Homomorphic public-key systems based on subgroup membership problems

We describe the group structure underlying several popular homomorphic public-key systems and the problems they are based on. We prove several well-known security results using only the group structure and assumptions about the related problems. Then we provide examples of two new instances of this group structure and analyse their security

On non-abelian homomorphic public-key cryptosystems

An important problem of modern cryptography concerns secret public-key computations in algebraic structures. We construct homomorphic cryptosystems being (secret) epimorphisms f:G --> H, where G, H are (publically known) groups and H is finite. A letter of a message to be encrypted is an element h element of H, while its encryption g element of G is such that f(g)=h. A homomorphic cryptosystem allows one to perform computations (operating in a group G) with encrypted information (without knowing the original message over H). In this paper certain homomorphic cryptosystems are constructed for the first time for non-abelian groups H (earlier, homomorphic cryptosystems were known only in the Abelian case). In fact, we present such a system for any solvable (fixed) group H.Comment: 15 pages, LaTe

Homomorphic public-key cryptosystems and encrypting boolean circuits

In this paper homomorphic cryptosystems are designed for the first time over any finite group. Applying Barrington's construction we produce for any boolean circuit of the logarithmic depth its encrypted simulation of a polynomial size over an appropriate finitely generated group

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

Still Wrong Use of Pairings in Cryptography

Several pairing-based cryptographic protocols are recently proposed with a wide variety of new novel applications including the ones in emerging technologies like cloud computing, internet of things (IoT), e-health systems and wearable technologies. There have been however a wide range of incorrect use of these primitives. The paper of Galbraith, Paterson, and Smart (2006) pointed out most of the issues related to the incorrect use of pairing-based cryptography. However, we noticed that some recently proposed applications still do not use these primitives correctly. This leads to unrealizable, insecure or too inefficient designs of pairing-based protocols. We observed that one reason is not being aware of the recent advancements on solving the discrete logarithm problems in some groups. The main purpose of this article is to give an understandable, informative, and the most up-to-date criteria for the correct use of pairing-based cryptography. We thereby deliberately avoid most of the technical details and rather give special emphasis on the importance of the correct use of bilinear maps by realizing secure cryptographic protocols. We list a collection of some recent papers having wrong security assumptions or realizability/efficiency issues. Finally, we give a compact and an up-to-date recipe of the correct use of pairings.Comment: 25 page

Constructions in public-key cryptography over matrix groups

ISBN : 978-0-8218-4037-5International audienceThe purpose of the paper is to give new key agreement protocols (a multi-party extension of the protocol due to Anshel-Anshel-Goldfeld and a generalization of the Diffie-Hellman protocol from abelian to solvable groups) and a new homomorphic public-key cryptosystem. They rely on difficulty of the conjugacy and membership problems for subgroups of a given group. To support these and other known cryptographic schemes we present a general technique to produce a family of instances being matrix groups (over finite commutative rings) which play a role for these schemes similar to the groups $Z_n^*$ in the existing cryptographic constructions like RSA or discrete logarithm

A new key exchange protocol based on the decomposition problem

In this paper we present a new key establishment protocol based on the decomposition problem in non-commutative groups which is: given two elements $w, w_1$ of the platform group $G$ and two subgroups $A, B \subseteq G$ (not necessarily distinct), find elements $a \in A, b \in B$ such that $w_1 = a w b$. Here we introduce two new ideas that improve the security of key establishment protocols based on the decomposition problem. In particular, we conceal (i.e., do not publish explicitly) one of the subgroups $A, B$, thus introducing an additional computationally hard problem for the adversary, namely, finding the centralizer of a given finitely generated subgroup.Comment: 7 page