Do we need to change some things? Open questions posed by the upcoming post-quantum migration to existing standards and deployments

Cryptographic algorithms are vital components ensuring the privacy and security of computer systems. They have constantly improved and evolved over the years following new developments, attacks, breaks, and lessons learned. A recent example is that of quantum-resistant cryptography, which has gained a lot of attention in the last decade and is leading to new algorithms being standardized today. These algorithms, however, present a real challenge: they come with strikingly different size and performance characteristics than their classical counterparts. At the same time, common foundational aspects of our transport protocols have lagged behind as the Internet remains a very diverse space in which different use-cases and parts of the world have different needs. This vision paper motivates more research and possible standards updates related to the upcoming quantum-resistant cryptography migration. It stresses the importance of amplification reflection attacks and congestion control concerns in transport protocols and presents research and standardization takeaways for assessing the impact and the efficacy of potential countermeasures. It emphasizes the need to go beyond the standardization of key encapsulation mechanisms in order to address the numerous protocols and deployments of public-key encryption while avoiding pitfalls. Finally, it motivates the critical need for research in anonymous credentials and blind signatures at the core of numerous deployments and standardization efforts aimed at providing privacy-preserving trust signals

Communication-Efficient Proactive MPC for Dynamic Groups with Dishonest Majorities

International audienceSecure multiparty computation (MPC) has recently been increasingly adopted to secure cryptographic keys in enterprises, cloud infrastructure, and cryptocurrency and blockchain-related settings such as wallets and exchanges. Using MPC in blockchains and other distributed systems highlights the need to consider dynamic settings. In such dynamic settings, parties, and potentially even parameters of underlying secret sharing and corruption tolerance thresholds of sub-protocols, may change over the lifetime of the protocol. In particular, stronger threat models-in which mobile adversaries control a changing set of parties (up to t out of n involved parties at any instant), and may eventually corrupt all n parties over the course of a protocol's execution-are becoming increasingly important for such real world deployments; secure protocols designed for such models are known as Proactive MPC (PMPC). In this work, we construct the first efficient PMPC protocol for dynamic groups (where the set of parties changes over time) secure against a dishonest majority of parties. Our PMPC protocol only requires O(n 2) (amortized) communication per secret, compared to existing PMPC protocols that require O(n 4) and only consider static groups with dishonest majorities. At the core of our PMPC protocol is a new efficient technique to perform multiplication of secret shared data (shared using a bivariate scheme) with O(n √ n) communication with security against a dishonest majority without requiring pre-computation. We also develop a new efficient bivariate batched proactive secret sharing (PSS) protocol for dishonest majorities, which may be of independent interest. This protocol enables multiple dealers to contribute different secrets that are efficiently shared together in one batch; previous batched PSS schemes required all secrets to come from a single dealer

Batch Fully Homomorphic Encryption over the Integers

We extend the fully homomorphic encryption scheme over the integers of van Dijk et al. (DGHV) to batch fully homomorphic encryption, i.e. to a scheme that supports encrypting and homomorphically processing a vector of plaintext bits as a single ciphertext. Our variant remains semantically secure under the (error-free) approximate GCD problem. We also show how to perform arbitrary permutations on the underlying plaintext vector given the ciphertext and the public key. Our scheme offers competitive performance: we describe an implementation of the fully homomorphic evaluation of AES encryption, with an amortized cost of about 12 minutes per AES ciphertext on a standard desktop computer; this is comparable to the timings presented by Gentry et al. at Crypto 2012 for their implementation of a Ring-LWE based fully homomorphic encryption scheme

Security Analysis of Signature Schemes with Key Blinding

Digital signatures are fundamental components of public key cryptography. They allow a signer to generate verifiable and unforgeable proofs---signatures---over arbitrary messages with a private key, and allow recipients to verify the proofs against the corresponding and expected public key. These properties are used in practice for a variety of use cases, ranging from identity or data authenticity to non-repudiation. Unsurprisingly, signature schemes are widely used in security protocols deployed on the Internet today. In recent years, some protocols have extended the basic syntax of signature schemes to support key blinding, a.k.a., key randomization. Roughly speaking, key blinding is the process by which a private signing key or public verification key is blinded (randomized) to hide information about the key pair. This is generally done for privacy reasons and has found applications in Tor and Privacy Pass. Recently, Denis, Eaton, Lepoint, and Wood proposed a technical specification for signature schemes with key blinding in an IETF draft. In this work, we analyze the constructions in this emerging specification. We demonstrate that the constructions provided satisfy the desired security properties for signature schemes with key blinding. We experimentally evaluate the constructions and find that they introduce a very reasonable 2-3x performance overhead compared to the base signature scheme. Our results complement the ongoing standardization efforts for this primitive

Publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata bit

We present a new construction for publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata. This primitive enables an issuer to generate an anonymous authentication token for a user while embedding a single private metadata bit. The token can be publicly verified, while the value of the private metadata is only accessible to the party holding the secret issuing key and remains hidden to any other party, even to the user. The security properties of this primitive also include unforgeability, which guarantees that only the issuer can generate new valid tokens, and unlinkability that guarantees that tokens issued with the same private metadata bit are indistinguishable. Our anonymous tokens scheme builds on the top of blind Schnorr signatures. We analyze its security in the algebraic group model and prove its security under the modified ROS assumption, one-more discrete logarithm, and decisional Diffie-Hellman assumptions

Optimization of Bootstrapping in Circuits

In 2009, Gentry proposed the first Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) scheme, an extremely powerful cryptographic primitive that enables to perform computations, i.e., to evaluate circuits, on encrypted data without decrypting them first. This has many applications, in particular in cloud computing. In all currently known FHE schemes, encryptions are associated to some (non-negative integer) noise level, and at each evaluation of an AND gate, the noise level increases. This is problematic because decryption can only work if the noise level stays below some maximum level $L$ at every gate of the circuit. To ensure that property, it is possible to perform an operation called _bootstrapping_ to reduce the noise level. However, bootstrapping is time-consuming and has been identified as a critical operation. This motivates a new problem in discrete optimization, that of choosing where in the circuit to perform bootstrapping operations so as to control the noise level; the goal is to minimize the number of bootstrappings in circuits. In this paper, we formally define the _bootstrap problem_, we design a polynomial-time $L$-approximation algorithm using a novel method of rounding of a linear program, and we show a matching hardness result: $(L-\epsilon)$-inapproximability for any $\epsilon>0$

Anonymous Tokens with Private Metadata Bit

We present a cryptographic construction for anonymous tokens with private metadata bit, called PMBTokens. This primitive enables an issuer to provide a user with a lightweight, single-use anonymous trust token that can embed a single private bit, which is accessible only to the party who holds the secret authority key and is private with respect to anyone else. Our construction generalizes and extends the functionality of Privacy Pass (PETS’18) with this private metadata bit capability. It is based on the DDH and CTDH assumptions in the random oracle model and provides unforgeability, unlinkability, and privacy for the metadata bit. Both Privacy Pass and PMBTokens rely on non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZKs). We present new techniques to remove the need for NIZKs, while still achieving unlinkability. We implement our constructions and we report their efficiency costs

Private Join and Compute from PIR with Default

The private join and compute (PJC) functionality enables secure computation over data distributed across different databases, which is a functionality with a wide range of applications, many of which address settings where the input databases are of significantly different sizes. We introduce the notion of private information retrieval (PIR) with default, which enables two-party PJC functionalities in a way that hides the size of the intersection of the two databases and incurs sublinear communication cost in the size of the bigger database. We provide two constructions for this functionality, one of which requires offline linear communication, which can be amortized across queries, and one that provides sublinear cost for each query but relies on more computationally expensive tools. We construct inner-product PJC, which has applications to ads conversion measurement and contact tracing, relying on an extension of PIR with default. We evaluate the efficiency of our constructions, which can enable $\mathbf{2^{12}}$ PIR with default lookups on a database of size $\mathbf{2^{30}}$ (or inner-product PJC on databases with such sizes) with the communication of $\mathbf{945}$MB, which costs less than $\mathbf{\$0.04}$ for the client and $\mathbf{\$5.22}$ for the server

Stream ciphers: A Practical Solution for Efficient Homomorphic-Ciphertext Compression

International audienceIn typical applications of homomorphic encryption, the first step consists for Alice to encrypt some plaintext m under Bob’s public key pk and to send the ciphertext c = HEpk(m) to some third-party evaluator Charlie. This paper specifically considers that first step, i.e. the problem of transmitting c as efficiently as possible from Alice to Charlie. As previously noted, a form of compression is achieved using hybrid encryption. Given a symmetric encryption scheme E, Alice picks a random key k and sends a much smaller ciphertext c′ = (HEpk(k), Ek(m)) that Charlie decompresses homomorphically into the original c using a decryption circuit CE−1 .In this paper, we revisit that paradigm in light of its concrete implemen- tation constraints; in particular E is chosen to be an additive IV-based stream cipher. We investigate the performances offered in this context by Trivium, which belongs to the eSTREAM portfolio, and we also pro- pose a variant with 128-bit security: Kreyvium. We show that Trivium, whose security has been firmly established for over a decade, and the new variant Kreyvium have an excellent performance

On the (in)security of ROS

We present an algorithm solving the ROS (Random inhomogeneities in a Overdetermined Solvable system of linear equations) problem in polynomial time for l > log p dimensions. Our algorithm can be combined with Wagner’s attack, and leads to a sub-exponential solution for any dimension l with best complexity known so far. When concurrent executions are allowed, our algorithm leads to practical attacks against unforgeability of blind signature schemes such as Schnorr and Okamoto--Schnorr blind signatures, threshold signatures such as GJKR and the original version of FROST, multisignatures such as CoSI and the two-round version of MuSig, partially blind signatures such as Abe-Okamoto, and conditional blind signatures such as ZGP17. Schemes for e-cash (such as Brands\u27 signature) and anonymous credentials (such as Anonymous Credentials Light) inspired from the above are also affected