Authentication under Constraints

Authentication has become a critical step to gain access to services such as on-line banking, e-commerce, transport systems and cars (contact-less keys). In several cases, however, the authentication process has to be performed under challenging conditions. This thesis is essentially a compendium of five papers which are the result of a two-year study on authentication in constrained settings. The two major constraints considered in this work are: (1) the noise and (2) the computational power. For what concerns authentication under noisy conditions, Paper A and Paper B ad- dress the case in which the noise is in the authentication credentials. More precisely, the aforementioned papers present attacks against biometric authentication systems, that exploit the inherent variant nature of biometric traits to gain information that should not be leaked by the system. Paper C and Paper D study proximity- based authentication, i.e., distance-bounding protocols. In this case, both of the constraints are present: the possible presence of noise in the channel (which affects communication and thus the authentication process), as well as resource constraints on the computational power and the storage space of the authenticating party (called the prover, e.g., an RFID tag). Finally, Paper E investigates how to achieve reliable verification of the authenticity of a digital signature, when the verifying party has limited computational power, and thus offloads part of the computations to an untrusted server. Throughout the presented research work, a special emphasis is given to privacy concerns risen by the constrained conditions

Algorithmes de délégation de calcul de couplage

International audienceWe address the question of how a computationally limited device may outsource pairing computation in cryptography to another, potentially malicious, but much more computationally powerful device. We introduce two new efficient protocols for securely outsourcing pairing computations to an untrusted helper. The first generic scheme is proven computationally secure (and can be proven statistically secure at the expense of worse performance). It allows various communication-efficiency trade-offs. The second specific scheme -- for optimal Ate pairing on a Barreto-Naehrig curve -- is unconditionally secure, and do not rely on any hardness assumptions. Both protocols are more efficient than the actual computation of the pairing by the restricted device and in particular they are more efficient than all previous proposals

Efficient and Secure Delegation of Exponentiation in General Groups to a Single Malicious Server

Group exponentiation is an important and relatively expensive operation used in many public-key cryptosystems and, more generally, cryptographic protocols. To expand the applicability of these solutions to computationally weaker devices, it has been advocated that this operation is delegated from a computationally weaker client to a computationally stronger server. Solving this problem in the case of a single, possibly malicious, server, has remained open since the introduction of a formal model. In previous work we have proposed practical and secure solutions applicable to two classes of specific groups, related to well-known cryptosystems. In this paper, we investigate this problem in a general class of multiplicative groups, possibly going beyond groups currently subject to quantum cryptanalysis attacks. Our main results are efficient delegation protocols for exponentiation in these general groups. The main technique in our results is a reduction of the protocol's security probability (i.e., the probability that a malicious server convinces a client of an incorrect exponentiation output) that is more efficient than by standard parallel repetition. The resulting protocols satisfy natural requirements such as correctness, security, privacy and efficiency, even if the adversary uses the full power of quantum computers. In particular, in our protocols the client performs a number of online group multiplications smaller by 1 to 2 orders of magnitude than in a non-delegated computation

Anonymous Single-Round Server-Aided Verification

Server-Aided Verification (SAV) is a method that can be employed to speed up the process of verifying signatures by letting the verifier outsource part of its computation load to a third party. Achieving fast and reliable verification under the presence of an untrusted server is an attractive goal in cloud computing and internet of things scenarios. In this paper, we describe a simple framework for SAV where the interaction between a verifier and an untrusted server happens via a single-round protocol. We propose a security model for SAV that refines existing ones and includes the new notions of SAV-anonymity and extended unforgeability. In addition, we apply our definitional framework to provide the first generic transformation from any signature scheme to a single-round SAV scheme that incorporates verifiable computation. Our compiler identifies two independent ways to achieve SAV-anonymity: computationally, through the privacy of the verifiable computation scheme, or unconditionally, through the adaptibility of the signature scheme. Finally, we define three novel instantiations of SAV schemes obtained through our compiler. Compared to previous works, our proposals are the only ones which simultaneously achieve existential unforgeability and soundness against collusion

Delegating a Pairing Can Be Both Secure and Efficient

International audienceBilinear pairings have been widely used in cryptographic protocols since they provide very interesting functionalities in regard of identity based cryptography, short signatures or cryptographic tools with complex properties. Unfortunately their implementation on limited devices remains complex and even if a lot of work has been done on the subject, the current results in terms of computational complexity may still be prohibitive. This is clearly not for today to find the implementation of a bilinear pairing in every smart card. One possibility to avoid this problem of efficiency is to delegate the pairing computation to a third party. The result should clearly be both secure and efficient. Regarding security, the resulting computation of a pairing e(A,B) by the third party should be verifiable by the smart card. Moreover, if the points A and/or B are secret at the beginning of the protocol, they should also be secret after its execution. Regarding efficiency, besides some specific cases, existing protocols for delegating a pairing are costlier than a true embedded computation inside the smart card. This is due to the fact that they require several exponentiations to check the validity of the result.In this paper we first propose a formal security model for the delegation of pairings that fixes some weakness of the previous models. We also provide efficient ways to delegate the computation of a pairing e(A,B), depending on the status of A and B. Our protocols enable the limited device to verify the value received from the third party with mostly one exponentiation and can be improved to also ensure secrecy of e(A,B)

Efficient Round-Optimal Blind Signatures in the Standard Model

Blind signatures are at the core of e-cash systems and have numerous other applications. In this work we construct efficient blind and partially blind signature schemes over bilinear groups in the standard model. Our schemes yield short signatures consisting of only a couple of elements from the shorter source group and have very short communication overhead consisting of $1$ group element on the user side and $3$ group elements on the signer side. At $80$-bit security, our schemes yield signatures consisting of only $40$ bytes which is $67\%$ shorter than the most efficient existing scheme with the same security in the standard model. Verification in our schemes requires only a couple of pairings. Our schemes compare favorably in every efficiency measure to all existing counterparts offering the same security in the standard model. In fact, the efficiency of our signing protocol as well as the signature size compare favorably even to many existing schemes in the random oracle model. For instance, our signatures are shorter than those of Brands\u27 scheme which is at the heart of the U-Prove anonymous credential system used in practice. The unforgeability of our schemes is based on new intractability assumptions of a ``one-more\u27\u27 type which we show are intractable in the generic group model, whereas their blindness holds w.r.t.~malicious signing keys in the information-theoretic sense. We also give variants of our schemes for a vector of messages