Simple and Generic Constructions of Succinct Functional Encryption

We propose simple generic constructions of succinct functional encryption. Our key tool is exponentially-efficient indistinguishability obfuscator (XIO), which is the same as indistinguishability obfuscator (IO) except that the size of an obfuscated circuit (or the running-time of an obfuscator) is slightly smaller than that of a brute-force canonicalizer that outputs the entire truth table of a circuit to be obfuscated. A ``compression factor\u27\u27 of XIO indicates how much XIO compresses the brute-force canonicalizer. In this study, we propose a significantly simple framework to construct succinct functional encryption via XIO and show that XIO is a powerful enough to achieve cutting-edge cryptography. In particular, we propose the following constructions: Single-key weakly succinct secret-key functional encryption (SKFE) is constructed from XIO (even with a bad compression factor) and one-way function. Single-key weakly succinct public-key functional encryption (PKFE) is constructed from XIO with a good compression factor and public-key encryption. Single-key weakly succinct PKFE is constructed from XIO (even with a bad compression factor) and identity-based encryption. Our new framework has side benefits. Our constructions do not rely on any number theoretic or lattice assumptions such as decisional Diffie-Hellman and learning with errors assumptions. Moreover, all security reductions incur only polynomial security loss. Known constructions of weakly succinct SKFE or PKFE from XIO with polynomial security loss rely on number theoretic or lattice assumptions

Lattice-Inspired Broadcast Encryption and Succinct Ciphertext-Policy ABE

Broadcast encryption remains one of the few remaining central cryptographic primitives that are not yet known to be achievable under a standard cryptographic assumption (excluding obfuscation-based constructions, see below). Furthermore, prior to this work, there were no known direct candidates for post-quantum-secure broadcast encryption. We propose a candidate ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) scheme for circuits, where the ciphertext size depends only on the depth of the policy circuit (and not its size). This, in particular, gives us a Broadcast Encryption (BE) scheme where the size of the keys and ciphertexts have a poly-logarithmic dependence on the number of users. This goal was previously only known to be achievable assuming ideal multilinear maps (Boneh, Waters and Zhandry, Crypto 2014) or indistinguishability obfuscation (Boneh and Zhandry, Crypto 2014) and in a concurrent work from generic bilinear groups and the learning with errors (LWE) assumption (Agrawal and Yamada, Eurocrypt 2020). Our construction relies on techniques from lattice-based (and in particular LWE-based) cryptography. We analyze some attempts at cryptanalysis, but we are unable to provide a security proof

Unbounded Predicate Inner Product Functional Encryption from Pairings

Predicate inner product functional encryption (P-IPFE) is essentially attribute-based IPFE (AB-IPFE) which additionally hides attributes associated to ciphertexts. In a P-IPFE, a message x is encrypted under an attribute w and a secret key is generated for a pair (y, v) such that recovery of ⟨ x, y⟩ requires the vectors w, v to satisfy a linear relation. We call a P-IPFE unbounded if it can encrypt unbounded length attributes and message vectors. ∙ zero predicate IPFE. We construct the first unbounded zero predicate IPFE (UZP-IPFE) which recovers ⟨ x, y⟩ if ⟨ w, v⟩ = 0 . This construction is inspired by the unbounded IPFE of Tomida and Takashima (ASIACRYPT 2018) and the unbounded zero inner product encryption of Okamoto and Takashima (ASIACRYPT 2012). The UZP-IPFE stands secure against general attackers capable of decrypting the challenge ciphertext. Concretely, it provides full attribute-hiding security in the indistinguishability-based semi-adaptive model under the standard symmetric external Diffie–Hellman assumption. ∙ non-zero predicate IPFE. We present the first unbounded non-zero predicate IPFE (UNP-IPFE) that successfully recovers ⟨ x, y⟩ if ⟨ w, v⟩ ≠ 0 . We generically transform an unbounded quadratic FE (UQFE) scheme to weak attribute-hiding UNP-IPFE in both public and secret key setting. Interestingly, our secret key simulation secure UNP-IPFE has succinct secret keys and is constructed from a novel succinct UQFE that we build in the random oracle model. We leave the problem of constructing a succinct public key UNP-IPFE or UQFE in the standard model as an important open problem

