5,211 research outputs found
Conscript Your Friends into Larger Anonymity Sets with JavaScript
We present the design and prototype implementation of ConScript, a framework
for using JavaScript to allow casual Web users to participate in an anonymous
communication system. When a Web user visits a cooperative Web site, the site
serves a JavaScript application that instructs the browser to create and submit
"dummy" messages into the anonymity system. Users who want to send non-dummy
messages through the anonymity system use a browser plug-in to replace these
dummy messages with real messages. Creating such conscripted anonymity sets can
increase the anonymity set size available to users of remailer, e-voting, and
verifiable shuffle-style anonymity systems. We outline ConScript's
architecture, we address a number of potential attacks against ConScript, and
we discuss the ethical issues related to deploying such a system. Our
implementation results demonstrate the practicality of ConScript: a workstation
running our ConScript prototype JavaScript client generates a dummy message for
a mix-net in 81 milliseconds and it generates a dummy message for a
DoS-resistant DC-net in 156 milliseconds.Comment: An abbreviated version of this paper will appear at the WPES 2013
worksho
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
Random Oracles in a Quantum World
The interest in post-quantum cryptography - classical systems that remain
secure in the presence of a quantum adversary - has generated elegant proposals
for new cryptosystems. Some of these systems are set in the random oracle model
and are proven secure relative to adversaries that have classical access to the
random oracle. We argue that to prove post-quantum security one needs to prove
security in the quantum-accessible random oracle model where the adversary can
query the random oracle with quantum states.
We begin by separating the classical and quantum-accessible random oracle
models by presenting a scheme that is secure when the adversary is given
classical access to the random oracle, but is insecure when the adversary can
make quantum oracle queries. We then set out to develop generic conditions
under which a classical random oracle proof implies security in the
quantum-accessible random oracle model. We introduce the concept of a
history-free reduction which is a category of classical random oracle
reductions that basically determine oracle answers independently of the history
of previous queries, and we prove that such reductions imply security in the
quantum model. We then show that certain post-quantum proposals, including ones
based on lattices, can be proven secure using history-free reductions and are
therefore post-quantum secure. We conclude with a rich set of open problems in
this area.Comment: 38 pages, v2: many substantial changes and extensions, merged with a
related paper by Boneh and Zhandr
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