158 research outputs found

    State of Utah v. Johnson : Unknown

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    Hash function requirements for Schnorr signatures

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    We provide two necessary conditions on hash functions for the Schnorr signature scheme to be secure, assuming compact group representations such as those which occur in elliptic curve groups. We also show, via an argument in the generic group model, that these conditions are sufficient. Our hash function security requirements are variants of the standard notions of preimage and second preimage resistance. One of them is in fact equivalent to the Nostradamus attack by Kelsey and Kohno (Eurocrypt, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4004: 183-200, 2006), and, when considering keyed compression functions, both are closely related to the ePre and eSec notions by Rogaway and Shrimpton (FSE, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3017: 371-388, 2004). Our results have a number of interesting implications in practice. First, since security does not rely on the hash function being collision resistant, Schnorr signatures can still be securely instantiated with SHA-1/SHA-256, unlike DSA signatures. Second, we conjecture that our properties require O(2 n ) work to solve for a hash function with n-bit output, thereby allowing the use of shorter hashes and saving twenty-five percent in signature size. And third, our analysis does not reveal any significant difference in hardness between forging signatures and computing discrete logarithms, which plays down the importance of the loose reductions in existing random-oracle proofs, and seems to support the use of "normal-size” group

    Forward-Secure Multi-Signatures

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    Multi-signatures allow a group of signers to jointly sign a message in a compact and efficiently verifiable signature, ideally independent of the number of signers in the group. We present the first provably secure forward-secure multi-signature scheme by deriving a forward-secure signature scheme from the hierarchical identity-based encryption of Boneh, Boyen, and Goh (Eurocrypt 2005) and showing how the signatures in that scheme can be securely composed. Multi-signatures in our scheme contain just two group elements (one from each of the base groups) and require one exponentation and three pairing computations to verify

    One-Shot Verifiable Encryption from Lattices

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    Verifiable encryption allows one to prove properties about encrypted data and is an important building block in the design of cryptographic protocols, e.g., group signatures, key escrow, fair exchange protocols, etc. Existing lattice-based verifiable encryption schemes, and even just proofs of knowledge of the encrypted data, require parallel composition of proofs to reduce the soundness error, resulting in proof sizes that are only truly practical when amortized over a large number of ciphertexts. In this paper, we present a new construction of a verifiable encryption scheme, based on the hardness of the Ring-LWE problem in the random-oracle model, for short solutions to linear equations over polynomial rings. Our scheme is one-shot , in the sense that a single instance of the proof already has negligible soundness error, yielding compact proofs even for individual ciphertexts. Whereas verifiable encryption usually guarantees that decryption can recover a witness for the original language, we relax this requirement to decrypt a witness of a related but extended language. This relaxation is sufficient for many applications and we illustrate this with example usages of our scheme in key escrow and verifiably encrypted signatures. One of the interesting aspects of our construction is that the decryption algorithm is probabilistic and uses the proof as input (rather than using only the ciphertext). The decryption time for honestly-generated ciphertexts only depends on the security parameter, while the expected running time for decrypting an adversarially-generated ciphertext is directly related to the number of random-oracle queries of the adversary who created it. This property suffices in most practical scenarios, especially in situations where the ciphertext proof is part of an interactive protocol, where the decryptor is substantially more powerful than the adversary, or where adversaries can be otherwise discouraged to submit malformed ciphertexts

    Robust Encryption

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    We provide a provable-security treatment of ``robust\u27\u27 encryption. Robustness means it is hard to produce a ciphertext that is valid for two different users. Robustness makes explicit a property that has been implicitly assumed in the past. We argue that it is an essential conjunct of anonymous encryption. We show that natural anonymity-preserving ways to achieve it, such as adding recipient identification information before encrypting, fail. We provide transforms that do achieve it, efficiently and provably. We assess the robustness of specific encryption schemes in the literature, providing simple patches for some that lack the property. We discuss applications including PEKS (Public-key Encryption with Keyword Search) and auctions. Overall our work enables safer and simpler use of encryption
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