On Modeling IND-CCA Security in Cryptographic Protocols

Two common notions of security for public key encryption schemes are shown to be equivalent: we prove that indistinguishability against chosen-ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA) is in fact polynomially equivalent to (yet slightly weaker than) securely realizing the ideal functionality F_PKE in the general modeling of cryptographic protocols of [http://eprint.iacr.org/2000/067]. This disproves in particular the claim that security in the sense of IND-CCA strictly implies security in the sense of realizing F_PKE (see [http://eprint.iacr.org/2000/067]). Moreover, we give concrete reductions among such security notions and show that these relations hold for both uniform and non-uniform adversarial entities

A Survey of Symbolic Methods in Computational Analysis of Cryptographic Systems

Since the 1980s, two approaches have been developed for analyzing security protocols. One of the approaches relies on a computational model that considers issues of complexity and probability. This approach captures a strong notion of security, guaranteed against all probabilistic polynomial-time attacks. The other approach relies on a symbolic model of protocol executions in which cryptographic primitives are treated as black boxes. Since the seminal work of Dolev and Yao, it has been realized that this latter approach enables significantly simpler and often automated proofs. However, the guarantees that it offers have been quite unclear. For more than twenty years the two approaches have coexisted but evolved mostly independently. Recently, significant research efforts attempt to develop paradigms for cryptographic systems analysis that combines the best of both worlds. There are two broad directions that have been followed. {\em Computational soundness} aims to establish sufficient conditions under which results obtained using symbolic models imply security under computational models. The {\em direct approach} aims to apply the principles and the techniques developed in the context of symbolic models directly to computational ones. In this paper we survey existing results along both of these directions. Our goal is to provide a rather complete summary that could act as a quick reference for researchers who want to contribute to the field, want to make use of existing results, or just want to get a better picture of what results already exist

Anonymity-Preserving Public-Key Encryption: A Constructive Approach

Abstract. A receiver-anonymous channel allows a sender to send a message to a receiver without an adversary learning for whom the message is intended. Wireless broadcast channels naturally provide receiver anonymity, as does multi-casting one message to a receiver population containing the intended receiver. While anonymity and confidentiality appear to be orthogonal properties, making anonymous communication confidential is more involved than one might expect, since the ciphertext might reveal which public key has been used to encrypt. To address this problem, public-key cryptosystems with enhanced security properties have been proposed. We investigate constructions as well as limitations for preserving receiver anonymity when using public-key encryption (PKE). We use the constructive cryptography approach by Maurer and Renner and interpret cryptographic schemes as constructions of a certain ideal resource (e.g. a confidential anonymous channel) from given real resources (e.g. a broadcast channel). We define appropriate anonymous communication resources and show that a very natural resource can be constructed by using a PKE scheme which fulfills three properties that appear in cryptographic literature (IND-CCA, key-privacy, weak robustness). We also show that a desirable stronger variant, preventing the adversary from selective “trial-deliveries ” of messages, is unfortunately unachievable by any PKE scheme, no matter how strong. The constructive approach makes the guarantees achieved by applying a cryptographic scheme explicit in the constructed (ideal) resource; this specifies the exact requirements for the applicability of a cryptographic scheme in a given context. It also allows to decide which of the existing security properties of such a cryptographic scheme are adequate for the considered scenario, and which are too weak or too strong. Here, we show that weak robustness is necessary but that so-called strong robustness is unnecessarily strong in that it does not construct a (natural) stronger resource

A Type-and-Identity-based Proxy Re-Encryption Scheme and its Application in Healthcare

Proxy re-encryption is a cryptographic primitive developed to delegate the decryption right from one party (the delegator) to another (the delegatee). In a proxy re-encryption scheme, the delegator assigns a key to a proxy to re-encrypt all messages encrypted with his public key such that the re-encrypted ciphertexts can be decrypted with the delegatee’s private key. We propose a type-and-identity-based proxy re-encryption scheme based on the Boneh-Franklin Identity Based Encryption (IBE) scheme. In our scheme, the delegator can categorize messages into different types and delegate the decryption right of each type to the delegatee through a proxy. Our scheme enables the delegator to provide the proxy fine-grained re-encryption capability. As an application, we propose a fine-grained Personal Health Record (PHR) disclosure scheme for healthcare service by applying the proposed scheme

How to prove security of communication protocols? A discussion on the soundness of formal models w.r.t. computational ones.

Security protocols are short programs that aim at securing communication over a public network. Their design is known to be error-prone with flaws found years later. That is why they deserve a careful security analysis, with rigorous proofs. Two main lines of research have been (independently) developed to analyse the security of protocols. On the one hand, formal methods provide with symbolic models and often automatic proofs. On the other hand, cryptographic models propose a tighter modeling but proofs are more difficult to write and to check. An approach developed during the last decade consists in bridging the two approaches, showing that symbolic models are sound w.r.t. symbolic ones, yielding strong security guarantees using automatic tools. These results have been developed for several cryptographic primitives (e.g. symmetric and asymmetric encryption, signatures, hash) and security properties. While proving soundness of symbolic models is a very promising approach, several technical details are often not satisfactory. Focusing on symmetric encryption, we describe the difficulties and limitations of the available results

