Trusty URIs: Verifiable, Immutable, and Permanent Digital Artifacts for Linked Data

To make digital resources on the web verifiable, immutable, and permanent, we propose a technique to include cryptographic hash values in URIs. We call them trusty URIs and we show how they can be used for approaches like nanopublications to make not only specific resources but their entire reference trees verifiable. Digital artifacts can be identified not only on the byte level but on more abstract levels such as RDF graphs, which means that resources keep their hash values even when presented in a different format. Our approach sticks to the core principles of the web, namely openness and decentralized architecture, is fully compatible with existing standards and protocols, and can therefore be used right away. Evaluation of our reference implementations shows that these desired properties are indeed accomplished by our approach, and that it remains practical even for very large files.Comment: Small error corrected in the text (table data was correct) on page 13: "All average values are below 0.8s (0.03s for batch mode). Using Java in batch mode even requires only 1ms per file.

Anonymity-Preserving Public-Key Encryption: A Constructive Approach

Abstract. A receiver-anonymous channel allows a sender to send a message to a receiver without an adversary learning for whom the message is intended. Wireless broadcast channels naturally provide receiver anonymity, as does multi-casting one message to a receiver population containing the intended receiver. While anonymity and confidentiality appear to be orthogonal properties, making anonymous communication confidential is more involved than one might expect, since the ciphertext might reveal which public key has been used to encrypt. To address this problem, public-key cryptosystems with enhanced security properties have been proposed. We investigate constructions as well as limitations for preserving receiver anonymity when using public-key encryption (PKE). We use the constructive cryptography approach by Maurer and Renner and interpret cryptographic schemes as constructions of a certain ideal resource (e.g. a confidential anonymous channel) from given real resources (e.g. a broadcast channel). We define appropriate anonymous communication resources and show that a very natural resource can be constructed by using a PKE scheme which fulfills three properties that appear in cryptographic literature (IND-CCA, key-privacy, weak robustness). We also show that a desirable stronger variant, preventing the adversary from selective “trial-deliveries ” of messages, is unfortunately unachievable by any PKE scheme, no matter how strong. The constructive approach makes the guarantees achieved by applying a cryptographic scheme explicit in the constructed (ideal) resource; this specifies the exact requirements for the applicability of a cryptographic scheme in a given context. It also allows to decide which of the existing security properties of such a cryptographic scheme are adequate for the considered scenario, and which are too weak or too strong. Here, we show that weak robustness is necessary but that so-called strong robustness is unnecessarily strong in that it does not construct a (natural) stronger resource

Naturally Rehearsing Passwords

We introduce quantitative usability and security models to guide the design of password management schemes --- systematic strategies to help users create and remember multiple passwords. In the same way that security proofs in cryptography are based on complexity-theoretic assumptions (e.g., hardness of factoring and discrete logarithm), we quantify usability by introducing usability assumptions. In particular, password management relies on assumptions about human memory, e.g., that a user who follows a particular rehearsal schedule will successfully maintain the corresponding memory. These assumptions are informed by research in cognitive science and validated through empirical studies. Given rehearsal requirements and a user's visitation schedule for each account, we use the total number of extra rehearsals that the user would have to do to remember all of his passwords as a measure of the usability of the password scheme. Our usability model leads us to a key observation: password reuse benefits users not only by reducing the number of passwords that the user has to memorize, but more importantly by increasing the natural rehearsal rate for each password. We also present a security model which accounts for the complexity of password management with multiple accounts and associated threats, including online, offline, and plaintext password leak attacks. Observing that current password management schemes are either insecure or unusable, we present Shared Cues--- a new scheme in which the underlying secret is strategically shared across accounts to ensure that most rehearsal requirements are satisfied naturally while simultaneously providing strong security. The construction uses the Chinese Remainder Theorem to achieve these competing goals

Efficient noninteractive certification of RSA moduli and beyond

In many applications, it is important to verify that an RSA public key (N; e) speci es a permutation over the entire space ZN, in order to prevent attacks due to adversarially-generated public keys. We design and implement a simple and e cient noninteractive zero-knowledge protocol (in the random oracle model) for this task. Applications concerned about adversarial key generation can just append our proof to the RSA public key without any other modi cations to existing code or cryptographic libraries. Users need only perform a one-time veri cation of the proof to ensure that raising to the power e is a permutation of the integers modulo N. For typical parameter settings, the proof consists of nine integers modulo N; generating the proof and verifying it both require about nine modular exponentiations. We extend our results beyond RSA keys and also provide e cient noninteractive zero- knowledge proofs for other properties of N, which can be used to certify that N is suitable for the Paillier cryptosystem, is a product of two primes, or is a Blum integer. As compared to the recent work of Auerbach and Poettering (PKC 2018), who provide two-message protocols for similar languages, our protocols are more e cient and do not require interaction, which enables a broader class of applications.https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/057First author draf

