Concurrently Non-Malleable Zero Knowledge in the Authenticated Public-Key Model

We consider a type of zero-knowledge protocols that are of interest for their practical applications within networks like the Internet: efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks. In an effort to reduce the setup assumptions required for efficient zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge that remain secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle attacks, we consider a model, which we call the Authenticated Public-Key (APK) model. The APK model seems to significantly reduce the setup assumptions made by the CRS model (as no trusted party or honest execution of a centralized algorithm are required), and can be seen as a slightly stronger variation of the Bare Public-Key (BPK) model from \cite{CGGM,MR}, and a weaker variation of the registered public-key model used in \cite{BCNP}. We then define and study man-in-the-middle attacks in the APK model. Our main result is a constant-round concurrent non-malleable zero-knowledge argument of knowledge for any polynomial-time relation (associated to a language in $\mathcal{NP}$), under the (minimal) assumption of the existence of a one-way function family. Furthermore,We show time-efficient instantiations of our protocol based on known number-theoretic assumptions. We also note a negative result with respect to further reducing the setup assumptions of our protocol to those in the (unauthenticated) BPK model, by showing that concurrently non-malleable zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge in the BPK model are only possible for trivial languages

Predictable arguments of knowledge

We initiate a formal investigation on the power of predictability for argument of knowledge systems for NP. Specifically, we consider private-coin argument systems where the answer of the prover can be predicted, given the private randomness of the verifier; we call such protocols Predictable Arguments of Knowledge (PAoK). Our study encompasses a full characterization of PAoK, showing that such arguments can be made extremely laconic, with the prover sending a single bit, and assumed to have only one round (i.e., two messages) of communication without loss of generality. We additionally explore PAoK satisfying additional properties (including zero-knowledge and the possibility of re-using the same challenge across multiple executions with the prover), present several constructions of PAoK relying on different cryptographic tools, and discuss applications to cryptography

Delayed-Input Non-Malleable Zero Knowledge and Multi-Party Coin Tossing in Four Rounds

In this work we start from the following two results in the state-of-the art: 1.4-round non-malleable zero knowledge (NMZK): Goyal et al. in FOCS 2014 showed the first 4-round one-one NMZK argument from one-way functions (OWFs). Their construction requires the prover to know the instance and the witness already at the 2nd round.2.4-round multi-party coin tossing (MPCT): Garg et al. in Eurocrypt 2016 showed the first 4-round protocol for MPCT. Their result crucially relies on 3-round 3-robust parallel non-malleable commitments. So far there is no candidate construction for such a commitment scheme under standard polynomial-time hardness assumptions. We improve the state-of-the art on NMZK and MPCT by presenting the following two results: 1.a delayed-input 4-round one-many NMZK argument IINMZKfrom OWFs; moreover IINMZKis also a delayed-input many-many synchronous NMZK argument.2.a 4-round MPCT protocol IIMPCTfrom one-to-one OWFs; IIMPCTuses IINMZKas subprotocol and exploits the special properties (e.g., delayed input, many-many synchronous) of IINMZK. Both IINMZKand IIMPCTmake use of a special proof of knowledge that offers additional security guarantees when played in parallel with other protocols. The new technique behind such a proof of knowledge is an additional contribution of this work and is of independent interest

Malleable Proof Systems and Applications

Malleability for cryptography is not necessarily an opportunity for attack, but in many cases a potentially useful feature that can be exploited. In this work, we examine notions of malleability for non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs. We start by defining a malleable proof system, and then consider ways to meaningfully control the malleability of the proof system, as in many settings we would like to guarantee that only certain types of transformations can be performed. We also define notions for the cases in which we do not necessarily want a user to know that a proof has been obtained by applying a particular transformation; these are analogous to function/circuit privacy for encryption. As our motivating application, we consider a shorter proof for verifiable shuffles. Our controlled-malleable proofs allow us for the first time to use one compact proof to prove the correctness of an entire multi-step shuffle. Each authority takes as input a set of encrypted votes and a controlled-malleable NIZK proof that these are a shuffle of the original encrypted votes submitted by the voters; it then permutes and re-randomizes these votes and updates the proof by exploiting its controlled malleability. As another application, we generically use controlled-malleable proofs to realize a strong notion of encryption security. Finally, we examine malleability in existing proof systems and observe that Groth-Sahai proofs are malleable. We then go beyond this observation by characterizing all the ways in which they are malleable, and use them to efficiently instantiate our generic constructions from above; this means we can instantiate our proofs and all their applications using only the Decision Linear (DLIN) assumption. Work done as an intern at Microsoft Research Redmon

