Hardness of SIS and LWE with Small Parameters

The Short Integer Solution (SIS) and Learning With Errors (LWE) problems are the foundations for countless applications in lattice-based cryptography, and are provably as hard as approximate lattice problems in the worst case. A important question from both a practical and theoretical perspective is how small their parameters can be made, while preserving their hardness. We prove two main results on SIS and LWE with small parameters. For SIS, we show that the problem retains its hardness for moduli $q \geq \beta \cdot n^{\delta}$ for any constant $\delta > 0$, where $\beta$ is the bound on the Euclidean norm of the solution. This improves upon prior results which required $q \geq \beta \cdot \sqrt{n \log n}$, and is essentially optimal since the problem is trivially easy for $q \leq \beta$. For LWE, we show that it remains hard even when the errors are small (e.g., uniformly random from $\{0,1\}$), provided that the number of samples is small enough (e.g., linear in the dimension $n$ of the LWE secret). Prior results required the errors to have magnitude at least $\sqrt{n}$ and to come from a Gaussian-like distribution

Learning with Errors is easy with quantum samples

Learning with Errors is one of the fundamental problems in computational learning theory and has in the last years become the cornerstone of post-quantum cryptography. In this work, we study the quantum sample complexity of Learning with Errors and show that there exists an efficient quantum learning algorithm (with polynomial sample and time complexity) for the Learning with Errors problem where the error distribution is the one used in cryptography. While our quantum learning algorithm does not break the LWE-based encryption schemes proposed in the cryptography literature, it does have some interesting implications for cryptography: first, when building an LWE-based scheme, one needs to be careful about the access to the public-key generation algorithm that is given to the adversary; second, our algorithm shows a possible way for attacking LWE-based encryption by using classical samples to approximate the quantum sample state, since then using our quantum learning algorithm would solve LWE

Lattice-Based Group Signatures: Achieving Full Dynamicity (and Deniability) with Ease

In this work, we provide the first lattice-based group signature that offers full dynamicity (i.e., users have the flexibility in joining and leaving the group), and thus, resolve a prominent open problem posed by previous works. Moreover, we achieve this non-trivial feat in a relatively simple manner. Starting with Libert et al.'s fully static construction (Eurocrypt 2016) - which is arguably the most efficient lattice-based group signature to date, we introduce simple-but-insightful tweaks that allow to upgrade it directly into the fully dynamic setting. More startlingly, our scheme even produces slightly shorter signatures than the former, thanks to an adaptation of a technique proposed by Ling et al. (PKC 2013), allowing to prove inequalities in zero-knowledge. Our design approach consists of upgrading Libert et al.'s static construction (EUROCRYPT 2016) - which is arguably the most efficient lattice-based group signature to date - into the fully dynamic setting. Somewhat surprisingly, our scheme produces slightly shorter signatures than the former, thanks to a new technique for proving inequality in zero-knowledge without relying on any inequality check. The scheme satisfies the strong security requirements of Bootle et al.'s model (ACNS 2016), under the Short Integer Solution (SIS) and the Learning With Errors (LWE) assumptions. Furthermore, we demonstrate how to equip the obtained group signature scheme with the deniability functionality in a simple way. This attractive functionality, put forward by Ishida et al. (CANS 2016), enables the tracing authority to provide an evidence that a given user is not the owner of a signature in question. In the process, we design a zero-knowledge protocol for proving that a given LWE ciphertext does not decrypt to a particular message

