50 research outputs found

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

    Concurrently Secure Blind Schnorr Signatures

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    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

    Malleable zero-knowledge proofs and applications

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    In recent years, the field of privacy-preserving technologies has experienced considerable expansion, with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) playing one of the most prominent roles. Although ZKPs have been a well-established theoretical construct for three decades, recent efficiency improvements and novel privacy applications within decentralized finance have become the main drivers behind the surge of interest and investment in this area. This momentum has subsequently sparked unprecedented technical advances. Non-interactive ZKPs (NIZKs) are now regularly implemented across a variety of domains, encompassing, but not limited to, privacy-enabling cryptocurrencies, credential systems, voting, mixing, secure multi-party computation, and other cryptographic protocols. This thesis, although covering several areas of ZKP technologies and their application, focuses on one important aspect of NIZKs, namely their malleability. Malleability is a quality of a proof system that describes the potential for altering an already generated proof. Different properties may be desired in different application contexts. On the one end of the spectrum, non-malleability ensures proof immutability, an important requirement in scenarios such as prevention of replay attacks in anonymous cryptocurrencies. At the other end, some NIZKs enable proof updatability, recursively and directly, a feature that is integral for a variety of contexts, such as private smart contracts, compact blockchains, ZK rollups, ZK virtual machines, and MPC protocols generally. This work starts with a detailed analysis of the malleability and overarching security of a popular NIZK, known as Groth16. Here we adopt a more definitional approach, studying certain properties of the proof system, and its setup ceremony, that are crucial for its precise modelling within bigger systems. Subsequently, the work explores the malleability of transactions within a private cryptocurrency variant, where we show that relaxing non-malleability assumptions enables a functionality, specifically an atomic asset swap, that is useful for cryptocurrency applications. The work culminates with a study of a less general, algebraic NIZK, and particularly its updatability properties, whose applicability we present within the context of ensuring privacy for regulatory compliance purposes

    Updatable Privacy-Preserving Blueprints

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    Privacy-preserving blueprints enable users to create escrows using the auditor\u27s public key. An escrow encrypts the evaluation of a function P(t,x)P(t,x), where tt is a secret input used to generate the auditor\u27s key and xx is the user\u27s private input to escrow generation. Nothing but P(t,x)P(t,x) is revealed even to a fully corrupted auditor. The original definition and construction (Kohlweiss et al., EUROCRYPT\u2723) only support the evaluation of functions on an input xx provided by a single user. We address this limitation by introducing updatable privacy-preserving blueprint schemes (UPPB), which enhance the original notion with the ability for multiple parties to non-interactively update the private value xx in a blueprint. Moreover, a UPPB scheme allows for verifying that a blueprint is the result of a sequence of valid updates while revealing nothing else. We present uBlu, an efficient instantiation of UPPB for computing a comparison between private user values and a private threshold tt set by the auditor, where the current value xx is the cumulative sum of private inputs, which enables applications such as privacy-preserving anti-money laundering and location tracking. Additionally, we show the feasibility of the notion generically for all value update functions and (binary) predicates from FHE and NIZKs. Our main technical contribution is a technique to keep the size of primary blueprint components independent of the number of updates and reasonable for practical applications. This is achieved by elegantly extending an algebraic NIZK by Couteau and Hartmann (CRYPTO\u2720) with an update function and making it compatible with our additive updates. This result is of independent interest and may find additional applications thanks to the concise size of our proofs

    Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022

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    Understanding Quantum Technologies 2022 is a creative-commons ebook that provides a unique 360 degrees overview of quantum technologies from science and technology to geopolitical and societal issues. It covers quantum physics history, quantum physics 101, gate-based quantum computing, quantum computing engineering (including quantum error corrections and quantum computing energetics), quantum computing hardware (all qubit types, including quantum annealing and quantum simulation paradigms, history, science, research, implementation and vendors), quantum enabling technologies (cryogenics, control electronics, photonics, components fabs, raw materials), quantum computing algorithms, software development tools and use cases, unconventional computing (potential alternatives to quantum and classical computing), quantum telecommunications and cryptography, quantum sensing, quantum technologies around the world, quantum technologies societal impact and even quantum fake sciences. The main audience are computer science engineers, developers and IT specialists as well as quantum scientists and students who want to acquire a global view of how quantum technologies work, and particularly quantum computing. This version is an extensive update to the 2021 edition published in October 2021.Comment: 1132 pages, 920 figures, Letter forma

    Anonymous Point Collection - Improved Models and Security Definitions

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    This work is a comprehensive, formal treatment of anonymous point collection. The proposed definition does not only provide a strong notion of security and privacy, but also covers features which are important for practical use. An efficient realization is presented and proven to fulfill the proposed definition. The resulting building block is the first one that allows for anonymous two-way transactions, has semi-offline capabilities, yields constant storage size, and is provably secure

    Applied Methuerstic computing

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    For decades, Applied Metaheuristic Computing (AMC) has been a prevailing optimization technique for tackling perplexing engineering and business problems, such as scheduling, routing, ordering, bin packing, assignment, facility layout planning, among others. This is partly because the classic exact methods are constrained with prior assumptions, and partly due to the heuristics being problem-dependent and lacking generalization. AMC, on the contrary, guides the course of low-level heuristics to search beyond the local optimality, which impairs the capability of traditional computation methods. This topic series has collected quality papers proposing cutting-edge methodology and innovative applications which drive the advances of AMC
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