Efficient non-malleable codes and key derivation for poly-size tampering circuits

Non-malleable codes, defined by Dziembowski, Pietrzak, and Wichs (ICS '10), provide roughly the following guarantee: if a codeword c encoding some message x is tampered to c' = f(c) such that c' ≠ c , then the tampered message x' contained in c' reveals no information about x. The non-malleable codes have applications to immunizing cryptosystems against tampering attacks and related-key attacks. One cannot have an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all efficient tampering functions f. However, in this paper we show 'the next best thing': for any polynomial bound s given a-priori, there is an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all tampering functions f computable by a circuit of size s. More generally, for any family of tampering functions F of size F ≤ 2s , there is an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all f in F . The rate of our codes, defined as the ratio of message to codeword size, approaches 1. Our results are information-theoretic and our main proof technique relies on a careful probabilistic method argument using limited independence. As a result, we get an efficiently samplable family of efficient codes, such that a random member of the family is non-malleable with overwhelming probability. Alternatively, we can view the result as providing an efficient non-malleable code in the 'common reference string' model. We also introduce a new notion of non-malleable key derivation, which uses randomness x to derive a secret key y = h(x) in such a way that, even if x is tampered to a different value x' = f(x) , the derived key y' = h(x') does not reveal any information about y. Our results for non-malleable key derivation are analogous to those for non-malleable codes. As a useful tool in our analysis, we rely on the notion of 'leakage-resilient storage' of Davì, Dziembowski, and Venturi (SCN '10), and, as a result of independent interest, we also significantly improve on the parameters of such schemes

Efficient and Tight Oblivious Transfer from PKE with Tight Multi-User Security

We propose an efficient oblivious transfer in the random oracle model based on public key encryption with pseudorandom public keys. The construction is as efficient as the state of art though it has a significant advantage. It has a tight security reduction to the multi-user security of the underlying public key encryption. In previous constructions, the security reduction has a multiplicative loss that amounts in at least the amount of adversarial random oracle queries. When considering this loss for a secure parameter choice, the underlying public key encryption or elliptic curve would require a significantly higher security level which would decrease the overall efficiency. Our OT construction can be instantiated from a wide range of assumptions such as DDH, LWE, or codes based assumptions as well as many public key encryption schemes such as the NIST PQC finalists. Since tight multi-user security is a very natural requirement which many public key encryption schemes suffice, many public key encryption schemes can be straightforwardly plugged in our construction without the need of reevaluating or adapting any parameter choices

Obfuscation without the Vulnerabilities of Multilinear Maps

Indistinguishability obfuscation is a central primitive in cryptography. Security of existing multilinear maps constructions on which current obfuscation candidates are based is poorly understood. In a few words, multilinear maps allow for checking if an arbitrary bounded degree polynomial on hidden values evaluates to zero or not. All known attacks on multilinear maps depend on the information revealed on computations that result in encodings of zero. This includes the recent annihilation attacks of Miles, Sahai and Zhandry [EPRINT 2016/147] on obfuscation candidates as a special case. Building on a modification of the Garg, Gentry and Halevi [EUROCRYPT 2013] multilinear maps (GGH for short), we present a new obfuscation candidate that is resilient to these vulnerabilities. Specifically, in our construction the results of all computations yielding a zero provably hide all the secret system parameters. This is the first obfuscation candidate that weakens the security needed from the zero-test. Formally, we prove security of our construction in a weakening of the idealized graded encoding model that accounts for all known vulnerabilities on GGH maps

Block-Wise Non-Malleable Codes

Non-malleable codes, introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak, and Wichs (ICS\u2710) provide the guarantee that if a codeword c of a message m, is modified by a tampering function f to c\u27, then c\u27 either decodes to m or to "something unrelated" to m. In recent literature, a lot of focus has been on explicitly constructing such codes against a large and natural class of tampering functions such as split-state model in which the tampering function operates on different parts of the codeword independently. In this work, we consider a stronger adversarial model called block-wise tampering model, in which we allow tampering to depend on more than one block: if a codeword consists of two blocks c = (c1, c2), then the first tampering function f1 could produce a tampered part c\u27_1 = f1(c1) and the second tampering function f2 could produce c\u27_2 = f2(c1, c2) depending on both c2 and c1. The notion similarly extends to multiple blocks where tampering of block ci could happen with the knowledge of all cj for j <= i. We argue this is a natural notion where, for example, the blocks are sent one by one and the adversary must send the tampered block before it gets the next block. A little thought reveals that it is impossible to construct such codes that are non-malleable (in the standard sense) against such a powerful adversary: indeed, upon receiving the last block, an adversary could decode the entire codeword and then can tamper depending on the message. In light of this impossibility, we consider a natural relaxation called non-malleable codes with replacement which requires the adversary to produce not only related but also a valid codeword in order to succeed. Unfortunately, we show that even this relaxed definition is not achievable in the information-theoretic setting (i.e., when the tampering functions can be unbounded) which implies that we must turn our attention towards computationally bounded adversaries. As our main result, we show how to construct a block-wise non-malleable code (BNMC) from sub-exponentially hard one-way permutations. We provide an interesting connection between BNMC and non-malleable commitments. We show that any BNMC can be converted into a nonmalleable (w.r.t. opening) commitment scheme. Our techniques, quite surprisingly, give rise to a non-malleable commitment scheme (secure against so-called synchronizing adversaries), in which only the committer sends messages. We believe this result to be of independent interest. In the other direction, we show that any non-interactive non-malleable (w.r.t. opening) commitment can be used to construct BNMC only with 2 blocks. Unfortunately, such commitment scheme exists only under highly non-standard assumptions (adaptive one-way functions) and hence can not substitute our main construction

