New security notions and feasibility results for authentication of quantum data

We give a new class of security definitions for authentication in the quantum setting. These definitions capture and strengthen existing definitions of security against quantum adversaries for both classical message authentication codes (MACs) and well as full quantum state authentication schemes. The main feature of our definitions is that they precisely characterize the effective behavior of any adversary when the authentication protocol accepts, including correlations with the key. Our definitions readily yield a host of desirable properties and interesting consequences; for example, our security definition for full quantum state authentication implies that the entire secret key can be re-used if the authentication protocol succeeds. Next, we present several protocols satisfying our security definitions. We show that the classical Wegman-Carter authentication scheme with 3-universal hashing is secure against superposition attacks, as well as adversaries with quantum side information. We then present conceptually simple constructions of full quantum state authentication. Finally, we prove a lifting theorem which shows that, as long as a protocol can securely authenticate the maximally entangled state, it can securely authenticate any state, even those that are entangled with the adversary. Thus, this shows that protocols satisfying a fairly weak form of authentication security automatically satisfy a stronger notion of security (in particular, the definition of Dupuis, et al (2012)).Comment: 50 pages, QCrypt 2016 - 6th International Conference on Quantum Cryptography, added a new lifting theorem that shows equivalence between a weak form of authentication security and a stronger notion that considers side informatio

Tamper Detection against Unitary Operators

We consider (Enc, Dec) schemes which are used to encode a classical/quantum message $m$ and derive an $n$-qubit quantum codeword $\psi_m$. The quantum codeword $\psi_m$ can adversarially tamper via a unitary $U \in \mathcal{U}$ from some known tampering unitary family $\mathcal{U}$, resulting in $U \psi_m U^\dagger$. Firstly, we initiate the general study of quantum tamper detection codes, which must detect that tampering occurred with high probability. In case there was no tampering, we would like to output the message $m$ with a probability of $1$. We show that quantum tamper detection codes exist for both classical messages and quantum messages for any family of unitaries $\mathcal{U}$, such that $|\mathcal{U}| < 2^{2^{\alpha n}}$ for some known constant $\alpha \in (0,1)$ and all the unitaries satisfy one additional condition : \begin{itemize} \item Far from Identity : For each $U \in \mathcal{U}$, we require that its modulus of trace value isn't too much i.e. $|Trace(U)| \leq \phi N$, where $N=2^n.$ \end{itemize} Quantum tamper-detection codes are quantum generalizations of classical tamper detection codes studied by Jafargholi et al. \cite{JW15}. Additionally for classical message $m$, if we must either output message $m$ or detect that tampering occurred and output $\perp$ with high probability, we show that it is possible without the restriction of Far from Identity condition for any family of unitaries $\mathcal{U}$, such that $|\mathcal{U} | < 2^{2^{\alpha n}}$. We also provide efficient (Enc, Dec) schemes when the family of tampering unitaries are from Pauli group $\mathcal{P}_n$, which can be thought of as a quantum version of the algebraic manipulation detection (AMD) codes of Cramer et al. \cite{CDFPW08}

Disjoint difference families and their applications

Difference sets and their generalisations to difference families arise from the study of designs and many other applications. Here we give a brief survey of some of these applications, noting in particular the diverse definitions of difference families and the variations in priorities in constructions. We propose a definition of disjoint difference families that encompasses these variations and allows a comparison of the similarities and disparities. We then focus on two constructions of disjoint difference families arising from frequency hopping sequences and showed that they are in fact the same. We conclude with a discussion of the notion of equivalence for frequency hopping sequences and for disjoint difference families

Adaptive learning and cryptography

Significant links exist between cryptography and computational learning theory. Cryptographic functions are the usual method of demonstrating significant intractability results in computational learning theory as they can demonstrate that certain problems are hard in a representation independent sense. On the other hand, hard learning problems have been used to create efficient cryptographic protocols such as authentication schemes, pseudo-random permutations and functions, and even public key encryption schemes.;Learning theory / coding theory also impacts cryptography in that it enables cryptographic primitives to deal with the issues of noise or bias in their inputs. Several different constructions of fuzzy primitives exist, a fuzzy primitive being a primitive which functions correctly even in the presence of noisy , or non-uniform inputs. Some examples of these primitives include error-correcting blockciphers, fuzzy identity based cryptosystems, fuzzy extractors and fuzzy sketches. Error correcting blockciphers combine both encryption and error correction in a single function which results in increased efficiency. Fuzzy identity based encryption allows the decryption of any ciphertext that was encrypted under a close enough identity. Fuzzy extractors and sketches are methods of reliably (re)-producing a uniformly random secret key given an imperfectly reproducible string from a biased source, through a public string that is called the sketch .;While hard learning problems have many qualities which make them useful in constructing cryptographic protocols, such as their inherent error tolerance and simple algebraic structure, it is often difficult to utilize them to construct very secure protocols due to assumptions they make on the learning algorithm. Due to these assumptions, the resulting protocols often do not have security against various types of adaptive adversaries. to help deal with this issue, we further examine the inter-relationships between cryptography and learning theory by introducing the concept of adaptive learning . Adaptive learning is a rather weak form of learning in which the learner is not expected to closely approximate the concept function in its entirety, rather it is only expected to answer a query of the learner\u27s choice about the target. Adaptive learning allows for a much weaker learner than in the standard model, while maintaining the the positive properties of many learning problems in the standard model, a fact which we feel makes problems that are hard to adaptively learn more useful than standard model learning problems in the design of cryptographic protocols. We argue that learning parity with noise is hard to do adaptively and use that assumption to construct a related key secure, efficient MAC as well as an efficient authentication scheme. In addition we examine the security properties of fuzzy sketches and extractors and demonstrate how these properties can be combined by using our related key secure MAC. We go on to demonstrate that our extractor can allow a form of related-key hardening for protocols in that, by affecting how the key for a primitive is stored it renders that protocol immune to related key attacks

