A Cramer-Shoup Encryption Scheme from the Linear Assumption and from Progressively Weaker Linear Variants

We describe a CCA-secure public-key encryption scheme, in the Cramer-Shoup paradigm, based on the Linear assumption of Boneh, Boyen, and Shacham. Through a comparison to the Kiltz tag-encryption scheme from TCC 2006, our scheme gives evidence that the Cramer-Shoup paradigm yields CCA encryption with shorter ciphertexts than the Canetti-Halevi-Katz paradigm. We present a generalization of the Linear assumption into a family of progressively weaker assumptions and show how to instantiate our Linear Cramer-Shoup encryption using the progressively weaker members of this family

Converting Pairing-Based Cryptosystems from Composite-Order Groups to Prime-Order Groups

We develop an abstract framework that encompasses the key properties of bilinear groups of composite order that are required to construct secure pairing-based cryptosystems, and we show how to use prime-order elliptic curve groups to construct bilinear groups with the same properties. In particular, we define a generalized version of the subgroup decision problem and give explicit constructions of bilinear groups in which the generalized subgroup decision assumption follows from the decision Diffie-Hellman assumption, the decision linear assumption, and/or related assumptions in prime-order groups. We apply our framework and our prime-order group constructions to create more efficient versions of cryptosystems that originally required composite-order groups. Specifically, we consider the Boneh-Goh-Nissim encryption scheme, the Boneh-Sahai-Waters traitor tracing system, and the Katz-Sahai-Waters attribute-based encryption scheme. We give a security theorem for the prime-order group instantiation of each system, using assumptions of comparable complexity to those used in the composite-order setting. Our conversion of the last two systems to prime-order groups answers a problem posed by Groth and Sahai

A cramer-shoup encryption scheme from the linear assumption and from progressively weaker linear variants

We describe a CCA-secure public-key encryption scheme, in the Cramer-Shoup paradigm, based on the Linear assumption of Boneh, Boyen, and Shacham. Through a comparison to the Kiltz tag-encryption scheme from TCC 2006, our scheme gives evidence that the Cramer-Shoup paradigm yields CCA encryption with shorter ciphertexts than the Canetti-Halevi-Katz paradigm. We present a generalization of the Linear assumption into a family of progressively weaker assumptions and show how to instantiate our Linear Cramer-Shoup encryption using the progressively weaker members of this family

Chameleon all-but-one TDFs and their application to chosen-ciphertext security

A*Star SERCLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011, Volume 6571/2011, 228-245</p

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 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 et al., TCC 2010), while still being able to capture realistic tampering attack

Secure Blind Decryption

Abstract. In this work we construct public key encryption schemes that admit a protocol for blindly decrypting ciphertexts. In a blind decryp-tion protocol, a user with a ciphertext interacts with a secret keyholder such that the user obtains the decryption of the ciphertext and the key-holder learns nothing about what it decrypted. While we are not the first to consider this problem, previous works provided only weak secu-rity guarantees against malicious users. We provide, to our knowledge, the first practical blind decryption schemes that are secure under a strong CCA security definition. We prove our construction secure in the stan-dard model under simple, well-studied assumptions in bilinear groups. To motivate the usefulness of this primitive we discuss several applica-tions including privacy-preserving distributed file systems and Oblivious Transfer schemes that admit public contribution.

Group Signatures with Message-Dependent Opening: Formal Definitions and Constructions

This paper introduces a new capability for group signatures called message-dependent opening. It is intended to weaken the high trust placed on the opener; i.e., no anonymity against the opener is provided by an ordinary group signature scheme. In a group signature scheme with message-dependent opening (GS-MDO), in addition to the opener, we set up an admitter that is not able to extract any user’s identity but admits the opener to open signatures by specifying messages where signatures on the specified messages will be opened by the opener. The opener cannot extract the signer’s identity from any signature whose corresponding message is not specified by the admitter. This paper presents formal definitions of GS-MDO and proposes a generic construction of it from identity-based encryption and adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. Moreover, we propose two specific constructions, one in the standard model and one in the random oracle model. Our scheme in the standard model is an instantiation of our generic construction but the message-dependent opening property is bounded. In contrast, our scheme in the random oracle model is not a direct instantiation of our generic construction but is optimized to increase efficiency and achieves the unbounded message-dependent opening property. Furthermore, we also demonstrate that GS-MDO implies identity-based encryption, thus implying that identity-based encryption is essential for designing GS-MDO schemes

Algebraic Frameworks for Cryptographic Primitives

A fundamental goal in theoretical cryptography is to identify the conceptually simplest abstractions that generically imply a collection of other cryptographic primitives. For symmetric-key primitives, this goal has been accomplished by showing that one-way functions are necessary and sufficient to realize primitives ranging from symmetric-key encryption to digital signatures. By contrast, for asymmetric primitives, we have no (known) unifying simple abstraction even for a few of its most basic objects. Moreover, even for public-key encryption (PKE) alone, we have no unifying abstraction that all known constructions follow. The fact that almost all known PKE constructions exploit some algebraic structure suggests considering abstractions that have some basic algebraic properties, irrespective of their concrete instantiation. We make progress on the aforementioned fundamental goal by identifying simple and useful cryptographic abstractions and showing that they imply a variety of asymmetric primitives. Our general approach is to augment symmetric abstractions with algebraic structure that turns out to be sufficient for PKE and much more, thus yielding a “bridge” between symmetric and asymmetric primitives. We introduce two algebraic frameworks that capture almost all concrete instantiations of (asymmetric) cryptographic primitives, and we also demonstrate their applicability by showing their cryptographic implications. Therefore, rather than manually building different cryptosystems from a new assumption, one only needs to build one (or more) of our simple structured primitives, and a whole host of cryptosystems immediately follows.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166137/1/alamati_1.pd

A Framework for Identity-Based Encryption with Almost Tight Security

We show a framework for constructing identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes that are (almost) tightly secure in the multi-challenge and multi-instance setting. In particular, we formalize a new notion called broadcast encoding, analogously to encoding notions by Attrapadung (Eurocrypt \u2714) and Wee (TCC \u2714). We then show that it can be converted into such an IBE. By instantiating the framework using several encoding schemes (new or known ones), we obtain the following: - We obtain (almost) tightly secure IBE in the multi-challenge, multi-instance setting, both in composite and prime-order groups. The latter resolves the open problem posed by Hofheinz et al (PKC \u2715). - We obtain the first (almost) tightly secure IBE with sub-linear size public parameters (master public keys). In particular, we can set the size of the public parameters to constant at the cost of longer ciphertexts. This gives a partial solution to the open problem posed by Chen and Wee (Crypto \u2713). By applying (a variant of) the Canetti-Halevi-Katz transformation to our schemes, we obtain several CCA-secure PKE schemes with tight security in the multi-challenge, multi-instance setting. One of our schemes achieves very small ciphertext overhead, consisting of less than 12 group elements. This significantly improves the state-of-the-art construction by Libert et al.~(in ePrint Archive) which requires 47 group elements. Furthermore, by modifying one of our IBE schemes obtained above, we can make it anonymous. This gives the first anonymous IBE whose security is almost tightly shown in the multi-challenge setting