Proxy Re-encryption based Fair Trade Protocol for Digital Goods Transactions via Smart Contracts

With the massive amount of digital data generated everyday, transactions of digital goods become a trend. One of the essential requirements for such transactions is fairness, which is defined as that both of the seller and the buyer get what they want, or neither. Current fair trade protocols generally involve a trusted third-party (TTP), which achieves fairness by heavily relying on the TTP's behaviors and the two parties' trust in the TTP. With the emergence of Blockchain, its decentralization and transparency make it a very good candidate to replace the TTP. In this work, we attempt to design a secure and fair protocol for digital goods transactions through smart contracts on Blockchain. To ensure security of the digital goods, we propose an advanced passive proxy re-encryption (PRE) scheme, which enables smart contracts to transfer the decryption right to a buyer after receiving his/her payment. Furthermore, based on smart contracts and the proposed passive PRE scheme, a fair trade protocol for digital goods transactions is proposed, whose fairness is guaranteed by the arbitration protocol. The proposed protocol supports Ciphertext publicity and repeatable sale, while involving less number of interactions. Comprehensive experiment results validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed protocol

Key Rotation for Authenticated Encryption

A common requirement in practice is to periodically rotate the keys used to encrypt stored data. Systems used by Amazon and Google do so using a hybrid encryption technique which is eminently practical but has questionable security in the face of key compromises and does not provide full key rotation. Meanwhile, symmetric updatable encryption schemes (introduced by Boneh et al. CRYPTO 2013) support full key rotation without performing decryption: ciphertexts created under one key can be rotated to ciphertexts created under a different key with the help of a re-encryption token. By design, the tokens do not leak information about keys or plaintexts and so can be given to storage providers without compromising security. But the prior work of Boneh et al. addresses relatively weak confidentiality goals and does not consider integrity at all. Moreover, as we show, a subtle issue with their concrete scheme obviates a security proof even for confidentiality against passive attacks. This paper presents a systematic study of updatable Authenticated Encryption (AE). We provide a set of security notions that strengthen those in prior work. These notions enable us to tease out real-world security requirements of different strengths and build schemes that satisfy them efficiently. We show that the hybrid approach currently used in industry achieves relatively weak forms of confidentiality and integrity, but can be modified at low cost to meet our stronger confidentiality and integrity goals. This leads to a practical scheme that has negligible overhead beyond conventional AE. We then introduce re-encryption indistinguishability, a security notion that formally captures the idea of fully refreshing keys upon rotation. We show how to repair the scheme of Boneh et al., attaining our stronger confidentiality notion. We also show how to extend the scheme to provide integrity, and we prove that it meets our re- encryption indistinguishability notion. Finally, we discuss how to instantiate our scheme efficiently using off-the-shelf cryptographic components (AE, hashing, elliptic curves). We report on the performance of a prototype implementation, showing that fully secure key rotations can be performed at a throughput of approximately 116 kB/s

Efficient cryptographic primitives: Secure comparison, binary decomposition and proxy re-encryption

”Data outsourcing becomes an essential paradigm for an organization to reduce operation costs on supporting and managing its IT infrastructure. When sensitive data are outsourced to a remote server, the data generally need to be encrypted before outsourcing. To preserve the confidentiality of the data, any computations performed by the server should only be on the encrypted data. In other words, the encrypted data should not be decrypted during any stage of the computation. This kind of task is commonly termed as query processing over encrypted data (QPED). One natural solution to solve the QPED problem is to utilize fully homomorphic encryption. However, fully homomorphic encryption is yet to be practical. The second solution is to adopt multi-server setting. However, the existing work is not efficient. Their implementations adopt costly primitives, such as secure comparison, binary decomposition among others, which reduce the efficiency of the whole protocols. Therefore, the improvement of these primitives results in high efficiency of the protocols. To have a well-defined scope, the following types of computations are considered: secure comparison (CMP), secure binary decomposition (SBD) and proxy re-encryption (PRE). We adopt the secret sharing scheme and paillier public key encryption as building blocks, and all computations can be done on the encrypted data by utilizing multiple servers. We analyze the security and the complexity of our proposed protocols, and their efficiencies are evaluated by comparing with the existing solutions.”--Abstract, page iii

