On Cryptographic Building Blocks and Transformations

Cryptographic building blocks play a central role in cryptography, e.g., encryption or digital signatures with their security notions. Further, cryptographic building blocks might be constructed modularly, i.e., emerge out of other cryptographic building blocks. Essentially, one cryptographically transforms the underlying block(s) and their (security) properties into the emerged block and its properties. This thesis considers cryptographic building blocks and new cryptographic transformations

Outsider-Anonymous Broadcast Encryption with Keyword Search: Generic Construction, CCA Security, and with Sublinear Ciphertexts

As a multi-receiver variants of public key encryption with keyword search (PEKS), broadcast encryption with keyword search (BEKS) has been proposed (Attrapadung et al. at ASIACRYPT 2006/Chatterjee-Mukherjee at INDOCRYPT 2018). Unlike broadcast encryption, no receiver anonymity is considered because the test algorithm takes a set of receivers as input and thus a set of receivers needs to be contained in a ciphertext. In this paper, we propose a generic construction of BEKS from anonymous and weakly robust 3-level hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE). The proposed generic construction provides outsider anonymity, where an adversary is allowed to obtain secret keys of outsiders who do not belong to the challenge sets, and provides sublinear-size ciphertext in terms of the number of receivers. Moreover, the proposed construction considers security against chosen-ciphertext attack (CCA) where an adversary is allowed to access a test oracle in the searchable encryption context. The proposed generic construction can be seen as an extension to the Fazio-Perera generic construction of anonymous broadcast encryption (PKC 2012) from anonymous and weakly robust identity-based encryption (IBE) and the Boneh et al. generic construction of PEKS (EUROCRYPT 2004) from anonymous IBE. We run the Fazio-Perera construction employs on the first-level identity and run the Boneh et al. generic construction on the second-level identity, i.e., a keyword is regarded as a second-level identity. The third-level identity is used for providing CCA security by employing one-time signatures. We also introduce weak robustness in the HIBE setting, and demonstrate that the Abdalla et al. generic transformation (TCC 2010/JoC 2018) for providing weak robustness to IBE works for HIBE with an appropriate parameter setting. We also explicitly introduce attractive concrete instantiations of the proposed generic construction from pairings and lattices, respectively

Efficient IBE with Tight Reduction to Standard Assumption in the Multi-challenge Setting

In 2015, Hofheinz et al. [PKC, 2015] extended Chen and Wee\u27s almost-tight reduction technique for identity based encryptions (IBE) [CRYPTO, 2013] to the multi-instance, multi-ciphertext (MIMC, or multi-challenge) setting, where the adversary is allowed to obtain multiple challenge ciphertexts from multiple IBE instances, and gave the first almost-tightly secure IBE in this setting using composite-order bilinear groups. Several prime-order realizations were proposed lately. However there seems to be a dilemma of high system performance (involving ciphertext/key size and encryption/decryption cost) or weak/standard security assumptions. A natural question is: can we achieve high performance without relying on stronger/non-standard assumptions? In this paper, we answer the question in the affirmative by describing a prime-order IBE scheme with the same performance as the most efficient solutions so far but whose security still relies on the standard k-linear (k-Lin) assumption. Our technical start point is Blazy et al.\u27s almost-tightly secure IBE [CRYPTO, 2014]. We revisit their concrete IBE scheme and associate it with the framework of nested dual system group. This allows us to extend Blazy et al.\u27s almost-tightly secure IBE to the MIMC setting using Gong et al.\u27s method [PKC, 2016]. We emphasize that, when instantiating our construction by the Symmetric eXternal Diffie-Hellman assumption (SXDH = 1-Lin), we obtain the most efficient concrete IBE scheme with almost-tight reduction in the MIMC setting, whose performance is even comparable to the most efficient IBE in the classical model (i.e., the single-instance, single-ciphertext setting). Besides pursuing high performance, our IBE scheme also achieves a weaker form of anonymity pointed out by Attrapadung et al. [AsiaCrypt, 2015]