IST Austria Thesis

In this thesis we discuss the exact security of message authentications codes HMAC , NMAC , and PMAC . NMAC is a mode of operation which turns a fixed input-length keyed hash function f into a variable input-length function. A practical single-key variant of NMAC called HMAC is a very popular and widely deployed message authentication code (MAC). PMAC is a block-cipher based mode of operation, which also happens to be the most famous fully parallel MAC. NMAC was introduced by Bellare, Canetti and Krawczyk Crypto’96, who proved it to be a secure pseudorandom function (PRF), and thus also a MAC, under two assumptions. Unfortunately, for many instantiations of HMAC one of them has been found to be wrong. To restore the provable guarantees for NMAC , Bellare [Crypto’06] showed its security without this assumption. PMAC was introduced by Black and Rogaway at Eurocrypt 2002. If instantiated with a pseudorandom permutation over n -bit strings, PMAC constitutes a provably secure variable input-length PRF. For adversaries making q queries, each of length at most ` (in n -bit blocks), and of total length σ ≤ q` , the original paper proves an upper bound on the distinguishing advantage of O ( σ 2 / 2 n ), while the currently best bound is O ( qσ/ 2 n ). In this work we show that this bound is tight by giving an attack with advantage Ω( q 2 `/ 2 n ). In the PMAC construction one initially XORs a mask to every message block, where the mask for the i th block is computed as τ i := γ i · L , where L is a (secret) random value, and γ i is the i -th codeword of the Gray code. Our attack applies more generally to any sequence of γ i ’s which contains a large coset of a subgroup of GF (2 n ). As for NMAC , our first contribution is a simpler and uniform proof: If f is an ε -secure PRF (against q queries) and a δ - non-adaptively secure PRF (against q queries), then NMAC f is an ( ε + `qδ )-secure PRF against q queries of length at most ` blocks each. We also show that this ε + `qδ bound is basically tight by constructing an f for which an attack with advantage `qδ exists. Moreover, we analyze the PRF-security of a modification of NMAC called NI by An and Bellare that avoids the constant rekeying on multi-block messages in NMAC and allows for an information-theoretic analysis. We carry out such an analysis, obtaining a tight `q 2 / 2 c bound for this step, improving over the trivial bound of ` 2 q 2 / 2 c . Finally, we investigate, if the security of PMAC can be further improved by using τ i ’s that are k -wise independent, for k &gt; 1 (the original has k = 1). We observe that the security of PMAC will not increase in general if k = 2, and then prove that the security increases to O ( q 2 / 2 n ), if the k = 4. Due to simple extension attacks, this is the best bound one can hope for, using any distribution on the masks. Whether k = 3 is already sufficient to get this level of security is left as an open problem. Keywords: Message authentication codes, Pseudorandom functions, HMAC, PMAC

Robust remote data checking

Remote data checking protocols, such as provable data possession (PDP) [1], allow clients that outsource data to untrusted servers to verify that the server continues to correctly store the data. Through the careful integration of forward error-correcting codes and remote data checking, a system can prove possession with arbitrarily high probability. We formalize this notion in the robust data possession guarantee. We distill the key performance and security require-ments for integrating forward error-correcting codes into PDP and describe an encoding scheme and file organization for robust data possession that meets these requirements. We give a detailed anal-ysis of this scheme and build a Monte-Carlo simulation to evaluate tradeoffs in reliability, space overhead, and performance. A prac-tical way to evaluate these tradeoffs is an essential input to sys-tem design, allowing the designer to choose the encoding and data checking protocol parameters that realize robust data possession

Cryptography with Auxiliary Input and Trapdoor from Constant-Noise LPN

Dodis, Kalai and Lovett (STOC 2009) initiated the study of the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem with (static) exponentially hard-to-invert auxiliary input. In particular, they showed that under a new assumption (called Learning Subspace with Noise) the above is quasi-polynomially hard in the high (polynomially close to uniform) noise regime. Inspired by the ``sampling from subspace\u27\u27 technique by Yu (eprint 2009 / 467) and Goldwasser et al. (ITCS 2010), we show that standard LPN can work in a mode (reducible to itself) where the constant-noise LPN (by sampling its matrix from a random subspace) is robust against sub-exponentially hard-to-invert auxiliary input with comparable security to the underlying LPN. Plugging this into the framework of [DKL09], we obtain the same applications as considered in [DKL09] (i.e., CPA/CCA secure symmetric encryption schemes, average-case obfuscators, reusable and robust extractors) with resilience to a more general class of leakages, improved efficiency and better security under standard assumptions. As a main contribution, under constant-noise LPN with certain sub-exponential hardness (i.e., $2^{\omega(n^{1/2})}$ for secret size $n$) we obtain a variant of the LPN with security on poly-logarithmic entropy sources, which in turn implies CPA/CCA secure public-key encryption (PKE) schemes and oblivious transfer (OT) protocols. Prior to this, basing PKE and OT on constant-noise LPN had been an open problem since Alekhnovich\u27s work (FOCS 2003)