Predictable arguments of knowledge

We initiate a formal investigation on the power of predictability for argument of knowledge systems for NP. Specifically, we consider private-coin argument systems where the answer of the prover can be predicted, given the private randomness of the verifier; we call such protocols Predictable Arguments of Knowledge (PAoK). Our study encompasses a full characterization of PAoK, showing that such arguments can be made extremely laconic, with the prover sending a single bit, and assumed to have only one round (i.e., two messages) of communication without loss of generality. We additionally explore PAoK satisfying additional properties (including zero-knowledge and the possibility of re-using the same challenge across multiple executions with the prover), present several constructions of PAoK relying on different cryptographic tools, and discuss applications to cryptography

Fully Leakage-Resilient Codes

Leakage resilient codes (LRCs) are probabilistic encoding schemes that guarantee message hiding even under some bounded leakage on the codeword. We introduce the notion of \emph{fully} leakage resilient codes (FLRCs), where the adversary can leak some $\lambda_0$ bits from the encoding process, i.e., the message and the randomness involved during the encoding process. In addition the adversary can as usual leak from the codeword. We give a simulation-based definition requiring that the adversary\u27s leakage from the encoding process and the codework can be simulated given just $\lambda_0$ bits of leakage from the message. For $\lambda_0 = 0$ our new simulation-based notion is equivalent to the usual game-based definition. A FLRC would be interesting in its own right and would be useful in building other leakage-resilient primitives in a composable manner. We give a fairly general impossibility result for FLRCs in the popular split-state model, where the codeword is broken into independent parts and where the leakage occurs independently on the parts. We show that if the leakage is allowed to be any poly-time function of the secret and if collision-resistant hash functions exist, then there is no FLRC for the split-state model. The result holds only when the message length can be linear in the security parameter. However, we can extend the impossibility result to FLRCs for constant-length messages under assumptions related to differing-input obfuscation. These results show that it is highly unlikely that we can build FLRCs for the split-state model when the leakage can be any poly-time function of the secret state. We then give two feasibility results for weaker models. First, we show that for \NC^0-bounded leakage from the randomness and arbitrary poly-time leakage from the parts of the codeword the inner-product construction proposed by Daví \etal (SCN\u2710) and successively improved by Dziembowski and Faust (ASIACRYPT\u2711) is a FLRC for the split-state model. Second, we provide a compiler from any LRC to a FLRC in the common reference string model for any fixed leakage family of small cardinality. In particular, this compiler applies to the split-state model but also to many other models

Backdoored Hash Functions: Immunizing HMAC and HKDF

Security of cryptographic schemes is traditionally measured as the inability of resource-constrained adversaries to violate a desired security goal. The security argument usually relies on a sound design of the underlying components. Arguably, one of the most devastating failures of this approach can be observed when considering adversaries such as intelligence agencies that can influence the design, implementation, and standardization of cryptographic primitives. While the most prominent example of cryptographic backdoors is NIST’s Dual_EC_DRBG, believing that such attempts have ended there is naive. Security of many cryptographic tasks, such as digital signatures, pseudorandom generation, and password protection, crucially relies on the security of hash functions. In this work, we consider the question of how backdoors can endanger security of hash functions and, especially, if and how we can thwart such backdoors. We particularly focus on immunizing arbitrarily backdoored versions of HMAC (RFC 2104) and the hash-based key derivation function HKDF (RFC 5869), which are widely deployed in critical protocols such as TLS. We give evidence that the weak pseudorandomness property of the compression function in the hash function is in fact robust against backdooring. This positive result allows us to build a backdoor-resistant pseudorandom function, i.e., a variant of HMAC, and we show that HKDF can be immunized against backdoors at little cost. Unfortunately, we also argue that safe-guarding unkeyed hash functions against backdoors is presumably hard

On-the-Fly Multiparty Computation on the Cloud via Multikey Fully Homomorphic Encryption

We propose a new notion of secure multiparty computation aided by a computationally-powerful but untrusted cloud server. In this notion that we call on-the-fly multiparty computation (MPC), the cloud can non-interactively perform arbitrary, dynamically chosen computations on data belonging to arbitrary sets of users chosen on-the-fly. All user\u27s input data and intermediate results are protected from snooping by the cloud as well as other users. This extends the standard notion of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), where users can only enlist the cloud\u27s help in evaluating functions on their own encrypted data. In on-the-fly MPC, each user is involved only when initially uploading his (encrypted) data to the cloud, and in a final output decryption phase when outputs are revealed; the complexity of both is independent of the function being computed and the total number of users in the system. When users upload their data, they need not decide in advance which function will be computed, nor who they will compute with; they need only retroactively approve the eventually-chosen functions and on whose data the functions were evaluated. This notion is qualitatively the best possible in minimizing interaction, since the users\u27 interaction in the decryption stage is inevitable: we show that removing it would imply generic program obfuscation and is thus impossible. Our contributions are two-fold: 1. We show how on-the-fly MPC can be achieved using a new type of encryption scheme that we call multikey FHE, which is capable of operating on inputs encrypted under multiple, unrelated keys. A ciphertext resulting from a multikey evaluation can be jointly decrypted using the secret keys of all the users involved in the computation. 2. We construct a multikey FHE scheme based on NTRU, a very efficient public-key encryption scheme proposed in the 1990s. It was previously not known how to make NTRU fully homomorphic even for a single party. We view the construction of (multikey) FHE from NTRU encryption as a main contribution of independent interest. Although the transformation to a fully homomorphic system deteriorates the efficiency of NTRU somewhat, we believe that this system is a leading candidate for a practical FHE scheme

The Magic of ELFs

We introduce the notion of an \emph{Extremely Lossy Function} (ELF). An ELF is a family of functions with an image size that is tunable anywhere from injective to having a polynomial-sized image. Moreover, for any efficient adversary, for a sufficiently large polynomial $r$ (necessarily chosen to be larger than the running time of the adversary), the adversary cannot distinguish the injective case from the case of image size $r$. We develop a handful of techniques for using ELFs, and show that such extreme lossiness is useful for instantiating random oracles in several settings. In particular, we show how to use ELFs to build secure point function obfuscation with auxiliary input, as well as polynomially-many hardcore bits for any one-way function. Such applications were previously known from strong knowledge assumptions --- for example polynomially-many hardcore bits were only know from differing inputs obfuscation, a notion whose plausibility has been seriously challenged. We also use ELFs to build a simple hash function with \emph{output intractability}, a new notion we define that may be useful for generating common reference strings. Next, we give a construction of ELFs relying on the \emph{exponential} hardness of the decisional Diffie-Hellman problem, which is plausible in pairing-based groups. Combining with the applications above, our work gives several practical constructions relying on qualitatively different --- and arguably better --- assumptions than prior works