Philanthropy in BRICS countries and the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Philanthropy in the BRICS countries and the UN Sustainable Development Goals is a review prepared by Russian Donors Forum alongside with the research Philanthropy and social investment in the BRICS countries. The review analyses how philanthropy in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa is aligning its activity with the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), what progress has already been made and what challenges the sector faces.The review studies the common features of philanthropy of the BRICS countries, as well as the role of Agenda 2030 in the sector of philanthropy and social investment in each of the countries

Efficient Fuzzy Search on Encrypted Data

We study the problem of efficient (sub-linear) fuzzy search on encrypted outsourced data, in the symmetric-key setting. In particular, a user who stores encrypted data on a remote untrusted server forms queries that enable the server to efficiently locate the records containing the requested keywords, even though the user may misspell keywords or provide noisy data in the query. We define an appropriate primitive for a general \emph{closeness} function on the message space that we call \emph{efficiently fuzzy-searchable encryption} (\emph{EFSE}). Next we identify an optimal security notion for EFSE. We demonstrate that existing schemes do not meet our security definition and propose a new scheme that we prove secure under basic assumptions. Unfortunately, the scheme requires large ciphertext length, but we show that, in a sense, this space-inefficiency is unavoidable for a general, optimally-secure scheme. Seeking the right balance between efficiency and security, we then show how to construct schemes that are more efficient and satisfy a weaker security notion that we propose. To illustrate, we present and analyze a more space-efficient scheme for supporting fuzzy search on biometric data that achieves the weaker notion

A New Pseudorandom Generator from Collision-Resistant Hash Functions

We present a new hash-function-based pseudorandom generator (PRG). Our PRG is reminiscent of the classical constructions iterating a function on a random seed and extracting Goldreich-Levin hardcore bits at each iteration step. The latest PRG of this type that relies on reasonable assumptions (regularity and one-wayness) is due to Haitner et al. In addition to a regular one-way function, each iteration in their ``randomized iterate\u27\u27 scheme uses a new pairwise-independent function, whose descriptions are part of the seed of the PRG. Our construction does not use pairwise-independent functions and is thus more efficient, requiring less computation and a significantly shorter seed. Our scheme\u27s security relies on the standard notions of collision-resistance and regularity of the underlying hash function, where the collision-resistance is required to be {\em exponential}. In particular, any polynomial-time adversary should have less than $2^{-n/2}$ probability of finding collisions, where $n$ is the output size of the hash function. We later show how to relax the regularity assumption by introducing a new notion that we call {\em worst-case regularity}, which lower bounds the size of primages of different elements from the range (while the common regularity assumption requires all such sets to be of equal size). Unlike previous results, we provide a concrete security statement

Privacy-Preserving Approximate k-Nearest-Neighbors Search that Hides Access, Query and Volume Patterns

We study the problem of privacy-preserving approximate kNN search in an outsourced environment — the client sends the encrypted data to an untrusted server and later can perform secure approximate kNN search and updates. We design a security model and propose a generic construction based on locality-sensitive hashing, symmetric encryption, and an oblivious map. The construction provides very strong security guarantees, not only hiding the information about the data, but also the access, query, and volume patterns. We implement, evaluate efficiency, and compare the performance of two concrete schemes based on an oblivious AVL tree and an oblivious BSkiplist

An Uninstantiable Random-Oracle-Model Scheme for a Hybrid Encryption Problem

We present a simple, natural random-oracle (RO) model scheme, for a practical goal, that is uninstantiable, meaning is proven in the RO model to meet its goal yet admits NO standard-model instantiation that meets this goal. The goal in question is IND-CCA-preserving asymmetric encryption which formally captures security of the most common practical usage of asymmetric encryption, namely to transport a symmetric key in such a way that symmetric encryption under the latter remains secure. The scheme is an ElGamal variant, called Hash ElGamal, that resembles numerous existing RO-model schemes, and on the surface shows no evidence of its anomalous properties. More generally, we show that a certain goal, that we call key-verifiable, ciphertext-verifiable IND-CCA-preserving asymmetric encryption, is achievable in the RO model (by Hash ElGamal in particular) but unachievable in the standard model. This helps us better understand the source of the anomalies in Hash ElGamal and also lifts our uninstantiability result from being about a specific scheme to being about a primitive or goal. These results extend our understanding of the gap between the standard and RO models, and bring concerns raised by previous work closer to practice by indicating that the problem of RO-model schemes admitting no secure instantiation can arise in domains where RO schemes are commonly designed

