LIPIcs

Proofs of space (PoS) [Dziembowski et al., CRYPTO'15] are proof systems where a prover can convince a verifier that he "wastes" disk space. PoS were introduced as a more ecological and economical replacement for proofs of work which are currently used to secure blockchains like Bitcoin. In this work we investigate extensions of PoS which allow the prover to embed useful data into the dedicated space, which later can be recovered. Our first contribution is a security proof for the original PoS from CRYPTO'15 in the random oracle model (the original proof only applied to a restricted class of adversaries which can store a subset of the data an honest prover would store). When this PoS is instantiated with recent constructions of maximally depth robust graphs, our proof implies basically optimal security. As a second contribution we show three different extensions of this PoS where useful data can be embedded into the space required by the prover. Our security proof for the PoS extends (non-trivially) to these constructions. We discuss how some of these variants can be used as proofs of catalytic space (PoCS), a notion we put forward in this work, and which basically is a PoS where most of the space required by the prover can be used to backup useful data. Finally we discuss how one of the extensions is a candidate construction for a proof of replication (PoR), a proof system recently suggested in the Filecoin whitepaper

Compression from Collisions, or Why CRHF Combiners Have a Long Output

A black-box combiner for collision resistant hash functions (CRHF) is a construction which given black-box access to two hash functions is collision resistant if at least one of the components is collision resistant. In this paper we prove a lower bound on the output length of black-box combiners for CRHFs. The bound we prove is basically tight as it is achieved by a recent construction of Canetti et al [CRYPTO'07]. The best previously known lower bounds only ruled out a very restricted class of combiners having a very strong security reduction: the reduction was required to output collisions for both underlying candidate hash-functions given a single collision for the combiner (Canetti et al [CRYPTO'07] building on Boneh and Boyen [CRYPTO'06] and Pietrzak [EUROCRYPT'07]). Our proof uses a lemma similar to the elegant ``reconstruction lemma'' of Gennaro and Trevisan [FOCS'00], which states that any function which is not one-way is compressible (and thus uniformly random function must be one-way). In a similar vein we show that a function which is not collision resistant is compressible. We also borrow ideas from recent work by Haitner et al. [FOCS'07], who show that one can prove the reconstruction lemma even relative to some very powerful oracles (in our case this will be an exponential time collision-finding oracle)

LIPIcs

De, Trevisan and Tulsiani [CRYPTO 2010] show that every distribution over n-bit strings which has constant statistical distance to uniform (e.g., the output of a pseudorandom generator mapping n-1 to n bit strings), can be distinguished from the uniform distribution with advantage epsilon by a circuit of size O( 2^n epsilon^2). We generalize this result, showing that a distribution which has less than k bits of min-entropy, can be distinguished from any distribution with k bits of delta-smooth min-entropy with advantage epsilon by a circuit of size O(2^k epsilon^2/delta^2). As a special case, this implies that any distribution with support at most 2^k (e.g., the output of a pseudoentropy generator mapping k to n bit strings) can be distinguished from any given distribution with min-entropy k+1 with advantage epsilon by a circuit of size O(2^k epsilon^2). Our result thus shows that pseudoentropy distributions face basically the same non-uniform attacks as pseudorandom distributions

Leakage-Resilient Cryptography

We construct a stream-cipher SC whose \emph{implementation} is secure even if arbitrary (adversely chosen) information on the internal state of SC is leaked during computation. This captures \emph{all} possible side-channel attacks on SC where the amount of information leaked in a given period is bounded, but overall cankbe arbitrary large, in particular much larger than the internalkstate of SC. The only other assumption we make on the \emph{implementation} of SC is that only data that is accessedkduring computation leaks information. The construction can be based on any pseudorandom generator, and the only computational assumption we make is that this PRG is secure against non-uniform adversaries in the classical sense (i.e. when there are no side-channels). The stream-cipher SC generates its output in chunks $K_1,K_2,\ldots$, and arbitrary but bounded information leakage is modeled by allowing the adversary to adaptively chose a function $f_\ell:\{0,1\}^*\rightarrow\{0,1\}^\lambda$ before $K_\ell$ is computed, she then gets $f_\ell(\tau_\ell)$ where $\tau_\ell$ is the internal state of \SC that is accessed during the computation of $K_\ell$. One notion of security we prove for \SC is that $K_\ell$ is indistinguishable from random when given $K_1,\ldots,K_{\ell-1}$, $f_1(\tau_1),\ldots, f_{\ell-1}(\tau_{\ell-1})$ and also the complete internal state of SC after $K_{\ell+1}$ has been computed (i.e. our cipher is forward-secure). The construction is based on alternating extraction (previously used in the intrusion-resilient secret-sharing scheme from FOCS'07). We move this concept to the computational setting by proving a lemma that states that the output of any PRG has high HILL pseudoentropy (i.e. is indistinguishable from some distribution with high min-entropy) even if arbitrary information about the seed is leaked. The amount of leakage \leak that we can tolerate in each step depends on the strength of the underlying PRG, it is at least logarithmic, but can be as large as a constant fraction of the internal state of SC if the PRG is exponentially hard

