Secure Blind Decryption

Abstract. In this work we construct public key encryption schemes that admit a protocol for blindly decrypting ciphertexts. In a blind decryp-tion protocol, a user with a ciphertext interacts with a secret keyholder such that the user obtains the decryption of the ciphertext and the key-holder learns nothing about what it decrypted. While we are not the first to consider this problem, previous works provided only weak secu-rity guarantees against malicious users. We provide, to our knowledge, the first practical blind decryption schemes that are secure under a strong CCA security definition. We prove our construction secure in the stan-dard model under simple, well-studied assumptions in bilinear groups. To motivate the usefulness of this primitive we discuss several applica-tions including privacy-preserving distributed file systems and Oblivious Transfer schemes that admit public contribution.

Security of signed ELGamal encryption

Assuming a cryptographically strong cyclic group G of prime order q and a random hash function H, we show that ElGamal encryption with an added Schnorr signature is secure against the adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, in which an attacker can freely use a decryption oracle except for the target ciphertext. We also prove security against the novel one-more-decyption attack. Our security proofs are in a new model, corresponding to a combination of two previously introduced models, the Random Oracle model and the Generic model. The security extends to the distributed threshold version of the scheme. Moreover, we propose a very practical scheme for private information retrieval that is based on blind decryption of ElGamal ciphertexts

Quantum-enhanced Secure Delegated Classical Computing

We present a quantumly-enhanced protocol to achieve unconditionally secure delegated classical computation where the client and the server have both limited classical and quantum computing capacity. We prove the same task cannot be achieved using only classical protocols. This extends the work of Anders and Browne on the computational power of correlations to a security setting. Concretely, we present how a client with access to a non-universal classical gate such as a parity gate could achieve unconditionally secure delegated universal classical computation by exploiting minimal quantum gadgets. In particular, unlike the universal blind quantum computing protocols, the restriction of the task to classical computing removes the need for a full universal quantum machine on the side of the server and makes these new protocols readily implementable with the currently available quantum technology in the lab

Security of discrete log cryptosystems in the random oracle and the generic model

We introduce novel security proofs that use combinatorial counting arguments rather than reductions to the discrete logarithm or to the Diffie-Hellman problem. Our security results are sharp and clean with no polynomial reduction times involved. We consider a combination of the random oracle model and the generic model. This corresponds to assuming an ideal hash function H given by an oracle and an ideal group of prime order q, where the binary encoding of the group elements is useless for cryptographic attacks In this model, we first show that Schnorr signatures are secure against the one-more signature forgery : A generic adversary performing t generic steps including l sequential interactions with the signer cannot produce l+1 signatures with a better probability than (t 2)/q. We also characterize the different power of sequential and of parallel attacks. Secondly, we prove signed ElGamal encryption is secure against the adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, in which an attacker can arbitrarily use a decryption oracle except for the challenge ciphertext. Moreover, signed ElGamal encryption is secure against the one-more decryption attack: A generic adversary performing t generic steps including l interactions with the decryption oracle cannot distinguish the plaintexts of l + 1 ciphertexts from random strings with a probability exceeding (t 2)/q

Cryptanalysis of an Encryption Scheme Based on Blind Source Separation

Recently Lin et al. proposed a method of using the underdetermined BSS (blind source separation) problem to realize image and speech encryption. In this paper, we give a cryptanalysis of this BSS-based encryption and point out that it is not secure against known/chosen-plaintext attack and chosen-ciphertext attack. In addition, there exist some other security defects: low sensitivity to part of the key and the plaintext, a ciphertext-only differential attack, divide-and-conquer (DAC) attack on part of the key. We also discuss the role of BSS in Lin et al.'s efforts towards cryptographically secure ciphers.Comment: 8 pages, 10 figures, IEEE forma