A machine-checked proof of security for AWS key management service

We present a machine-checked proof of security for the domain management protocol of Amazon Web Services' KMS (Key Management Service) a critical security service used throughout AWS and by AWS customers. Domain management is at the core of AWS KMS; it governs the top-level keys that anchor the security of encryption services at AWS. We show that the protocol securely implements an ideal distributed encryption mechanism under standard cryptographic assumptions. The proof is machine-checked in the EasyCrypt proof assistant and is the largest EasyCrypt development to date.Manuel Barbosa was supported by grant SFRH/BSAB/143018/2018 awarded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). Vitor Pereira was supported by grant FCT-PD/BD/113967/201 awarded by FCT. This work was partially funded by national funds via FCT in the context of project PTDC/CCI-INF/31698/2017

Password-Authenticated Public-Key Encryption

We introduce password-authenticated public-key encryption (PAPKE), a new cryptographic primitive. PAPKE enables secure end-to-end encryption between two entities without relying on a trusted third party or other out-of-band mechanisms for authentication. Instead, resistance to man-in-the-middle attacks is ensured in a human-friendly way by authenticating the public key with a shared password, while preventing offline dictionary attacks given the authenticated public key and/or the ciphertexts produced using this key. Our contributions are three-fold. First, we provide property-based and universally composable (UC) definitions for PAPKE, with the resulting primitive combining CCA security of public-key encryption (PKE) with password authentication. Second, we show that PAPKE implies Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), but the reverse implication does not hold, indicating that PAPKE is a strictly stronger primitive than PAKE. Indeed, PAPKE implies a two-flow PAKE which remains secure if either party re-uses its state in multiple sessions, e.g. due to communication errors, thus strengthening existing notions of PAKE security. Third, we show two highly practical UC PAPKE schemes: a generic construction built from CCA-secure and anonymous PKE and an ideal cipher, and a direct construction based on the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Finally, applying our PAPKE-to-PAKE compiler to the above PAPKE schemes we exhibit the first 2-round UC PAKE\u27s with efficiency comparable to (unauthenticated) Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Generic Constructions of Compact and Tightly Selective-Opening Secure Public-key Encryption Schemes

We propose two generic constructions of public-key encryption (PKE) with tight simulation-based selective-opening security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (SIM-SO-CCA) in the random oracle model. Our constructions can be instantiated with a small constant number of elements in the ciphertext, ignoring smaller contributions from symmetric-key encryption. That is, they have compact ciphertexts. Furthermore, three of our instantiations have compact public keys as well. Known (almost) tightly SIM-SO-CCA secure PKE schemes are due to the work of Lyu et al. (PKC 2018) and Libert et al. (Crypto 2017). They have either linear-size ciphertexts or linear-size public keys. Moreover, they only achieve almost tightness, namely, with security loss depending on the security parameter. In contrast to them, our schemes are the first ones achieving both tight SIM-SO-CCA security and compactness. More precisely, our two generic constructions are: - From Pseudorandom KEM: Our first generic construction is from a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) with pseudorandom ciphertexts against plaintext-checking attacks. Such a KEM can be constructed directly from the Strong Diffie-Hellman (StDH), Computational DH (CDH), and Decisional DH assumptions. Both their ciphertexts and public keys are compact. Their security loss is a small constant. Interestingly, our CDH-based construction is the first scheme achieving all these advantages based on a weak search assumption. Furthermore, we also give a generic construction of such a KEM, which yields an efficient tightly SIM-SO-CCA PKE from lattices. - From Lossy Encryption: Our second scheme is the well-known Fujisaki-Okamoto transformation. We show that it can turn a lossy encryption scheme into a tightly SIM-SO-CCA secure PKE. This transformation preserves both tightness and compactness of the underlying lossy encryption, which is in contrast to the non-tight proof of Heuer et al. (PKC 2015)

