Amortized Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption

Threshold cryptography enables cryptographic operations while keeping the secret keys distributed at all times. Agrawal et al. (CCS\u2718) propose a framework for Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption (DiSE). They introduce a new notion of Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption (TSE), in that encryption and decryption are performed by interacting with a threshold number of servers. However, the necessity for interaction on each invocation limits performance when encrypting large datasets, incurring heavy computation and communication on the servers. This paper proposes a new approach to resolve this problem by introducing a new notion called Amortized Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption (ATSE), which allows a privileged client (with access to sensitive data) to encrypt a large group of messages using a single interaction. Importantly, our notion requires a client to interact for decrypting each ciphertext, thus providing the same security (privacy and authenticity) guarantee as DiSE with respect to a not-so-privileged client. We construct an ATSE scheme based on a new primitive that we formalize as flexible threshold key-derivation (FTKD), which allows parties to interactively derive pseudorandom keys in different modes in a threshold manner. Our FTKD construction, which uses bilinear pairings, is based on a distributed variant of left/right constrained PRF by Boneh and Waters (Asiacrypt\u2713). Despite our use of bilinear maps, our scheme achieves significant speed-ups due to the amortized interaction. Our experiments show 40x lower latency and 30x more throughput in some settings

ParaDiSE: Efficient Threshold Authenticated Encryption in Fully Malicious Model

Threshold cryptographic algorithms achieve robustness against key and access compromise by distributing secret keys among multiple entities. Most prior work focuses on threshold public-key primitives, despite extensive use of authenticated encryption in practice. Though the latter can be deployed in a threshold manner using multi-party computation (MPC), doing so incurs a high communication cost. In contrast, dedicated constructions of threshold authenticated encryption algorithms can achieve high performance. However to date, few such algorithms are known, most notably DiSE (distributed symmetric encryption) by Agrawal et al. (ACM CCS 2018). To achieve threshold authenticated encryption} (TAE), prior work does not suffice, due to shortcomings in definitions, analysis, and design, allowing for potentially insecure schemes, an undesirable similarity between encryption and decryption, and insufficient understanding of the impact of parameters due to lack of concrete analysis. In response, we revisit the problem of designing secure and efficient TAE schemes. (1) We give new TAE security definitions in the fully malicious setting addressing the aforementioned concerns. (2) We construct efficient schemes satisfying our definitions and perform concrete and more modular security analyses. (3) We conduct an extensive performance evaluation of our constructions, against prior ones

DiSE: Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption

Threshold cryptography provides a mechanism for protecting secret keys by sharing them among multiple parties, who then jointly perform cryptographic operations. An attacker who corrupts upto a threshold number of parties cannot recover the secrets or violate security. Prior works in this space have mostly focused on definitions and constructions for public-key cryptography and digital signatures, and thus do not capture the security concerns and efficiency challenges of symmetric-key based applications which commonly use long-term (unprotected) master keys to protect data at rest, authenticate clients on enterprise networks, and secure data and payments on IoT devices. We put forth the first formal treatment for distributed symmetric-key encryption, proposing new notions of correctness, privacy and authenticity in presence of malicious attackers. We provide strong and intuitive game-based definitions that are easy to understand and yield efficient constructions. We propose a generic construction of threshold authenticated encryption based on any distributed pseudorandom function (DPRF). When instantiated with the two different DPRF constructions proposed by Naor, Pinkas and Reingold (Eurocrypt 1999) and our enhanced versions, we obtain several efficient constructions meeting different security definitions. We implement these variants and provide extensive performance comparisons. Our most efficient instantiation uses only symmetric-key primitives and achieves a throughput of upto 1 million encryptions/decryptions per seconds, or alternatively a sub-millisecond latency with upto 18 participating parties