Individual Simulations

We develop an individual simulation technique that explicitly makes use of particular properties/structures of a given adversary\u27s functionality. Using this simulation technique, we obtain the following results. 1. We construct the first protocols that \emph{break previous black-box barriers} of [Xiao, TCC\u2711 and Alwen et al., Crypto\u2705] under the standard hardness of factoring, both of which are polynomial time simulatable against all a-priori bounded polynomial size distinguishers: -- Two-round selective opening secure commitment scheme. -- Three-round concurrent zero knowledge and concurrent witness hiding argument for NP in the bare public-key model. 2. We present a simpler two-round weak zero knowledge and witness hiding argument for NP in the plain model under the sub-exponential hardness of factoring. Our technique also yields a significantly simpler proof that existing distinguisher-dependent simulatable zero knowledge protocols are also polynomial time simulatable against all distinguishers of a-priori bounded polynomial size. The core conceptual idea underlying our individual simulation technique is an observation of the existence of nearly optimal extractors for all hard distributions: For any NP-instance(s) sampling algorithm, there exists a polynomial-size witness extractor (depending on the sampler\u27s functionality) that almost outperforms any circuit of a-priori bounded polynomial size in terms of the success probability

On the round complexity of black-box constructions of commitments secure against selective opening attacks

Selective opening attacks against commitment schemes occur when the commitment scheme is repeated in parallel and an adversary can choose depending on the commit-phase transcript to see the values and openings to some subset of the committed bits. Commitments are secure under such attacks if one can prove that the remaining, unopened commitments stay secret. We prove the following black-box constructions and black-box lower bounds for commitments secure against selective opening attacks for parallel composition: 1. $3$ (resp. $4$) rounds are necessary to build computationally (resp. statistically) binding and computationally hiding commitments. 2. There is a black-box construction of $(t+3)$-round statistically binding commitments secure against selective opening attacks based on $t$-round stand-alone statistically hiding commitments. 3. $O(1)$-round statistically-hiding commitments are equivalent to $O(1)$-round statistically-binding commitments. Our lower bounds improve upon the parameters obtained by the impossibility results of Bellare \etal{} (EUROCRYPT \u2709), and are proved in a fundamentally different way, by observing that essentially all known impossibility results for black-box zero-knowledge can also be applied to the case of commitments secure against selective opening attacks

Secure computation under network and physical attacks

2011 - 2012This thesis proposes several protocols for achieving secure com- putation under concurrent and physical attacks. Secure computation allows many parties to compute a joint function of their inputs, while keeping the privacy of their input preserved. It is required that the pri- vacy one party's input is preserved even if other parties participating in the protocol collude or deviate from the protocol. In this thesis we focus on concurrent and physical attacks, where adversarial parties try to break the privacy of honest parties by ex- ploiting the network connection or physical weaknesses of the honest parties' machine. In the rst part of the thesis we discuss how to construct proto- cols that are Universally Composable (UC for short) based on physical setup assumptions. We explore the use of Physically Uncloneable Func- tions (PUFs) as setup assumption for achieving UC-secure computa- tions. PUF are physical noisy source of randomness. The use of PUFs in the UC-framework has been proposed already in [14]. However, this work assumes that all PUFs in the system are trusted. This means that, each party has to trust the PUFs generated by the other parties. In this thesis we focus on reducing the trust involved in the use of such PUFs and we introduce the Malicious PUFs model in which only PUFs generated by honest parties are assumed to be trusted. Thus the secu- rity of each party relies on its own PUF only and holds regardless of the goodness of the PUFs generated/used by the adversary. We are able to show that, under this more realistic assumption, one can achieve UC- secure computation, under computational assumptions. Moreover, we show how to achieve unconditional UC-secure commitments with (ma- licious) PUFs and with stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens. We discuss our contribution on this matter in Part I. These results are contained in papers [80] and [28]. In the second part of the thesis we focus on the concurrent setting, and we investigate on protocols achieving round optimality and black- box access to a cryptographic primitive. We study two fundamental functionalities: commitment scheme and zero knowledge, and we focus on some of the round-optimal constructions and lower bounds con- cerning both functionalities. We nd that such constructions present subtle issues. Hence, we provide new protocols that actually achieve the security guarantee promised by previous results. Concerning physical attacks, we consider adversaries able to re- set the machine of the honest party. In a reset attack a machine is forced to run a protocol several times using the same randomness. In this thesis we provide the rst construction of a witness indistinguish- able argument system that is simultaneous resettable and argument of knowledge. We discuss about this contribution in Part III, which is the content of the paper. [edited by author]XI n.s

