The chaining lemma and its application

We present a new information-theoretic result which we call the Chaining Lemma. It considers a so-called “chain” of random variables, defined by a source distribution X(0)with high min-entropy and a number (say, t in total) of arbitrary functions (T1,…, Tt) which are applied in succession to that source to generate the chain (Formula presented). Intuitively, the Chaining Lemma guarantees that, if the chain is not too long, then either (i) the entire chain is “highly random”, in that every variable has high min-entropy; or (ii) it is possible to find a point j (1 ≤ j ≤ t) in the chain such that, conditioned on the end of the chain i.e. (Formula presented), the preceding part (Formula presented) remains highly random. We think this is an interesting information-theoretic result which is intuitive but nevertheless requires rigorous case-analysis to prove. We believe that the above lemma will find applications in cryptography. We give an example of this, namely we show an application of the lemma to protect essentially any cryptographic scheme against memory tampering attacks. We allow several tampering requests, the tampering functions can be arbitrary, however, they must be chosen from a bounded size set of functions that is fixed a prior

Privacy-preserving automated exposure notification

Contact tracing is an essential component of public health efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases. Automating parts of the contact tracing process has the potential to significantly increase its scalability and efficacy, but also raises an array of privacy concerns, including the risk of unwanted identification of infected individuals and clandestine collection of privacy-invasive data about the population at large. In this paper, we focus on automating the exposure notification part of contact tracing, which notifies people who have been in close proximity to infected people of their potential exposure to the virus. This work is among the first to focus on the privacy aspects of automated exposure notification. We introduce two privacy-preserving exposure notification schemes based on proximity detection. Both systems are decentralized - no central entity has access to sensitive data. The first scheme is simple and highly efficient, and provides strong privacy for non-diagnosed individuals and some privacy for diagnosed individuals. The second scheme provides enhanced privacy guarantees for diagnosed individuals, at some cost to efficiency. We provide formal definitions for automated exposure notification and its security, and we prove the security of our constructions with respect to these definitions.First author draf

Leakage-resilient non-malleable codes

A recent trend in cryptography is to construct cryptosystems that are secure against physical attacks. Such attacks are usually divided into two classes: the \emph{leakage} attacks in which the adversary obtains some information about the internal state of the machine, and the \emph{tampering} attacks where the adversary can modify this state. One of the popular tools used to provide tamper-resistance are the \emph{non-malleable codes} introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS 2010). These codes can be defined in several variants, but arguably the most natural of them are the information-theoretically secure codes in the k-split-state model (the most desired case being k=2). Such codes were constucted recently by Aggarwal et al.~(STOC 2014). Unfortunately, unlike the earlier, computationally-secure constructions (Liu and Lysyanskaya, CRYPTO 2012) these codes are not known to be resilient to leakage. This is unsatisfactory, since in practice one always aims at providing resilience against both leakage and tampering (especially considering tampering without leakage is problematic, since the leakage attacks are usually much easier to perform than the tampering attacks). In this paper we close this gap by showing a non-malleable code in the $2$-split state model that is secure against leaking almost a $1/12$-th fraction of the bits from the codeword (in the bounded-leakage model). This is achieved via a generic transformation that takes as input any non-malleable code (\Enc,\Dec) in the $2$-split state model, and constructs out of it another non-malleable code (\Enc',\Dec') in the $2$-split state model that is additionally leakage-resilient. The rate of (\Enc',\Dec') is linear in the rate of (\Enc,\Dec). Our construction requires that \Dec is \emph{symmetric}, i.e., for all $x, y$, it is the case that \Dec(x,y) = \Dec(y,x), but this property holds for all currently known information-theoretically secure codes in the $2$-split state model. In particular, we can apply our transformation to the code of Aggarwal et al., obtaining the first leakage-resilient code secure in the split-state model. Our transformation can be applied to other codes (in particular it can also be applied to a recent code of Aggarwal, Dodis, Kazana and Obremski constructed in the work subsequent to this one)

Probabilistically Checkable Arguments

We give a general reduction that converts any public-coin interactive proof into a one-round (two-message) argument. The reduction relies on a method proposed by Aiello et al. [ABOR00], of using a Private-Information-Retrieval (PIR) scheme to collapse rounds in interactive protocols. For example, the reduction implies that for any security parameter t, the membership in any language in PSPACE can be proved by a one-round (two-message) argument of size poly(n, t), which is sound for malicious provers of size 2 t. (Note that the honest prover in this construction runs in exponential time, since she has to prove membership in PSPACE, but we can choose t such that 2 t is significantly larger than the running time of the honest prover). A probabilistically checkable argument (PCA) is a relaxation of the notion of probabilistically checkable proof (PCP). It is defined analogously to PCP, except that the soundness property is required to hold only computationally. We consider the model where the argument is of one round (two-message), where the verifier’s message depends only on his (private) randomness. We show that for membership in many NP languages, there are PCAs (with efficient honest provers) that are of size polynomial in the size of the witness. This compares to the best PCP

Linear Algebra with Sub-linear Zero-Knowledge Arguments

Abstract. We suggest practical sub-linear size zero-knowledge arguments for statements involving linear algebra. Given commitments to matrices over a finite field, we give a sub-linear size zero-knowledge argument that one committed matrix is the product of two other committed matrices. We also offer a sub-linear size zero-knowledge argument for a committed matrix being equal to the Hadamard product of two other committed matrices. Armed with these tools we can give many other sub-linear size zero-knowledge arguments, for instance for a committed matrix being upper or lower triangular, a committed matrix being the inverse of another committed matrix, or a committed matrix being a permutation of another committed matrix. A special case of what can be proved using our techniques is the satisfiability of an arithmetic circuit wit

Non-Interactive Verifiable Computing: Outsourcing Computation to Untrusted Workers

Verifiable Computation enables a computationally weak client to “outsource ” the computation of a function F on various inputs x1,...,xk to one or more workers. The workers return the result of the function evaluation, e.g., yi = F(xi), as well as a proof that the computation of F was carried out correctly on the given value xi. The verification of the proof should require substantially less computational effort than computing F(xi) from scratch. We present a protocol that allows the worker to return a computationally-sound, non-interactive proof that can be verified in O(m) time, where m is the bit-length of the output of F. The protocol requires a one-time pre-processing stage by the client which takes O(|C|) time, where C is the smallest Boolean circuit computing F. Our scheme also provides input and output privacy for the client, meaning that the workers do not learn any information about the xi or yi values.

Improved delegation of computation using fully homomorphic encryption

Following Gennaro, Gentry, and Parno (Cryptology ePrint Archive 2009/547), we use fully homomorphic encryption to design improved schemes for delegating computation. In such schemes, a delegator outsources the computation of a function F on many, dynamically chosen inputs xi to a worker in such a way that it is infeasible for the worker to make the delegator accept a result other than F (xi). The “online stage ” of the Gennaro et al. scheme is very efficient: the parties exchange two messages, the delegator runs in time poly(log T), and the worker runs in time poly(T), where T is the time complexity of F. However, the “offline stage ” (which depends on the function F but not the inputs to be delegated) is inefficient: the delegator runs in time poly(T) and generates a public key of length poly(T) that needs to be accessed by the worker during the online stage. Our first construction eliminates the large public key from the Gennaro et al. scheme. The delegator still invests poly(T) time in the offline stage, but does not need to communicate or publish anything. Our second construction reduces the work of the delegator in the offline stage to poly(log T) at the price of a 4-message (offline) interaction with a poly(T)-time worke