Cryptanalysis of the Huang-Liu-Yang Cryptosystem from PKC 2012

This short note describes a key-recovery attack against a multivariate quadratic cryptosystem proposed by Huang, Liu, and Yang (PKC 2012). Our attack is running lattice-basis reduction algorithms on a lattice constructed from the keys in the cryptosystem. The attack takes less than 20 minutes for the proposed parameter sets which are expected to be 80-bit and 128-bit security

A Survey on Homomorphic Encryption Schemes: Theory and Implementation

Legacy encryption systems depend on sharing a key (public or private) among the peers involved in exchanging an encrypted message. However, this approach poses privacy concerns. Especially with popular cloud services, the control over the privacy of the sensitive data is lost. Even when the keys are not shared, the encrypted material is shared with a third party that does not necessarily need to access the content. Moreover, untrusted servers, providers, and cloud operators can keep identifying elements of users long after users end the relationship with the services. Indeed, Homomorphic Encryption (HE), a special kind of encryption scheme, can address these concerns as it allows any third party to operate on the encrypted data without decrypting it in advance. Although this extremely useful feature of the HE scheme has been known for over 30 years, the first plausible and achievable Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, which allows any computable function to perform on the encrypted data, was introduced by Craig Gentry in 2009. Even though this was a major achievement, different implementations so far demonstrated that FHE still needs to be improved significantly to be practical on every platform. First, we present the basics of HE and the details of the well-known Partially Homomorphic Encryption (PHE) and Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SWHE), which are important pillars of achieving FHE. Then, the main FHE families, which have become the base for the other follow-up FHE schemes are presented. Furthermore, the implementations and recent improvements in Gentry-type FHE schemes are also surveyed. Finally, further research directions are discussed. This survey is intended to give a clear knowledge and foundation to researchers and practitioners interested in knowing, applying, as well as extending the state of the art HE, PHE, SWHE, and FHE systems.Comment: - Updated. (October 6, 2017) - This paper is an early draft of the survey that is being submitted to ACM CSUR and has been uploaded to arXiv for feedback from stakeholder

Practical Cryptanalysis of a Public-Key Encryption Scheme Based on New Multivariate Quadratic Assumptions

In this paper, we investigate the security of a public-key encryption scheme introduced by Huang, Liu and Yang (HLY) at PKC’12. This new scheme can be provably reduced to the hardness of solving a set of quadratic equations whose coefficients of highest degree are chosen according to a discrete Gaussian distributions. The other terms being chosen uniformly at random. Such a problem is a variant of the classical problem of solving a system of non-linear equations (PoSSo), which is known to be hard for random systems. The main hypothesis of Huang, Liu and Yang is that their variant is not easier than solving PoSSo for random instances. In this paper, we disprove this hypothesis. To this end, we exploit the fact that the new problem proposed by Huang, Liu and Yang reduces to an easy instance of the Learning With Errors (LWE) problem. The main contribution of this paper is to show that security and efficiency are essentially incompatible for the HLY proposal. That is, one cannot find parameters which yield a secure and a practical scheme. For instance, we estimate that a public-key of at least 1.03 GB is required to achieve 80-bit security against known attacks. As a proof of concept, we present practical attacks against all the parameters proposed Huang, Liu and Yang. We have been able to recover the private-key in roughly one day for the first challenge proposed by HLY and in roughly three days for the second challenge

Envisioning the Future of Cyber Security in Post-Quantum Era: A Survey on PQ Standardization, Applications, Challenges and Opportunities

The rise of quantum computers exposes vulnerabilities in current public key cryptographic protocols, necessitating the development of secure post-quantum (PQ) schemes. Hence, we conduct a comprehensive study on various PQ approaches, covering the constructional design, structural vulnerabilities, and offer security assessments, implementation evaluations, and a particular focus on side-channel attacks. We analyze global standardization processes, evaluate their metrics in relation to real-world applications, and primarily focus on standardized PQ schemes, selected additional signature competition candidates, and PQ-secure cutting-edge schemes beyond standardization. Finally, we present visions and potential future directions for a seamless transition to the PQ era

