CCA Security and Trapdoor Functions via Key-Dependent-Message Security

We study the relationship among public-key encryption (PKE) satisfying indistinguishability against chosen plaintext attacks (IND-CPA security), that against chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA security), and trapdoor functions (TDF). Specifically, we aim at finding a unified approach and some additional requirement to realize IND-CCA secure PKE and TDF based on IND-CPA secure PKE, and show the following two main results. As the first main result, we show how to achieve IND-CCA security via a weak form of key-dependent-message (KDM) security. More specifically, we construct an IND-CCA secure PKE scheme based on an IND-CPA secure PKE scheme and a secret-key encryption (SKE) scheme satisfying one-time KDM security with respect to projection functions (projection-KDM security). Projection functions are elementary functions with respect to which KDM security has been widely studied. Since the existence of projection-KDM secure PKE implies that of the above two building blocks, as a corollary of this result, we see that the existence of IND-CCA secure PKE is implied by that of projection-KDM secure PKE. As the second main result, we extend the above construction of IND-CCA secure PKE into that of TDF by additionally requiring a mild requirement for each building block. Our TDF satisfies adaptive one-wayness. We can instantiate our TDF based on a wide variety of computational assumptions. Especially, we obtain the first TDF (with adaptive one-wayness) based on the sub-exponential hardness of the constant-noise learning-parity-with-noise (LPN) problem. In addition, we show that by extending the above constructions, we can obtain PKE schemes satisfying advanced security notions under CCA, that is, optimal rate leakage-resilience under CCA and selective-opening security under CCA. As a result, we obtain the first PKE schemes satisfying these security notions based on the computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption or the low-noise LPN assumption

Naor-Yung paradigm with shared randomness and applications

The Naor-Yung paradigm (Naor and Yung, STOC’90) allows to generically boost security under chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) to security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) for public-key encryption (PKE) schemes. The main idea is to encrypt the plaintext twice (under independent public keys), and to append a non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof that the two ciphertexts indeed encrypt the same message. Later work by Camenisch, Chandran, and Shoup (Eurocrypt’09) and Naor and Segev (Crypto’09 and SIAM J. Comput.’12) established that the very same techniques can also be used in the settings of key-dependent message (KDM) and key-leakage attacks (respectively). In this paper we study the conditions under which the two ciphertexts in the Naor-Yung construction can share the same random coins. We find that this is possible, provided that the underlying PKE scheme meets an additional simple property. The motivation for re-using the same random coins is that this allows to design much more efficient NIZK proofs. We showcase such an improvement in the random oracle model, under standard complexity assumptions including Decisional Diffie-Hellman, Quadratic Residuosity, and Subset Sum. The length of the resulting ciphertexts is reduced by 50%, yielding truly efficient PKE schemes achieving CCA security under KDM and key-leakage attacks. As an additional contribution, we design the first PKE scheme whose CPA security under KDM attacks can be directly reduced to (low-density instances of) the Subset Sum assumption. The scheme supports keydependent messages computed via any affine function of the secret ke

New Constructions of Reusable Designated-Verifier NIZKs

Non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (NIZKs) for NP are an important cryptographic primitive, but we currently only have instantiations under a few specific assumptions. Notably, we are missing constructions from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption, the Diffie-Hellman (CDH/DDH) assumption, and the learning parity with noise (LPN) assumption. In this paper, we study a relaxation of NIZKs to the designated-verifier setting (DV-NIZK), where a trusted setup generates a common reference string together with a secret key for the verifier. We want reusable schemes, which allow the verifier to reuse the secret key to verify many different proofs, and soundness should hold even if the malicious prover learns whether various proofs are accepted or rejected. Such reusable DV-NIZKs were recently constructed under the CDH assumption, but it was open whether they can also be constructed under LWE or LPN. We also consider an extension of reusable DV-NIZKs to the malicious designated-verifier setting (MDV-NIZK). In this setting, the only trusted setup consists of a common random string. However, there is also an additional untrusted setup in which the verifier chooses a public/secret key needed to generate/verify proofs, respectively. We require that zero-knowledge holds even if the public key is chosen maliciously by the verifier. Such reusable MDV-NIZKs were recently constructed under the ``one-more CDH\u27\u27 assumption, but constructions under CDH/LWE/LPN remained open. In this work, we give new constructions of (reusable) DV-NIZKs and MDV-NIZKs using generic primitives that can be instantiated under CDH, LWE, or LPN

