59 research outputs found
Post-quantum cryptography
Cryptography is essential for the security of online communication, cars and implanted medical devices. However, many commonly used cryptosystems will be completely broken once large quantum computers exist. Post-quantum cryptography is cryptography under the assumption that the attacker has a large quantum computer; post-quantum cryptosystems strive to remain secure even in this scenario. This relatively young research area has seen some successes in identifying mathematical operations for which quantum algorithms offer little advantage in speed, and then building cryptographic systems around those. The central challenge in post-quantum cryptography is to meet demands for cryptographic usability and flexibility without sacrificing confidence.</p
Building Correlation Immune Functions from Sets of Mutually Orthogonal Cellular Automata
Correlation immune Boolean functions play an important role in the implementation of efficient masking countermeasures for side-channel attacks in cryptography. In this paper, we investigate a method to construct correlation immune functions through families of mutually orthogonal cellular automata (MOCA). First, we show that the orthogonal array (OA) associated to a family of MOCA can be expanded to a binary OA of strength at least 2. To prove this result, we exploit the characterization of MOCA in terms of orthogonal labelings on de Bruijn graphs. Then, we use the resulting binary OA to define the support of a second-order correlation immune function. Next, we perform some computational experiments to construct all such functions up to variables, and observe that their correlation immunity order is actually greater, always at least 3. We conclude by discussing how these results open up interesting perspectives for future research, with respect to the search of new correlation-immune functions and binary orthogonal arrays
Optimization of Tree Modes for Parallel Hash Functions: A Case Study
This paper focuses on parallel hash functions based on tree modes of
operation for an inner Variable-Input-Length function. This inner function can
be either a single-block-length (SBL) and prefix-free MD hash function, or a
sponge-based hash function. We discuss the various forms of optimality that can
be obtained when designing parallel hash functions based on trees where all
leaves have the same depth. The first result is a scheme which optimizes the
tree topology in order to decrease the running time. Then, without affecting
the optimal running time we show that we can slightly change the corresponding
tree topology so as to minimize the number of required processors as well.
Consequently, the resulting scheme decreases in the first place the running
time and in the second place the number of required processors.Comment: Preprint version. Added citations, IEEE Transactions on Computers,
201
A Characterization of Chameleon Hash Functions and New, Efficient Designs
This paper shows that chameleon hash functions and Sigma
protocols are equivalent. We provide a transform of any suitable Sigma protocol
to a chameleon hash function, and also show that any chameleon hash function is
the result of applying our transform to some suitable Sigma protocol. This
enables us to unify previous designs of chameleon hash functions, seeing them
all as emanating from a common paradigm, and also obtain new designs that are
more efficient than previous ones. In particular, via a modified version of the
Fiat-Shamir protocol, we obtain the fastest known chameleon hash function with
a proof of security based on the STANDARD factoring assumption.
The increasing number of applications of
chameleon hash functions,
including on-line/off-line signing, chameleon signatures, designated-verifier
signatures and conversion from weakly-secure to fully-secure
signatures, make our work of
contemporary interest
Programmable hash functions and their applications
We introduce a new combinatorial primitive called *programmable hash functions* (PHFs). PHFs can be used to *program* the output of a hash function such that it contains solved or unsolved discrete logarithm instances with a certain probability. This is a technique originally used for security proofs in the random oracle model. We give a variety of *standard model* realizations of PHFs (with different parameters).
The programmability makes PHFs a suitable tool to obtain black-box proofs of cryptographic protocols when considering adaptive attacks. We propose generic digital signature schemes from the strong RSA problem and from some hardness assumption on bilinear maps that can be
instantiated with any PHF. Our schemes offer various improvements over known constructions. In particular, for a reasonable choice of parameters, we obtain short standard model digital signatures over bilinear maps
About Machine-Readable Travel Documents
Passports are documents that help immigration officers to identify people. In order to strongly authenticate their data and to automatically identify people, they are now equipped with RFID chips. These contain private information, biometrics, and a digital signature by issuing authorities. Although they substantially increase security at the border controls, they also come with new security and privacy issues. In this paper, we survey existing protocols and their weaknesses
Building Secure Public Key Encryption Scheme from Hidden Field Equations
Multivariate public key cryptography is a set of cryptographic schemes built from the NP-hardness of solving quadratic equations over finite fields, amongst which the hidden field equations (HFE) family of schemes remain the most famous. However, the original HFE scheme was insecure, and the follow-up modifications were shown to be still vulnerable to attacks. In this paper, we propose a new variant of the HFE scheme by considering the special equation x2=x defined over the finite field F3 when x=0,1. We observe that the equation can be used to further destroy the special structure of the underlying central map of the HFE scheme. It is shown that the proposed public key encryption scheme is secure against known attacks including the MinRank attack, the algebraic attacks, and the linearization equations attacks. The proposal gains some advantages over the original HFE scheme with respect to the encryption speed and public key size
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