On Improving Communication Complexity in Cryptography

Cryptography grew to be much more than "the study of secret writing". Modern cryptography is concerned with establishing properties such as privacy, integrity and authenticity in protocols for secure communication and computation. This comes at a price: Cryptographic tools usually introduce an overhead, both in terms of communication complexity (that is, number and size of messages transmitted) and computational efficiency (that is, time and memory required). As in many settings communication between the parties involved is the bottleneck, this thesis is concerned with improving communication complexity in cryptographic protocols. One direction towards this goal is scalable cryptography: In many cryptographic schemes currently deployed, the security degrades linearly with the number of instances (e.g. encrypted messages) in the system. As this number can be huge in contexts like cloud computing, the parameters of the scheme have to be chosen considerably larger - and in particular depending on the expected number of instances in the system - to maintain security guarantees. We advance the state-of-the-art regarding scalable cryptography by constructing schemes where the security guarantees are independent of the number of instances. This allows to choose smaller parameters, even when the expected number of instances is immense. - We construct the first scalable encryption scheme with security against active adversaries which has both compact public keys and ciphertexts. In particular, we significantly reduce the size of the public key to only about 3% of the key-size of the previously most efficient scalable encryption scheme. (Gay,Hofheinz, and Kohl, CRYPTO, 2017) - We present a scalable structure-preserving signature scheme which improves both in terms of public-key and signature size compared to the previously best construction to about 40% and 56% of the sizes, respectively. (Gay, Hofheinz, Kohl, and Pan, EUROCRYPT, 2018) Another important area of cryptography is secure multi-party computation, where the goal is to jointly evaluate some function while keeping each party’s input private. In traditional approaches towards secure multi-party computation either the communication complexity scales linearly in the size of the function, or the computational efficiency is poor. To overcome this issue, Boyle, Gilboa, and Ishai (CRYPTO, 2016) introduced the notion of homomorphic secret sharing. Here, inputs are shared between parties such that each party does not learn anything about the input, and such that the parties can locally evaluate functions on the shares. Homomorphic secret sharing implies secure computation where the communication complexity only depends on the size of the inputs, which is typically much smaller than the size of the function. A different approach towards efficient secure computation is to split the protocol into an input-independent preprocessing phase, where long correlated strings are generated, and a very efficient online phase. One example for a useful correlation are authenticated Beaver triples, which allow to perform efficient multiplications in the online phase such that privacy of the inputs is preserved and parties deviating the protocol can be detected. The currently most efficient protocols implementing the preprocessing phase require communication linear in the number of triples to be generated. This results typically in high communication costs, as the online phase requires at least one authenticated Beaver triple per multiplication. We advance the state-of-the art regarding efficient protocols for secure computation with low communication complexity as follows. - We construct the first homomorphic secret sharing scheme for computing arbitrary functions in NC 1 (that is, functions that are computably by circuits with logarithmic depth) which supports message spaces of arbitrary size, has only negligible correctness error, and does not require expensive multiplication on ciphertexts. (Boyle, Kohl, and Scholl, EUROCRYPT, 2019) - We introduce the notion of a pseudorandom correlation generator for general correlations. Pseudorandom correlation generators allow to locally extend short correlated seeds into long pseudorandom correlated strings. We show that pseudorandom correlation generators can replace the preprocessing phase in many protocols, leading to a preprocessing phase with sublinear communication complexity. We show connections to homomorphic secret sharing schemes and give the first instantiation of pseudorandom correlation generators for authenticated Beaver triples at reasonable computational efficiency. (Boyle, Couteau, Gilboa, Ishai, Kohl, and Scholl, CRYPTO, 2019

