Another Step Towards Realizing Random Oracles: Non-Malleable Point Obfuscation

The random oracle paradigm allows us to analyze the security of protocols and constructions in an idealized model, where all parties have access to a truly random function. This is one of the most popular and well-studied models in cryptography. However, being such a strong idealized model, it is known to be susceptible to various weaknesses when implemented naively in ``real-life\u27\u27, as shown by Canetti, Goldreich and Halevi (J. ACM 2004). As a counter-measure, one could try to identify and implement only one or few of the properties a random oracle possesses that are needed for a specific setting. Such a systematic study was initiated by Canetti (CRYPTO 1997), who showed how to implement the property that the output of the function does not reveal anything regarding the input by constructing a point function obfucator. This property turned out to suffice in many follow-up works and applications. In this work, we tackle another natural property of random oracles and implement it in the standard model. The property we focus on is non-malleability, where it is required that the output on an input cannot be used to generate an output on any related point. We construct a point obfuscator that is both hiding (a la Canetti) and is non-malleable for a non-trivial class of mauling functions. Our construction does not use heavy cryptographic machinery (such as zero-knowledge proofs) and is comparable to that of Canetti in terms of time complexity and obfuscation size. The security of our construction relies on variants of the DDH and power-DDH assumptions. On the technical side, we introduce a new technique for proving security of a construction based on a DDH-like assumption. We call this technique ``double-exponentiation\u27\u27 and believe it will be useful in the future

Studies in program obfuscation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mathematics, 2010.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-164).Program obfuscation is the software analog to the problem of tamper-proofing hardware. The goal of program obfuscation is to construct a compiler, called an "obfuscator," that garbles the code of a computer program while maintaining its functionality. Commercial products exist to perform this procedure, but they do not provide a rigorous security guarantee. Over the past decade, program obfuscation has been studied by the theoretical cryptography community, where rigorous definitions of security have been proposed and obfuscators have been constructed for some families of programs. This thesis presents three contributions based on the virtual black-box security definition of Barak et al [10]. First, we show tight connections between obfuscation and symmetric-key encryption. Specifically, obfuscation can be used to construct an encryption scheme with strong leakage resilience and key-dependent message security. The converse is also true, and these connections scale with the level of security desired. As a result, the known constructions and impossibility results for each primitive carry over to the other. Second, we present two new security definitions that augment the virtual black-box property to incorporate non-malleability. The virtual black-box definition does not prevent an adversary from modifying an obfuscated program intelligently. By contrast, our new definitions provide software with the same security guarantees as tamper-proof and tamper-evident hardware, respectively. The first definition prohibits tampering, and the second definition requires that tampering is detectable after the fact. We construct non-malleable obfuscators of both favors for some program families of interest. Third, we present an obfuscator for programs that test for membership in a hyperplane. This generalizes prior works that obfuscate equality testing. We prove the security of the obfuscator under a new strong variant of the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption that holds in the generic group model. Additionally, we show a cryptographic application of the new obfuscator to leak-ageresilient one-time digital signatures. The thesis also includes a survey of the prior results in the field.by Mayank Varia.Ph.D

COA-Secure Obfuscation and Applications

We put forth a new paradigm for program obfuscation, where obfuscated programs are endowed with proofs of ``well-formedness.\u27\u27 In addition to asserting existence of an underlying plaintext program with an attested structure and functionality, these proofs also prevent mauling attacks, whereby an adversary surreptitiously creates an obfuscated program based on secrets which are embedded in a given obfuscated program. We call this new guarantee Chosen Obfuscation Attack (COA) security. We define and construct general-purpose COA-secure Probabilistic Indistinguishability Obfuscators for circuits, assuming sub-exponential IO for circuits and CCA commitments. To demonstrate the power of the new notion, we use it to realize, in the plain model: - Structural Watermarking, which is a new form of software watermarking that provides significantly broader protection than current schemes and features a keyless, public verification process. - Completely CCA encryption, which is a strengthening of completely non-malleable encryption. We also show, based on the same assumptions, a generic method for enhancing any obfuscation mechanism that guarantees any semantic-style form of hiding to one that provides also COA security

