Constructing CCA-secure predicate encapsulation schemes from CPA-secure schemes and universal one-way hash functions

We present a new transformation of chosen-plaintext secure predicate encryption schemes with public index into chosen-ciphertext secure schemes. Our construction requires only a universal one-way hash function and is selectively secure in the standard model. The transformation is not generic but can be applied to various existing schemes constructed from bilinear groups. Using common structural properties of these schemes we provide an efficient and simple transformation without overhead in form of one-time signatures or message authentication codes as required in the known generic transformations

Subtleties in Security Definitions for Predicate Encryption with Public Index

We take a critical look at established security definitions for predicate encryption (PE) with public index under chosen-plaintext attack (CPA) and under chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA). In contrast to conventional public-key encryption (PKE), security definitions for PE have to deal with user collusion which is modeled by an additional key generation oracle. We identify three different formalizations of key handling in the literature implicitly assumed to lead to the same security notion. Contrary to this assumption we prove that the corresponding models result in two different security notions under CPA and three different security notions under CCA. Similarly to the recent results for PKE and conventional key-encapsulation mechanism (KEM) (Journal of Cryptology, 2015) we also analyze subtleties in security definitions for PE and predicate key-encapsulation mechanism (P-KEM) regarding the so-called no-challenge-decryption condition. While the results for PE and PKE are similar, the results for P-KEM significantly differ from the corresponding results for conventional KEM. Our analysis is based on appropriate definitions of semantic security and indistinguishability of encryptions for PE under different attacks scenarios. These definitions complement related security definitions for identity-based encryption and functional encryption. As a result of our work we suggest security definitions for PE and P-KEM under different attack scenarios

How to Prove Statements Obliviously?

Cryptographic applications often require proving statements about hidden secrets satisfying certain circuit relations. Moreover, these proofs must often be generated obliviously, i.e., without knowledge of the secret. This work presents a new technique called --- FRI on hidden values --- for efficiently proving such statements. This technique enables a polynomial commitment scheme for values hidden inside linearly homomorphic primitives, such as linearly homomorphic encryption, linearly homomorphic commitment, group exponentiation, fully homomorphic encryption, etc. Building on this technique, we obtain the following results. 1. An efficient SNARK for proving the honest evaluation of FHE ciphertexts. This allows for an efficiently verifiable private delegation of computation, where the client only needs to perform logarithmic many FHE computations to verify the correctness of the computation. 2. An efficient approach for privately delegating the computation of zkSNARKs to a single untrusted server, without making any non-black-box use of cryptography. All prior works require multiple servers and the assumption that some subset of the servers are honest. 3. A weighted threshold signature scheme that does not require any setup. In particular, parties may sample their own keys independently, and no distributed key generation (DKG) protocol is needed. Furthermore, the efficiency of our scheme is completely independent of the weights. Prior to this work, there were no known black-box feasibility results for any of these applications. We also investigate the use of this approach in the context of public proof aggregation. These are only a few representative applications that we explore in this paper. We expect our techniques to be widely applicable in many other scenarios

Dynamic Decentralized Functional Encryption

International audienceWe introduce Dynamic Decentralized Functional Encryption (DDFE), a generalization ofFunctional Encryption which allows multiple users to join the system dynamically, without relying on atrusted third party or on expensive and interactive Multi-Party Computation protocols.This notion subsumes existing multi-user extensions of Functional Encryption, such as Multi-Input, Multi-Client, and Ad Hoc Multi-Input Functional Encryption.We define and construct schemes for various functionalities which serve as building-blocks for latter primitivesand may be useful in their own right, such as a scheme for dynamically computing sums in any Abeliangroup. These constructions build upon simple primitives in a modular way, and have instantiations fromwell-studied assumptions, such as DDH or LWE.Our constructions culminate in an Inner-Product scheme for computing weighted sums on aggregatedencrypted data, from standard assumptions in prime-order groups in the Random Oracle Model