Algebraic Frameworks for Cryptographic Primitives

A fundamental goal in theoretical cryptography is to identify the conceptually simplest abstractions that generically imply a collection of other cryptographic primitives. For symmetric-key primitives, this goal has been accomplished by showing that one-way functions are necessary and sufficient to realize primitives ranging from symmetric-key encryption to digital signatures. By contrast, for asymmetric primitives, we have no (known) unifying simple abstraction even for a few of its most basic objects. Moreover, even for public-key encryption (PKE) alone, we have no unifying abstraction that all known constructions follow. The fact that almost all known PKE constructions exploit some algebraic structure suggests considering abstractions that have some basic algebraic properties, irrespective of their concrete instantiation. We make progress on the aforementioned fundamental goal by identifying simple and useful cryptographic abstractions and showing that they imply a variety of asymmetric primitives. Our general approach is to augment symmetric abstractions with algebraic structure that turns out to be sufficient for PKE and much more, thus yielding a “bridge” between symmetric and asymmetric primitives. We introduce two algebraic frameworks that capture almost all concrete instantiations of (asymmetric) cryptographic primitives, and we also demonstrate their applicability by showing their cryptographic implications. Therefore, rather than manually building different cryptosystems from a new assumption, one only needs to build one (or more) of our simple structured primitives, and a whole host of cryptosystems immediately follows.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166137/1/alamati_1.pd

Toward Fine-Grained Blackbox Separations Between Semantic and Circular-Security Notions

We address the problems of whether t-circular-secure encryption can be based on (t-1)-circular-secure encryption or on semantic (CPA) security, if t = 1. While for t = 1 a folklore construction, based on CPA-secure encryption, can be used to build a 1-circular-secure encryption with the same secret-key and message space, no such constructions are known for the bit-encryption case, which is of particular importance in fully-homomorphic encryption. Also, for $t \geq 2$, all constructions of t-circular-secure encryption (bitwise or otherwise) are based on specific assumptions. We make progress toward these problems by ruling out all fully-blackbox constructions of -- 1-seed circular-secure public-key bit encryption from CPA-secure public-key encryption; -- t-seed circular-secure public-key encryption from (t-1)-seed circular-secure public-key encryption, for any $t \geq 2$. Informally, seed-circular security is a variant of the circular security notion in which the seed of the key-generation algorithm, instead of the secret key, is encrypted. We also show how to extend our first result to rule out a large and non-trivial class of constructions of 1-circular-secure bit encryption, which we dub key-isolating constructions. Our separation model follows that of Gertner, Malkin and Reingold (FOCS’01), which is a weaker separation model than that of Impagliazzo and Rudich

A Study of Separations in Cryptography: New Results and New Models

For more than 20 years, black-box impossibility results have been used to argue the infeasibility of constructing certain cryptographic primitives (e.g., key agreement) from others (e.g., one-way functions). In this dissertation we further extend the frontier of this field by demonstrating several new impossibility results as well as a new framework for studying a more general class of constructions. Our first two results demonstrate impossibility of black-box constructions of two commonly used cryptographic primitives. In our first result we study the feasibility of black-box constructions of predicate encryption schemes from standard assumptions and demonstrate strong limitations on the types of schemes that can be constructed. In our second result we study black-box constructions of constant-round zero-knowledge proofs from one-way permutations and show that, under commonly believed complexity assumptions, no such constructions exist. A widely recognized limitation of black-box impossibility results, however, is that they say nothing about the usefulness of (known) non-black-box techniques. This state of affairs is unsatisfying as we would at least like to rule out constructions using the set of techniques we have at our disposal. With this motivation in mind, in the final result of this dissertation we propose a new framework for black-box constructions with a non-black-box flavor, specifically, those that rely on zero-knowledge proofs relative to some oracle. Our framework is powerful enough to capture a large class of known constructions, however we show that the original black-box separation of key agreement from one-way functions still holds even in this non-black-box setting that allows for zero-knowledge proofs