Affine Determinant Programs: A Framework for Obfuscation and Witness Encryption

An affine determinant program ADP: {0,1}^n → {0,1} is specified by a tuple (A,B_1,...,B_n) of square matrices over F_q and a function Eval: F_q → {0,1}, and evaluated on x \in {0,1}^n by computing Eval(det(A + sum_{i \in [n]} x_i B_i)). In this work, we suggest ADPs as a new framework for building general-purpose obfuscation and witness encryption. We provide evidence to suggest that constructions following our ADP-based framework may one day yield secure, practically feasible obfuscation. As a proof-of-concept, we give a candidate ADP-based construction of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for all circuits along with a simple witness encryption candidate. We provide cryptanalysis demonstrating that our schemes resist several potential attacks, and leave further cryptanalysis to future work. Lastly, we explore practically feasible applications of our witness encryption candidate, such as public-key encryption with near-optimal key generation

Interaction-Preserving Compilers for Secure Computation

In this work we consider the following question: What is the cost of security for multi-party protocols? Specifically, given an insecure protocol where parties exchange (in the worst case) ? bits in N rounds, is it possible to design a secure protocol with communication complexity close to ? and N rounds? We systematically study this problem in a variety of settings and we propose solutions based on the intractability of different cryptographic problems. For the case of two parties we design an interaction-preserving compiler where the number of bits exchanged in the secure protocol approaches ? and the number of rounds is exactly N, assuming the hardness of standard problems over lattices. For the more general multi-party case, we obtain the same result assuming either (i) an additional round of interaction or (ii) the existence of extractable witness encryption and succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge. As a contribution of independent interest, we construct the first multi-key fully homomorphic encryption scheme with message-to-ciphertext ratio (i.e., rate) of 1 - o(1), assuming the hardness of the learning with errors (LWE) problem. We view our work as a support for the claim that, as far as interaction and communication are concerned, one does not need to pay a significant price for security in multi-party protocols

Circuit-ABE from LWE: Unbounded Attributes and Semi-adaptive Security

We construct an LWE-based key-policy attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme that supports attributes of unbounded polynomial length. Namely, the size of the public parameters is a fixed polynomial in the security parameter and a depth bound, and with these fixed length parameters, one can encrypt attributes of arbitrary length. Similarly, any polynomial size circuit that adheres to the depth bound can be used as the policy circuit regardless of its input length (recall that a depth d circuit can have as many as 2d inputs). This is in contrast to previous LWE-based schemes where the length of the public parameters has to grow linearly with the maximal attribute length. We prove that our scheme is semi-adaptively secure, namely, the adversary can choose the challenge attribute after seeing the public parameters (but before any decryption keys). Previous LWE-based constructions were only able to achieve selective security. (We stress that the “complexity leveraging” technique is not applicable for unbounded attributes). We believe that our techniques are of interest at least as much as our end result. Fundamentally, selective security and bounded attributes are both shortcomings that arise out of the current LWE proof techniques that program the challenge attributes into the public parameters. The LWE toolbox we develop in this work allows us to delay this programming. In a nutshell, the new tools include a way to generate an a-priori unbounded sequence of LWE matrices, and have fine-grained control over which trapdoor is embedded in each and every one of them, all with succinct representation.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1350619)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant CNS-1413964)United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant 712307

Compactness vs Collusion Resistance in Functional Encryption

We present two general constructions that can be used to combine any two functional encryption (FE) schemes (supporting a bounded number of key queries) into a new functional encryption scheme supporting a larger number of key queries. By using these constructions iteratively, we transform any primitive FE scheme supporting a single functional key query (from a sufficiently general class of functions) and has certain weak compactness properties to a collusion-resistant FE scheme with the same or slightly weaker compactness properties. Together with previously known reductions, this shows that the compact, weakly compact, collusion-resistant, and weakly collusion-resistant versions of FE are all equivalent under polynomial time reductions. These are all FE variants known to imply the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation, and were previously thought to offer slightly different avenues toward the realization of obfuscation from general assumptions. Our results show that they are indeed all equivalent, improving our understanding of the minimal assumptions on functional encryption required to instantiate indistinguishability obfuscation