The Exact Security of a Stateful IBE and New Compact Stateful PKE Schemes

Recently, Baek et al. proposed a stateful identity based encryption scheme with compact ciphertext and commented that the security of the scheme can be reduced to the Computational Bilinear Diffie Hellman (CBDH) problem. In this paper, we formally prove that the security of the stateful identity based encryption scheme by Baek et al. cannot be reduced to the CBDH problem. In fact, we show that the challenger will confront the Y-Computational problem while providing the decryption oracle access to the adversary. We provide the exact and formal security proof for the scheme, assuming the hardness of the Gap Bilinear Diffie Hellman (GBDH) problem. We also propose two new stateful public key encryption scheme with ciphertext verifiability. Our schemes offer more compact ciphertext when compared to all existing stateful public key encryption schemes with ciphertext verifiability. We have proved all the schemes in the random oracle model

Securing Remote Access Inside Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) that are being increasingly deployed in communities and public places provide a relatively stable routing infrastructure and can be used for diverse carrier-managed services. As a particular example we consider the scenario where a mobile device initially registered for the use with one wireless network (its home network) moves to the area covered by another network inside the same mesh. The goal is to establish a secure access to the home network using the infrastructure of the mesh. Classical mechanisms such as VPNs can protect end-to-end communication between the mobile device and its home network while remaining transparent to the routing infrastructure. In WMNs this transparency can be misused for packet injection leading to the unnecessary consumption of the communication bandwidth. This may have negative impact on the cooperation of mesh routers which is essential for the connection establishment. In this paper we describe how to establish remote connections inside WMNs while guaranteeing secure end-to-end communication between the mobile device and its home network and secure transmission of the corresponding packets along the underlying multi-hop path. Our solution is a provably secure, yet lightweight and round-optimal remote network access protocol in which intermediate mesh routers are considered to be part of the security architecture. We also sketch some ideas on the practical realization of the protocol using known standards and mention extensions with regard to forward secrecy, anonymity and accounting

Concurrently Secure Blind Schnorr Signatures

Many applications of blind signatures (notably in blockchains) require the resulting signatures to be compatible with the existing system. This makes schemes that produce Schnorr signatures (now being standardized and supported by major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin) desirable. Unfortunately, the existing blind-signing protocol has been shown insecure when users can open signing sessions concurrently (Eurocrypt\u2721). On the other hand, only allowing sequential sessions opens the door to denial-of-service attacks. We present the first practical, concurrently secure blind-signing protocol for Schnorr signatures, using the standard primitives NIZK and PKE and assuming that Schnorr signatures themselves are unforgeable. We cast our scheme as a generalization of blind and partially blind signatures: we introduce the notion of predicate blind signatures, in which the signer can define a predicate that the blindly signed message must satisfy. We provide proof-of-concept implementations and benchmarks for various choices of primitives and scenarios, including blindly signing Bitcoin transactions conditioned on certain properties

Critical Perspectives on Provable Security: Fifteen Years of Another Look Papers

We give an overview of our critiques of “proofs” of security and a guide to our papers on the subject that have appeared over the past decade and a half. We also provide numerous additional examples and a few updates and errata

New Cryptosystems From CSP-Based Self-Distributive Systems

We propose new cryptosystems based on self-distributive systems that are defined by conjugator searching problems (CSP) in noncommutative groups. Under the newly developed cryptographic assumptions, our basic construction is proven IND-CPA secure in the standard model. Then, we describe two extensions: The first is proven IND-CCA secure in the random oracle model, while the second achieves the IND-CCA security in the standard model. Moreover, our proposal is instantiated with braid groups, and leads to a new braid-based encryption scheme and its security is directly rooted in the intractability assumption of CSP in braid groups

Chosen-Ciphertext Secure RSA-type Cryptosystems

This paper explains how to design fully secure RSA-type cryptosystems from schemes only secure against passive attacks, in the standard model. We rely on instance-independence assumptions, which, roughly speaking, conjecture that for certain problems, an interactive access to a solver for another problem does not help the challenger. Previously, instance-independence assumptions were used in a negative way, to prove that certain schemes proven in the random oracle model were not provable in the standard model. Our paradigm applies virtually to all (weakly secure) RSA-type encryption schemes for which public-key RSA exponent can be arbitrarily chosen. As an illustration, we present a chosen-ciphertext secure variant of the Naccache-Stern encryption scheme