Puncturable Encryption: A Generic Construction from Delegatable Fully Key-Homomorphic Encryption

Puncturable encryption (PE), proposed by Green and Miers at IEEE S&P 2015, is a kind of public key encryption that allows recipients to revoke individual messages by repeatedly updating decryption keys without communicating with senders. PE is an essential tool for constructing many interesting applications, such as asynchronous messaging systems, forward-secret zero round-trip time protocols, public-key watermarking schemes and forward-secret proxy re-encryptions. This paper revisits PEs from the observation that the puncturing property can be implemented as efficiently computable functions. From this view, we propose a generic PE construction from the fully key-homomorphic encryption, augmented with a key delegation mechanism (DFKHE) from Boneh et al. at Eurocrypt 2014. We show that our PE construction enjoys the selective security under chosen plaintext attacks (that can be converted into the adaptive security with some efficiency loss) from that of DFKHE in the standard model. Basing on the framework, we obtain the first post-quantum secure PE instantiation that is based on the learning with errors problem, selective secure under chosen plaintext attacks (CPA) in the standard model. We also discuss about the ability of modification our framework to support the unbounded number of ciphertext tags inspired from the work of Brakerski and Vaikuntanathan at CRYPTO 2016

Forward and Backward Private Searchable Encryption from Constrained Cryptographic Primitives

Using dynamic Searchable Symmetric Encryption, a user with limited storage resources can securely outsource a database to an untrusted server, in such a way that the database can still be searched and updated efficiently. For these schemes, it would be desirable that updates do not reveal any information a priori about the modifications they carry out, and that deleted results remain inaccessible to the server a posteriori. If the first property, called forward privacy, has been the main motivation of recent works, the second one, backward privacy, has been overlooked. In this paper, we study for the first time the notion of backward privacy for searchable encryption. After giving formal definitions for different flavors of backward privacy, we present several schemes achieving both forward and backward privacy, with various efficiency trade-offs. Our constructions crucially rely on primitives such as constrained pseudo-random functions and puncturable encryption schemes. Using these advanced cryptographic primitives allows for a fine-grained control of the power of the adversary, preventing her from evaluating functions on selected inputs, or decrypting specific ciphertexts. In turn, this high degree of control allows our SSE constructions to achieve the stronger forms of privacy outlined above. As an example, we present a framework to construct forward-private schemes from range-constrained pseudo-random functions. Finally, we provide experimental results for implementations of our schemes, and study their practical efficiency

Universally composable end-to-end secure messaging

CNS-1718135 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1801564 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1931714 - National Science Foundation; CNS-1915763 - National Science Foundation; HR00112020021 - Department of Defense/DARPA; 000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000037211 - SRI Internationalhttps://eprint.iacr.org/2022/376.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Offline Witness Encryption with Semi-Adaptive Security

The first construction of Witness Encryption (WE) by Garg et al. (STOC 2013) has led to many exciting avenues of research in the past years. A particularly interesting variant is Offline WE (OWE) by Abusalah et al. (ACNS 2016), as the encryption algorithm uses neither obfuscation nor multilinear maps. Current OWE schemes provide only selective security. That is, the adversary must commit to their challenge messages $m_0$ and $m_1$ before seeing the public parameters. We provide a new, generic framework to construct OWE, which achieves adaptive security in the sense that the adversary may choose their challenge messages adaptively. We call this semi-adaptive security, because - as in prior work - the instance of the considered NP language that is used to create the challenge ciphertext must be fixed before the parameters are generated in the security proof. We show that our framework gives the first OWE scheme with constant ciphertext overhead even for messages of polynomially-bounded size. We achieve this by introducing a new variant of puncturable encryption defined by Green and Miers (S&P 2015) and combining it with the iO-based approach of Abusalah et al. Finally, we show that our framework can be easily extended to construct the first Extractable Offline Witness Encryption (EOWE), by using extractability obfuscation of Boyle et al. (TCC 2014) in place of iO, opening up even more possible applications. The obfuscation is needed only for our public parameters, but its functionality can be realised with a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), which means we have a very efficient scheme with ciphertexts consisting of only 5 group elements

Public-Key Puncturable Encryption: Modular and Compact Constructions

We revisit the method of designing public-key puncturable encryption schemes and present a generic conversion by leveraging the techniques of distributed key-distribution and revocable encryption. In particular, we first introduce a refined version of identity-based revocable encryption, named key-homomorphic identity-based revocable key encapsulation mechanism with extended correctness. Then, we propose a generic construction of puncturable key encapsulation mechanism from the former by merging the idea of distributed key-distribution. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our generic construction supports unbounded number of punctures and multiple tags per message, thus achieving more fine-grained revocation of decryption capability. Further, it does not rely on random oracles, not suffer from non-negligible correctness error, and results in a variety of efficient schemes with distinct features. More precisely, we obtain the first scheme with very compact ciphertexts in the standard model, and the first scheme with support for both unbounded size of tags per ciphertext and unbounded punctures as well as constant-time puncture operation. Moreover, we get a comparable scheme proven secure under the standard DBDH assumption, which enjoys both faster encryption and decryption than previous works based on the same assumption, especially when the number of tags associated with the ciphertext is large