On Removing Graded Encodings from Functional Encryption

Functional encryption (FE) has emerged as an outstanding concept. By now, we know that beyond the immediate application to computation over encrypted data, variants with {\em succinct ciphertexts} are so powerful that they yield the full might of indistinguishability obfuscation (IO). Understanding how, and under which assumptions, such succinct schemes can be constructed has become a grand challenge of current research in cryptography. Whereas the first schemes were based themselves on IO, recent progress has produced constructions based on {\em constant-degree graded encodings}. Still, our comprehension of such graded encodings remains limited, as the instantiations given so far have exhibited different vulnerabilities. Our main result is that, assuming LWE, {\em black-box constructions} of {\em sufficiently succinct} FE schemes from constant-degree graded encodings can be transformed to rely on a much better-understood object --- {\em bilinear groups}. In particular, under an {\em über assumption} on bilinear groups, such constructions imply IO in the plain model. The result demonstrates that the exact level of ciphertext succinctness of FE schemes is of major importance. In particular, we draw a fine line between known FE constructions from constant-degree graded encodings, which just fall short of the required succinctness, and the holy grail of basing IO on better-understood assumptions. In the heart of our result, are new techniques for removing ideal graded encoding oracles from FE constructions. Complementing the result, for weaker ideal models, namely the generic-group model and the random-oracle model, we show a transformation from {\em collusion-resistant} FE in either of the two models directly to FE (and IO) in the plain model, without assuming bilinear groups

Ad Hoc Multi-Input Functional Encryption

Consider sources that supply sensitive data to an aggregator. Standard encryption only hides the data from eavesdroppers, but using specialized encryption one can hope to hide the data (to the extent possible) from the aggregator itself. For flexibility and security, we envision schemes that allow sources to supply encrypted data, such that at any point a dynamically-chosen subset of sources can allow an agreed-upon joint function of their data to be computed by the aggregator. A primitive called multi-input functional encryption (MIFE), due to Goldwasser et al. (EUROCRYPT 2014), comes close, but has two main limitations: - it requires trust in a third party, who is able to decrypt all the data, and - it requires function arity to be fixed at setup time and to be equal to the number of parties. To drop these limitations, we introduce a new notion of ad hoc MIFE. In our setting, each source generates its own public key and issues individual, function-specific secret keys to an aggregator. For successful decryption, an aggregator must obtain a separate key from each source whose ciphertext is being computed upon. The aggregator could obtain multiple such secret-keys from a user corresponding to functions of varying arity. For this primitive, we obtain the following results: - We show that standard MIFE for general functions can be bootstrapped to ad hoc MIFE for free, i.e. without making any additional assumption. - We provide a direct construction of ad hoc MIFE for the inner product functionality based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. This yields the first construction of this natural primitive based on a standard assumption. At a technical level, our results are obtained by combining standard MIFE schemes and two-round secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols in novel ways highlighting an interesting interplay between MIFE and two-round MPC

Impossibility of Order-Revealing Encryption in Idealized Models

An Order-Revealing Encryption (ORE) scheme gives a public procedure by which two ciphertexts can be compared to reveal the order of their underlying plaintexts. The ideal security notion for ORE is that \emph{only} the order is revealed --- anything else, such as the distance between plaintexts, is hidden. The only known constructions of ORE achieving such ideal security are based on cryptographic multilinear maps and are currently too impractical for real-world applications. In this work, we give evidence that building ORE from weaker tools may be hard. Indeed, we show black-box separations between ORE and most symmetric-key primitives, as well as public key encryption and anything else implied by generic groups in a black-box way. Thus, any construction of ORE must either (1) achieve weaker notions of security, (2) be based on more complicated cryptographic tools, or (3) require non-black-box techniques. This suggests that any ORE achieving ideal security will likely be somewhat inefficient. Central to our proof is a proof of impossibility for something we call \emph{information theoretic ORE}, which has connections to tournament graphs and a theorem by Erdös. This impossibility proof will be useful for proving other black box separations for ORE