Two-Message Statistically Sender-Private OT from LWE

: We construct a two-message oblivious transfer (OT) protocol without setup that guarantees statistical privacy for the sender even against malicious receivers. Receiver privacy is game based and relies on the hardness of learning with errors (LWE). This flavor of OT has been a central building block for minimizing the round complexity of witness indistinguishable and zero knowledge proof systems and multi-party computation protocols, as well as for achieving circuit privacy for homomorphic encryption in the malicious setting. Prior to this work, all candidates in the literature from standard assumptions relied on number theoretic assumptions and were thus insecure in the post-quantum setting. This work provides the first (presumed) post-quantum secure candidate and thus allows to instantiate the aforementioned applications in a post-quantum secure manner. Technically, we rely on the transference principle: Either a lattice or its dual must have short vectors. Short vectors, in turn, can be translated to information loss in encryption. Thus encrypting one message with respect to the lattice and one with respect to its dual guarantees that at least one of them will be statistically hidden

A framework for cryptographic problems from linear algebra

We introduce a general framework encompassing the main hard problems emerging in lattice-based cryptography, which naturally includes the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystem, but also problems coming from code-based cryptography. The framework allows to easily instantiate new hard problems and to automatically construct plausibly post-quantum secure primitives from them. As a first basic application, we introduce two new hard problems and the corresponding encryption schemes. Concretely, we study generalisations of hard problems such as SIS, LWE and NTRU to free modules over quotients of Z[X] by ideals of the form (f,g), where f is a monic polynomial and g∈Z[X] is a ciphertext modulus coprime to f. For trivial modules (i.e. of rank one), the case f=Xn+1 and g=q∈Z>1 corresponds to ring-LWE, ring-SIS and NTRU, while the choices f=Xn−1 and g=X−2 essentially cover the recently proposed Mersenne prime cryptosystems. At the other extreme, when considering modules of large rank and letting deg(f)=1, one recovers the framework of LWE and SIS

Statistical Zap Arguments from Quasi-Polynomial LWE

We give the first construction of statistical Zaps. Our construction satisfies computational soundness and relies on the quasi-polynomial hardness of learning with errors assumption

Efficient and Tight Oblivious Transfer from PKE with Tight Multi-User Security

We propose an efficient oblivious transfer in the random oracle model based on public key encryption with pseudorandom public keys. The construction is as efficient as the state of art though it has a significant advantage. It has a tight security reduction to the multi-user security of the underlying public key encryption. In previous constructions, the security reduction has a multiplicative loss that amounts in at least the amount of adversarial random oracle queries. When considering this loss for a secure parameter choice, the underlying public key encryption or elliptic curve would require a significantly higher security level which would decrease the overall efficiency. Our OT construction can be instantiated from a wide range of assumptions such as DDH, LWE, or codes based assumptions as well as many public key encryption schemes such as the NIST PQC finalists. Since tight multi-user security is a very natural requirement which many public key encryption schemes suffice, many public key encryption schemes can be straightforwardly plugged in our construction without the need of reevaluating or adapting any parameter choices

Multi-theorem (Malicious) Designated-Verifier NIZK for QMA

We present the first non-interactive zero-knowledge argument system for QMA with multi-theorem security. Our protocol setup constitutes an additional improvement and is constructed in the malicious designated-verifier (MDV-NIZK) model (Quach, Rothblum, and Wichs, EUROCRYPT 2019), where the setup consists of a trusted part that includes only a common uniformly random string and an untrusted part of classical public and secret verification keys, which even if sampled maliciously by the verifier, the zero knowledge property still holds. The security of our protocol is established under the Learning with Errors Assumption. Our main technical contribution is showing a general transformation that compiles any sigma protocol into a reusable MDV-NIZK protocol, using NIZK for NP. Our technique is classical but works for quantum protocols and allows the construction of a reusable MDV-NIZK for QMA

Simpler Statistically Sender Private Oblivious Transfer from Ideals of Cyclotomic Integers

We present a two-message oblivious transfer protocol achieving statistical sender privacy and computational receiver privacy based on the RLWE assumption for cyclotomic number fields. This work improves upon prior lattice-based statistically sender-private oblivious transfer protocols by reducing the total communication between parties by a factor $O(n\log q)$ for transfer of length $O(n)$ messages. Prior work of Brakerski and Döttling uses transference theorems to show that either a lattice or its dual must have short vectors, the existence of which guarantees lossy encryption for encodings with respect to that lattice, and therefore statistical sender privacy. In the case of ideal lattices from embeddings of cyclotomic integers, the existence of one short vector implies the existence of many, and therefore encryption with respect to either a lattice or its dual is guaranteed to ``lose more information about the message than can be ensured in the case of general lattices. This additional structure of ideals of cyclotomic integers allows for efficiency improvements beyond those that are typical when moving from the generic to ideal lattice setting, resulting in smaller message sizes for sender and receiver, as well as a protocol that is simpler to describe and analyze