Nonmalleable Digital Lockers and Robust Fuzzy Extractors in the Plain Model

We give the first constructions in the plain model of 1) nonmalleable digital lockers (Canetti and Varia, TCC 2009) and 2) robust fuzzy extractors (Boyen et al., Eurocrypt 2005) that secure sources with entropy below 1/2 of their length. Constructions were previously only known for both primitives assuming random oracles or a common reference string (CRS). Along the way, we define a new primitive called a nonmalleable point function obfuscation with associated data. The associated data is public but protected from all tampering. We use the same paradigm to then extend this to digital lockers. Our constructions achieve nonmalleability over the output point by placing a CRS into the associated data and using an appropriate non-interactive zero-knowledge proof. Tampering is protected against the input point over low-degree polynomials and over any tampering to the output point and associated data. Our constructions achieve virtual black box security. These constructions are then used to create robust fuzzy extractors that can support low-entropy sources in the plain model. By using the geometric structure of a syndrome secure sketch (Dodis et al., SIAM Journal on Computing 2008), the adversary’s tampering function can always be expressed as a low-degree polynomial; thus, the protection provided by the constructed nonmalleable objects suffices

Separations among formulations of non-malleable encryption under valid ciphertext condition

Non-malleability is one of the basic security goals for encryption schemes which ensures the resistance of the scheme against ciphertext modifications in the sense that any adversary, given a ciphertext of a plaintext, cannot generate another ciphertext whose underlying plaintext is meaningfully related to the initial one. There are multiple formulations of non-malleable encryption schemes, depending on whether they are based on simulation or comparison, or whether they impose valid ciphertext condition, in which an adversary is required to generate only valid ciphertexts, or not. In addition to the simulation-based and comparison-based formulations (SNM and CNM), non-malleability has an indistinguishability-based characterization called ciphertext indistinguishability (IND) against parallel chosen-ciphertext attacks. These three formulations, SNM, CNM and IND, have been shown to be equivalent if the valid ciphertext condition is not imposed; however, if that condition is imposed, then the equivalence among them has been shown only against the strongest type of attack models, and the relations among them against the weaker types of the attack models remain open. This work answers this open question by showing the separations SNM*$\not\rightarrow$CNM* and IND*$\not\rightarrow$SNM* against the weaker types of the attack models, where the asterisk attached to the short-hand notations represents that the valid ciphertext condition is imposed. Moreover, motivated by the proof of the latter separation, this paper introduces simulation-based and comparison-based formulations of semantic security (SSS* and CSS*) against parallel chosen-ciphertext attacks, and shows the equivalences SSS*$\leftrightarrow$SNM* and CSS*$\leftrightarrow$CNM* against all types of the attack models. It thus follows that IND*$\not\rightarrow$SSS*, that is, semantic security and ciphertext indistinguishability, which have been shown to be equivalent in various settings, separate against the weaker parallel chosen-ciphertext attacks under the valid ciphertext condition

Same Point Composable and Nonmalleable Obfuscated Point Functions

A point obfuscator is an obfuscated program that indicates if a user enters a previously stored password. A digital locker is stronger: outputting a key if a user enters a previously stored password. The real-or-random transform allows one to build a digital locker from a composable point obfuscator (Canetti and Dakdouk, Eurocrypt 2008). Ideally, both objects would be nonmalleable, detecting adversarial tampering. Appending a non-interactive zero knowledge proof of knowledge adds nonmalleability in the common random string (CRS) model. Komargodski and Yogev (Eurocrypt, 2018) built a nonmalleable point obfuscator without a CRS. We show a lemma in their proof is false, leaving security of their construction unclear. Bartusek, Ma, and Zhandry (Crypto, 2019) used similar techniques and introduced another nonmalleable point function; their obfuscator is not secure if the same point is obfuscated twice. Thus, there was no composable and nonmalleable point function to instantiate the real-or-random construction. Our primary contribution is a nonmalleable point obfuscator that can be composed any polynomial number of times with the same point (which must be known ahead of time). Security relies on the assumption used in Bartusek, Ma, and Zhandry. This construction enables a digital locker that is nonmalleable with respect to the input password. As a secondary contribution, we introduce a key encoding step to detect tampering on the key. This step combines nonmalleable codes and seed-dependent condensers. The seed for the condenser must be public and not tampered, so this can be achieved in the CRS model. The password distribution may depend on the condenser’s seed as long as it is efficiently sampleable. This construction is black box in the underlying point obfuscation. Nonmalleability for the password is ensured for functions that can be represented as low degree polynomials. Key nonmalleability is inherited from the class of functions prevented by the nonmalleable code

Auditable Obfuscation

We introduce a new variant of malicious obfuscation. Our formalism is incomparable to the existing definitions by Canetti and Varia (TCC 2010), Canetti et al. (EUROCRYPT 2022) and Badrinarayanan et al. (ASIACRYPT 2016). We show that this concept is natural and applicable to obfuscation-as-a-service platforms. We next define a new notion called auditable obfuscation which provides security against malicious obfuscation. Finally, we construct a proof of concept of the developed notions based on well-studied theoretical obfuscation proposals

