Hard isogeny problems over RSA moduli and groups with infeasible inversion

We initiate the study of computational problems on elliptic curve isogeny graphs defined over RSA moduli. We conjecture that several variants of the neighbor-search problem over these graphs are hard, and provide a comprehensive list of cryptanalytic attempts on these problems. Moreover, based on the hardness of these problems, we provide a construction of groups with infeasible inversion, where the underlying groups are the ideal class groups of imaginary quadratic orders. Recall that in a group with infeasible inversion, computing the inverse of a group element is required to be hard, while performing the group operation is easy. Motivated by the potential cryptographic application of building a directed transitive signature scheme, the search for a group with infeasible inversion was initiated in the theses of Hohenberger and Molnar (2003). Later it was also shown to provide a broadcast encryption scheme by Irrer et al. (2004). However, to date the only case of a group with infeasible inversion is implied by the much stronger primitive of self-bilinear map constructed by Yamakawa et al. (2014) based on the hardness of factoring and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO). Our construction gives a candidate without using iO.Comment: Significant revision of the article previously titled "A Candidate Group with Infeasible Inversion" (arXiv:1810.00022v1). Cleared up the constructions by giving toy examples, added "The Parallelogram Attack" (Sec 5.3.2). 54 pages, 8 figure

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Isogeny-based post-quantum key exchange protocols

The goal of this project is to understand and analyze the supersingular isogeny Diffie Hellman (SIDH), a post-quantum key exchange protocol which security lies on the isogeny-finding problem between supersingular elliptic curves. In order to do so, we first introduce the reader to cryptography focusing on key agreement protocols and motivate the rise of post-quantum cryptography as a necessity with the existence of the model of quantum computation. We review some of the known attacks on the SIDH and finally study some algorithmic aspects to understand how the protocol can be implemented

Analysis of Parallel Montgomery Multiplication in CUDA

For a given level of security, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) offers improved efficiency over classic public key implementations. Point multiplication is the most common operation in ECC and, consequently, any significant improvement in perfor- mance will likely require accelerating point multiplication. In ECC, the Montgomery algorithm is widely used for point multiplication. The primary purpose of this project is to implement and analyze a parallel implementation of the Montgomery algorithm as it is used in ECC. Specifically, the performance of CPU-based Montgomery multiplication and a GPU-based implementation in CUDA are compared