Improvements and New Constructions of Digital Signatures

Ein digitales Signaturverfahren, oft auch nur digitale Signatur genannt, ist ein wichtiger und nicht mehr wegzudenkender Baustein in der Kryptographie. Es stellt das digitale Äquivalent zur klassischen handschriftlichen Signatur dar und liefert darüber hinaus noch weitere wünschenswerte Eigenschaften. Mit solch einem Verfahren kann man einen öffentlichen und einen geheimen Schlüssel erzeugen. Der geheime Schlüssel dient zur Erstellung von Signaturen zu beliebigen Nachrichten. Diese können mit Hilfe des öffentlichen Schlüssels von jedem überprüft und somit verifiziert werden. Desweiteren fordert man, dass das Verfahren "sicher" sein soll. Dazu gibt es in der Literatur viele verschiedene Begriffe und Definitionen, je nachdem welche konkreten Vorstellungen beziehungsweise Anwendungsgebiete man hat. Vereinfacht gesagt, sollte es für einen Angreifer ohne Kenntnis des geheimen Schlüssels nicht möglich sein eine gültige Signatur zu einer beliebigen Nachricht zu fälschen. Ein sicheres Signaturverfahren kann somit verwendet werden um die folgenden Ziele zu realisieren: - Authentizität: Jeder Empfänger kann überprüfen, ob die Nachricht von einem bestimmten Absender kommt. - Integrität der Nachricht: Jeder Empfänger kann feststellen, ob die Nachricht bei der Übertragung verändert wurde. - Nicht-Abstreitbarkeit: Der Absender kann nicht abstreiten die Signatur erstellt zu haben. Damit ist der Einsatz von digitalen Signaturen für viele Anwendungen in der Praxis sehr wichtig. Überall da, wo es wichtig ist die Authentizität und Integrität einer Nachricht sicherzustellen, wie beim elektronischen Zahlungsverkehr, Softwareupdates oder digitalen Zertifikaten im Internet, kommen digitale Signaturen zum Einsatz. Aber auch für die kryptographische Theorie sind digitale Signaturen ein unverzichtbares Hilfsmittel. Sie ermöglichen zum Beispiel die Konstruktion von stark sicheren Verschlüsselungsverfahren. Eigener Beitrag: Wie bereits erwähnt gibt es unterschiedliche Sicherheitsbegriffe im Rahmen von digitalen Signaturen. Ein Standardbegriff von Sicherheit, der eine recht starke Form von Sicherheit beschreibt, wird in dieser Arbeit näher betrachtet. Die Konstruktion von Verfahren, die diese Form der Sicherheit erfüllen, ist ein vielschichtiges Forschungsthema. Dazu existieren unterschiedliche Strategien in unterschiedlichen Modellen. In dieser Arbeit konzentrieren wir uns daher auf folgende Punkte. - Ausgehend von vergleichsweise realistischen Annahmen konstruieren wir ein stark sicheres Signaturverfahren im sogenannten Standardmodell, welches das realistischste Modell für Sicherheitsbeweise darstellt. Unser Verfahren ist das bis dahin effizienteste Verfahren in seiner Kategorie. Es erstellt sehr kurze Signaturen und verwendet kurze Schlüssel, beides unverzichtbar für die Praxis. - Wir verbessern die Qualität eines Sicherheitsbeweises von einem verwandten Baustein, der identitätsbasierten Verschlüsselung. Dies hat unter anderem Auswirkung auf dessen Effizienz bezüglich der empfohlenen Schlüssellängen für den sicheren Einsatz in der Praxis. Da jedes identitätsbasierte Verschlüsselungsverfahren generisch in ein digitales Signaturverfahren umgewandelt werden kann ist dies auch im Kontext digitaler Signaturen interessant. - Wir betrachten Varianten von digitalen Signaturen mit zusätzlichen Eigenschaften, sogenannte aggregierbare Signaturverfahren. Diese ermöglichen es mehrere Signaturen effizient zu einer zusammenzufassen und dabei trotzdem alle zugehörigen verschiedenen Nachrichten zu verifizieren. Wir geben eine neue Konstruktion von solch einem aggregierbaren Signaturverfahren an, bei der das Verfahren eine Liste aller korrekt signierten Nachrichten in einer aggregierten Signatur ausgibt anstatt, wie bisher üblich, nur gültig oder ungültig. Wenn eine aggregierte Signatur aus vielen Einzelsignaturen besteht wird somit das erneute Berechnen und eventuell erneute Senden hinfällig und dadurch der Aufwand erheblich reduziert