Round-Optimal Black-Box Two-Party Computation

In [Eurocrypt 2004] Katz and Ostrovsky establish the exact round complexity of secure two-party computation with respect to black-box proofs of security. They prove that 5 rounds are necessary for secure two-party protocols (4-round are sufficient if only one party receives the output) and provide a protocol that matches such lower bound. The main challenge when designing such protocol is to parallelize the proofs of consistency provided by both parties – necessary when security against malicious adversaries is considered– in 4 rounds. Toward this goal they employ specific proofs in which the statement can be unspecified till the last round but that require non-black-box access to the underlying primitives. A rich line of work [IKLP06, Hai08, CDSMW09, IKOS07, PW09] has shown that the non- black-box use of the cryptographic primitive in secure two-party computation is not necessary by providing black-box constructions matching basically all the feasibility results that were previously demonstrated only via non-black-box protocols. All such constructions however are far from being round optimal. The reason is that they are based on cut-and-choose mechanisms where one party can safely take an action only after the other party has successfully completed the cut-and-choose phase, therefore requiring additional rounds. A natural question is whether round-optimal constructions do inherently require non-black- box access to the primitives, and whether the lower bound shown by Katz and Ostrovsky can only be matched by a non-black-box protocol. In this work we show that round-optimality is achievable even with only black-box access to the primitives. We provide the first 4-round black-box oblivious transfer based on any enhanced trapdoor permutation. Plugging a parallel version of our oblivious transfer into the black- box non-interactive secure computation protocol of [IKO+11] we obtain the first round-optimal black-box two-party protocol in the plain model for any functionality

Unconditionally Secure and Universally Composable Commitments from Physical Assumptions

We present a constant-round unconditional black-box compiler that transforms any ideal (i.e., statistically-hiding and statistically-binding) straight-line extractable commitment scheme, into an extractable and equivocal commitment scheme, therefore yielding to UC-security [9]. We exemplify the usefulness of our compiler by providing two (constant-round) instantiations of ideal straight-line extractable commitment based on (malicious) PUFs [36] and stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens [26], therefore achieving the first unconditionally UC-secure commitment with malicious PUFs and stateless tokens, respectively. Our constructions are secure for adversaries creating arbitrarily malicious stateful PUFs/tokens. Previous results with malicious PUFs used either computational assumptions to achieve UC- secure commitments or were unconditionally secure but only in the indistinguishability sense [36]. Similarly, with stateless tokens, UC-secure commitments are known only under computational assumptions [13, 24, 15], while the (not UC) unconditional commitment scheme of [23] is secure only in a weaker model in which the adversary is not allowed to create stateful tokens. Besides allowing us to prove feasibility of unconditional UC-security with (malicious) PUFs and stateless tokens, our compiler can be instantiated with any ideal straight-line extractable commitment scheme, thus allowing the use of various setup assumptions which may better fit the application or the technology available

Encryption schemes secure against chosen-ciphertext selective opening attacks

Imagine many small devices send data to a single receiver, encrypted using the receiver's public key. Assume an adversary that has the power to adaptively corrupt a subset of these devices. Given the information obtained from these corruptions, do the ciphertexts from uncorrupted devices remain secure? Recent results suggest that conventional security notions for encryption schemes (like IND-CCA security) do not suffice in this setting. To fill this gap, the notion of security against selective-opening attacks (SOA security) has been introduced. It has been shown that lossy encryption implies SOA security against a passive, i.e., only eavesdropping and corrupting, adversary (SO-CPA). However, the known results on SOA security against an active adversary (SO-CCA) are rather limited. Namely, while there exist feasibility results, the (time and space) complexity of currently known SO-C

Trapdoor commitment schemes and their applications

Informally, commitment schemes can be described by lockable steely boxes. In the commitment phase, the sender puts a message into the box, locks the box and hands it over to the receiver. On one hand, the receiver does not learn anything about the message. On the other hand, the sender cannot change the message in the box anymore. In the decommitment phase the sender gives the receiver the key, and the receiver then opens the box and retrieves the message. One application of such schemes are digital auctions where each participant places his secret bid into a box and submits it to the auctioneer. In this thesis we investigate trapdoor commitment schemes. Following the abstract viewpoint of lockable boxes, a trapdoor commitment is a box with a tiny secret door. If someone knows the secret door, then this person is still able to change the committed message in the box, even after the commitment phase. Such trapdoors turn out to be very useful for the design of secure cryptographic protocols involving commitment schemes. In the first part of the thesis, we formally introduce trapdoor commitments and extend the notion to identity-based trapdoors, where trapdoors can only be used in connection with certain identities. We then recall the most popular constructions of ordinary trapdoor protocols and present new solutions for identity-based trapdoors. In the second part of the thesis, we show the usefulness of trapdoors in commitment schemes. Deploying trapdoors we construct efficient non-malleable commitment schemes which basically guarantee indepency of commitments. Furthermore, applying (identity-based) trapdoor commitments we secure well-known identification protocols against a new kind of attack. And finally, by means of trapdoors, we show how to construct composable commitment schemes that can be securely executed as subprotocols within complex protocols