Naor-Yung paradigm with shared randomness and applications

The Naor-Yung paradigm (Naor and Yung, STOC’90) allows to generically boost security under chosen-plaintext attacks (CPA) to security against chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCA) for public-key encryption (PKE) schemes. The main idea is to encrypt the plaintext twice (under independent public keys), and to append a non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof that the two ciphertexts indeed encrypt the same message. Later work by Camenisch, Chandran, and Shoup (Eurocrypt’09) and Naor and Segev (Crypto’09 and SIAM J. Comput.’12) established that the very same techniques can also be used in the settings of key-dependent message (KDM) and key-leakage attacks (respectively). In this paper we study the conditions under which the two ciphertexts in the Naor-Yung construction can share the same random coins. We find that this is possible, provided that the underlying PKE scheme meets an additional simple property. The motivation for re-using the same random coins is that this allows to design much more efficient NIZK proofs. We showcase such an improvement in the random oracle model, under standard complexity assumptions including Decisional Diffie-Hellman, Quadratic Residuosity, and Subset Sum. The length of the resulting ciphertexts is reduced by 50%, yielding truly efficient PKE schemes achieving CCA security under KDM and key-leakage attacks. As an additional contribution, we design the first PKE scheme whose CPA security under KDM attacks can be directly reduced to (low-density instances of) the Subset Sum assumption. The scheme supports keydependent messages computed via any affine function of the secret ke

Efficient non-malleable commitment schemes

We present efficient non-malleable commitment schemes based on standard assumptions such as RSA and Discrete-Log, and under the condition that the network provides publicly available RSA or Discrete-Log parameters generated by a trusted party. Our protocols require only three rounds and a few modular exponentiations. We also discuss the difference between the notion of non-malleable commitment schemes used by Dolev, Dwork and Naor [DDN00] and the one given by Di Crescenzo, Ishai and Ostrovsky [DIO98]

Non-Malleable Multi-Prover Interactive Proofs and Witness Signatures

We explore a new man-in-the-middle adversarial model for multi-prover interactive proofs (MIPs), and construct round-optimal, unconditionally secure, non-malleable MIPs. We compile from a large sub-class of Sigma protocols to a non-malleable MIP, avoiding the use of expensive NP-reductions to Graph Hamiltonicity or other NP-complete problems. Our compiler makes novel use of non-malleable codes - in particular, we rely on many-many non-malleable codes constructed recently by Chattopadhyay, Goyal and Li (STOC 2016). We introduce another (seemingly unrelated) primitive - witness signatures - motivated by the goal of removing central trust assumptions from cryptography. Witness signatures allow any party with a valid witness to an NP statement to sign a message on behalf of that statement. These signatures must be unforgeable - that is, signing a new message, even given several signatures, should be as hard as computing a witness to the NP statement itself. We first observe that most natural notions of witness signatures are impossible to achieve in the plain model. While still wanting to avoid a central trusted setup, we turn to the tamper proof hardware token model of Katz (Eurocrypt 2007). We show that non-malleable MIPs yield efficient, unconditional witness signatures in the hardware token model. However, our construction of unconditional witness signatures only supports bounded verification. We also obtain unbounded polynomial verification assuming the existence of one-way functions. Finally, we give a matching lower bound - obtaining unconditional unbounded-verifiable witness signatures with black-box extraction, is impossible even with access to an unbounded number of stateful tamper-proof hardware tokens

Continuously non-malleable codes with split-state refresh

Non-malleable codes for the split-state model allow to encode a message into two parts, such that arbitrary independent tampering on each part, and subsequent decoding of the corresponding modified codeword, yields either the same as the original message, or a completely unrelated value. Continuously non-malleable codes further allow to tolerate an unbounded (polynomial) number of tampering attempts, until a decoding error happens. The drawback is that, after an error happens, the system must self-destruct and stop working, otherwise generic attacks become possible. In this paper we propose a solution to this limitation, by leveraging a split-state refreshing procedure. Namely, whenever a decoding error happens, the two parts of an encoding can be locally refreshed (i.e., without any interaction), which allows to avoid the self-destruct mechanism. An additional feature of our security model is that it captures directly security against continual leakage attacks. We give an abstract framework for building such codes in the common reference string model, and provide a concrete instantiation based on the external Diffie-Hellman assumption. Finally, we explore applications in which our notion turns out to be essential. The first application is a signature scheme tolerating an arbitrary polynomial number of split-state tampering attempts, without requiring a self-destruct capability, and in a model where refreshing of the memory happens only after an invalid output is produced. This circumvents an impossibility result from a recent work by Fuijisaki and Xagawa (Asiacrypt 2016). The second application is a compiler for tamper-resilient RAM programs. In comparison to other tamper-resilient compilers, ours has several advantages, among which the fact that, for the first time, it does not rely on the self-destruct feature