APE: Authenticated Permutation-Based Encryption for Lightweight Cryptography

The domain of lightweight cryptography focuses on cryptographic algorithms for extremely constrained devices. It is very costly to avoid nonce reuse in such environments, because this requires either a hardware source of randomness, or non-volatile memory to store a counter. At the same time, a lot of cryptographic schemes actually require the nonce assumption for their security. In this paper, we propose APE as the first permutation-based authenticated encryption scheme that is resistant against nonce misuse. We formally prove that APE is secure, based on the security of the underlying permutation. To decrypt, APE processes the ciphertext blocks in reverse order, and uses inverse permutation calls. APE therefore requires a permutation that is both efficient for forward and inverse calls. We instantiate APE with the permutations of three recent lightweight hash function designs: Quark, Photon, and Spongent. For any of these permutations, an implementation that sup- ports both encryption and decryption requires less than 1.9 kGE and 2.8 kGE for 80-bit and 128-bit security levels, respectively

Key Rotation for Authenticated Encryption

A common requirement in practice is to periodically rotate the keys used to encrypt stored data. Systems used by Amazon and Google do so using a hybrid encryption technique which is eminently practical but has questionable security in the face of key compromises and does not provide full key rotation. Meanwhile, symmetric updatable encryption schemes (introduced by Boneh et al. CRYPTO 2013) support full key rotation without performing decryption: ciphertexts created under one key can be rotated to ciphertexts created under a different key with the help of a re-encryption token. By design, the tokens do not leak information about keys or plaintexts and so can be given to storage providers without compromising security. But the prior work of Boneh et al. addresses relatively weak confidentiality goals and does not consider integrity at all. Moreover, as we show, a subtle issue with their concrete scheme obviates a security proof even for confidentiality against passive attacks. This paper presents a systematic study of updatable Authenticated Encryption (AE). We provide a set of security notions that strengthen those in prior work. These notions enable us to tease out real-world security requirements of different strengths and build schemes that satisfy them efficiently. We show that the hybrid approach currently used in industry achieves relatively weak forms of confidentiality and integrity, but can be modified at low cost to meet our stronger confidentiality and integrity goals. This leads to a practical scheme that has negligible overhead beyond conventional AE. We then introduce re-encryption indistinguishability, a security notion that formally captures the idea of fully refreshing keys upon rotation. We show how to repair the scheme of Boneh et al., attaining our stronger confidentiality notion. We also show how to extend the scheme to provide integrity, and we prove that it meets our re- encryption indistinguishability notion. Finally, we discuss how to instantiate our scheme efficiently using off-the-shelf cryptographic components (AE, hashing, elliptic curves). We report on the performance of a prototype implementation, showing that fully secure key rotations can be performed at a throughput of approximately 116 kB/s

Analyzing Multi-key Security Degradation

Contains fulltext : 179039.pdf (preprint version ) (Closed access) Contains fulltext : 179039.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)nul

On Symmetric Encryption with Distinguishable Decryption Failures

We propose to relax the assumption that decryption failures are indistinguishable in security models for symmetric encryption. Our main purpose is to build models that better reflect the reality of cryptographic implementations, and to surface the security issues that arise from doing so. We systematically explore the consequences of this relaxation, with some surprising consequences for our understanding of this basic cryptographic primitive. Our results should be useful to practitioners who wish to build accurate models of their implementations and then analyse them. They should also be of value to more theoretical cryptographers proposing new encryption schemes, who, in an ideal world, would be compelled by this work to consider the possibility that their schemes might leak more than simple decryption failures

Prochlo: Strong Privacy for Analytics in the Crowd

The large-scale monitoring of computer users' software activities has become commonplace, e.g., for application telemetry, error reporting, or demographic profiling. This paper describes a principled systems architecture---Encode, Shuffle, Analyze (ESA)---for performing such monitoring with high utility while also protecting user privacy. The ESA design, and its Prochlo implementation, are informed by our practical experiences with an existing, large deployment of privacy-preserving software monitoring. (cont.; see the paper