On Round Optimal Statistical Zero Knowledge Arguments

We construct the first three message statistical zero knowledge arguments for all of NP, matching the known lower bound. We do so based on keyless multi-collision resistant hash functions and other standard primitives (based on the Learning with Errors assumption) --- the same assumptions used to obtain round optimal computational zero knowledge. The main component in our constructions is a statistically witness indistinguishable argument of knowledge based on a new notion of statistically hiding commitments with subset opening

Unbounded Multi-Party Computation from Learning with Errors

We consider the problem of round-optimal unbounded MPC: in the first round, parties publish a message that depends only on their input. In the second round, any subset of parties can jointly and securely compute any function $f$ over their inputs in a single round of broadcast. We do not impose any a-priori bound on the number of parties nor on the size of the functions that can be computed. Our main result is a semi-malicious two-round protocol for unbounded MPC in the plain model from the hardness of the standard learning with errors (LWE) problem. Prior work in the same setting assumes the hardness of problems over bilinear maps. Thus, our protocol is the first example of unbounded MPC that is post-quantum secure. The central ingredient of our protocol is a new scheme of attribute-based secure function evaluation (AB-SFE) with public decryption. Our construction combines techniques from the realm of homomorphic commitments with delegation of lattice basis. We believe that such a scheme may find further applications in the future

Weakly Extractable One-Way Functions

A family of one-way functions is extractable if given a random function in the family, an efficient adversary can only output an element in the image of the function if it knows a corresponding preimage. This knowledge extraction guarantee is particularly powerful since it does not require interaction. However, extractable one-way functions (EFs) are subject to a strong barrier: assuming indistinguishability obfuscation, no EF can have a knowledge extractor that works against all polynomial-size non-uniform adversaries. This holds even for non-black-box extractors that use the adversary’s code. Accordingly, the literature considers either EFs based on non-falsifiable knowledge assumptions, where the extractor is not explicitly given, but it is only assumed to exist, or EFs against a restricted class of adversaries with a bounded non-uniform advice. This falls short of cryptography’s gold standard of security that requires an explicit reduction against non-uniform adversaries of arbitrary polynomial size. Motivated by this gap, we put forward a new notion of weakly extractable one-way functions (WEFs) that circumvents the known barrier. We then prove that WEFs are inextricably connected to the long standing question of three-message zero knowledge protocols. We show that different flavors of WEFs are sufficient and necessary for three-message zero knowledge to exist. The exact flavor depends on whether the protocol is computational or statistical zero knowledge and whether it is publicly or privately verifiable. Combined with recent progress on constructing three message zero-knowledge, we derive a new connection between keyless multi-collision resistance and the notion of incompressibility and the feasibility of non-interactive knowledge extraction. Another interesting corollary of our result is that in order to construct three-message zero knowledge arguments, it suffices to construct such arguments where the honest prover strategy is unbounded

Lattice-based, more general anti-leakage model and its application in decentralization

In the case of standard \LWE samples $(\mathbf{A},\mathbf{b = sA + e})$, $\mathbf{A}$ is typically uniformly over $\mathbb{Z}_q^{n \times m}$, and under the \LWE assumption, the conditional distribution of $\mathbf{s}$ given $\mathbf{b}$ and $\mathbf{s}$ should be consistent. However, if an adversary chooses $\mathbf{A}$ adaptively, the gap between the two may be larger. In this work, we are mainly interested in quantifying $\tilde{H}_\infty(\mathbf{s}|\mathbf{sA + e})$, while $\mathbf{A}$ an adversary chooses. Brakerski and D\ {o}ttling answered the question in one case: they proved that when $\mathbf{s}$ is uniformly chosen from $\mathbb{Z}_q^n$, it holds that $\tilde{H}_\infty(\mathbf{s}|\mathbf{sA + e}) \varpropto \rho_\sigma(\Lambda_q(\mathbf{A}))$. We prove that for any $d \leq q$, $\mathbf{s}$ is uniformly chosen from $\mathbb{Z}_d^n$ or is sampled from a discrete Gaussian, the above result still holds. In addition, as an independent result, we have also proved the regularity of the hash function mapped to the prime-order group and its Cartesian product. As an application of the above results, we improved the multi-key fully homomorphic encryption\cite{TCC:BraHalPol17} and answered the question raised at the end of their work positively: we have GSW-type ciphertext rather than Dual-GSW, and the improved scheme has shorter keys and ciphertext