Round Optimal Black-Box “Commit-and-Prove”

Motivatedbytheoreticalandpracticalconsiderations,anim- portant line of research is to design secure computation protocols that only make black-box use of cryptography. An important component in nearly all the black-box secure computation constructions is a black- box commit-and-prove protocol. A commit-and-prove protocol allows a prover to commit to a value and prove a statement about this value while guaranteeing that the committed value remains hidden. A black- box commit-and-prove protocol implements this functionality while only making black-box use of cryptography. In this paper, we build several tools that enable constructions of round- optimal, black-box commit and prove protocols. In particular, assuming injective one-way functions, we design the first round-optimal, black- box commit-and-prove arguments of knowledge satisfying strong privacy against malicious verifiers, namely: – Zero-knowledge in four rounds and, – Witness indistinguishability in three rounds. Prior to our work, the best known black-box protocols achieving commit- and-prove required more rounds. We additionally ensure that our protocols can be used, if needed, in the delayed-input setting, where the statement to be proven is decided only towards the end of the interaction. We also observe simple applications of our protocols towards achieving black-box four-round constructions of extractable and equivocal commitments. We believe that our protocols will provide a useful tool enabling several new constructions and easy round-efficient conversions from non-black- box to black-box protocols in the future

Round-optimal Black-box Commit-and-prove with Succinct Communication

We give a four-round black-box construction of a commit-and-prove protocol with succinct communication. Our construction is WI and has constant soundness error, and it can be upgraded into a one that is ZK and has negligible soundness error by relying on a round-preserving transformation of Khurana et al. (TCC 2018). Our construction is obtained by combining the MPC-in-the-head technique of Ishai et al. (SICOMP 2009) with the two-round succinct argument of Kalai et al. (STOC 2014), and the main technical novelty lies in the analysis of the soundness---we show that, although the succinct argument of Kalai et al. does not necessarily provide soundness for NP statements, it can be used in the MPC-in-the-head technique for proving the consistency of committed MPC views. Our construction is based on sub-exponentially hard collision-resistant hash functions, two-round PIRs, and two-round OTs

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)

Concurrently Non-Malleable Zero Knowledge in the Authenticated Public-Key Model

We consider a type of zero-knowledge protocols that are of interest for their practical applications within networks like the Internet: efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks. In an effort to reduce the setup assumptions required for efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks, we consider a model, which we call the Authenticated Public-Key (APK) model. The APK model seems to significantly reduce the setup assumptions made by the CRS model (as no trusted party or honest execution of a centralized algorithm are required), and can be seen as a slightly stronger variation of the Bare Public-Key (BPK) model from \cite{CGGM,MR}, and a weaker variation of the registered public-key model used in \cite{BCNP}. We then define and study man-in-the-middle attacks in the APK model. Our main result is a constant-round concurrent non-malleable zero-knowledge argument of knowledge for any polynomial-time relation (associated to a language in $\mathcal{NP}$), under the (minimal) assumption of the existence of a one-way function family. Furthermore,We show time-efficient instantiations of our protocol based on known number-theoretic assumptions. We also note a negative result with respect to further reducing the setup assumptions of our protocol to those in the (unauthenticated) BPK model, by showing that concurrently non-malleable zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge in the BPK model are only possible for trivial languages

Concurrent Knowledge-Extraction in the Public-Key Model

Knowledge extraction is a fundamental notion, modelling machine possession of values (witnesses) in a computational complexity sense. The notion provides an essential tool for cryptographic protocol design and analysis, enabling one to argue about the internal state of protocol players without ever looking at this supposedly secret state. However, when transactions are concurrent (e.g., over the Internet) with players possessing public-keys (as is common in cryptography), assuring that entities ``know'' what they claim to know, where adversaries may be well coordinated across different transactions, turns out to be much more subtle and in need of re-examination. Here, we investigate how to formally treat knowledge possession by parties (with registered public-keys) interacting over the Internet. Stated more technically, we look into the relative power of the notion of ``concurrent knowledge-extraction'' (CKE) in the concurrent zero-knowledge (CZK) bare public-key (BPK) model.Comment: 38 pages, 4 figure

On the Efficiency of Classical and Quantum Secure Function Evaluation

We provide bounds on the efficiency of secure one-sided output two-party computation of arbitrary finite functions from trusted distributed randomness in the statistical case. From these results we derive bounds on the efficiency of protocols that use different variants of OT as a black-box. When applied to implementations of OT, these bounds generalize most known results to the statistical case. Our results hold in particular for transformations between a finite number of primitives and for any error. In the second part we study the efficiency of quantum protocols implementing OT. While most classical lower bounds for perfectly secure reductions of OT to distributed randomness still hold in the quantum setting, we present a statistically secure protocol that violates these bounds by an arbitrarily large factor. We then prove a weaker lower bound that does hold in the statistical quantum setting and implies that even quantum protocols cannot extend OT. Finally, we present two lower bounds for reductions of OT to commitments and a protocol based on string commitments that is optimal with respect to both of these bounds

Improved Black-Box Constructions of Composable Secure Computation

We close the gap between black-box and non-black-box constructions of $\mathit{composable}$ secure multiparty computation in the plain model under the $\mathit{minimal}$ assumption of semi-honest oblivious transfer. The notion of protocol composition we target is $\mathit{angel\text{-}based}$ security, or more precisely, security with super-polynomial helpers. In this notion, both the simulator and the adversary are given access to an oracle called an $\mathit{angel}$ that can perform some predefined super-polynomial time task. Angel-based security maintains the attractive properties of the universal composition framework while providing meaningful security guarantees in complex environments without having to trust anyone. Angel-based security can be achieved using non-black-box constructions in $\max(R_{\mathsf{OT}},\widetilde{O}(\log n))$ rounds where $R_{\mathsf{OT}}$ is the round-complexity of the semi-honest oblivious transfer. However, currently, the best known $\mathit{black\text{-}box}$ constructions under the same assumption require $\max(R_{\mathsf{OT}},\widetilde{O}(\log^2 n))$ rounds. If $R_{\mathsf{OT}}$ is a constant, the gap between non-black-box and black-box constructions can be a multiplicative factor $\log n$. We close this gap by presenting a $\max(R_{\mathsf{OT}},\widetilde{O}(\log n))$-round black-box construction. We achieve this result by constructing constant-round 1-1 CCA-secure commitments assuming only black-box access to one-way functions