LNCS

HMAC and its variant NMAC are the most popular approaches to deriving a MAC (and more generally, a PRF) from a cryptographic hash function. Despite nearly two decades of research, their exact security still remains far from understood in many different contexts. Indeed, recent works have re-surfaced interest for {\em generic} attacks, i.e., attacks that treat the compression function of the underlying hash function as a black box. Generic security can be proved in a model where the underlying compression function is modeled as a random function -- yet, to date, the question of proving tight, non-trivial bounds on the generic security of HMAC/NMAC even as a PRF remains a challenging open question. In this paper, we ask the question of whether a small modification to HMAC and NMAC can allow us to exactly characterize the security of the resulting constructions, while only incurring little penalty with respect to efficiency. To this end, we present simple variants of NMAC and HMAC, for which we prove tight bounds on the generic PRF security, expressed in terms of numbers of construction and compression function queries necessary to break the construction. All of our constructions are obtained via a (near) {\em black-box} modification of NMAC and HMAC, which can be interpreted as an initial step of key-dependent message pre-processing. While our focus is on PRF security, a further attractive feature of our new constructions is that they clearly defeat all recent generic attacks against properties such as state recovery and universal forgery. These exploit properties of the so-called ``functional graph'' which are not directly accessible in our new constructions

LNCS

Consider a joint distribution (X,A) on a set. We show that for any family of distinguishers, there exists a simulator such that 1 no function in can distinguish (X,A) from (X,h(X)) with advantage ε, 2 h is only O(2 3ℓ ε -2) times less efficient than the functions in. For the most interesting settings of the parameters (in particular, the cryptographic case where X has superlogarithmic min-entropy, ε > 0 is negligible and consists of circuits of polynomial size), we can make the simulator h deterministic. As an illustrative application of our theorem, we give a new security proof for the leakage-resilient stream-cipher from Eurocrypt'09. Our proof is simpler and quantitatively much better than the original proof using the dense model theorem, giving meaningful security guarantees if instantiated with a standard blockcipher like AES. Subsequent to this work, Chung, Lui and Pass gave an interactive variant of our main theorem, and used it to investigate weak notions of Zero-Knowledge. Vadhan and Zheng give a more constructive version of our theorem using their new uniform min-max theorem

LNCS

Generalized Selective Decryption (GSD), introduced by Panjwani [TCC’07], is a game for a symmetric encryption scheme Enc that captures the difficulty of proving adaptive security of certain protocols, most notably the Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) multicast encryption protocol. In the GSD game there are n keys k1,..., kn, which the adversary may adaptively corrupt (learn); moreover, it can ask for encryptions Encki (kj) of keys under other keys. The adversary’s task is to distinguish keys (which it cannot trivially compute) from random. Proving the hardness of GSD assuming only IND-CPA security of Enc is surprisingly hard. Using “complexity leveraging” loses a factor exponential in n, which makes the proof practically meaningless. We can think of the GSD game as building a graph on n vertices, where we add an edge i → j when the adversary asks for an encryption of kj under ki. If restricted to graphs of depth ℓ, Panjwani gave a reduction that loses only a factor exponential in ℓ (not n). To date, this is the only non-trivial result known for GSD. In this paper we give almost-polynomial reductions for large classes of graphs. Most importantly, we prove the security of the GSD game restricted to trees losing only a quasi-polynomial factor n3 log n+5. Trees are an important special case capturing real-world protocols like the LKH protocol. Our new bound improves upon Panjwani’s on some LKH variants proposed in the literature where the underlying tree is not balanced. Our proof builds on ideas from the “nested hybrids” technique recently introduced by Fuchsbauer et al. [Asiacrypt’14] for proving the adaptive security of constrained PRFs