Combined (identity-based) public key schemes

Consider a scenario in which parties use a public key encryption scheme and a signature scheme with a single public key/private key pair---so the private key sk is used for both signing and decrypting. Such a simultaneous use of a key is in general considered poor cryptographic practice, but from an efficiency point of view looks attractive. We offer security notions to analyze such violations of key separation. For both the identity- and the non-identity-based setting, we show that---although being insecure in general---for schemes of interest the resulting combined (identity-based) public key scheme can offer strong security guarantees

Partitioned Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange

Group Password-Based Authenticated Key Exchange (GPAKE) allows a group of users to establish a secret key, as long as all of them share the same password. However, in existing GPAKE protocols as soon as one user runs the protocol with a non-matching password, all the others abort and no key is established. In this paper we seek for a more flexible, yet secure, GPAKE and put forward the notion of partitioned GPAKE. Partitioned GPAKE tolerates users that run the protocol on different passwords. Through a protocol run, any subgroup of users that indeed share a password, establish a session key, factoring out the ``noise\u27\u27 of inputs by users holding different passwords. At the same time any two keys, each established by a different subgroup of users, are pair-wise independent if the corresponding subgroups hold different passwords. We also introduce the notion of password-privacy for partitioned GPAKE, which is a kind of affiliation hiding property, ensuring that an adversary should not be able to tell whether any given set of users share a password. Finally, we propose an efficient instantiation of partitioned GPAKE building on an unforgeable symmetric encryption scheme and a PAKE by Bellare et al. Our proposal is proven secure in the random oracle/ideal cipher model, and requires only two communication rounds

Related Message Attacks to Public Key Encryption Schemes: Relations among Security Notions

Consider a scenario in which an adversary, attacking a certain public key encryption scheme, gains knowledge of several ciphertexts which underlying plaintext are meaningfully related with a given target ciphertext. This kind of related message attack has been proved successful against several public key encryption schemes; widely known is the Franklin-Reiter attack to RSA with low exponent and its subsequent improvement by Coppersmith. However, to the best of our knowledge no formal treatment of these type of attacks has to date been done, and as a result, it has not been rigorously studied which of the ``standard\u27\u27 security notions imply resilience to them. We give formal definitions of several security notions capturing the resistance to this kind of attacks. For passive adversaries we prove that, for the case of indistinguishability, security against related message attacks is equivalent to standard CPA security. On the other hand, one-wayness robust schemes in this sense can be seen as strictly between OW-CPA and IND-CPA secure schemes. Furthermore, we prove that the same holds for active (CCA) adversaries

Auditable Asymmetric Password Authenticated Public Key Establishment

Non-repudiation of messages generated by users is a desirable feature in a number of applications ranging from online banking to IoT scenarios. However, it requires certified public keys and usually results in poor usability as a user must carry around his certificate (e.g., in a smart-card) or must install it in all of his devices. A user-friendly alternative, adopted by several companies and national administrations, is to have a ``cloud-based\u27\u27 PKI. In a nutshell, each user has a PKI certificate stored at a server in the cloud; users authenticate to the server---via passwords or one-time codes---and ask it to sign messages on their behalf. As such, there is no way for the server to prove to a third party that a signature on a given message was authorized by a user. As the server holds the user\u27s certified key, it might as well have signed arbitrary messages in an attempt to impersonate that user. In other words, a user could deny having signed a message, by claiming that the signature was produced by the server without his consent. The same holds in case the secret key is derived deterministically from the user\u27s password, for the server, by knowing the password, may still frame the user. In this paper we provide a password-only solution to non-repudiation of user messages by introducing Auditable Asymmetric Password Authenticated Public Key Establishment (A2PAKE). This is a PAKE-like protocol that generates an asymmetric key-pair where the public key is output to every participant, but the secret key is private output to just one of the parties (e.g., the user). Further, the protocol can be audited, i.e., given the public key output by a protocol run with a user, the server can prove to a third party that the corresponding secret key is held by that specific user. Thus, if the user signs messages with that secret key, then signatures are non-repudiable. We provide a universally composable definition of A2PAKE and an instantiation based on a distributed oblivious pseudo-random function. We also develop a prototype implementation of our instantiation and use it to evaluate its performance in realistic settings

Group key exchange protocols withstanding ephemeral-key reveals

When a group key exchange protocol is executed, the session key is typically extracted from two types of secrets; long-term keys (for authentication) and freshly generated (often random) values. The leakage of this latter so-called ephemeral keys has been extensively analyzed in the 2-party case, yet very few works are concerned with it in the group setting. We provide a generic {group key exchange} construction that is strongly secure, meaning that the attacker is allowed to learn both long-term and ephemeral keys (but not both from the same participant, as this would trivially disclose the session key). Our design can be seen as a compiler, in the sense that it builds on a 2-party key exchange protocol which is strongly secure and transforms it into a strongly secure group key exchange protocol by adding only one extra round of communication. When applied to an existing 2-party protocol from Bergsma et al., the result is a 2-round group key exchange protocol which is strongly secure in the standard model, thus yielding the first construction with this property

Reaction Attacks on Public Key Cryptosystems Based on the Word Problem

Wagner and Magyarik outlined a general construction for public key cryptosystems based on the hardness of the word problem for finitely presented groups. At the same time, they gave a specific example of such a system. We prove that their approach is vulnerable to so-called reaction attacks, namely, it is possible to retrieve the private key just by watching the performance of a legitimate recipient

Security of the most significant bits of the Shamir message passing scheme

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Pitfalls in Public Key Cryptosystems Based on Free Partially Commutative Monoids and Groups

key schemes based on word problems in free partially commutative monoids and groups. We show that both proposals are vulnerable to chosen ciphertext attacks, and thus in the present form must be considered as insecure