Amortized Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption

Threshold cryptography enables cryptographic operations while keeping the secret keys distributed at all times. Agrawal et al. (CCS\u2718) propose a framework for Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption (DiSE). They introduce a new notion of Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption (TSE), in that encryption and decryption are performed by interacting with a threshold number of servers. However, the necessity for interaction on each invocation limits performance when encrypting large datasets, incurring heavy computation and communication on the servers. This paper proposes a new approach to resolve this problem by introducing a new notion called Amortized Threshold Symmetric-key Encryption (ATSE), which allows a privileged client (with access to sensitive data) to encrypt a large group of messages using a single interaction. Importantly, our notion requires a client to interact for decrypting each ciphertext, thus providing the same security (privacy and authenticity) guarantee as DiSE with respect to a not-so-privileged client. We construct an ATSE scheme based on a new primitive that we formalize as flexible threshold key-derivation (FTKD), which allows parties to interactively derive pseudorandom keys in different modes in a threshold manner. Our FTKD construction, which uses bilinear pairings, is based on a distributed variant of left/right constrained PRF by Boneh and Waters (Asiacrypt\u2713). Despite our use of bilinear maps, our scheme achieves significant speed-ups due to the amortized interaction. Our experiments show 40x lower latency and 30x more throughput in some settings

On the Round Complexity of Fully Secure Solitary MPC with Honest Majority

We study the problem of secure multiparty computation for functionalities where only one party receives the output, to which we refer as solitary MPC. Recently, Halevi et al. (TCC 2019) studied fully secure (i.e., with guaranteed output delivery) solitary MPC and showed impossibility of such protocols for certain functionalities when there is no honest majority among the parties. In this work, we study fully secure solitary MPC in the honest majority setting and focus on its round complexity. We note that a broadcast channel or public key infrastructure (PKI) setup is necessary for an $n$-party protocol against malicious adversaries corrupting up to $t$ parties where $n/3 \leq t < n/2$. Therefore, we study the following settings and ask the question: Can fully secure solitary MPC be achieved in fewer rounds than fully secure standard MPC in which all parties receive the output? - When there is a broadcast channel and no PKI: * We start with a negative answer to the above question. In particular, we show that the exact round complexity of fully secure solitary MPC is 3, which is the same as fully secure standard MPC. * We then study the minimal number of broadcast rounds needed in the design of round-optimal fully secure solitary MPC. We show that both the first and second rounds of broadcast are necessary when $2 \lceil n/5 \rceil \leq t < n/2$, whereas pairwise-private channels suffice in the last round. Notably, this result also applies to fully secure standard MPC in which all parties receive the output. - When there is a PKI and no broadcast channel, nevertheless, we show more positive results: * We show an upper bound of 5 rounds for any honest majority. This is superior to the super-constant lower bound for fully secure standard MPC in the exact same setting. * We complement this by showing a lower bound of 4 rounds when $3\lceil n/7 \rceil \leq t < n/2$. * For the special case of $t=1,n=3$, when the output receiving party does not have an input to the function, we show an upper bound of $2$ rounds, which is optimal. When the output receiving party has an input to the function, we show a lower bound of 3, which matches an upper bound from prior work. * For the special case of $t=2,n=5$, we show a lower bound of 3 rounds (an upper bound of 4 follows from prior work). All our results also assume the existence of a common reference string (CRS) and pairwise-private channels. Our upper bounds use a decentralized threshold fully homomorphic encryption (dTFHE) scheme (which can be built from the learning with errors (LWE) assumption) as the main building block

Game-Set-MATCH: Using Mobile Devices for Seamless External-Facing Biometric Matching