On Strong Simulation and Composable Point Obfuscation

The Virtual Black Box (VBB) property for program obfuscators provides a strong guarantee: Anything computable by an efficient adversary given the obfuscated program can also be computed by an efficient simulator with only oracle access to the program. However, we know how to achieve this notion only for very restricted classes of programs. This work studies a simple relaxation of VBB: Allow the simulator unbounded computation time, while still allowing only polynomially many queries to the oracle. We then demonstrate the viability of this relaxed notion, which we call Virtual Grey Box (VGB), in the context of fully composable obfuscators for point programs: It is known that, w.r.t. VBB, if such obfuscators exist then there exist multi-bit point obfuscators (aka ``digital lockers\u27\u27) and subsequently also very strong variants of encryption that are resilient to various attacks, such as key leakage and key-dependent-messages. However, no composable VBB-obfuscators for point programs have been shown. We show fully composable {\em VGB}-obfuscators for point programs under a strong variant of the Decision Diffie Hellman assumption. We show they suffice for the above applications and even for extensions to the public key setting as well as for encryption schemes with resistance to certain related key attacks (RKA)

Non-Malleable Functions and Their Applications

We formally study ``non-malleable functions\u27\u27 (NMFs), a general cryptographic primitive which simplifies and relaxes ``non-malleable one-way/hash functions\u27\u27 (NMOWHFs) introduced by Boldyreva et al. (Asiacrypt 2009) and refined by Baecher et al. (CT-RSA 2010). NMFs focus on basic functions, rather than one-way/hash functions considered in the literature of NMOWHFs. We mainly follow Baecher et al. to formalize a game-based definition for NMFs. Roughly, a function $f$ is non-malleable if given an image $y^* \leftarrow f(x^*)$ for a randomly chosen $x^*$, it is hard to output a mauled image $y$ with a transformation $\phi$ from some prefixed transformation class s.t. $y = f(\phi(x^*))$. A distinctive strengthening of our non-malleable notion is that $\phi$ such that $\phi(x^*) = x^*$ is allowed. We also consider adaptive non-malleability, which stipulates that non-malleability holds even when an inversion oracle is available. We investigate the relations between non-malleability and one-wayness in depth. In non-adaptive setting, we show that for any achievable transformation class, non-malleability implies one-wayness for poly-to-one functions but not vise versa.In adaptive setting, we show that for most algebra-induced transformation class, adaptive non-malleability (ANM) is equivalent to adaptive one-wayness (AOW) for injective functions. These results establish theoretical connections between non-malleability and one-wayness for functions, which extend to trapdoor functions as well, and thus resolve the open problems left by Kiltz et al. (Eurocrypt 2010). We also study the relations between standard OW/NM and hinted OW/NM, where the latter notions are typically more useful in practice. Towards efficient realizations of NMFs, we give a deterministic construction from adaptive trapdoor functions and a randomized construction from all-but-one lossy functions and one-time signature. This partially solves an open problem posed by Boldyreva et al. (Asiacrypt 2009). Finally, we explore applications of NMFs in security against related-key attacks (RKA). We first show that the implication AOW $\Rightarrow$ ANM provides key conceptual insight into addressing non-trivial copy attacks in RKA security. We then show that NMFs give rise to a generic construction of continuous non-malleable key derivation functions, which have proven to be very useful in achieving RKA security for numerous cryptographic primitives. Particularly, our construction simplifies and clarifies the construction by Qin et al. (PKC 2015)

The Distinction Between Fixed and Random Generators in Group-Based Assumptions

There is surprisingly little consensus on the precise role of the generator g in group-based assumptions such as DDH. Some works consider g to be a fixed part of the group description, while others take it to be random. We study this subtle distinction from a number of angles. - In the generic group model, we demonstrate the plausibility of groups in which random-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is hard but fixed-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is easy. We observe that such groups have interesting cryptographic applications. - We find that seemingly tight generic lower bounds for the Discrete-Log and CDH problems with preprocessing (Corrigan-Gibbs and Kogan, Eurocrypt 2018) are not tight in the sub-constant success probability regime if the generator is random. We resolve this by proving tight lower bounds for the random generator variants; our results formalize the intuition that using a random generator will reduce the effectiveness of preprocessing attacks. - We observe that DDH-like assumptions in which exponents are drawn from low-entropy distributions are particularly sensitive to the fixed- vs. random-generator distinction. Most notably, we discover that the Strong Power DDH assumption of Komargodski and Yogev (Komargodski and Yogev, Eurocrypt 2018) used for non-malleable point obfuscation is in fact false precisely because it requires a fixed generator. In response, we formulate an alternative fixed-generator assumption that suffices for a new construction of non-malleable point obfuscation, and we prove the assumption holds in the generic group model. We also give a generic group proof for the security of fixed-generator, low-entropy DDH (Canetti, Crypto 1997)