Homomorphic encryption and some black box attacks

This paper is a compressed summary of some principal definitions and concepts in the approach to the black box algebra being developed by the authors. We suggest that black box algebra could be useful in cryptanalysis of homomorphic encryption schemes, and that homomorphic encryption is an area of research where cryptography and black box algebra may benefit from exchange of ideas

Secure Key Encapsulation Mechanism with Compact Ciphertext and Public Key from Generalized Srivastava code

Code-based public key cryptosystems have been found to be an interesting option in the area of Post-Quantum Cryptography. In this work, we present a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) using a parity check matrix of the Generalized Srivastava code as the public key matrix. Generalized Srivastava codes are privileged with the decoding technique of Alternant codes as they belong to the family of Alternant codes. We exploit the dyadic structure of the parity check matrix to reduce the storage of the public key. Our encapsulation leads to a shorter ciphertext as compared to DAGS proposed by Banegas et al. in Journal of Mathematical Cryptology which also uses Generalized Srivastava code. Our KEM provides IND-CCA security in the random oracle model. Also, our scheme can be shown to achieve post-quantum security in the quantum random oracle model

Limits of Practical Sublinear Secure Computation

Secure computations on big data call for protocols that have sublinear communication complexity in the input length. While fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) provides a general solution to the problem, employing it on a large scale is currently quite far from being practical. This is also the case for secure computation tasks that reduce to weaker forms of FHE such as \u27\u27somewhat homomorphic encryption\u27\u27 or single-server private information retrieval (PIR). Quite unexpectedly, Aggarwal, Mishra, and Pinkas (Eurocrypt 2004), Brickell and Shmatikov (Asiacrypt 2005), and shelat and Venkitasubramaniam (Asiacrypt 2015) have shown that in several natural instances of secure computation on big data, there are practical sublinear communication protocols that only require sublinear local computation and minimize the use of expensive public-key operations. This raises the question of whether similar protocols exist for other natural problems. In this paper we put forward a framework for separating \u27\u27practical\u27\u27 sublinear protocols from \u27\u27impractical\u27\u27 ones, and establish a methodology for identifying \u27\u27provably hard\u27\u27 big-data problems that do not admit practical protocols. This is akin to the use of NP-completeness to separate hard algorithmic problems from easy ones. We show that while the previous protocols of Aggarwal et al., Brickell and Shmatikov, and shelat and Venkitasubramaniam are indeed classified as being \u27\u27practical\u27\u27 in this framework, slight variations of the problems they solve and other natural computational problems on big data are hard. Our negative results are established by showing that the problem at hand is \u27\u27PIR-hard\u27\u27 in the sense that any secure protocol for the problem implies PIR on a large database. This imposes a barrier on the local computational cost of secure protocols for the problem. We also identify a new natural relaxation of PIR that we call semi-PIR, which is useful for establishing \u27\u27intermediate hardness\u27\u27 of several practically motivated secure computation tasks. We show that semi-PIR implies slightly sublinear PIR via an adaptive black-box reduction and that ruling out a stronger black-box reduction would imply a major breakthrough in complexity theory. We also establish information-theoretic separations between semi-PIR and PIR, showing that some problems that we prove to be semi-PIR-hard are not PIR-hard

Sampling the Integers with Low Relative Error

Randomness is an essential part of any secure cryptosystem, but many constructions rely on distributions that are not uniform. This is particularly true for lattice based cryptosystems, which more often than not make use of discrete Gaussian distributions over the integers. For practical purposes it is crucial to evaluate the impact that approximation errors have on the security of a scheme to provide the best possible trade-off between security and performance. Recent years have seen surprising results allowing to use relatively low precision while maintaining high levels of security. A key insight in these results is that sampling a distribution with low relative error can provide very strong security guarantees. Since floating point numbers provide guarantees on the relative approximation error, they seem a suitable tool in this setting, but it is not obvious which sampling algorithms can actually profit from them. While previous works have shown that inversion sampling can be adapted to provide a low relative error (Pöppelmann et al., CHES 2014; Prest, ASIACRYPT 2017), other works have called into question if this is possible for other sampling techniques (Zheng et al., Eprint report 2018/309). In this work, we consider all sampling algorithms that are popular in the cryptographic setting and analyze the relationship of floating point precision and the resulting relative error. We show that all of the algorithms either natively achieve a low relative error or can be adapted to do so

i-Hop Homomorphic Encryption and Rerandomizable Yao Circuits

Homomorphic encryption (HE) schemes enable computing functions on encrypted data, by means of a public Eval procedure that can be applied to ciphertexts. But the evaluated ci-phertexts so generated may differ from freshly encrypted ones. This brings up the question of whether one can keep computing on evaluated ciphertexts. An i-hop homomorphic encryption scheme is one where Eval can be called on its own output up to i times, while still being able to decrypt the result. A multi-hop homomorphic encryption is a scheme which is i-hop for all i. In this work we study i-hop and multi-hop schemes in conjunction with the properties of function-privacy (i.e., Eval’s output hides the function) and compactness (i.e., the output of Eval is short). We provide formal definitions and describe several constructions. First, we observe that “bootstrapping ” techniques can be used to convert any (1-hop) homo-morphic encryption scheme into an i-hop scheme for any i, and the result inherits the function-privacy and/or compactness of the underlying scheme. However, if the underlying scheme is not compact (such as schemes derived from Yao circuits) then the complexity of the resulting i-hop scheme can be as high as kO(i). We then describe a specific DDH-based multi-hop homomorphic encryption scheme that does not suffer from this exponential blowup. Although not compact, this scheme has complexity linear in the size of the composed function, independently of the number of hops. The main technical ingredient in this solution is a re-randomizable variant of the Yao circuits. Namely, given a garbled circuit, anyone can re-garble it in such a way that even the party that gener-ated the original garbled circuit cannot recognize it. This construction may be of independent interest

