4,336 research outputs found
A CCA2 Secure Variant of the McEliece Cryptosystem
The McEliece public-key encryption scheme has become an interesting
alternative to cryptosystems based on number-theoretical problems. Differently
from RSA and ElGa- mal, McEliece PKC is not known to be broken by a quantum
computer. Moreover, even tough McEliece PKC has a relatively big key size,
encryption and decryption operations are rather efficient. In spite of all the
recent results in coding theory based cryptosystems, to the date, there are no
constructions secure against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model -
the de facto security notion for public-key cryptosystems. In this work, we
show the first construction of a McEliece based public-key cryptosystem secure
against chosen ciphertext attacks in the standard model. Our construction is
inspired by a recently proposed technique by Rosen and Segev
Lattice-Based proof of a shuffle
In this paper we present the first fully post-quantum proof of a shuffle for RLWE encryption schemes. Shuffles are commonly used to construct mixing networks (mix-nets), a key element to ensure anonymity in many applications such as electronic voting systems. They should preserve anonymity even against an attack using quantum computers in order to guarantee long-term privacy. The proof presented in this paper is built over RLWE commitments which are perfectly binding and computationally hiding under the RLWE assumption, thus achieving security in a post-quantum scenario. Furthermore we provide a new definition for a secure mixing node (mix-node) and prove that our construction satisfies this definition.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Public Evidence from Secret Ballots
Elections seem simple---aren't they just counting? But they have a unique,
challenging combination of security and privacy requirements. The stakes are
high; the context is adversarial; the electorate needs to be convinced that the
results are correct; and the secrecy of the ballot must be ensured. And they
have practical constraints: time is of the essence, and voting systems need to
be affordable and maintainable, and usable by voters, election officials, and
pollworkers. It is thus not surprising that voting is a rich research area
spanning theory, applied cryptography, practical systems analysis, usable
security, and statistics. Election integrity involves two key concepts:
convincing evidence that outcomes are correct and privacy, which amounts to
convincing assurance that there is no evidence about how any given person
voted. These are obviously in tension. We examine how current systems walk this
tightrope.Comment: To appear in E-Vote-Id '1
Introducing Accountability to Anonymity Networks
Many anonymous communication (AC) networks rely on routing traffic through
proxy nodes to obfuscate the originator of the traffic. Without an
accountability mechanism, exit proxy nodes risk sanctions by law enforcement if
users commit illegal actions through the AC network. We present BackRef, a
generic mechanism for AC networks that provides practical repudiation for the
proxy nodes by tracing back the selected outbound traffic to the predecessor
node (but not in the forward direction) through a cryptographically verifiable
chain. It also provides an option for full (or partial) traceability back to
the entry node or even to the corresponding user when all intermediate nodes
are cooperating. Moreover, to maintain a good balance between anonymity and
accountability, the protocol incorporates whitelist directories at exit proxy
nodes. BackRef offers improved deployability over the related work, and
introduces a novel concept of pseudonymous signatures that may be of
independent interest.
We exemplify the utility of BackRef by integrating it into the onion routing
(OR) protocol, and examine its deployability by considering several
system-level aspects. We also present the security definitions for the BackRef
system (namely, anonymity, backward traceability, no forward traceability, and
no false accusation) and conduct a formal security analysis of the OR protocol
with BackRef using ProVerif, an automated cryptographic protocol verifier,
establishing the aforementioned security properties against a strong
adversarial model
Interactive certificate for the verification of Wiedemann's Krylov sequence: application to the certification of the determinant, the minimal and the characteristic polynomials of sparse matrices
Certificates to a linear algebra computation are additional data structures
for each output, which can be used by a-possibly randomized- verification
algorithm that proves the correctness of each output. Wiede-mann's algorithm
projects the Krylov sequence obtained by repeatedly multiplying a vector by a
matrix to obtain a linearly recurrent sequence. The minimal polynomial of this
sequence divides the minimal polynomial of the matrix. For instance, if the
input matrix is sparse with n 1+o(1) non-zero entries, the
computation of the sequence is quadratic in the dimension of the matrix while
the computation of the minimal polynomial is n 1+o(1), once that projected
Krylov sequence is obtained. In this paper we give algorithms that compute
certificates for the Krylov sequence of sparse or structured
matrices over an abstract field, whose Monte Carlo verification complexity can
be made essentially linear. As an application this gives certificates for the
determinant, the minimal and characteristic polynomials of sparse or structured
matrices at the same cost
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