LightChain: A DHT-based Blockchain for Resource Constrained Environments

As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage efficiency, convergence to centralization, and consistency problems. In this paper, we propose LightChain, which is the first blockchain architecture that operates over a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) of participating peers. LightChain is a permissionless blockchain that provides addressable blocks and transactions within the network, which makes them efficiently accessible by all the peers. Each block and transaction is replicated within the DHT of peers and is retrieved in an on-demand manner. Hence, peers in LightChain are not required to retrieve or keep the entire blockchain. LightChain is fair as all of the participating peers have a uniform chance of being involved in the consensus regardless of their influence such as hashing power or stake. LightChain provides a deterministic fork-resolving strategy as well as a blacklisting mechanism, and it is secure against colluding adversarial peers attacking the availability and integrity of the system. We provide mathematical analysis and experimental results on scenarios involving 10K nodes to demonstrate the security and fairness of LightChain. As we experimentally show in this paper, compared to the mainstream blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, LightChain requires around 66 times less per node storage, and is around 380 times faster on bootstrapping a new node to the system, while each LightChain node is rewarded equally likely for participating in the protocol

Distributed Single Password Protocol Framework

Passwords are the most widely used factor in various areas such as secret sharing, key establishment, and user authentication. Single password protocols are proposed (starting with Belenkiy et. al [4]) to overcome the challenges of traditional password protocols and provide provable security against offline dictionary, man-in-the-middle, phishing, and honeypot attacks. While they ensure provable security, they allow a user securely to use a single \textit{low-entropy human memorable} password for all her accounts. They achieve this with the help of a cloud or mobile storage device. However, an attacker corrupting both the login server and storage can mount an offline dictionary attack on user\u27s single password. In this work, we introduce a framework for distributed single password protocols (DiSPP) that analyzes existing protocols, improves upon them regarding novel constructions and distributed schemes, and allows exploiting alternative cryptographic primitives to obtain secure distributed single password protocols with various trade-offs. Previous single password solutions can be instantiated as part of our framework. We further introduce a secure DiSPP instantiation derived from our framework enforcing the adversary to corrupt several cloud and mobile storage devices in addition to the login server in order to perform a successful offline dictionary attack. We also provide a comparative analysis of different solutions derived from our framework

A Post-Quantum Four-Party Outsourced Authentication

In this paper, for the first time, we consider a four-party scenario, where a \textit{customer} holding a smart card wants to authenticate herself to a \textit{server}, which employs a \textit{cloud database} to verify the customer. The customers initially register with the \textit{manager}. The manager outsources the processed registration data to a cloud database. Then, the customer only interacts with the server for authentication purposes. The server employs the help of the cloud database during authentication. In addition to the security of the authentication, privacy is another goal, where the cloud should not learn which customer is interacting with which server. We consider several different threat models and provide secure and efficient generic solutions as well as a post-quantum secure solution

Anonymous, Attribute Based, Decentralized, Secure, and Fair e-Donation

E-cash and cryptocurrency schemes have been a focus of applied cryptography for a long time. However, we acknowledge the continuing need for a cryptographic protocol that provides global scale, decentralized, secure, and fair delivery of donations. Such a protocol would replace central trusted entities (e.g., charity organizations) and guarantee the privacy of the involved parties (i.e., donors and recipients of the donations). In this work, we target this online donation problem and propose a practical solution for it. First, we propose a novel decentralized e-donation framework, along with its operational components and security definitions. Our framework relies on a public ledger that can be realized via a distributed blockchain. Second, we instantiate our e-donation framework with a practical scheme employing privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies and attribute-based signatures. Third, we provide implementation results showing that our operations have feasible computation and communication costs. Finally, we prove the security of our e-donation scheme via formal reductions to the security of the underlying primitives

Threshold Single Password Authentication

Passwords are the most widely used form of online user authentication. In a traditional setup, the user, who has a human-memorable low entropy password, wants to authenticate with a login server. Unfortunately, existing solutions in this setting are either non-portable or insecure against many attacks, including phishing, man-in-the-middle, honeypot, and offline dictionary attacks. Three previous studies (Acar et al. 2013, Bicakci et al. 2011, and Jarecki et al. 2016) provide solutions secure against offline dictionary attacks by additionally employing a storage provider (either a cloud storage or a mobile device for portability). These works provide solutions where offline dictionary attacks are impossible as long as the adversary does not corrupt both the login server and the storage provider. For the first time, improving these previous works, we provide a more secure generalized solution employing multiple storage providers, where our solution is proven secure against offline dictionary attacks as long as the adversary does not corrupt the login server and threshold-many storage providers. We define ideal and real world indistinguishability for threshold single password authentication (Threshold SPA) schemes, and formally prove security of our solution via ideal-real simulation. Our solution provides security against all the above-mentioned attacks, including phishing, man-in-the-middle, honeypot, and offline dictionary attacks, and requires no change on the server side. Thus, our solution can immediately be deployed via a browser extension (or a mobile application) and support from some storage providers. We further argue that our protocol is efficient and scalable, and provide performance numbers where the user and storage load are only a few milliseconds