Homomorphic Lower Digits Removal and Improved FHE Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is a crucial operation in Gentry\u27s breakthrough work on fully homomorphic encryption (FHE), where a homomorphic encryption scheme evaluates its own decryption algorithm. There has been a couple of implementations of bootstrapping, among which HElib arguably marks the state-of-the-art in terms of throughput, ciphertext/message size ratio and support for large plaintext moduli. In this work, we apply a family of lowest digit removal polynomials to improve homomorphic digit extraction algorithm which is crucial part in bootstrapping for both FV and BGV schemes. If the secret key has 1-norm $h=l_1(s)$ and the plaintext modulus is $t = p^r$, we achieved bootstrapping depth $\log h + \log( \log_p(ht))$ in FV scheme. In case of the BGV scheme, we bring down the depth from $\log h + 2 \log t$ to $\log h + \log t$. We implemented bootstrapping for FV in the SEAL library. Besides the regular mode, we introduce another slim mode\u27 , which restrict the plaintexts to batched vectors in $\mathbb{Z}_{p^r}$. The slim mode has similar throughput as the regular mode, while each individual run is much faster and uses much smaller memory. For example, bootstrapping takes $6.75$ seconds for 7 bit plaintext space with 64 slots and $1381$ seconds for $GF(257^{128})$ plaintext space with 128 slots. We also implemented our improved digit extraction procedure for the BGV scheme in HElib

Building an Efficient Lattice Gadget Toolkit: Subgaussian Sampling and More

Many advanced lattice cryptography applications require efficient algorithms for inverting the so-called gadget matrices, which are used to formally describe a digit decomposition problem that produces an output with specific (statistical) properties. The common gadget inversion problems are the classical (often binary) digit decomposition, subgaussian decomposition, Learning with Errors (LWE) decoding, and discrete Gaussian sampling. In this work, we build and implement an efficient lattice gadget toolkit that provides a general treatment of gadget matrices and algorithms for their inversion/sampling. The main contribution of our work is a set of new gadget matrices and algorithms for efficient subgaussian sampling that have a number of major theoretical and practical advantages over previously known algorithms. Another contribution deals with efficient algorithms for LWE decoding and discrete Gaussian sampling in the Residue Number System (RNS) representation. We implement the gadget toolkit in PALISADE and evaluate the performance of our algorithms both in terms of runtime and noise growth. We illustrate the improvements due to our algorithms by implementing a concrete complex application, key-policy attribute-based encryption (KP-ABE), which was previously considered impractical for CPU systems (except for a very small number of attributes). Our runtime improvements for the main bottleneck operation based on subgaussian sampling range from 18x (for 2 attributes) to 289x (for 16 attributes; the maximum number supported by a previous implementation). Our results are applicable to a wide range of other advanced applications in lattice cryptography, such as GSW-based homomorphic encryption schemes, leveled fully homomorphic signatures, key-hiding PRFs and other forms of ABE, some program obfuscation constructions, and more

Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Matrix-Vector Relations and Lattice-Based Group Encryption

International audienceGroup encryption (GE) is the natural encryption analogue of group signatures in that it allows verifiably encrypting messages for some anonymous member of a group while providing evidence that the receiver is a properly certified group member. Should the need arise, an opening authority is capable of identifying the receiver of any ciphertext. As introduced by Kiayias, Tsiounis and Yung (Asiacrypt'07), GE is motivated by applications in the context of oblivious retriever storage systems, anonymous third parties and hierarchical group signatures. This paper provides the first realization of group encryption under lattice assumptions. Our construction is proved secure in the standard model (assuming interaction in the proving phase) under the Learning-With-Errors (LWE) and Short-Integer-Solution (SIS) assumptions. As a crucial component of our system, we describe a new zero-knowledge argument system allowing to demonstrate that a given ciphertext is a valid encryption under some hidden but certified public key, which incurs to prove quadratic statements about LWE relations. Specifically, our protocol allows arguing knowledge of witnesses consisting of X ∈ Z m×n q , s ∈ Z n q and a small-norm e ∈ Z m which underlie a public vector b = X · s + e ∈ Z m q while simultaneously proving that the matrix X ∈ Z m×n q has been correctly certified. We believe our proof system to be useful in other applications involving zero-knowledge proofs in the lattice setting

Isogeny-Based Quantum-Resistant Undeniable Signatures

Abstract. We propose an undeniable signature scheme based on el-liptic curve isogenies, and prove its security under certain reasonable number-theoretic computational assumptions for which no efficient quan-tum algorithms are known. Our proposal represents only the second known quantum-resistant undeniable signature scheme, and the first such scheme secure under a number-theoretic complexity assumption