Finding Safety in Numbers with Secure Allegation Escrows

For fear of retribution, the victim of a crime may be willing to report it only if other victims of the same perpetrator also step forward. Common examples include 1) identifying oneself as the victim of sexual harassment, especially by a person in a position of authority or 2) accusing an influential politician, an authoritarian government, or ones own employer of corruption. To handle such situations, legal literature has proposed the concept of an allegation escrow: a neutral third-party that collects allegations anonymously, matches them against each other, and de-anonymizes allegers only after de-anonymity thresholds (in terms of number of co-allegers), pre-specified by the allegers, are reached. An allegation escrow can be realized as a single trusted third party; however, this party must be trusted to keep the identity of the alleger and content of the allegation private. To address this problem, this paper introduces Secure Allegation Escrows (SAE, pronounced "say"). A SAE is a group of parties with independent interests and motives, acting jointly as an escrow for collecting allegations from individuals, matching the allegations, and de-anonymizing the allegations when designated thresholds are reached. By design, SAEs provide a very strong property: No less than a majority of parties constituting a SAE can de-anonymize or disclose the content of an allegation without a sufficient number of matching allegations (even in collusion with any number of other allegers). Once a sufficient number of matching allegations exist, the join escrow discloses the allegation with the allegers' identities. We describe how SAEs can be constructed using a novel authentication protocol and a novel allegation matching and bucketing algorithm, provide formal proofs of the security of our constructions, and evaluate a prototype implementation, demonstrating feasibility in practice.Comment: To appear in NDSS 2020. New version includes improvements to writing and proof. The protocol is unchange

On publicly verifiable secret sharing schemes

Secret sharing allows a dealer to distribute shares of a secret to a set of parties such that only so-called authorised subsets of these parties can recover the secret, whilst forbidden sets gain at most some restricted amount of information. This idea has been built upon in verifiable secret sharing to allow parties to verify that their shares are valid and will therefore correctly reconstruct the same secret. This can then be further extended to publicly verifiable secret sharing by firstly considering only public channels of communication, hence imposing the need for encryption of the shares, and secondly by requiring that any party be able to verify any other parties shares from the public encryption. In this thesis we work our way up from the original secret sharing scheme by Shamir to examples of various approaches of publicly verifiable schemes. Due to the need for encryption in private communication, different cryptographic methods allow for certain interesting advantages in the schemes. We review some important existing methods and their significant properties of interest, such as being homomorphic or efficiently verifiable. We also consider recent improvements in these schemes and make a contribution by showing that an encryption scheme by Castagnos and Laguillaumie allows for a publicly verifiable secret sharing scheme to have some interesting homomorphic properties. To explore further we look at generalisations to the recently introduced idea of Abelian secret sharing, and we consider some examples of such constructions. Finally we look at some applications of secret sharing schemes, and present our own implementation of Schoenmaker’s scheme in Python, along with a voting system on which it is based

Group key establishment protocols: Pairing cryptography and verifiable secret sharing scheme

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Computer Engineering, Izmir, 2013Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 97-103)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishx, 154 leavesThe aim of this study is to establish a common secret key over an open network for a group of user to be used then symmetrical secure communication between them. There are two methods of GKE protocol which are key agreement and key distribution. Key agreement is a mechanism whereby the parties jointly establish a common secret. As to key distribution, it is a mechanism whereby one of the parties creates or obtains a secret value and then securely distributes it to other parties. In this study, both methods is applied and analyzed in two different GKE protocols. Desirable properties of a GKE are security and efficiency. Security is attributed in terms of preventing attacks against passive and active adversary. Efficiency is quantified in terms of computation, communication and round complexity. When constructing a GKE, the challenge is to provide security and efficiency according to attributed and quantified terms. Two main cryptographic tools are selected in order to handle the defined challenge. One of them is bilinear pairing which is based on elliptic curve cryptography and another is verifiable secret sharing which is based on multiparty computation. In this thesis, constructions of these two GKE protocols are studied along with their communication models, security and efficiency analysis. Also, an implementation of four-user group size is developed utilizing PBC, GMP and OpenSSL Libraries for both two protocols

Ideal Tightly Couple (t,m,n) Secret Sharing

As a fundamental cryptographic tool, (t,n)-threshold secret sharing ((t,n)-SS) divides a secret among n shareholders and requires at least t, (t<=n), of them to reconstruct the secret. Ideal (t,n)-SSs are most desirable in security and efficiency among basic (t,n)-SSs. However, an adversary, even without any valid share, may mount Illegal Participant (IP) attack or t/2-Private Channel Cracking (t/2-PCC) attack to obtain the secret in most (t,n)-SSs.To secure ideal (t,n)-SSs against the 2 attacks, 1) the paper introduces the notion of Ideal Tightly cOupled (t,m,n) Secret Sharing (or (t,m,n)-ITOSS ) to thwart IP attack without Verifiable SS; (t,m,n)-ITOSS binds all m, (m>=t), participants into a tightly coupled group and requires all participants to be legal shareholders before recovering the secret. 2) As an example, the paper presents a polynomial-based (t,m,n)-ITOSS scheme, in which the proposed k-round Random Number Selection (RNS) guarantees that adversaries have to crack at least symmetrical private channels among participants before obtaining the secret. Therefore, k-round RNS enhances the robustness of (t,m,n)-ITOSS against t/2-PCC attack to the utmost. 3) The paper finally presents a generalized method of converting an ideal (t,n)-SS into a (t,m,n)-ITOSS, which helps an ideal (t,n)-SS substantially improve the robustness against the above 2 attacks