A Cryptographic Look at Multi-Party Channels

Cryptographic channels aim to enable authenticated and confidential communication over the Internet. The general understanding seems to be that providing security in the sense of authenticated encryption for every (unidirectional) point-to-point link suffices to achieve this goal. As recently shown (in FSE17/ToSC17), however, the security properties of the unidirectional links do not extend, in general, to the bidirectional channel as a whole. Intuitively, the reason for this is that the increased interaction in bidirectional communication can be exploited by an adversary. The same applies, a fortiori, in a multi-party setting where several users operate concurrently and the communication develops in more directions. In the cryptographic literature, however, the targeted goals for group communication in terms of channel security are still unexplored. Applying the methodology of provable security, we fill this gap by defining exact (game-based) authenticity and confidentiality goals for broadcast communication, and showing how to achieve them. Importantly, our security notions also account for the causal dependencies between exchanged messages, thus naturally extending the bidirectional case where causal relationships are automatically captured by preserving the sending order. On the constructive side we propose a modular and yet efficient protocol that, assuming only point-to-point links between users, leverages (non-cryptographic) broadcast and standard cryptographic primitives to a full-fledged broadcast channel that provably meets the security notions we put forth

Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram's MTProto 2.0

MTProto 2.0 is a suite of cryptographic protocols for instant messaging at the core of the popular Telegram messenger application. In this paper we analyse MTProto 2.0 using the symbolic verifier ProVerif. We provide fully automated proofs of the soundness of MTProto 2.0's authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat, and rekeying mechanisms with respect to several security properties, including authentication, integrity, secrecy and perfect forward secrecy; at the same time, we discover that the rekeying protocol is vulnerable to an unknown key-share (UKS) attack. We proceed in an incremental way: each protocol is examined in isolation, relying only on the guarantees provided by the previous ones and the robustness of the basic cryptographic primitives. Our research proves the formal correctness of MTProto 2.0 w.r.t. most relevant security properties, and it can serve as a reference for implementation and analysis of clients and servers.Comment: 19 page

Contributions to secret sharing and other distributed cryptosystems

The present thesis deals with primitives related to the eld of distributed cryptography. First, we study signcryption schemes, which provide at the same time the functionalities of encryption and signature, where the unsigncryption operation is distributed. We consider this primitive from a theoretical point of view and set a security framework for it. Then, we present two signcryption schemes with threshold unsigncryption, with di erent properties. Furthermore, we use their authenticity property to apply them in the development of a di erent primitive: digital signatures with distributed veri cation. The second block of the thesis deals with the primitive of multi-secret sharing schemes. After stating some e ciency limitations of multi-secret sharing schemes in an information-theoretic scenario, we present several multi-secret sharing schemes with provable computational security. Finally, we use the results in multi-secret sharing schemes to generalize the traditional framework of distributed cryptography (with a single policy of authorized subsets) into a multipolicy setting, and we present both a multi-policy distributed decryption scheme and a multi-policy distributed signature scheme. Additionally, we give a short outlook on how to apply the presented multi-secret sharing schemes in the design of other multi-policy cryptosystems, like the signcryption schemes considered in this thesis. For all the schemes proposed throughout the thesis, we follow the same formal structure. After de ning the protocols of the primitive and the corresponding security model, we propose the new scheme and formally prove its security, by showing a reduction to some computationally hard mathematical problem.Avui en dia les persones estan implicades cada dia més en diferents activitats digitals tant en la seva vida professional com en el seu temps lliure. Molts articles de paper, com diners i tiquets, estan sent reemplaçats més i més per objectes digitals. La criptografia juga un paper crucial en aquesta transformació, perquè proporciona seguretat en la comunicació entre els diferents participants que utilitzen un canal digital. Depenent de la situació específica, alguns requisits de seguretat en la comunicació poden incloure privacitat (o confidencialitat), autenticitat, integritat o no-repudi. En algunes situacions, repartir l'operació secreta entre un grup de participants fa el procés més segur i fiable que quan la informació secreta està centralitzada en un únic participant; la criptografia distribuïda és l’àrea de la criptografia que estudia aquestes situacions. Aquesta tesi tracta de primitives relacionades amb el camp de la criptografia distribuïda. Primer, estudiem esquemes “signcryption”, que ofereixen a la vegada les funcionalitats de xifrat i signatura, on l'operació de “unsigncryption” està distribuïda. Considerem aquesta primitiva des d’un punt de vista teòric i establim un marc de seguretat per ella. Llavors, presentem dos esquemes “signcryption” amb operació de “unsigncryption” determinada per una estructura llindar, cada un amb diferents propietats. A més, utilitzem la seva propietat d’autenticitat per desenvolupar una nova primitiva: signatures digitals amb verificació distribuïda. El segon bloc de la tesi tracta la primitiva dels esquemes de compartició de multi-secrets. Després de demostrar algunes limitacions en l’eficiència dels esquemes de compartició de multi-secrets en un escenari de teoria de la informació, presentem diversos esquemes de compartició de multi-secrets amb seguretat computacional demostrable. Finalment, utilitzem els resultats obtinguts en els esquemes de compartició de multi-secrets per generalitzar el paradigma tradicional de la criptografia distribuïda (amb una única política de subconjunts autoritzats) a un marc multi-política, i presentem un esquema de desxifrat distribuït amb multi-política i un esquema de signatura distribuïda amb multi-política. A més, donem indicacions de com es poden aplicar els nostres esquemes de compartició de multi-secrets en el disseny d’altres criptosistemes amb multi-política, com per exemple els esquemes “signcryption” considerats en aquesta tesi. Per tots els esquemes proposats al llarg d’aquesta tesi, seguim la mateixa estructura formal. Després de definir els protocols de la primitiva primitius i el model de seguretat corresponent, proposem el nou esquema i demostrem formalment la seva seguretat, mitjançant una reducció a algun problema matemàtic computacionalment difícil