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

An Improved BKW Algorithm for LWE with Applications to Cryptography and Lattices

In this paper, we study the Learning With Errors problem and its binary variant, where secrets and errors are binary or taken in a small interval. We introduce a new variant of the Blum, Kalai and Wasserman algorithm, relying on a quantization step that generalizes and fine-tunes modulus switching. In general this new technique yields a significant gain in the constant in front of the exponent in the overall complexity. We illustrate this by solving p within half a day a LWE instance with dimension n = 128, modulus $q = n^2$, Gaussian noise $\alpha = 1/(\sqrt{n/\pi} \log^2 n)$ and binary secret, using $2^{28}$ samples, while the previous best result based on BKW claims a time complexity of $2^{74}$ with $2^{60}$ samples for the same parameters. We then introduce variants of BDD, GapSVP and UniqueSVP, where the target point is required to lie in the fundamental parallelepiped, and show how the previous algorithm is able to solve these variants in subexponential time. Moreover, we also show how the previous algorithm can be used to solve the BinaryLWE problem with n samples in subexponential time $2^{(\ln 2/2+o(1))n/\log \log n}$. This analysis does not require any heuristic assumption, contrary to other algebraic approaches; instead, it uses a variant of an idea by Lyubashevsky to generate many samples from a small number of samples. This makes it possible to asymptotically and heuristically break the NTRU cryptosystem in subexponential time (without contradicting its security assumption). We are also able to solve subset sum problems in subexponential time for density $o(1)$, which is of independent interest: for such density, the previous best algorithm requires exponential time. As a direct application, we can solve in subexponential time the parameters of a cryptosystem based on this problem proposed at TCC 2010.Comment: CRYPTO 201

PPP-Completeness with Connections to Cryptography

Polynomial Pigeonhole Principle (PPP) is an important subclass of TFNP with profound connections to the complexity of the fundamental cryptographic primitives: collision-resistant hash functions and one-way permutations. In contrast to most of the other subclasses of TFNP, no complete problem is known for PPP. Our work identifies the first PPP-complete problem without any circuit or Turing Machine given explicitly in the input, and thus we answer a longstanding open question from [Papadimitriou1994]. Specifically, we show that constrained-SIS (cSIS), a generalized version of the well-known Short Integer Solution problem (SIS) from lattice-based cryptography, is PPP-complete. In order to give intuition behind our reduction for constrained-SIS, we identify another PPP-complete problem with a circuit in the input but closely related to lattice problems. We call this problem BLICHFELDT and it is the computational problem associated with Blichfeldt's fundamental theorem in the theory of lattices. Building on the inherent connection of PPP with collision-resistant hash functions, we use our completeness result to construct the first natural hash function family that captures the hardness of all collision-resistant hash functions in a worst-case sense, i.e. it is natural and universal in the worst-case. The close resemblance of our hash function family with SIS, leads us to the first candidate collision-resistant hash function that is both natural and universal in an average-case sense. Finally, our results enrich our understanding of the connections between PPP, lattice problems and other concrete cryptographic assumptions, such as the discrete logarithm problem over general groups

A framework for cryptographic problems from linear algebra

We introduce a general framework encompassing the main hard problems emerging in lattice-based cryptography, which naturally includes the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystem, but also problems coming from code-based cryptography. The framework allows to easily instantiate new hard problems and to automatically construct plausibly post-quantum secure primitives from them. As a first basic application, we introduce two new hard problems and the corresponding encryption schemes. Concretely, we study generalisations of hard problems such as SIS, LWE and NTRU to free modules over quotients of Z[X] by ideals of the form (f,g), where f is a monic polynomial and g∈Z[X] is a ciphertext modulus coprime to f. For trivial modules (i.e. of rank one), the case f=Xn+1 and g=q∈Z>1 corresponds to ring-LWE, ring-SIS and NTRU, while the choices f=Xn−1 and g=X−2 essentially cover the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystems. At the other extreme, when considering modules of large rank and letting deg(f)=1, one recovers the framework of LWE and SIS

A New Provably Secure Cryptosystem Using Dedekind Domain Direct Product Approach

We would like to prevent, detect, and protect communication and information systems' attacks, which include unauthorized reading of a message of file and traffic analysis or active attacks, such as modification of messages or files, and denial of service by providing cryptographic techniques. If we prove that an encryption algorithm is based on mathematical NP-hard problems, we can prove its security. In this paper, we present a new NTRU-Like public-key cryptosystem with security provably based on the worst-case hardness of the approximate lattice problems (NP-hard problems) in some structured lattices (ideal lattices) in order to attain the applicable objectives of preserving the confidentiality of communication and information system resources (includes hardware, software, firmware, information/data, and telecommunications). Our proposed scheme is an improvement of ETRU cryptosystem. ETRU is an NTRU-Like public-key cryptosystem based on the Eisenstein integers Z [f_3 ] where f_3 is a primitive cube root of unity. ETRU has heuristic security and it has no proof of security. We show that our cryptosystem has security stronger than that of ETRU, over cartesian product of dedekind domains and extended cyclotomic polynomials. We prove the security of our main algorithm from the R-SIS and R-LWE problems as NP-hard problems