We use biometrics like fingerprints and facial images to identify ourselves to our mobile devices and log on to applications everyday. Such authentication is internal-facing: we provide measurement on the same device where the template is stored. If our personal devices could participate in external-facing authentication too, where biometric measurement is captured by a nearby external sensor, then we could also enjoy a frictionless authentication experience in a variety of physical spaces like grocery stores, convention centers, ATMs, etc. The open setting of a physical space brings forth important privacy concerns though. We design a suite of secure protocols for external-facing authentication based on the cosine similarity metric which provide privacy for both user templates stored on their devices and the biometric measurement captured by external sensors in this open setting. The protocols provide different levels of security, ranging from passive security with some leakage to active security with no leakage at all. With the help of new packing techniques and zero-knowledge proofs for Paillier encryption - and careful protocol design, our protocols achieve very practical performance numbers. For templates of length 256 with elements of size 16 bits each, our fastest protocol takes merely 0.024 seconds to compute a match, but even the slowest one takes no more than 0.12 seconds. The communication overhead of our protocols is very small too. The passive and actively secure protocols (with some leakage) need to exchange just 16.5KB and 27.8KB of data, respectively. The first message is designed to be reusable and, if sent in advance, would cut the overhead down to just 0.5KB and 0.8KB, respectively

DiSE: Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption

Threshold cryptography provides a mechanism for protecting secret keys by sharing them among multiple parties, who then jointly perform cryptographic operations. An attacker who corrupts upto a threshold number of parties cannot recover the secrets or violate security. Prior works in this space have mostly focused on definitions and constructions for public-key cryptography and digital signatures, and thus do not capture the security concerns and efficiency challenges of symmetric-key based applications which commonly use long-term (unprotected) master keys to protect data at rest, authenticate clients on enterprise networks, and secure data and payments on IoT devices. We put forth the first formal treatment for distributed symmetric-key encryption, proposing new notions of correctness, privacy and authenticity in presence of malicious attackers. We provide strong and intuitive game-based definitions that are easy to understand and yield efficient constructions. We propose a generic construction of threshold authenticated encryption based on any distributed pseudorandom function (DPRF). When instantiated with the two different DPRF constructions proposed by Naor, Pinkas and Reingold (Eurocrypt 1999) and our enhanced versions, we obtain several efficient constructions meeting different security definitions. We implement these variants and provide extensive performance comparisons. Our most efficient instantiation uses only symmetric-key primitives and achieves a throughput of upto 1 million encryptions/decryptions per seconds, or alternatively a sub-millisecond latency with upto 18 participating parties

Bounded Tamper Resilience: How to go beyond the Algebraic Barrier

Related key attacks (RKAs) are powerful cryptanalytic attacks where an adversary can change the secret key and observe the effect of such changes at the output. The state of the art in RKA security protects against an a-priori unbounded number of certain algebraic induced key relations, e.g., affine functions or polynomials of bounded degree. In this work, we show that it is possible to go beyond the algebraic barrier and achieve security against arbitrary key relations, by restricting the number of tampering queries the adversary is allowed to ask for. The latter restriction is necessary in case of arbitrary key relations, as otherwise a generic attack of Gennaro et al. (TCC 2004) shows how to recover the key of almost any cryptographic primitive. We describe our contributions in more detail below. 1) We show that standard ID and signature schemes constructed from a large class of $\Sigma$-protocols (including the Okamoto scheme, for instance) are secure even if the adversary can arbitrarily tamper with the prover’s state a bounded number of times and obtain some bounded amount of leakage. Interestingly, for the Okamoto scheme we can allow also independent tampering with the public parameters. 2) We show a bounded tamper and leakage resilient CCA secure public key cryptosystem based on the DDH assumption. We first define a weaker CPA-like security notion that we can instantiate based on DDH, and then we give a general compiler that yields CCA-security with tamper and leakage resilience. This requires a public tamper-proof common reference string. 3) Finally, we explain how to boost bounded tampering and leakage resilience (as in 1. and 2. above) to continuous tampering and leakage resilience, in the so-called floppy model where each user has a personal hardware token (containing leak- and tamper-free information) which can be used to refresh the secret key. We believe that bounded tampering is a meaningful and interesting alternative to avoid known impossibility results and can provide important insights into the security of existing standard cryptographic schemes

Reusable Two-Round MPC from DDH

We present a reusable two-round multi-party computation (MPC) protocol from the Decisional Diffie Hellman assumption (DDH). In particular, we show how to upgrade any secure two-round MPC protocol to allow reusability of its first message across multiple computations, using Homomorphic Secret Sharing (HSS) and pseudorandom functions in NC1— each of which can be instantiated from DDH. In our construction, if the underlying two-round MPC protocol is secure against semi-honest adversaries (in the plain model) then so is our reusable two-round MPC protocol. Similarly, if the underlying two-round MPC protocol is secure against malicious adversaries (in the common random/reference string model) then so is our reusable two-round MPC protocol. Previously, such reusable two-round MPC protocols were only known under assumptions on lattices. At a technical level, we show how to upgrade any two-round MPC protocol to a first message succinct two-round MPC protocol, where the first message of the protocol is generated independently of the computed circuit (though it is not reusable). This step uses homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) and low-depth pseudorandom functions. Next, we show a generic transformation that upgrades any first message succinct two-round MPC to allow for reusability of its first message