Cut-and-Choose Based Two-Party Computation in the Online/Offline and Batch Settings

Protocols for secure two-party computation enable a pair of mistrusting parties to compute a joint function of their private inputs without revealing anything but the output. One of the fundamental techniques for obtaining secure computation is that of Yao\u27s garbled circuits. In the setting of malicious adversaries, where the corrupted party can follow any arbitrary (polynomial-time) strategy in an attempt to breach security, the cut-and-choose technique is used to ensure that the garbled circuit is constructed correctly. The cost of this technique is the construction and transmission of multiple circuits; specifically, $s$ garbled circuits are used in order to obtain a maximum cheating probability of $2^{-s}$. In this paper, we show how to reduce the amortized cost of cut-and-choose based secure two-party computation to {\cal O}\(\frac{s}{\log N}\) garbled circuits when $N$ secure computations are run. We use this method to construct a secure protocol in the batch setting. Next, we show how the cut-and-choose method on garbled circuits can be used in an online/offline setting in order to obtain a very fast online phase with very few exponentiations, and we apply our amortization method to this setting as well. Our online/offline protocols are competitive with the TinyOT and SPDZ protocols due to the minimal interaction in the online phase (previous protocols require only information-theoretic operations in the online phase and are therefore very efficient; however, they also require many rounds of communication which increases latency). Although ${\cal O}(\frac{s}{\log N})$ may seem to be a mild efficiency improvement asymptotically, it is a \emph{dramatic improvement} for concrete parameters since $s$ is a statistical security parameter and so is typically small. Specifically, instead of $40$ circuits to obtain an error of $2^{-40}$, when running $2^{10}$ executions we need only $7.06$ circuits on average per secure computation, and when running $2^{20}$ executions this is reduced to an average of just $4.08$. In addition, in the online/offline setting, the online phase per secure computation consists of evaluating only $6$ garbled circuits for $2^{10}$ executions and $4$ garbled circuits for $2^{20}$ executions (plus some small additional overhead). In practice, when using fast implementations (like the JustGarble framework of Bellare et al.), the resulting protocol is remarkably fast. We present a number of variants of our protocols with different assumptions and efficiency levels. Our basic protocols rely on the DDH assumption alone, while our most efficient variants are proven secure in the random-oracle model. Interestingly, the variant in the random-oracle model of our protocol for the online/offline setting has online communication that is independent of the size of the circuit in use. None of the previous protocols in the online/offline setting achieves this property, which is very significant since communication is usually a dominant cost in practice

Steganography-Free Zero-Knowledge

We revisit the well-studied problem of preventing steganographic communication in multi-party communications. While this is known to be a provably impossible task, we propose a new model that allows circumventing this impossibility. In our model, the parties first publish a single message during an honest non-interactive pre-processing phase and then later interact in an execution phase. We show that in this model, it is indeed possible to prevent any steganographic communication in zero-knowledge protocols. Our solutions rely on standard cryptographic assumptions

Composable Security in the Tamper Proof Hardware Model under Minimal Complexity

We put forth a new formulation of tamper-proof hardware in the Global Universal Composable (GUC) framework introduced by Canetti et al. in TCC 2007. Almost all of the previous works rely on the formulation by Katz in Eurocrypt 2007 and this formulation does not fully capture tokens in a concurrent setting. We address these shortcomings by relying on the GUC framework where we make the following contributions: (1) We construct secure Two-Party Computation (2PC) protocols for general functionalities with optimal round complexity and computational assumptions using stateless tokens. More precisely, we show how to realize arbitrary functionalities with GUC security in two rounds under the minimal assumption of One-Way Functions (OWFs). Moreover, our construction relies on the underlying function in a black-box way. As a corollary, we obtain feasibility of Multi-Party Computation (MPC) with GUC-security under the minimal assumption of OWFs. As an independent contribution, we identify an issue with a claim in a previous work by Goyal, Ishai, Sahai, Venkatesan and Wadia in TCC 2010 regarding the feasibility of UC-secure computation with stateless tokens assuming collision-resistant hash-functions (and the extension based only on one-way functions). (2) We then construct a 3-round MPC protocol to securely realize arbitrary functionalities with GUC-security starting from any semi-honest secure MPC protocol. For this construction, we require the so-called one-many commit-and-prove primitive introduced in the original work of Canetti, Lindell, Ostrovsky and Sahai in STOC 2002 that is round-efficient and black-box in the underlying commitment. Using specially designed ``input-delayed\u27\u27 protocols we realize this primitive (with a 3-round protocol in our framework) using stateless tokens and one-way functions (where the underlying one-way function is used in a black-box way)