Tightly Secure IBE under Constant-size Master Public Key

International audienceChen and Wee [CRYPTO, 2013] proposed the first almost tightly and adaptively secure IBE in the standard model and left two open problems which called for a tightly secure IBE with (1) constant-size master public key and/or (2) constant security loss. In this paper, we propose an IBE scheme with constant-size master public key and tighter security reduction. This (partially) solves Chen and Wee's first open problem and makes progress on the second one. Technically, our IBE scheme is built based on Wee's petit IBE scheme [TCC, 2016] in the composite-order bilinear group whose order is product of four primes. The sizes of master public key, ciphertexts, and secret keys are not only constant but also nearly optimal as Wee's petit IBE. We can prove its adaptive security in the multi-instance, multi-ciphertext setting [PKC, 2015] based on the decisional subgroup assumption and a subgroup variant of DBDH assumption. The security loss is O(log q) where q is the upper bound of the total number of secret keys and challenge ciphertexts revealed to adversary in each single IBE instance. It's much smaller than those for all known adaptively secure IBE schemes in a concrete sense

Almost-tight Identity Based Encryption against Selective Opening Attack

The paper presented an identity based encryption (IBE) under selective opening attack (SOA) whose security is almost-tightly related to a set of computational assumptions. Our result is a combination of Bellare, Waters, and Yilek\u27s method [TCC, 2011] for constructing (not tightly) SOA secure IBE and Hofheinz, Koch, and Striecks\u27 technique [PKC, 2015] on building almost-tightly secure IBE in the multi-ciphertext setting. In particular, we first tuned Bellare et al.\u27s generic construction for SOA secure IBE to show that a one-bit IBE achieving ciphertext indistinguishability under chosen plaintext attack in the multi-ciphertext setting (with one-sided publicly openability) tightly implies a multi-bit IBE secure under selective opening attack. Next, we almost-tightly reduced such a one-bit IBE to static assumptions in the composite-order bilinear groups employing the technique of Hofheinz et al. This yielded the first SOA secure IBE with almost-tight reduction

Tracking Information Flow by Mapping Broadcast Encryption Subgroups to Security Lattices

In this paper we consider scenarios in which a server broadcasts messages with different confidentiality levels to nodes subgroups holding the appropriate clearance. We build on IND-CPA broadcast encryption schemes to preserve the message's confidentiality over a network. Our proposal is that, to verify that information in the server flows to nodes with the appropriate clearances (e.g. verify the use of the correct encryption keys), we can map broadcast subgroups of nodes to levels in information flow security lattices. We implement this idea via a type system and provide a soundness proof with respect to a formally defined secure information flow property for server code

IST Austria Thesis

Many security definitions come in two flavors: a stronger “adaptive” flavor, where the adversary can arbitrarily make various choices during the course of the attack, and a weaker “selective” flavor where the adversary must commit to some or all of their choices a-priori. For example, in the context of identity-based encryption, selective security requires the adversary to decide on the identity of the attacked party at the very beginning of the game whereas adaptive security allows the attacker to first see the master public key and some secret keys before making this choice. Often, it appears to be much easier to achieve selective security than it is to achieve adaptive security. A series of several recent works shows how to cleverly achieve adaptive security in several such scenarios including generalized selective decryption [Pan07][FJP15], constrained PRFs [FKPR14], and Yao’s garbled circuits [JW16]. Although the above works expressed vague intuition that they share a common technique, the connection was never made precise. In this work we present a new framework (published at Crypto ’17 [JKK+17a]) that connects all of these works and allows us to present them in a unified and simplified fashion. Having the framework in place, we show how to achieve adaptive security for proxy re-encryption schemes (published at PKC ’19 [FKKP19]) and provide the first adaptive security proofs for continuous group key agreement protocols (published at S&P ’21 [KPW+21]). Questioning optimality of our framework, we then show that currently used proof techniques cannot lead to significantly better security guarantees for "graph-building" games (published at TCC ’21 [KKPW21a]). These games cover generalized selective decryption, as well as the security of prominent constructions for constrained PRFs, continuous group key agreement, and proxy re-encryption. Finally, we revisit the adaptive security of Yao’s garbled circuits and extend the analysis of Jafargholi and Wichs in two directions: While they prove adaptive security only for a modified construction with increased online complexity, we provide the first positive results for the original construction by Yao (published at TCC ’21 [KKP21a]). On the negative side, we prove that the results of Jafargholi and Wichs are essentially optimal by showing that no black-box reduction can provide a significantly better security bound (published at Crypto ’21 [KKPW21c])