3-Message Zero Knowledge Against Human Ignorance

The notion of Zero Knowledge has driven the field of cryptography since its conception over thirty years ago. It is well established that two-message zero-knowledge protocols for NP do not exist, and that four-message zero-knowledge arguments exist under the minimal assumption of one-way functions. Resolving the precise round complexity of zero-knowledge has been an outstanding open problem for far too long. In this work, we present a three-message zero-knowledge argument system with soundness against uniform polynomial-time cheating provers. The main component in our construction is the recent delegation protocol for RAM computations (Kalai and Paneth, TCC 2016B and Brakerski, Holmgren and Kalai, ePrint 2016). Concretely, we rely on a three-message variant of their protocol based on a key-less collision-resistant hash functions secure against uniform adversaries as well as other standard primitives. More generally, beyond uniform provers, our protocol provides a natural and meaningful security guarantee against real-world adversaries, which we formalize following Rogaway’s “human-ignorance” approach (VIETCRYPT 2006): in a nutshell, we give an explicit uniform reduction from any adversary breaking the soundness of our protocol to finding collisions in the underlying hash function.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1350619)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1413964

Watermarking Cryptographic Capabilities

A watermarking scheme for programs embeds some information called a mark into a program while preserving its functionality. No adversary can remove the mark without damaging the functionality of the program. In this work, we study the problem of watermarking various cryptographic programs such as pseudorandom function (PRF) evaluation, decryption, and signing. For example, given a PRF F, we create a marked program C~ that evaluates F(). An adversary that gets C~ cannot come up with any program C* in which the mark is removed but which still evaluates the PRF correctly on even a small fraction of the inputs. The work of Barak, Goldreich, Impagliazzo, Rudich, Sahai, Vadhan, and Yang (CRYPTO\u2701 and Journal of ACM 59(2)) shows that, assuming indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), such watermarking is impossible if the marked program C~ evaluates the original program with perfect correctness. In this work we show that, assuming iO, such watermarking is possible if the marked program C~ is allowed to err with even a negligible probability, which would be undetectable to the user. Our watermarking schemes are public key, meaning that we use a secret marking key to embed marks in programs, and a public detection key that allows anyone to detect marks in programs. Our schemes are secure against chosen program attacks where the adversary is given oracle access to the marking functionality. We emphasize that our security notion of watermark non-removability considers arbitrary adversarial strategies to modify the marked program, in contrast to the prior works (Nishimaki, EUROCRYPT \u2713)

Impossibility of Simulation Secure Functional Encryption Even with Random Oracles

In this work we study the feasibility of achieving simulation security in functional encryption (FE) in the random oracle model. Our main result is negative in that we give a functionality for which it is impossible to achieve simulation security even with the aid of random oracles. We begin by giving a formal definition of simulation security that explicitly incorporates the random oracles. Next, we show a particular functionality for which it is impossible to achieve simulation security. Here messages are interpreted as seeds to a (weak) pseudorandom function family F and private keys are ascribed to points in the domain of the function. On a message s and private key x one can learn F(s,x). We show that there exists an attacker that makes a polynomial number of private key queries followed by a single ciphertext query for which there exists no simulator. Our functionality and attacker access pattern closely matches the standard model impossibility result of Agrawal, Gorbunov, Vaikuntanathan and Wee (CRYPTO 2013). The crux of their argument is that no simulator can succinctly program in the outputs of an unbounded number of evaluations of a pseudorandom function family into a bounded size ciphertext. However, their argument does not apply in the random oracle setting since the oracle acts as an additional conduit of information which the simulator can program. We overcome this barrier by proposing an attacker who decrypts the challenge ciphertext with the secret keys issued earlier without using the random oracle, even though the decryption algorithm may require it. This involves collecting most of the useful random oracle queries in advance, without giving the simulator too many opportunities to program. We note that our negative result contradicts a theorem of De Caro et al. (CRYPTO 2013) (as originally stated) which claims that random oracles can transform any indistinguishability secure functional encryption system into one that is simulation secure. De Caro et. al subsequently revised their work to show such a transformation from a new indistinguishability definition called functional encryption ”for circuits with random oracle gates”. An implication of our result when combined with theirs is that this new definition of functional encryption for circuits with random oracle gates is impossible to achieve even when all algorithms have access to a random oracle. On the flip side, we demonstrate the utility of the random oracle in simulation security. Given only public key encryption and low-depth PRGs we show how to build an FE system that is simulation secure for any poly-time attacker that makes an unbounded number of message queries, but an a-priori bounded number of key queries. This bests what is possible in the standard model where it is only feasible to achieve security for an attacker that is bounded both in the number of key and message queries it makes. We achieve this by creating a system that leverages the random oracle to get one-key security and then adapt previously known techniques to boost the system to resist up to q queries. Finally, we ask whether it is possible to achieve simulation security for an unbounded number of messages and keys, but where all key queries are made after the message queries. We show this too is impossible to achieve using a different twist on our first impossibility result

Minicrypt Primitives with Algebraic Structure and Applications

Algebraic structure lies at the heart of much of Cryptomania as we know it. An interesting question is the following: instead of building (Cryptomania) primitives from concrete assumptions, can we build them from simple Minicrypt primitives endowed with additional algebraic structure? In this work, we affirmatively answer this question by adding algebraic structure to the following Minicrypt primitives: • One-Way Function (OWF) • Weak Unpredictable Function (wUF) • Weak Pseudorandom Function (wPRF) The algebraic structure that we consider is group homomorphism over the input/output spaces of these primitives. We also consider a “bounded” notion of homomorphism where the primitive only supports an a priori bounded number of homomorphic operations in order to capture lattice-based and other “noisy” assumptions. We show that these structured primitives can be used to construct many cryptographic protocols. In particular, we prove that: • (Bounded) Homomorphic OWFs (HOWFs) imply collision-resistant hash functions, Schnorr-style signatures, and chameleon hash functions. • (Bounded) Input-Homomorphic weak UFs (IHwUFs) imply CPA-secure PKE, non-interactive key exchange, trapdoor functions, blind batch encryption (which implies anonymous IBE, KDM-secure and leakage-resilient PKE), CCA2 deterministic PKE, and hinting PRGs (which in turn imply transformation of CPA to CCA security for ABE/1-sided PE). • (Bounded) Input-Homomorphic weak PRFs (IHwPRFs) imply PIR, lossy trapdoor functions, OT and MPC (in the plain model). In addition, we show how to realize any CDH/DDH-based protocol with certain properties in a generic manner using IHwUFs/IHwPRFs, and how to instantiate such a protocol from many concrete assumptions. We also consider primitives with substantially richer structure, namely Ring IHwPRFs and L-composable IHwPRFs. In particular, we show the following: • Ring IHwPRFs with certain properties imply FHE. • 2-composable IHwPRFs imply (black-box) IBE, and $L$-composable IHwPRFs imply non-interactive $(L + 1)$-party key exchange. Our framework allows us to categorize many cryptographic protocols based on which structured Minicrypt primitive implies them. In addition, it potentially makes showing the existence of many cryptosystems from novel assumptions substantially easier in the future