Fully Homomorphic Encryption from the Finite Field Isomorphism Problem

If $q$ is a prime and $n$ is a positive integer then any two finite fields of order $q^n$ are isomorphic. Elements of these fields can be thought of as polynomials with coefficients chosen modulo $q$, and a notion of length can be associated to these polynomials. A non-trivial isomorphism between the fields, in general, does not preserve this length, and a short element in one field will usually have an image in the other field with coefficients appearing to be randomly and uniformly distributed modulo $q$. This key feature allows us to create a new family of cryptographic constructions based on the difficulty of recovering a secret isomorphism between two finite fields. In this paper we describe a fully homomorphic encryption scheme based on this new hard problem

Studies on the Security of Selected Advanced Asymmetric Cryptographic Primitives

The main goal of asymmetric cryptography is to provide confidential communication, which allows two parties to communicate securely even in the presence of adversaries. Ever since its invention in the seventies, asymmetric cryptography has been improved and developed further, and a formal security framework has been established around it. This framework includes different security goals, attack models, and security notions. As progress was made in the field, more advanced asymmetric cryptographic primitives were proposed, with other properties in addition to confidentiality. These new primitives also have their own definitions and notions of security. This thesis consists of two parts, where the first relates to the security of fully homomorphic encryption and related primitives. The second part presents a novel cryptographic primitive, and defines what security goals the primitive should achieve. The first part of the thesis consists of Article I, II, and III, which all pertain to the security of homomorphic encryption schemes in one respect or another. Article I demonstrates that a particular fully homomorphic encryption scheme is insecure in the sense that an adversary with access only to the public material can recover the secret key. It is also shown that this insecurity mainly stems from the operations necessary to make the scheme fully homomorphic. Article II presents an adaptive key recovery attack on a leveled homomorphic encryption scheme. The scheme in question claimed to withstand precisely such attacks, and was the only scheme of its kind to do so at the time. This part of the thesis culminates with Article III, which is an overview article on the IND-CCA1 security of all acknowledged homomorphic encryption schemes. The second part of the thesis consists of Article IV, which presents Vetted Encryption (VE), a novel asymmetric cryptographic primitive. The primitive is designed to allow a recipient to vet who may send them messages, by setting up a public filter with a public verification key, and providing each vetted sender with their own encryption key. There are three different variants of VE, based on whether the sender is identifiable to the filter and/or the recipient. Security definitions, general constructions and comparisons to already existing cryptographic primitives are provided for all three variants.Doktorgradsavhandlin

Algebraic Frameworks for Cryptographic Primitives

A fundamental goal in theoretical cryptography is to identify the conceptually simplest abstractions that generically imply a collection of other cryptographic primitives. For symmetric-key primitives, this goal has been accomplished by showing that one-way functions are necessary and sufficient to realize primitives ranging from symmetric-key encryption to digital signatures. By contrast, for asymmetric primitives, we have no (known) unifying simple abstraction even for a few of its most basic objects. Moreover, even for public-key encryption (PKE) alone, we have no unifying abstraction that all known constructions follow. The fact that almost all known PKE constructions exploit some algebraic structure suggests considering abstractions that have some basic algebraic properties, irrespective of their concrete instantiation. We make progress on the aforementioned fundamental goal by identifying simple and useful cryptographic abstractions and showing that they imply a variety of asymmetric primitives. Our general approach is to augment symmetric abstractions with algebraic structure that turns out to be sufficient for PKE and much more, thus yielding a “bridge” between symmetric and asymmetric primitives. We introduce two algebraic frameworks that capture almost all concrete instantiations of (asymmetric) cryptographic primitives, and we also demonstrate their applicability by showing their cryptographic implications. Therefore, rather than manually building different cryptosystems from a new assumption, one only needs to build one (or more) of our simple structured primitives, and a whole host of cryptosystems immediately follows.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166137/1/alamati_1.pd