Updatable Public Key Encryption in the Standard Model

Forward security (FS) ensures that corrupting the current secret key in the system preserves the privacy or integrity of the prior usages of the system. Achieving forward security is especially hard in the setting of public-key encryption (PKE), where time is divided into periods, and in each period the receiver derives the next-period secret key from their current secret key, while the public key stays constant. Indeed, all current constructions of FS-PKE are built from hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE) and are rather complicated. Motivated by applications to secure messaging, recent works of Jost et al. (Eurocrypt’19) and Alwen et al. (CRYPTO’20) consider a natural relaxation of FS-PKE, which they term updatable PKE (UPKE). In this setting, the transition to the next period can be initiated by any sender, who can compute a special update ciphertext. This ciphertext directly produces the next-period public key and can be processed by the receiver to compute the next-period secret key. If done honestly, future (regular) ciphertexts produced with the new public key can be decrypted with the new secret key, but past such ciphertexts cannot be decrypted with the new secret key. Moreover, this is true even if all other previous-period updates were initiated by untrusted senders. Both papers also constructed a very simple UPKE scheme based on the CDH assumption in the random oracle model. However, they left open the question of building such schemes in the standard model, or based on other (e.g., post-quantum) assumptions, without using the heavy HIBE techniques. In this work, we construct two efficient UPKE schemes in the standard model, based on the DDH and LWE assumptions, respectively. Somewhat interestingly, our constructions gain their efficiency (compared to prior FS-PKE schemes) by using tools from the area of circular-secure and leakage resilient public-key encryption schemes (rather than HIBE)

On the Non-malleability of the Fiat-Shamir Transform

The Fiat-Shamir transform is a well studied paradigm for removing interaction from public-coin protocols. We investigate whether the resulting non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof systems also exhibit non-malleability properties that have up to now only been studied for NIZK proof systems in the common reference string model: first, we formally define simulation soundness and a weak form of simulation extraction in the random oracle model (ROM). Second, we show that in the ROM the Fiat-Shamir transform meets these properties under lenient conditions. A consequence of our result is that, in the ROM, we obtain truly efficient non malleable NIZK proof systems essentially for free. Our definitions are sufficient for instantiating the Naor-Yung paradigm for CCA2-secure encryption, as well as a generic construction for signature schemes from hard relations and simulation-extractable NIZK proof systems. These two constructions are interesting as the former preserves both the leakage resilience and key-dependent message security of the underlying CPA-secure encryption scheme, while the latter lifts the leakage resilience of the hard relation to the leakage resilience of the resulting signature scheme

