General Impossibility of Group Homomorphic Encryption in the Quantum World

Group homomorphic encryption represents one of the most important building blocks in modern cryptography. It forms the basis of widely-used, more sophisticated primitives, such as CCA2-secure encryption or secure multiparty computation. Unfortunately, recent advances in quantum computation show that many of the existing schemes completely break down once quantum computers reach maturity (mainly due to Shor's algorithm). This leads to the challenge of constructing quantum-resistant group homomorphic cryptosystems. In this work, we prove the general impossibility of (abelian) group homomorphic encryption in the presence of quantum adversaries, when assuming the IND-CPA security notion as the minimal security requirement. To this end, we prove a new result on the probability of sampling generating sets of finite (sub-)groups if sampling is done with respect to an arbitrary, unknown distribution. Finally, we provide a sufficient condition on homomorphic encryption schemes for our quantum attack to work and discuss its satisfiability in non-group homomorphic cases. The impact of our results on recent fully homomorphic encryption schemes poses itself as an open question.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figures, conferenc

Discrete logarithms in curves over finite fields

A survey on algorithms for computing discrete logarithms in Jacobians of curves over finite fields

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

Stopping time signatures for some algorithms in cryptography

We consider the normalized distribution of the overall running times of some cryptographic algorithms, and what information they reveal about the algorithms. Recent work of Deift, Menon, Olver, Pfrang, and Trogdon has shown that certain numerical algorithms applied to large random matrices exhibit a characteristic distribution of running times, which depends only on the algorithm but are independent of the choice of probability distributions for the matrices. Different algorithms often exhibit different running time distributions, and so the histograms for these running time distributions provide a time-signature for the algorithms, making it possible, in many cases, to distinguish one algorithm from another. In this paper we extend this analysis to cryptographic algorithms, and present examples of such algorithms with time-signatures that are indistinguishable, and others with time-signatures that are clearly distinct.Comment: 20 page