Natural sd-RCCA secure public-key encryptions from hybrid paradigms

The existence of natural public-key encryption (PKE) schemes satisfying secretly detectable replayable CCA (sd-RCCA) security is left as open. By introducing probabilistic message authentication codes (MACs) into popular KEM plus DEM paradigms, several instances of such schemes are presented in this paper. It is known that the encrypt-then-authenticate paradigm gives an RCCA secure DEM when the underlying MAC is regular (but not strong) secure, where forgeries for old messages might be possible. By further requiring that the validity of such forgeries can be verified only secretly, sd-RCCA secure DEMs is obtained. Combining such DEMs with CCA secure KEMs gives sd-RCCA secure hybrid PKEs. We first formalize the related notions and this paradigm, and also other variants of KEM plus DEM hybrid paradigm since MACs are commonly used in them. Then we show natural examples of desired probabilistic MACs under the standard DDH assumption, and find appropriate KEMs to match the message space for those MACs and then obtain natural instances of sd-RCCA secure hybrid PKEs

Identity-Based Encryption for Fair Anonymity Applications: Defining, Implementing, and Applying Rerandomizable RCCA-secure IBE

Our context is anonymous encryption schemes hiding their receiver, but in a setting which allows authorities to reveal the receiver when needed. While anonymous Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) is a natural candidate for such fair anonymity (it gives trusted authority access by design), the de facto security standard (a.k.a. IND-ID-CCA) is incompatible with the ciphertext rerandomizability which is crucial to anonymous communication. Thus, we seek to extend IND-ID-CCA security for IBE to a notion that can be meaningfully relaxed for rerandomizability while it still protects against active adversaries. To the end, inspired by the notion of replayable adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack (RCCA) security (Canetti et al., Crypto\u2703), we formalize a new security notion called Anonymous Identity-Based RCCA (ANON-ID-RCCA) security for rerandomizable IBE and propose the first construction with rigorous security analysis. The core of our scheme is a novel extension of the double-strand paradigm, which was originally proposed by Golle et al. (CT-RSA\u2704) and later extended by Prabhakaran and Rosulek (Crypto\u2707), to the well-known Gentry-IBE (Eurocrypt\u2706). Notably, our scheme is the first IBE that simultaneously satisfies adaptive security, rerandomizability, and recipient-anonymity to date. As the application of our new notion, we design a new universal mixnet in the identity-based setting that does not require public key distribution (with fair anonymity). More generally, our new notion is also applicable to most existing rerandomizable RCCA-secure applications to eliminate the need for public key distribution infrastructure while allowing fairness

Message Transmission with Reverse Firewalls---Secure Communication on Corrupted Machines

Suppose Alice wishes to send a message to Bob privately over an untrusted channel. Cryptographers have developed a whole suite of tools to accomplish this task, with a wide variety of notions of security, setup assumptions, and running times. However, almost all prior work on this topic made a seemingly innocent assumption: that Alice has access to a trusted computer with a proper implementation of the protocol. The Snowden revelations show us that, in fact, powerful adversaries can and will corrupt users\u27 machines in order to compromise their security. And, (presumably) accidental vulnerabilities are regularly found in popular cryptographic software, showing that users cannot even trust implementations that were created honestly. This leads to the following (seemingly absurd) question: ``Can Alice securely send a message to Bob even if she cannot trust her own computer?!\u27\u27 Bellare, Paterson, and Rogaway recently studied this question. They show a strong lower bound that in particular rules out even semantically secure public-key encryption in their model. However, Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz recently introduced a new framework for solving such problems: reverse firewalls. A secure reverse firewall is a third party that ``sits between Alice and the outside world\u27\u27 and modifies her sent and received messages so that even if the her machine has been corrupted, Alice\u27s security is still guaranteed. We show how to use reverse firewalls to sidestep the impossibility result of Bellare et al., and we achieve strong security guarantees in this extreme setting. Indeed, we find a rich structure of solutions that vary in efficiency, security, and setup assumptions, in close analogy with message transmission in the classical setting. Our strongest and most important result shows a protocol that achieves interactive, concurrent CCA-secure message transmission with a reverse firewall---i.e., CCA-secure message transmission on a possibly compromised machine! Surprisingly, this protocol is quite efficient and simple, requiring only four rounds and a small constant number of public-key operations for each party. It could easily be used in practice. Behind this result is a technical composition theorem that shows how key agreement with a sufficiently secure reverse firewall can be used to construct a message-transmission protocol with its own secure reverse firewall