Fork-Resilient Continuous Group Key Agreement

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) lets a evolving group of clients agree on a sequence of group keys. An important application of CGKA is scalable asynchronous end-to-end (E2E) encrypted group messaging. A major problem preventing the use of CGKA over unreliable infrastructure are so-called forks. A fork occurs when group members have diverging views of the group\u27s history (and thus its current state); e.g. due to network or server failures. Once communication channels are restored, members resolve a fork by agreeing on the state of the group again. Today\u27s CGKA protocols make fork resolution challenging, as natural resolution strategies seem to conflict with the way the protocols enforce group state agreement and forward secrecy. Meanwhile, secure group messaging protocols which do support fork resolution do not scale nearly as well as CGKA does. In this work, we pave the way to practical scalable E2E messaging over unreliable infrastructure. To that end, we generalize CGKA to Fork Resilient-CGKA which allows clients to process significantly more types of out-of-order network traffic. This is important for many natural fork resolution procedures as they are based, in part, on replaying missed traffic. Next, we give two FR-CGKA constructions: a practical one based on the CGKA underlying the MLS messaging standard and an optimally secure one (albeit with only theoretical efficiency). To further assist with fork resolution, we introduce a simple new abstraction to describe a client\u27s local protocol state. The abstraction describes all and only the information relevant to natural fork resolution, making it easier for higher-level fork resolution procedures to work with and reason about. We define a black-box extension of an FR-CGKA which maintains such a description of a client\u27s internal state. Finally, as a proof of concept, we give a basic fork resolution protocol

Session Resumption Protocols and Efficient Forward Security for TLS 1.3 0-RTT

The TLS 1.3 0-RTT mode enables a client reconnecting to a server to send encrypted application-layer data in 0-RTT ( zero round-trip time ), without the need for a prior interactive handshake. This fundamentally requires the server to reconstruct the previous session\u27s encryption secrets upon receipt of the client\u27s first message. The standard techniques to achieve this are session caches or, alternatively, session tickets. The former provides forward security and resistance against replay attacks, but requires a large amount of server-side storage. The latter requires negligible storage, but provides no forward security and is known to be vulnerable to replay attacks. In this paper, we first formally define session resumption protocols as an abstract perspective on mechanisms like session caches and session tickets. We give a new generic construction that provably provides forward security and replay resilience, based on puncturable pseudorandom functions (PPRFs). This construction can immediately be used in TLS 1.3 0-RTT and deployed unilaterally by servers, without requiring any changes to clients or the protocol. We then describe two new constructions of PPRFs, which are particularly suitable for use for forward-secure and replay-resilient session resumption in TLS 1.3. The first construction is based on the strong RSA assumption. Compared to standard session caches, for 128-bit security it reduces the required server storage by a factor of almost 20, when instantiated in a way such that key derivation and puncturing together are cheaper on average than one full exponentiation in an RSA group. Hence, a 1 GB session cache can be replaced with only about 51 MBs of storage, which significantly reduces the amount of secure memory required. For larger security parameters or in exchange for more expensive computations, even larger storage reductions are achieved. The second construction combines a standard binary tree PPRF with a new domain extension technique. For a reasonable choice of parameters, this reduces the required storage by a factor of up to 5 compared to a standard session cache. It employs only symmetric cryptography, is suitable for high-traffic scenarios, and can serve thousands of tickets per second

Forward-Secure 0-RTT Goes Live: Implementation and Performance Analysis in QUIC

Modern cryptographic protocols, such as TLS 1.3 and QUIC, can send cryptographically protected data in zero round-trip times (0-RTT) , that is, without the need for a prior interactive handshake. Such protocols meet the demand for communication with minimal latency, but those currently deployed in practice achieve only rather weak security properties, as they may not achieve forward security for the first transmitted payload message and require additional countermeasures against replay attacks. Recently, 0-RTT protocols with full forward security and replay resilience have been proposed in the academic literature. These are based on puncturable encryption, which uses rather heavy building blocks, such as cryptographic pairings. Some constructions were claimed to have practical efficiency, but it is unclear how they compare concretely to protocols deployed in practice, and we currently do not have any benchmark results that new protocols can be compared with. We provide the first concrete performance analysis of a modern 0-RTT protocol with full forward security, by integrating the Bloom Filter Encryption scheme of Derler et al. (EUROCRYPT 2018) in the Chromium QUIC implementation and comparing it to Google\u27s original QUIC protocol. We find that for reasonable deployment parameters, the server CPU load increases approximately by a factor of eight and the memory consumption on the server increases significantly, but stays below 400 MB even for medium-scale deployments that handle up to 50K connections per day. The difference of the size of handshake messages is small enough that transmission time on the network is identical, and therefore not significant. We conclude that while current 0-RTT protocols with full forward security come with significant computational overhead, their use in practice is not infeasible, and may be used in applications where the increased CPU and memory load can be tolerated in exchange for full forward security and replay resilience on the cryptographic protocol level. Our results also serve as a first benchmark that can be used to assess the efficiency of 0-RTT protocols potentially developed in the future