18,982 research outputs found
A CCA2 Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem
The McEliece public-key encryption scheme has become an interesting
alternative to cryptosystems based on number-theoretical problems. Differently
from RSA and ElGa- mal, McEliece PKC is not known to be broken by a quantum
computer. Moreover, even tough McEliece PKC has a relatively big key size,
encryption and decryption operations are rather efficient. In spite of all the
recent results in coding theory based cryptosystems, to the date, there are no
constructions secure against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model -
the de facto security notion for public-key cryptosystems. In this work, we
show the first construction of a McEliece based public-key cryptosystem secure
against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model. Our construction is
inspired by a recently proposed technique by Rosen and Segev
Finding Safety in Numbers with Secure Allegation Escrows
For fear of retribution, the victim of a crime may be willing to report it
only if other victims of the same perpetrator also step forward. Common
examples include 1) identifying oneself as the victim of sexual harassment,
especially by a person in a position of authority or 2) accusing an influential
politician, an authoritarian government, or ones own employer of corruption. To
handle such situations, legal literature has proposed the concept of an
allegation escrow: a neutral third-party that collects allegations anonymously,
matches them against each other, and de-anonymizes allegers only after
de-anonymity thresholds (in terms of number of co-allegers), pre-specified by
the allegers, are reached.
An allegation escrow can be realized as a single trusted third party;
however, this party must be trusted to keep the identity of the alleger and
content of the allegation private. To address this problem, this paper
introduces Secure Allegation Escrows (SAE, pronounced "say"). A SAE is a group
of parties with independent interests and motives, acting jointly as an escrow
for collecting allegations from individuals, matching the allegations, and
de-anonymizing the allegations when designated thresholds are reached. By
design, SAEs provide a very strong property: No less than a majority of parties
constituting a SAE can de-anonymize or disclose the content of an allegation
without a sufficient number of matching allegations (even in collusion with any
number of other allegers). Once a sufficient number of matching allegations
exist, the join escrow discloses the allegation with the allegers' identities.
We describe how SAEs can be constructed using a novel authentication protocol
and a novel allegation matching and bucketing algorithm, provide formal proofs
of the security of our constructions, and evaluate a prototype implementation,
demonstrating feasibility in practice.Comment: To appear in NDSS 2020. New version includes improvements to writing
and proof. The protocol is unchange
Cloud Data Auditing Using Proofs of Retrievability
Cloud servers offer data outsourcing facility to their clients. A client
outsources her data without having any copy at her end. Therefore, she needs a
guarantee that her data are not modified by the server which may be malicious.
Data auditing is performed on the outsourced data to resolve this issue.
Moreover, the client may want all her data to be stored untampered. In this
chapter, we describe proofs of retrievability (POR) that convince the client
about the integrity of all her data.Comment: A version has been published as a book chapter in Guide to Security
Assurance for Cloud Computing (Springer International Publishing Switzerland
2015
A New Cryptosystem Based On Hidden Order Groups
Let be a cyclic multiplicative group of order . It is known that the
Diffie-Hellman problem is random self-reducible in with respect to a
fixed generator if is known. That is, given and
having oracle access to a `Diffie-Hellman Problem' solver with fixed generator
, it is possible to compute in polynomial time (see
theorem 3.2). On the other hand, it is not known if such a reduction exists
when is unknown (see conjuncture 3.1). We exploit this ``gap'' to
construct a cryptosystem based on hidden order groups and present a practical
implementation of a novel cryptographic primitive called an \emph{Oracle Strong
Associative One-Way Function} (O-SAOWF). O-SAOWFs have applications in
multiparty protocols. We demonstrate this by presenting a key agreement
protocol for dynamic ad-hoc groups.Comment: removed examples for multiparty key agreement and join protocols,
since they are redundan
Ideal Tightly Couple (t,m,n) Secret Sharing
As a fundamental cryptographic tool, (t,n)-threshold secret sharing
((t,n)-SS) divides a secret among n shareholders and requires at least t,
(t<=n), of them to reconstruct the secret. Ideal (t,n)-SSs are most desirable
in security and efficiency among basic (t,n)-SSs. However, an adversary, even
without any valid share, may mount Illegal Participant (IP) attack or
t/2-Private Channel Cracking (t/2-PCC) attack to obtain the secret in most
(t,n)-SSs.To secure ideal (t,n)-SSs against the 2 attacks, 1) the paper
introduces the notion of Ideal Tightly cOupled (t,m,n) Secret Sharing (or
(t,m,n)-ITOSS ) to thwart IP attack without Verifiable SS; (t,m,n)-ITOSS binds
all m, (m>=t), participants into a tightly coupled group and requires all
participants to be legal shareholders before recovering the secret. 2) As an
example, the paper presents a polynomial-based (t,m,n)-ITOSS scheme, in which
the proposed k-round Random Number Selection (RNS) guarantees that adversaries
have to crack at least symmetrical private channels among participants before
obtaining the secret. Therefore, k-round RNS enhances the robustness of
(t,m,n)-ITOSS against t/2-PCC attack to the utmost. 3) The paper finally
presents a generalized method of converting an ideal (t,n)-SS into a
(t,m,n)-ITOSS, which helps an ideal (t,n)-SS substantially improve the
robustness against the above 2 attacks
- …