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

Towards Tightly Secure Short Signature and IBE

Constructing short signatures with tight security from standard assumptions is a long-standing open problem. We present an adaptively secure, short (and stateless) signature scheme, featuring a constant security loss relative to a conservative hardness assumption, Short Integer Solution (SIS), and the security of a concretely instantiated pseudorandom function (PRF). This gives a class of tightly secure short lattice signature schemes whose security is based on SIS and the underlying assumption of the instantiated PRF. Our signature construction further extends to give a class of tightly and adaptively secure ``compact Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) schemes, reducible with constant security loss from Regev\u27s vanilla Learning With Errors (LWE) hardness assumption and the security of a concretely instantiated PRF. Our approach is a novel combination of a number of techniques, including Katz and Wang signature, Agrawal et al.\ lattice-based secure IBE, and Boneh et al.\ key-homomorphic encryption. Our results, at the first time, eliminate the dependency between the number of adversary\u27s queries and the security of short signature/IBE schemes in the context of lattice-based cryptography. They also indicate that tightly secure PRFs (with constant security loss) would imply tightly, adaptively secure short signature and IBE schemes (with constant security loss)

Short Identity-Based Signatures with Tight Security from Lattices

We construct a short and adaptively secure identity-based signature scheme tightly based on the well-known Short Integer Solution (SIS) assumption. Although identity-based signature schemes can be tightly constructed from either standard signature schemes against adaptive corruptions in the multi-user setting or a two-level hierarchical identity-based encryption scheme, neither of them is known with short signature size and tight security based on the SIS assumption. Here ``short\u27\u27 means the signature size is independent of the message length, which is in contrast to the tree-based (tight) signatures. Our approach consists of two steps: Firstly, we give two generic transformations (one with random oracles and the other without) from non-adaptively secure identity-based signature schemes to adaptively secure ones tightly. Our idea extends the similar transformation for digital signature schemes. Secondly, we construct a non-adaptively secure identity-based signature scheme based on the SIS assumption in the random oracle model

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

Lattice-based Signatures with Tight Adaptive Corruptions and More

We construct the first tightly secure signature schemes in the multi-user setting with adaptive corruptions from lattices. In stark contrast to the previous tight constructions whose security is solely based on number-theoretic assumptions, our schemes are based on the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption which is supposed to be post-quantum secure. The security of our scheme is independent of the numbers of users and signing queries, and it is in the non-programmable random oracle model. Our LWE-based scheme is compact namely, its signatures contain only a constant number of lattice vectors. At the core of our construction are a new abstraction of the existing lossy identification (ID) schemes using dual-mode commitment schemes and a refinement of the framework by Diemert et al. (PKC 2021) which transforms a lossy ID scheme to a signature using sequential OR proofs. In combination, we obtain a tight generic construction of signatures from dual-mode commitments in the multi-user setting. Improving the work of Diemert et al., our new approach can be instantiated using not only the LWE assumption, but also an isogeny-based assumption. We stress that our LWE-based lossy ID scheme in the intermediate step uses a conceptually different idea than the previous lattice-based ones. Of independent interest, we formally rule out the possibility that the aforementioned ``ID-to-Signature'' methodology can work tightly using parallel OR proofs. In addition to the results of Fischlin et al. (EUROCRYPT 2020), our impossibility result shows a qualitative difference between both forms of OR proofs in terms of tightness

Weak is Better: Tightly Secure Short Signatures from Weak PRFs

The Boyen-Li signature scheme [Asiacrypt\u2716] is a major theoretical breakthrough. Via a clever homomorphic evaluation of a pseudorandom function over their verification key, they achieve a reduction loss in security linear in the underlying security parameter and entirely independent of the number of message queries made, while still maintaining short signatures (consisting of a single short lattice vector). All previous schemes with such an independent reduction loss in security required a linear number of such lattice vectors, and even in the classical world, the only schemes achieving short signatures relied on non-standard assumptions. We improve on their result, providing a verification key smaller by a linear factor, a significantly tighter reduction with only a constant loss, and signing and verification algorithms that could plausibly run in about 1 second. Our main idea is to change the scheme in a manner that allows us to replace the pseudorandom function evaluation with an evaluation of a much more efficient weak pseudorandom function. As a matter of independent interest, we give an improved method of randomized inversion of the G gadget matrix [MP12], which reduces the noise growth rate in homomorphic evaluations performed in a large number of lattice-based cryptographic schemes, without incurring the high cost of sampling discrete Gaussians