymity against chosen identity vector set and chosen plaintext attack (Anon-CIVS-CPA), and prove that the proposed scheme provides this property. Performance evaluation shows the practical and deployable aspects of our proposed scheme. With the advantage of HIBBE, we enable hierarchical identity-based signature (HIBS) schemes to sign a message for a set of designated verifiers. This resulted in proposing a generic construction for the novel notion of hierarchical identity-based multi-designated verifiable signature (HIB-MDVS). We formally define HIB-MDVS's security against existential forgery under chosen message attack (EF-CMA), prove that the resulting HIB-MDVS is unforgeable, and finally show that it provides the anonymity of the intended verifiers.
Cryptanalysis of a Homomorphic Encryption Scheme
Homomorphic encryption allows to make specific operations on private data which stays encrypted.
While applications such as cloud computing require to have a practical solution, the encryption scheme must be secure. In this article, we detail and analyze in-depth the homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Zhou and Wornell. From the analysis of the encryption scheme, we are able to mount three attacks. The first attack enables to recover a secret plaintext message broadcasted to multiple users. The second attack performs a chosen ciphertext key recovery attack and it was implemented and verified. The last attack is a related chosen plaintext decryption attack.
Non-malleability under Selective Opening Attacks: Implication and Separation
We formalize the security notions of non-malleability under selective opening attacks (NM-SO security) in two approaches: the indistinguishability-based approach and the simulationbased approach. We explore the relations between NM-SO security notions and the known selective
opening security notions, and the relations between NM-SO security notions and the standard non-malleability notions.
Non-Interactive RAM and Batch NP Delegation from any PIR
We present an adaptive and non-interactive protocol for verifying arbitrary efficient computations in fixed polynomial time. Our protocol is computationally sound and can be based on any computational PIR scheme, which in turn can be based on standard polynomial-time cryptographic assumptions (e.g. the worst case hardness of polynomial-factor approximation of short-vector lattice problems). In our protocol, the prover and the verifier do not need to interact at all: The verifier sets up a public key ahead of time, and this key can be used by any prover to prove arbitrary statements in a completely adaptive manner. Verification is done using a secret verification key, and soundness relies on this key not being known to the prover. Our protocol further allows to prove statements about computations of arbitrary RAM machines.
Previous works either relied on knowledge assumptions, or could only offer non-adaptive two-message protocols (where the first message could not be re-used), and required either obfuscation-based assumptions or super-polynomial hardness assumptions.
We show that our techniques can also be applied to construct a new type of (non-adaptive) 2-message delegation protocols for batch NP statements. Specifically, we can simultaneously prove the membership of multiple instances in a given NP language, with communication complexity proportional to the length of a single witness.