Efficient TTP-free mental poker protocols

Zhao et al proposed an efficient mental poker protocol which did not require using a Trusted Third Party(TTP). The protocol is efficient and suitable for any number of players but it introduces a security flaw. In this paper, we propose two mental poker protocols based on Zhao\u27s previous work. The security flaw has been removed and the additional computing cost is small

Efficient TTP-free mental poker protocols

Zhao et al proposed an efficient mental poker protocol which did not require using a trusted third party (TTP). The protocol is efficient and suitable for any number of players but it introduces a security flaw. In this paper, we propose two mental poker protocols based on Zhao's previous work. The security flaw has been removed and the additional computing cost is small.6 page(s

Constant-Round Privacy Preserving Multiset Union

Privacy preserving multiset union (PPMU) protocol allows a set of parties, each with a multiset, to collaboratively compute a multiset union secretly, meaning that any information other than union is not revealed. We propose efficient PPMU protocols, using multiplicative homomorphic cryptosystem. The novelty of our protocol is to directly encrypt a polynomial by representing it by an element of an extension field. The resulting protocols consist of constant rounds and improve communication cost. We also prove the security of our protocol against malicious adversaries, in the random oracle model

Crowdsourcing atop blockchains

Traditional crowdsourcing systems, such as Amazon\u27s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), though once acquiring great economic successes, have to fully rely on third-party platforms to serve between the requesters and the workers for basic utilities. These third-parties have to be fully trusted to assist payments, resolve disputes, protect data privacy, manage user authentications, maintain service online, etc. Nevertheless, tremendous real-world incidents indicate how elusive it is to completely trust these platforms in reality, and the reduction of such over-reliance becomes desirable. In contrast to the arguably vulnerable centralized approaches, a public blockchain is a distributed and transparent global consensus computer that is highly robust. The blockchain is usually managed and replicated by a large-scale peer-to-peer network collectively, thus being much more robust to be fully trusted for correctness and availability. It, therefore, becomes enticing to build novel crowdsourcing applications atop blockchains to reduce the over-trust on third-party platforms. However, this new fascinating technology also brings about new challenges, which were never that severe in the conventional centralized setting. The most serious issue is that the blockchain is usually maintained in the public Internet environment with a broader attack surface open to anyone. This not only causes serious privacy and security issues, but also allows the adversaries to exploit the attack surface to hamper more basic utilities. Worse still, most existing blockchains support only light on-chain computations, and the smart contract executed atop the decentralized consensus computer must be simple, which incurs serious feasibility problems. In reality, the privacy/security issue and the feasibility problem even restrain each other and create serious tensions to hinder the broader adoption of blockchain. The dissertation goes through the non-trivial challenges to realize secure yet still practical decentralization (for urgent crowdsourcing use-cases), and lay down the foundation for this line of research. In sum, it makes the next major contributions. First, it identifies the needed security requirements in decentralized knowledge crowdsourcing (e.g., data privacy), and initiates the research of private decentralized crowdsourcing. In particular, the confidentiality of solicited data is indispensable to prevent free-riders from pirating the others\u27 submissions, thus ensuring the quality of solicited knowledge. To this end, a generic private decentralized crowdsourcing framework is dedicatedly designed, analyzed, and implemented. Furthermore, this dissertation leverages concretely efficient cryptographic design to reduce the cost of the above generic framework. It focuses on decentralizing the special use-case of Amazon MTurk, and conducts multiple specific-purpose optimizations to remove needless generality to squeeze performance. The implementation atop Ethereum demonstrates a handling cost even lower than MTurk. In addition, it focuses on decentralized crowdsourcing of computing power for specific machine learning tasks. It lets a requester place deposits in the blockchain to recruit some workers for a designated (randomized) programs. If and only if these workers contribute their resources to compute correctly, they would earn well-deserved payments. For these goals, a simple yet still useful incentive mechanism is developed atop the blockchain to deter rational workers from cheating. Finally, the research initiates the first systematic study on crowdsourcing blockchains\u27 full nodes to assist superlight clients (e.g., mobile phones and IoT devices) to read the blockchain\u27s records. This dissertation presents a novel generic solution through the powerful lens of game-theoretic treatments, which solves the long-standing open problem of designing generic superlight clients for all blockchains

Lattice-based threshold cryptography

Ever since the appearance of quantum computers, prime factoring and discrete logarithm based cryptography has been put in question, giving birth to the so called post-quantum cryptography. The goal of this bachelor's degree thesis is to develop a post-quantum threshold cryptosystem, in particular based on Ring Learning with Errors, a lattice-based problem

Diseños de protocolos criptográficos: nuevas propuestas basadas en grafos

Se destaca el papel que la teoría de grafos puede jugar en el entorno de la criptografía moderna. Se introduce también una nueva metodología de diseño en el campo de los protocolos criptográficos. Entre los protocolos estudiados destacan as de transferencia inconsciente y compromiso de bits por se considerados primitivos esenciales para el diseño de esquemas criptográficos más complejos. También se presta especial atención a las demostraciones de conocimiento nulo aportando nuevos algoritmos orientados a resolver el problema de la identificación

Efficient Statistical Zero-Knowledge Authentication Protocols for Smart Cards Secure Against Active & Concurrent Attacks

We construct statistical zero-knowledge authentication protocols for smart cards based on general assumptions. The main protocol is only secure against active attacks, but we present a modification based on trapdoor commitments that can resist concurrent attacks as well. Both protocols are instantiated using lattice-based primitives, which are conjectured to be secure against quantum attacks. We illustrate the practicality of our main protocol on smart cards in terms of storage, computation, communication, and round complexities. Furthermore, we compare it to other lattice-based authentication protocols, which are either zero-knowledge or have a similar structure. The comparison shows that our protocol improves the best previous protocol