Water Infiltration in Methylammonium Lead Iodide Perovskite: Fast and Inconspicuous

While the susceptibility of CH3NH3PbI3 to water is well documented, water influence on device performance is not well understood. Herein we use infrared spectroscopy to show that water infiltration into CH3NH3PbI3 occurs much faster and at much lower humidity than previously thought. We propose a molecular model where water molecules have a strong effect on the hydrogen bonding between the methylammonium cations and the Pb-I cage. Furthermore, the exposure of CH3NH3PbI3 to ambient environment increases the photocurrent of films in lateral devices by more than one order of magnitude. The observed slow component in the photocurrent buildup indicates that the effect is associated with enhanced proton conduction when light is combined with water and oxygen exposure.C.M. and M.S. acknowledge support by the Heidelberg Graduate School of Fundamental Physics. A.A.B. is a Royal Society University Research Fellow.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Chemical Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.chemmater.5b0388

Security Definitions For Hash Functions: Combining UCE and Indifferentiability

Hash functions are one of the most important cryptographic primitives, but their desired security properties have proven to be remarkably hard to formalize. To prove the security of a protocol using a hash function, nowadays often the random oracle model (ROM) is used due to its simplicity and its strong security guarantees. Moreover, hash function constructions are commonly proven to be secure by showing them to be indifferentiable from a random oracle when using an ideal compression function. However, it is well known that no hash function realizes a random oracle and no real compression function realizes an ideal one. As an alternative to the ROM, Bellare et al. recently proposed the notion of universal computational extractors (UCE). This notion formalizes that a family of functions ``behaves like a random oracle\u27\u27 for ``real-world\u27\u27 protocols while avoiding the general impossibility results. However, in contrast to the indifferentiability framework, UCE is formalized as a multi-stage game without clear composition guarantees. As a first contribution, we introduce context-restricted indifferentiability (CRI), a generalization of indifferentiability that allows us to model that the random oracle does not compose generally but can only be used within a well-specified set of protocols run by the honest parties, thereby making the provided composition guarantees explicit. We then show that UCE and its variants can be phrased as a special case of CRI. Moreover, we show how our notion of CRI leads to generalizations of UCE. As a second contribution, we prove that the hash function constructed by Merkle-Damgard satisfies one of the well-known UCE variants, if we assume that the compression function satisfies one of our generalizations of UCE, basing the overall security on a plausible assumption. This result further validates the Merkle-Damgard construction and shows that UCE-like assumptions can serve both as a valid reference point for modular protocol analyses, as well as for the design of hash functions, linking those two aspects in a framework with explicit composition guarantees

Unpicking PLAID: a cryptographic analysis of an ISO-standards-track authentication protocol

The Protocol for Lightweight Authentication of Identity (PLAID) aims at secure and private authentication between a smart card and a terminal. Originally developed by a unit of the Australian Department of Human Services for physical and logical access control, PLAID has now been standardized as an Australian standard AS-5185-2010 and is currently in the fast track standardization process for ISO/IEC 25182-1.2. We present a cryptographic evaluation of PLAID. As well as reporting a number of undesirable cryptographic features of the protocol, we show that the privacy properties of PLAID are significantly weaker than claimed: using a variety of techniques we can fingerprint and then later identify cards. These techniques involve a novel application of standard statistical and data analysi

Policy-Based Sanitizable Signatures

Sanitizable signatures are a variant of signatures which allow a single, and signer-defined, sanitizer to modify signed messages in a controlled way without invalidating the respective signature. They turned out to be a versatile primitive, proven by different variants and extensions, e.g., allowing multiple sanitizers or adding new sanitizers one-by-one. However, existing constructions are very restricted regarding their flexibility in specifying potential sanitizers. We propose a different and more powerful approach: Instead of using sanitizers\u27 public keys directly, we assign attributes to them. Sanitizing is then based on policies, i.e., access structures defined over attributes. A sanitizer can sanitize, if, and only if, it holds a secret key to attributes satisfying the policy associated to a signature, while offering full-scale accountability

Chameleon-Hashes with Dual Long-Term Trapdoors and Their Applications

A chameleon-hash behaves likes a standard collision-resistant hash function for outsiders. If, however, a trapdoor is known, arbitrary collisions can be found. Chameleon-hashes with ephemeral trapdoors (CHET; Camenisch et al., PKC ’17) allow prohibiting that the holder of the long-term trapdoor can find collisions by introducing a second, ephemeral, trapdoor. However, this ephemeral trapdoor is required to be chosen freshly for each hash. We extend these ideas and introduce the notion of chameleon-hashes with dual long-term trapdoors (CHDLTT). Here, the second trapdoor is not chosen freshly for each new hash; Rather, the hashing party can decide if it wants to generate a fresh second trapdoor or use an existing one. This primitive generalizes CHETs, extends their applicability and enables some appealing new use-cases, including three-party sanitizable signatures, group-level selectively revocable signatures and break-the-glass signatures. We present two provably secure constructions and an implementation which demonstrates that this extended primitive is efficient enough for use in practice

3-Message Zero Knowledge Against Human Ignorance

The notion of Zero Knowledge has driven the field of cryptography since its conception over thirty years ago. It is well established that two-message zero-knowledge protocols for NP do not exist, and that four-message zero-knowledge arguments exist under the minimal assumption of one-way functions. Resolving the precise round complexity of zero-knowledge has been an outstanding open problem for far too long. In this work, we present a three-message zero-knowledge argument system with soundness against uniform polynomial-time cheating provers. The main component in our construction is the recent delegation protocol for RAM computations (Kalai and Paneth, TCC 2016B and Brakerski, Holmgren and Kalai, ePrint 2016). Concretely, we rely on a three-message variant of their protocol based on a key-less collision-resistant hash functions secure against uniform adversaries as well as other standard primitives. More generally, beyond uniform provers, our protocol provides a natural and meaningful security guarantee against real-world adversaries, which we formalize following Rogaway’s “human-ignorance” approach (VIETCRYPT 2006): in a nutshell, we give an explicit uniform reduction from any adversary breaking the soundness of our protocol to finding collisions in the underlying hash function.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1350619)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award CNS-1413964

On ELFs, Deterministic Encryption, and Correlated-Input Security

We construct deterministic public key encryption secure for any constant number of arbitrarily correlated computationally unpredictable messages. Prior works required either random oracles or non-standard knowledge assumptions. In contrast, our constructions are based on the exponential hardness of DDH, which is plausible in elliptic curve groups. Our central tool is a new trapdoored extremely lossy function, which modifies extremely lossy functions by adding a trapdoor

Masking Fuzzy-Searchable Public Databases

We introduce and study the notion of keyless fuzzy search (KlFS) which allows to mask a publicly available database in such a way that any third party can retrieve content if and only if it possesses some data that is “close to” the encrypted data – no cryptographic keys are involved. We devise a formal security model that asks a scheme not to leak any information about the data and the queries except for some well-defined leakage function if attackers cannot guess the right query to make. In particular, our definition implies that recovering high entropy data protected with a KlFS scheme is costly. We propose two KlFS schemes: both use locality-sensitive hashes (LSH), cryptographic hashes and symmetric encryption as building blocks. The first scheme is generic and works for abstract plaintext domains. The second scheme is specifically suited for databases of images. To demonstrate the feasibility of our KlFS for images, we implemented and evaluated a prototype system that supports image search by object similarity on a masked database