Design and Analysis of Opaque Signatures

Digital signatures were introduced to guarantee the authenticity and integrity of the underlying messages. A digital signature scheme comprises the key generation, the signature, and the verification algorithms. The key generation algorithm creates the signing and the verifying keys, called also the signer’s private and public keys respectively. The signature algorithm, which is run by the signer, produces a signature on the input message. Finally, the verification algorithm, run by anyone who knows the signer’s public key, checks whether a purported signature on some message is valid or not. The last property, namely the universal verification of digital signatures is undesirable in situations where the signed data is commercially or personally sensitive. Therefore, mechanisms which share most properties with digital signatures except for the universal verification were invented to respond to the aforementioned need; we call such mechanisms “opaque signatures”. In this thesis, we study the signatures where the verification cannot be achieved without the cooperation of a specific entity, namely the signer in case of undeniable signatures, or the confirmer in case of confirmer signatures; we make three main contributions. We first study the relationship between two security properties important for public key encryption, namely data privacy and key privacy. Our study is motivated by the fact that opaque signatures involve always an encryption layer that ensures their opacity. The properties required for this encryption vary according to whether we want to protect the identity (i.e. the key) of the signer or hide the validity of the signature. Therefore, it would be convenient to use existing work about the encryption scheme in order to derive one notion from the other. Next, we delve into the generic constructions of confirmer signatures from basic cryptographic primitives, e.g. digital signatures, encryption, or commitment schemes. In fact, generic constructions give easy-to-understand and easy-to-prove schemes, however, this convenience is often achieved at the expense of efficiency. In this contribution, which constitutes the core of this thesis, we first analyze the already existing constructions; our study concludes that the popular generic constructions of confirmer signatures necessitate strong security assumptions on the building blocks, which impacts negatively the efficiency of the resulting signatures. Next, we show that a small change in these constructionsmakes these assumptions drop drastically, allowing as a result constructions with instantiations that compete with the dedicated realizations of these signatures. Finally, we revisit two early undeniable signatures which were proposed with a conjectural security. We disprove the claimed security of the first scheme, and we provide a fix to it in order to achieve strong security properties. Next, we upgrade the second scheme so that it supports a iii desirable feature, and we provide a formal security treatment of the new scheme: we prove that it is secure assuming new reasonable assumptions on the underlying constituents

Bloom Filter Encryption and Applications to Efficient Forward-Secret 0-RTT Key Exchange

Forward secrecy is considered an essential design goal of modern key establishment (KE) protocols, such as TLS 1.3, for example. Furthermore, efficiency considerations such as zero round-trip time (0-RTT), where a client is able to send cryptographically protected payload data along with the very first KE message, are motivated by the practical demand for secure low-latency communication. For a long time, it was unclear whether protocols that simultaneously achieve 0-RTT and full forward secrecy exist. Only recently, the first forward-secret 0-RTT protocol was described by Günther et al. (Eurocrypt 2017). It is based on Puncturable Encryption. Forward secrecy is achieved by puncturing the secret key after each decryption operation, such that a given ciphertext can only be decrypted once (cf. also Green and Miers, S&P 2015). Unfortunately, their scheme is completely impractical, since one puncturing operation takes between 30 seconds and several minutes for reasonable security and deployment parameters, such that this solution is only a first feasibility result, but not efficient enough to be deployed in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new primitive that we term Bloom Filter Encryption (BFE), which is derived from the probabilistic Bloom filter data structure. We describe different constructions of BFE schemes, and show how these yield new puncturable encryption mechanisms with extremely efficient puncturing. Most importantly, a puncturing operation only involves a small number of very efficient computations, plus the deletion of certain parts of the secret key, which outperforms previous constructions by orders of magnitude. This gives rise to the first forward-secret 0-RTT protocols that are efficient enough to be deployed in practice. We believe that BFE will find applications beyond forward-secret 0-RTT protocols

Construction of Fully CCA-Secure Predicate Encryptions from Pair Encoding Schemes

This paper presents a new framework for constructing fully CCA-secure predicate encryption schemes from pair encoding schemes. Our construction is the first in the context of predicate encryption which uses the technique of well-formedness proofs known from public key encryption. The resulting constructions are simpler and more efficient compared to the schemes achieved using known generic transformations from CPA-secure to CCA-secure schemes. The reduction costs of our framework are comparable to the reduction costs of the underlying CPA-secure framework. We achieve this last result by applying the dual system encryption methodology in a novel way