On Improving Communication Complexity in Cryptography

Cryptography grew to be much more than "the study of secret writing". Modern cryptography is concerned with establishing properties such as privacy, integrity and authenticity in protocols for secure communication and computation. This comes at a price: Cryptographic tools usually introduce an overhead, both in terms of communication complexity (that is, number and size of messages transmitted) and computational efficiency (that is, time and memory required). As in many settings communication between the parties involved is the bottleneck, this thesis is concerned with improving communication complexity in cryptographic protocols. One direction towards this goal is scalable cryptography: In many cryptographic schemes currently deployed, the security degrades linearly with the number of instances (e.g. encrypted messages) in the system. As this number can be huge in contexts like cloud computing, the parameters of the scheme have to be chosen considerably larger - and in particular depending on the expected number of instances in the system - to maintain security guarantees. We advance the state-of-the-art regarding scalable cryptography by constructing schemes where the security guarantees are independent of the number of instances. This allows to choose smaller parameters, even when the expected number of instances is immense. - We construct the first scalable encryption scheme with security against active adversaries which has both compact public keys and ciphertexts. In particular, we significantly reduce the size of the public key to only about 3% of the key-size of the previously most efficient scalable encryption scheme. (Gay,Hofheinz, and Kohl, CRYPTO, 2017) - We present a scalable structure-preserving signature scheme which improves both in terms of public-key and signature size compared to the previously best construction to about 40% and 56% of the sizes, respectively. (Gay, Hofheinz, Kohl, and Pan, EUROCRYPT, 2018) Another important area of cryptography is secure multi-party computation, where the goal is to jointly evaluate some function while keeping each party’s input private. In traditional approaches towards secure multi-party computation either the communication complexity scales linearly in the size of the function, or the computational efficiency is poor. To overcome this issue, Boyle, Gilboa, and Ishai (CRYPTO, 2016) introduced the notion of homomorphic secret sharing. Here, inputs are shared between parties such that each party does not learn anything about the input, and such that the parties can locally evaluate functions on the shares. Homomorphic secret sharing implies secure computation where the communication complexity only depends on the size of the inputs, which is typically much smaller than the size of the function. A different approach towards efficient secure computation is to split the protocol into an input-independent preprocessing phase, where long correlated strings are generated, and a very efficient online phase. One example for a useful correlation are authenticated Beaver triples, which allow to perform efficient multiplications in the online phase such that privacy of the inputs is preserved and parties deviating the protocol can be detected. The currently most efficient protocols implementing the preprocessing phase require communication linear in the number of triples to be generated. This results typically in high communication costs, as the online phase requires at least one authenticated Beaver triple per multiplication. We advance the state-of-the art regarding efficient protocols for secure computation with low communication complexity as follows. - We construct the first homomorphic secret sharing scheme for computing arbitrary functions in NC 1 (that is, functions that are computably by circuits with logarithmic depth) which supports message spaces of arbitrary size, has only negligible correctness error, and does not require expensive multiplication on ciphertexts. (Boyle, Kohl, and Scholl, EUROCRYPT, 2019) - We introduce the notion of a pseudorandom correlation generator for general correlations. Pseudorandom correlation generators allow to locally extend short correlated seeds into long pseudorandom correlated strings. We show that pseudorandom correlation generators can replace the preprocessing phase in many protocols, leading to a preprocessing phase with sublinear communication complexity. We show connections to homomorphic secret sharing schemes and give the first instantiation of pseudorandom correlation generators for authenticated Beaver triples at reasonable computational efficiency. (Boyle, Couteau, Gilboa, Ishai, Kohl, and Scholl, CRYPTO, 2019

Keyed-Fully Homomorphic Encryption without Indistinguishability Obfuscation

(Fully) homomorphic encryption ((F)HE) allows users to publicly evaluate circuits on encrypted data. Although public homomorphic evaluation property has various applications, (F)HE cannot achieve security against chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA2) due to its nature. To achieve both the CCA2 security and homomorphic evaluation property, Emura et al. (PKC 2013) introduced keyed-homomorphic public key encryption (KH-PKE) and formalized its security denoted by KH-CCA security. KH-PKE has a homomorphic evaluation key that enables users to perform homomorphic operations. Intuitively, KH-PKE achieves the CCA2 security unless adversaries have a homomorphic evaluation key. Although Lai et al. (PKC 2016) proposed the first keyed-fully homomorphic encryption (keyed-FHE) scheme, its security relies on the indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), and this scheme satisfies a weak variant of KH-CCA security. Here, we propose a generic construction of a KH-CCA secure keyed-FHE scheme from an FHE scheme secure against non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attack (CCA1) and a strong dual-system simulation-sound non-interactive zero-knowledge (strong DSS-NIZK) argument system by using the Naor-Yung paradigm. We show that there are a strong DSS-NIZK and an IND-CCA1 secure FHE scheme that are suitable for our generic construction. This shows that there exists a keyed-FHE scheme from simpler primitives than iO