Generic Efficient Dynamic Proofs of Retrievability

Together with its great advantages, cloud storage brought many interesting security issues to our attention. Since 2007, with the first efficient storage integrity protocols Proofs of Retrievability (PoR) of Juels and Kaliski, and Provable Data Possession (PDP) of Ateniese et al., many researchers worked on such protocols. The first proposals worked for static or limited dynamic data, whereas later proposals enabled fully dynamic data integrity and retrievability. Since the beginning, the difference between PDP and PoR models were greatly debated. Most notably, it was thought that dynamic PoR (DPoR) is harder than dynamic PDP (DPDP). Historically this was true: The first DPDP scheme was shown by Erway et al. in 2009, whereas the first DPoR scheme was created by Cash et al. in 2013. We show how to obtain DPoR from DPDP and PDP, together with erasure codes, making us realize that even though we did not know it, in 2009 we already could have had a DPoR solution. We propose a general framework for constructing DPoR schemes. Our framework encapsulates all known DPoR schemes as its special cases. We further show practical and interesting optimizations that enable even better performance than Chandran et al. and Shi et al. constructions. For the first time, we show how to obtain audit bandwidth for DPoR that is independent of the data size, and how the client can greatly speed up updates with O(λ√n) local storage (where n is the number of blocks, and λ is the security parameter), which corresponds to less than 3 MB for 10 GB outsourced data, and can easily be obtained in today’s smart phones, let alone computers

Enabling Two-Party Secure Computation on Set Intersection

In this paper, we propose the first linear two-party secure-computation private set intersection (PSI) protocol, in the semi-honest adversary model, computing the following functionality. One of the parties ($P_X$) inputs a set of items $X = \{x_j \mid 1 \le j \le n_X\}$, whereas the other party ($P_Y$) inputs a set of items $Y = \{y_i \mid 1\le i \le n_Y \}$ and a set of corresponding data pairs $D_Y = \{ (d_i^0,d_i^1) \mid 1 \le i \le n_Y\}$ having the same cardinality with $Y$. While $P_Y$ outputs nothing, $P_X$ outputs a set of data $D_X = \{ d_i^{b_i} \mid b_i = 1 \text{ if } y_i \in X, b_i = 0 \text{ otherwise}\}$. This functionality is generally required when the PSI protocol is used as a part of a larger secure two-party computation such as threshold PSI or any function of the intersection in general. In literature, there are linear circuit and secure-computation PSI proposals, such as Pinkas et al. PSI protocol (Eurocrypt 2019), our PSI protocol (CANS 2020) and Chandran et al. PSI protocol (PETS 2022), for similar functionalities but having a cuckoo table mapping in the functionality, which complicates the application of different secure computation techniques on top of the output of the PSI protocol. We also show that the idea in the construction of our secure-computation PSI protocol having the functionality mentioned above can be utilized to convert the existing circuit PSI and secure-computation PSI protocols into the protocols realizing the functionality not having the cuckoo table mapping. We provide this conversion method as a separate protocol, which is one of the main contributions of this work. While creating the protocol, as a side contribution, we provide a one-time batch oblivious programmable pseudo-random function based on garbled Bloom filters

Efficiently Making Secure Two-Party Computation Fair

Secure two-party computation cannot be fair against malicious adversaries, unless a trusted third party (TTP) or a gradual-release type super-constant round protocol is employed. Existing optimistic fair two-party computation protocols with constant rounds are either too costly to arbitrate (e.g., the TTP may need to re-do almost the whole computation), or require the use of electronic payments. Furthermore, most of the existing solutions were proven secure and fair via a partial simulation, which, we show, may lead to insecurity overall. We propose a new framework for fair and secure two-party computation that can be applied on top of any secure two party computation protocol based on Yao's garbled circuits and zero-knowledge proofs. We show that our fairness overhead is minimal, compared to all known existing work. Furthermore, our protocol is fair even in terms of the work performed by Alice and Bob. We also prove our protocol is fair and secure simultaneously, through one simulator, which guarantees that our fairness extensions do not leak any private information. Lastly, we ensure that the TTP never learns the inputs or outputs of the computation. Therefore, even if the TTP becomes malicious and causes unfairness by colluding with one party, the security of the underlying protocol is still preserved

A Generic Dynamic Provable Data Possession Framework

Ateniese et al. introduced the Provable Data Possession (PDP) model in 2007. Following that, Erway et al. adapted the model for dynamically updatable data, and called it the Dynamic Provable Data Possession (DPDP) model. The idea is that a client outsources her files to a server, and later on challenges the server to obtain a proof that her data is kept intact. During recent years, many schemes have been proposed for this purpose, all following a similar framework. We analyze in detail the exact requirements of dynamic data outsourcing schemes regarding security and efficiency, and propose a general framework for constructing such schemes that encompasses existing DPDP-like schemes as different instantiations. We show that a dynamic data outsourcing scheme can be constructed given black-box access to an implicitly-ordered authenticated data structure (that we define). Moreover, for blockless verification efficiency, a homomorphic verifiable tag scheme is also needed. We investigate the requirements and conditions these building blocks should satisfy, using which one can easily check applicability of a given building block for dynamic data outsourcing. Finally, we provide a comparison among different building blocks