End-to-End Encrypted Group Messaging with Insider Security

Our society has become heavily dependent on electronic communication, and preserving the integrity of this communication has never been more important. Cryptography is a tool that can help to protect the security and privacy of these communications. Secure messaging protocols like OTR and Signal typically employ end-to-end encryption technology to mitigate some of the most egregious adversarial attacks, such as mass surveillance. However, the secure messaging protocols deployed today suffer from two major omissions: they do not natively support group conversations with three or more participants, and they do not fully defend against participants that behave maliciously. Secure messaging tools typically implement group conversations by establishing pairwise instances of a two-party secure messaging protocol, which limits their scalability and makes them vulnerable to insider attacks by malicious members of the group. Insiders can often perform attacks such as rendering the group permanently unusable, causing the state of the group to diverge for the other participants, or covertly remaining in the group after appearing to leave. It is increasingly important to prevent these insider attacks as group conversations become larger, because there are more potentially malicious participants. This dissertation introduces several new protocols that can be used to build modern communication tools with strong security and privacy properties, including resistance to insider attacks. Firstly, the dissertation addresses a weakness in current two-party secure messaging tools: malicious participants can leak portions of a conversation alongside cryptographic proof of authorship, undermining confidentiality. The dissertation introduces two new authenticated key exchange protocols, DAKEZ and XZDH, with deniability properties that can prevent this type of attack when integrated into a secure messaging protocol. DAKEZ provides strong deniability in interactive settings such as instant messaging, while XZDH provides deniability for non-interactive settings such as mobile messaging. These protocols are accompanied by composable security proofs. Secondly, the dissertation introduces Safehouse, a new protocol that can be used to implement secure group messaging tools for a wide range of applications. Safehouse solves the difficult cryptographic problems at the core of secure group messaging protocol design: it securely establishes and manages a shared encryption key for the group and ephemeral signing keys for the participants. These keys can be used to build chat rooms, team communication servers, video conferencing tools, and more. Safehouse enables a server to detect and reject protocol deviations, while still providing end-to-end encryption. This allows an honest server to completely prevent insider attacks launched by malicious participants. A malicious server can still perform a denial-of-service attack that renders the group unavailable or "forks" the group into subgroups that can never communicate again, but other attacks are prevented, even if the server colludes with a malicious participant. In particular, an adversary controlling the server and one or more participants cannot cause honest participants' group states to diverge (even in subtle ways) without also permanently preventing them from communicating, nor can the adversary arrange to covertly remain in the group after all of the malicious participants under its control are removed from the group. Safehouse supports non-interactive communication, dynamic group membership, mass membership changes, an invitation system, and secure property storage, while offering a variety of configurable security properties including forward secrecy, post-compromise security, long-term identity authentication, strong deniability, and anonymity preservation. The dissertation includes a complete proof-of-concept implementation of Safehouse and a sample application with a graphical client. Two sub-protocols of independent interest are also introduced: a new cryptographic primitive that can encrypt multiple private keys to several sets of recipients in a publicly verifiable and repeatable manner, and a round-efficient interactive group key exchange protocol that can instantiate multiple shared key pairs with a configurable knowledge relationship

Big-Key Symmetric Encryption: Resisting Key Exfiltration

This paper aims to move research in the bounded retrieval model (BRM) from theory to practice by considering symmetric (rather than public-key) encryption, giving efficient schemes, and providing security analyses with sharp, concrete bounds. The threat addressed is malware that aims to exfiltrate a user\u27s key. Our schemes aim to thwart this by using an enormously long key, yet paying for this almost exclusively in storage cost, not speed. Our main result is a general-purpose lemma, the subkey prediction lemma, that gives a very good bound on an adversary\u27s ability to guess a (modest length) subkey of a big-key, the subkey consisting of the bits of the big-key found at random, specified locations, after the adversary has exfiltrated partial information about the big key (e.g., half as many bits as the big-key is long). We then use this to design a new kind of key encapsulation mechanism, and, finally, a symmetric encryption scheme. Both are in the random-oracle model. We also give a less efficient standard-model scheme that is based on universal computational extractors (UCE). Finally, we define and achieve hedged BRM symmetric encryption, which provides authenticity in the absence of leakage

Direct Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Attribute-Based Key Encapsulations without Random Oracles

Abstract. We present a new technique to realize attribute-based encryption (ABE) schemes secure in the standard model against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA-secure). Our approach is to extend certain concrete chosen-plaintext secure (CPA-secure) ABE schemes to achieve more efficient constructions than the known generic constructions of CCA-secure ABE schemes. We restrict ourselves to the construction of attribute-based key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) and present two concrete CCA-secure schemes: a key-policy attribute-based KEM that is based on Goyal’s key-policy ABE and a ciphertextpolicy attribute-based KEM that is based on Waters ’ ciphertext-policy ABE. To achieve our goals, we use an appropriate hash function and need to extend the public parameters and the ciphertexts of the underlying CPA-secure encryption schemes only by a single group element. Moreover, we use the same hardness assumptions as the underlying CPA-secure encryption schemes