Natural sd-RCCA Secure Public-key Encryptions from Hybrid Paradigms

The existence of natural public-key encryption (PKE) schemes satisfying secretly detectable replayable CCA (sd-RCCA) security is left as open. By introducing probabilistic message authentication codes (MACs) into popular KEM plus DEM paradigms, several instances of such schemes are presented in this paper. It is known that the encrypt-then-authenticate paradigm gives an RCCA secure DEM when the underlying MAC is regular (but not strong) secure, where forgeries for old messages might be possible. By further requiring that the validity of such forgeries can be verified only secretly, sd-RCCA secure DEMs is obtained. Combining such DEMs with CCA secure KEMs gives sd-RCCA secure hybrid PKEs. We first formalize the related notions and this paradigm, and also other variants of KEM plus DEM hybrid paradigm since MACs are commonly used in them. Then we show natural examples of desired probabilistic MACs under the standard DDH assumption, and find appropriate KEMs to match the message space for those MACs and then obtain natural instances of sd-RCCA secure hybrid PKEs

Leakage-Resilient Public-Key Encryption from Obfuscation

The literature on leakage-resilient cryptography contains various leakage models that provide different levels of security. In this work, we consider the \emph{bounded leakage} and the \emph{continual leakage} models. In the bounded leakage model (Akavia et al. -- TCC 2009), it is assumed that there is a fixed upper bound $L$ on the number of bits the attacker may leak on the secret key in the entire lifetime of the scheme. Alternatively, in the continual leakage model (Brakerski et al. -- FOCS 2010, Dodis et al. -- FOCS 2010), the lifetime of a cryptographic scheme is divided into ``time periods\u27\u27 between which the scheme\u27s secret key is updated. Furthermore, in its attack the adversary is allowed to obtain some bounded amount of leakage on the current secret key during each time period. In the continual leakage model, a challenging problem has been to provide security against \emph{leakage on key updates}, that is, leakage that is a function not only of the current secret key but also the \emph{randomness used to update it}. We propose a new, modular approach to overcome this problem. Namely, we present a compiler that transforms any public-key encryption or signature scheme that achieves a slight strengthening of continual leakage resilience, which we call \emph{consecutive} continual leakage resilience, to one that is continual leakage resilient with leakage on key updates, assuming \emph{indistinguishability obfuscation} (Barak et al. --- CRYPTO 2001, Garg et al. -- FOCS 2013). Under the stronger assumption of \emph{public-coin differing-inputs obfuscation} (Ishai et al. -- TCC 2015) the leakage rate tolerated by our compiled scheme is essentially as good as that of the starting scheme. Our compiler is obtained by making a new connection between the problems of leakage on key updates and so-called ``sender-deniable\u27\u27 encryption (Canetti et al. -- CRYPTO 1997), which was recently realized for the first time by Sahai and Waters (STOC 2014). In the bounded leakage model, we develop a new approach to constructing leakage-resilient encryption from obfuscation, based upon the public-key encryption scheme from \iO and punctured pseudorandom functions due to Sahai and Waters (STOC 2014). In particular, we achieve leakage-resilient public key encryption tolerating $L$ bits of leakage for any $L$ from \iO and one-way functions. We build on this to achieve leakage-resilient public key encryption with optimal leakage rate of $1-o(1)$ based on public-coin differing-inputs obfuscation and collision-resistant hash functions. Such a leakage rate is not known to be achievable in a generic way based on public-key encryption alone. We then develop entirely new techniques to construct a new public key encryption scheme that is secure under (consecutive) continual leakage resilience (under appropriate assumptions), which we believe is of independent interest

Oblivious Transfer from Rerandomizable PKE

The relationship between oblivious transfer (OT) and public-key encryption (PKE) has been studied by Gertner et al. (FOCS 2000). They showed that OT can be constructed from special types of PKE, i.e., PKE with oblivious sampleability of public keys or ciphertexts. In this work, we give new black-box constructions of OT from PKE without any oblivious sampleability. Instead, we require that the PKE scheme is rerandomizable, meaning that one can use the public key to rerandomize a ciphertext into a fresh ciphertext. We give two different OT protocols with different efficiency features based on rerandomizable PKE. For $1$-out-of-$n$ OT, in our first OT protocol, the sender has sublinear (in $n$) cost, and in our second OT protocol, the cost of the receiver is independent of $n$. As a comparison, in the PKE-based OT protocols of Gertner et al., both the sender and receiver have linear cost