Direct Constructions of Bidirectional Proxy Re-Encryption with Alleviated Trust in Proxy

In this work, we study (the direct constructions of) bidirectional proxy re-encryption (PRE) with alleviated trust in the proxy, specifically the master secret security (MSS) and the non-transitivity (NT) security, in the standard model, and achieve the following: 1. A multi-hop MSS-secure bidirectional PRE scheme with security against chosen plaintext attacks (CPA) in the standard model, where the ciphertext remains constant size regardless of how many times it has been re-encrypted. To the best of our knowledge, there exists previously no MSS-secure multi-hop bidirectional PRE scheme with constant size of ciphertexts (whether in the random oracle model or not). 2. A single-hop MSS-secure and non-transitive bidirectional PRE scheme with security against chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA) in the standard model. The CCA-secure scheme is based on the CPA-secure scheme, and particularly employs a new re-encryption key (REK) generation mechanism to which each user makes equal contributions, where a \emph{single} REK is used in both directions with the same proxy computation. Single-hop non-transitive bidirectional PRE schemes also enjoy better fine-grained delegate right control (against malicious proxy). The security analysis uses Coron\u27s technique [Coron, Crypto 2000], which particularly allows adaptive secret key corruption. Along the way, we also refine and clarify the security models for bidirectional PRE

Chosen-Ciphertext Secure Proxy Re-Encryption without Pairing

Office of Research, Singapore Management Universit

Secure bidirectional proxy re-encryption for cryptographic cloud storage

Bidirectional proxy re-encryption allows ciphertext transformation between Alice and Bob via a semi-trusted proxy, who however cannot obtain the corresponding plaintext. Due to this special property, bidirectional proxy re-encryption has become a flexible tool in many dynamic environments, such as cryptographic cloud storage. Nonetheless, how to design a secure and efficient bidirectional proxy re-encryption is still challenging. In this paper, we propose a new bidirectional proxy re-encryption scheme that holds the following properties: (1) constant ciphertext size no matter how many times the transformation is performed; (2) master secret security in the random oracle model, i.e., Alice (resp. Bob) colluding with the proxy cannot obtain Bob’s (resp. Alice’s) private key; (3) replayable chosen ciphertext (RCCA) security in the random oracle model. The above three properties are usually required in the cryptographic cloud storage. Furthermore, the proposed new master secret security may be of independent interest, as it is closer to the original desire: delegate the decryption rights while keeping the signing rights

Reducing HSM Reliance in Payments through Proxy Re-Encryption

Credit and debit-card payments are typically authenticated with PINs. Once entered into a terminal, the PIN is sent as an encrypted \emph{PIN block} across a payments network to the destination bank, which decrypts and verifies the PIN block. Each node in the payments network routes the PIN block to the next node by decrypting the block with its own key, and then re-encrypting the PIN block with the next node\u27s key; nodes establish shared secret keys with their neighbors to do so. This decrypt-then-encrypt operation over PIN blocks is known as \emph{PIN translation}, and it is currently performed in Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to avoid possible PIN exposure. However, HSMs incur heavy acquisition and operational expenses. Introduced at EUROCRYPT\u2798, proxy re-encryption (PRE) is a cryptographic primitive which can re-encrypt without exposing sensitive data. We perform an extensive study of PRE as applied to PIN translation, and show through formalization, security analysis, and an implementation study that PRE is a practical alternative to HSMs. With PRE, we eliminate the need for HSMs during re-encryption of a PIN, thus greatly reducing the number of HSMs needed by each participant in the payments ecosystem. Along the way we conduct practice-oriented PRE research, with novel theoretical contributions to resolve issues in comparing so-called honest re-encryption to chosen-ciphertext PRE security, and a new efficient PRE scheme achieving a type of chosen-ciphertext security

Intelligent Computing for Big Data

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have the potential to further develop current big data research. The Special Issue on ‘Intelligent Computing for Big Data’ highlighted a number of recent studies related to the use of intelligent computing techniques in the processing of big data for text mining, autism diagnosis, behaviour recognition, and blockchain-based storage