Ad Hoc Multi-Input Functional Encryption

Consider sources that supply sensitive data to an aggregator. Standard encryption only hides the data from eavesdroppers, but using specialized encryption one can hope to hide the data (to the extent possible) from the aggregator itself. For flexibility and security, we envision schemes that allow sources to supply encrypted data, such that at any point a dynamically-chosen subset of sources can allow an agreed-upon joint function of their data to be computed by the aggregator. A primitive called multi-input functional encryption (MIFE), due to Goldwasser et al. (EUROCRYPT 2014), comes close, but has two main limitations: - it requires trust in a third party, who is able to decrypt all the data, and - it requires function arity to be fixed at setup time and to be equal to the number of parties. To drop these limitations, we introduce a new notion of ad hoc MIFE. In our setting, each source generates its own public key and issues individual, function-specific secret keys to an aggregator. For successful decryption, an aggregator must obtain a separate key from each source whose ciphertext is being computed upon. The aggregator could obtain multiple such secret-keys from a user corresponding to functions of varying arity. For this primitive, we obtain the following results: - We show that standard MIFE for general functions can be bootstrapped to ad hoc MIFE for free, i.e. without making any additional assumption. - We provide a direct construction of ad hoc MIFE for the inner product functionality based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. This yields the first construction of this natural primitive based on a standard assumption. At a technical level, our results are obtained by combining standard MIFE schemes and two-round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols in novel ways highlighting an interesting interplay between MIFE and two-round MPC

A Taxonomy of Workflow Management Systems for Grid Computing

With the advent of Grid and application technologies, scientists and engineers are building more and more complex applications to manage and process large data sets, and execute scientific experiments on distributed resources. Such application scenarios require means for composing and executing complex workflows. Therefore, many efforts have been made towards the development of workflow management systems for Grid computing. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy that characterizes and classifies various approaches for building and executing workflows on Grids. We also survey several representative Grid workflow systems developed by various projects world-wide to demonstrate the comprehensiveness of the taxonomy. The taxonomy not only highlights the design and engineering similarities and differences of state-of-the-art in Grid workflow systems, but also identifies the areas that need further research.Comment: 29 pages, 15 figure

Foundations, Properties, and Security Applications of Puzzles: A Survey

Cryptographic algorithms have been used not only to create robust ciphertexts but also to generate cryptograms that, contrary to the classic goal of cryptography, are meant to be broken. These cryptograms, generally called puzzles, require the use of a certain amount of resources to be solved, hence introducing a cost that is often regarded as a time delay---though it could involve other metrics as well, such as bandwidth. These powerful features have made puzzles the core of many security protocols, acquiring increasing importance in the IT security landscape. The concept of a puzzle has subsequently been extended to other types of schemes that do not use cryptographic functions, such as CAPTCHAs, which are used to discriminate humans from machines. Overall, puzzles have experienced a renewed interest with the advent of Bitcoin, which uses a CPU-intensive puzzle as proof of work. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the most important puzzle construction schemes available in the literature, categorizing them according to several attributes, such as resource type, verification type, and applications. We have redefined the term puzzle by collecting and integrating the scattered notions used in different works, to cover all the existing applications. Moreover, we provide an overview of the possible applications, identifying key requirements and different design approaches. Finally, we highlight the features and limitations of each approach, providing a useful guide for the future development of new puzzle schemes.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing Survey