Revisiting (R)CCA Security and Replay Protection

This paper takes a fresh approach to systematically characterizing, comparing, and understanding CCA-type security definitions for public-key encryption (PKE), a topic with a long history. The justification for a concrete security definition $X$ is relative to a benchmark application (e.g. confidential communication): Does the use of a PKE scheme satisfying $X$ imply the security of the application? Because unnecessarily strong definitions may lead to unnecessarily inefficient schemes or unnecessarily strong computational assumptions, security definitions should be as weak as possible, i.e. as close as possible to (but above) the benchmark. Understanding the hierarchy of security definitions, partially ordered by the implication (i.e. at least as strong) relation, is hence important, as is placing the relevant applications as benchmark levels within the hierarchy. CCA-2 security is apparently the strongest notion, but because it is arguably too strong, Canetti, Krawczyk, and Nielsen (Crypto 2003) proposed the relaxed notions of Replayable CCA security (RCCA) as perhaps the weakest meaningful definition, and they investigated the space between CCA and RCCA security by proposing two versions of Detectable RCCA (d-RCCA) security which are meant to ensure that replays of ciphertexts are either publicly or secretly detectable (and hence preventable). The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, following the work of Coretti, Maurer, and Tackmann (Asiacrypt 2013), we formalize the three benchmark applications of PKE that serve as the natural motivation for security notions, namely the construction of certain types of (possibly replay-protected) confidential channels (from an insecure and an authenticated communication channel). Second, we prove that RCCA does not achieve the confidentiality benchmark and, contrary to previous belief, that the proposed d-RCCA notions are not even relaxations of CCA-2 security. Third, we propose the natural security notions corresponding to the three benchmarks: an appropriately strengthened version of RCCA to ensure confidentiality, as well as two notions for capturing public and secret replay detectability

Almost Tightly-Secure Re-Randomizable and Replayable CCA-secure Public Key Encryption

Re-randomizable Replayable CCA-secure public key encryption (Rand-RCCA PKE) schemes guarantee security against chosen-ciphertext attacks while ensuring the useful property of re-randomizable ciphertexts. We introduce the notion of multi-user and multi-ciphertext Rand-RCCA PKE and we give the first construction of such a PKE scheme with an almost tight security reduction to a standard assumption. Our construction is structure preserving and can be instantiated over Type-1 pairing groups. Technically, our work borrows ideas from the state of the art Rand-RCCA PKE scheme of Faonio et al. (ASIACRYPT’19) and the adaptive partitioning technique of Hofheinz (EUROCRYPT’17). Additionally, we show (1) how to turn our scheme into a publicly-verifiable (pv) Rand-RCCA scheme and (2) that plugging our pv-Rand-RCCA PKE scheme into the MixNet protocol of Faonio et al. we can obtain the first almost tightly-secure MixNet protocol

Transferable E-cash: A Cleaner Model and the First Practical Instantiation

Transferable e-cash is the most faithful digital analog of physical cash, as it allows users to transfer coins between them in isolation, that is, without interacting with a bank or a “ledger”. Appropriate protection of user privacy and, at the same time, providing means to trace fraudulent behavior (double-spending of coins) have made instantiating the concept notoriously hard. Baldimtsi et al. (PKC\u2715) gave a first instantiation, but, as it relies on a powerful cryptographic primitive, the scheme is not practical. We also point out a flaw in their scheme. In this paper we revisit the model for transferable e-cash and propose simpler yet stronger security definitions. We then provide the first concrete construction, based on bilinear groups, give rigorous proofs that it satisfies our model, and analyze its efficiency in detail

Mix-Nets from Re-Randomizable and Replayable CCA-secure Public-Key Encryption

Mix-nets are protocols that allow a set of senders to send messages anonymously. Faonio et al. (ASIACRYPT’19) showed how to instantiate mix-net protocols based on Public-Verifiable Re-randomizable Replayable CCA-secure (Rand-RCCA) PKE schemes. The bottleneck of their approach is that public-verifiable Rand-RCCA PKEs are less efficient than typical CPA-secure re-randomizable PKEs. In this paper, we revisit their mix-net protocol, showing how to get rid of the cumbersome public-verifiability property, and we give a more efficient instantiation for the mix-net protocol based on a (non publicly-verifiable) Rand-RCCA scheme. Additionally, we give a more careful security analysis of their mix-net protocol