Order-Preserving Encryption Revisited: Improved Security Analysis and Alternative Solutions

We further the study of order-preserving symmetric encryption (OPE), a primitive for allowing efficient range queries on encrypted data, recently initiated (from a cryptographic perspective) by Boldyreva et al.~(Eurocrypt \u2709). First, we address the open problem of characterizing what encryption via a random order-preserving function (ROPF) leaks about underlying data (ROPF being the ``ideal object\u27\u27 in the security definition, POPF, satisfied by their scheme.) In particular, we show that, for a database of randomly distributed plaintexts and appropriate choice of parameters, ROPF encryption leaks neither the precise value of any plaintext nor the precise distance between any two of them. The analysis here introduces useful new techniques. On the other hand, we show that ROPF encryption leaks approximate value of any plaintext as well as approximate distance between any two plaintexts, each to an accuracy of about square root of the domain size. We then study schemes that are not order-preserving, but which nevertheless allow efficient range queries and achieve security notions stronger than POPF. In a setting where the entire database is known in advance of key-generation (considered in several prior works), we show that recent constructions of ``monotone minimal perfect hash functions\u27\u27 allow to efficiently achieve (an adaptation of) the notion of IND-O(rdered) CPA also considered by Boldyreva et al., which asks that \emph{only} the order relations among the plaintexts is leaked. Finally, we introduce {\em modular} order-preserving encryption (MOPE), in which the scheme of Boldyreva et al. is prepended with a random shift cipher. MOPE improves the security of OPE in a sense, as it does not leak any information about plaintext location. We clarify that our work should not be interpreted as saying the original scheme of Boldyreva et al., or the variants that we introduce, are ``secure\u27\u27 or ``insecure.\u27\u27 Rather, the goal of this line of research is to help practitioners decide whether the options provide a suitable security-functionality tradeoff for a given application

Identity-based Encryption with Efficient Revocation

Identity-based encryption (IBE) is an exciting alternative to public-key encryption, as IBE eliminates the need for a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Any setting, PKI- or identity-based, must provide a means to revoke users from the system. Efficient revocation is a well-studied problem in the traditional PKI setting. However in the setting of IBE, there has been little work on studying the revocation mechanisms. The most practical solution requires the senders to also use time periods when encrypting, and all the receivers (regardless of whether their keys have been compromised or not) to update their private keys regularly by contacting the trusted authority. We note that this solution does not scale well -- as the number of users increases, the work on key updates becomes a bottleneck. We propose an IBE scheme that significantly improves key-update efficiency on the side of the trusted party (from linear to logarithmic in the number of users), while staying efficient for the users. Our scheme builds on the ideas of the Fuzzy IBE primitive and binary tree data structure, and is provably secure

Secure Proxy Signature Schemes for Delegation of Signing Rights

A proxy signature scheme permits an entity to delegate its signing rights to another entity. These schemes have been suggested for use in numerous applications, particularly in distributed computing. But to date, no proxy signature schemes with guaranteed security have been proposed; no precise definitions or proofs of security have been provided for such schemes. In this paper, we formalize a notion of security for proxy signature schemes and present provably-secure schemes. We analyze the security of the well-known delegation-by-certificate scheme and show that after some slight but important modifications, the resulting scheme is secure, assuming the underlying standard signature scheme is secure. We then show that employment of the recently introduced aggregate signature schemes permits bandwidth and computational savings. Finally, we analyze the proxy signature scheme of Kim, Park and Won, which offers important performance benefits. We propose modifications to this scheme that preserve its efficiency, and yield a proxy signature scheme that is provably secure in the random-oracle model, under the discrete-logarithm assumption

Deterministic and Efficiently Searchable Encryption

We present as-strong-as-possible definitions of privacy, and constructions achieving them, for public-key encryption schemes where the encryption algorithm is \textit{deterministic}. We obtain as a consequence database encryption methods that permit fast (i.e.~sub-linear, and in fact logarithmic, time) search while provably providing privacy that is as strong as possible subject to this fast search constraint. One of our constructs, called RSA-DOAEP, has the added feature of being length preserving, so that it is the first example of a public-key cipher. We generalize this to obtain a notion of efficiently-searchable encryption schemes which permit more flexible privacy to search-time trade-offs via a technique called bucketization. Our results answer much-asked questions in the database community and provide foundations for work done there