An Efficient Certificate-Based Designated Verifier Signature Scheme

Certificate-based public key cryptography not only solves certificate revocation problem in traditional PKI but also overcomes key escrow problem inherent in identity-based cryptosystems. This new primitive has become an attractive cryptographic paradigm. In this paper, we propose the notion and the security model of certificate-based designated verifier signatures (CBDVS). We provide the first construction of CBDVS and prove that our scheme is existentially unforgeable against adaptive chosen message attacks in the random oracle model. Our scheme only needs two pairing operations, and the signature is only one element in the bilinear group G1. To the best of our knowledge, our scheme enjoys shortest signature length with less operation cost

Enhanced fully homomorphic encryption scheme using modified key generation for cloud environment

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is a special class of encryption that allows performing unlimited mathematical operations on encrypted data without decrypting it. There are symmetric and asymmetric FHE schemes. The symmetric schemes suffer from the semantically security property and need more performance improvements. While asymmetric schemes are semantically secure however, they pose two implicit problems. The first problem is related to the size of key and ciphertext and the second problem is the efficiency of the schemes. This study aims to reduce the execution time of the symmetric FHE scheme by enhancing the key generation algorithm using the Pick-Test method. As such, the Binary Learning with Error lattice is used to solve the key and ciphertext size problems of the asymmetric FHE scheme. The combination of enhanced symmetric and asymmetric algorithms is used to construct a multi-party protocol that allows many users to access and manipulate the data in the cloud environment. The Pick-Test method of the Sym-Key algorithm calculates the matrix inverse and determinant in one instance requires only n-1 extra multiplication for the calculation of determinant which takes 0(N3) as a total cost, while the Random method in the standard scheme takes 0(N3) to find matrix inverse and 0(N!) to calculate the determinant which results in 0(N4) as a total cost. Furthermore, the implementation results show that the proposed key generation algorithm based on the pick-test method could be used as an alternative to improve the performance of the standard FHE scheme. The secret key in the Binary-LWE FHE scheme is selected from {0,1}n to obtain a minimal key and ciphertext size, while the public key is based on learning with error problem. As a result, the secret key, public key and tensored ciphertext is enhanced from logq , 0(n2log2q) and ((n+1)n2log2q)2log q to n, (n+1)2log q and (n+1)2log q respectively. The Binary-LWE FHE scheme is a secured but noise-based scheme. Hence, the modulus switching technique is used as a noise management technique to scale down the noise from e and c to e/B and c/B respectively thus, the total cost for noise management is enhanced from 0(n3log2q) to 0(n2log q) . The Multi-party protocol is constructed to support the cloud computing on Sym-Key FHE scheme. The asymmetric Binary-LWE FHE scheme is used as a small part of the protocol to verify the access of users to any resource. Hence, the protocol combines both symmetric and asymmetric FHE schemes which have the advantages of efficiency and security. FHE is a new approach with a bright future in cloud computing

Insecurity of a Certificate-free Ad Hoc Anonymous Authentication

Abstract The ring signature scheme is a simplified group signature scheme for no manager while preserving unconditionally anonymous of the signer. Certificateless cryptography is introduced for eliminating the use of certificates in Public Key Infrastructure and solving the key-escrow problem in ID-based cryptogratography. Recently, Qin et al. proposed the first RSA-based certificateless ring signature scheme which was proved unforgeable in random oracle model. In this paper, we demonstrated that this scheme was not secure against the Type I adversary

A survey on wireless body area networks: architecture, security challenges and research opportunities.

In the era of communication technologies, wireless healthcare networks enable innovative applications to enhance the quality of patients’ lives, provide useful monitoring tools for caregivers, and allows timely intervention. However, due to the sensitive information within the Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs), insecure data violates the patients’ privacy and may consequently lead to improper medical diagnosis and/or treatment. Achieving a high level of security and privacy in WBAN involves various challenges due to its resource limitations and critical applications. In this paper, a comprehensive survey of the WBAN technology is provided, with a particular focus on the security and privacy concerns along with their countermeasures, followed by proposed research directions and open issues