Theory of Cryptography

Reducibility between different cryptographic primitives is a fundamental problem in modern cryptography. As one of the primitives, traitor tracing systems help content distributors recover the identities of users that collaborated in the pirate construction by tracing pirate decryption boxes. We present the first negative result on designing efficient traitor tracing systems via black-box constructions from symmetric cryptographic primitives, e.g. one-way functions. More specifically, we show that there is no secure traitor tracing scheme in the random oracle model, such that \(\ell _k\cdot \ell _c^2<\widetilde{\varOmega }(n)\), where \(\ell _k\) is the length of user key, \(\ell _c\) is the length of ciphertext and n is the number of users, under the assumption that the scheme does not access the oracle to generate private user keys. To our best knowledge, all the existing cryptographic schemes (not limited to traitor tracing systems) via black-box constructions from one-way functions satisfy this assumption. Thus, our negative results indicate that most of the standard black-box reductions in cryptography cannot help construct a more efficient traitor tracing system.

We prove our results by extending the connection between traitor tracing systems and differentially private database sanitizers to the setting with random oracle access. After that, we prove the lower bound for traitor tracing schemes by constructing a differentially private sanitizer that only queries the random oracle polynomially many times. In order to reduce the query complexity of the sanitizer, we prove a large deviation bound for decision forests, which might be of independent interest.

Zero knowledge proof systems have been widely studied in cryptography. In the statistical setting, two classes of proof systems studied are Statistical Zero Knowledge (SZK) and Non-Interactive Statistical Zero Knowledge (NISZK), where the difference is that in NISZK only very limited communication is allowed between the verifier and the prover. It is an open problem whether these two classes are in fact equal. In this paper, we rule out efficient black box reductions between SZK and NISZK.

We achieve this by studying algorithms which can reverse the entropy of a function. The problem of estimating the entropy of a circuit is complete for NISZK. Hence, reversing the entropy of a function is equivalent to a black box reduction of NISZK to its complement, which is known to be equivalent to a black box reduction of SZK to NISZK [Goldreich et al. CRYPTO 1999]. We show that any such black box algorithm incurs an exponential loss of parameters, and hence cannot be implemented efficiently.

Position based cryptography (PBC), proposed in the seminal work of Chandran, Goyal, Moriarty, and Ostrovsky (SIAM J. Computing, 2014), aims at constructing cryptographic schemes in which the identity of the user is his geographic position. Chandran et al. construct PBC schemes for secure positioning and position-based key agreement in the bounded-storage model (Maurer, J. Cryptology, 1992). Apart from bounded memory, their security proofs need a strong additional restriction on the power of the adversary: he cannot compute joint functions of his inputs. Removing this assumption is left as an open problem.

We show that an answer to this question would resolve a long standing open problem in multiparty communication complexity: finding a function that is hard to compute with low communication complexity in the simultaneous message model, but easy to compute in the fully adaptive model.

On a more positive side: we also show some implications in the other direction, i.e.: we prove that lower bounds on the communication complexity of certain multiparty problems imply existence of PBC primitives. Using this result we then show two attractive ways to “bypass” our hardness result: the first uses the random oracle model, the second weakens the locality requirement in the bounded-storage model to online computability. The random oracle construction is arguably one of the simplest proposed so far in this area. Our results indicate that constructing improved provably secure protocols for PBC requires a better understanding of multiparty communication complexity. This is yet another example where negative results in one area (in our case: lower bounds in multiparty communication complexity) can be used to construct secure cryptographic schemes.

Realizing indistinguishablility obfuscation (IO) based on well understood computational assumptions is an important open problem. Recently, realizing functional encryption (FE) has emerged as a promising direction towards that goal. This is because: (1) compact single-key FE (where the functional secret-key is of length double the ciphertext length) is known to imply IO [Anath and Jain, CRYPTO 2015; Bitansky and Vaikuntanathan, FOCS 2015] and (2) several strong variants of single-key FE are known based on various standard computation assumptions.

In this work, we study when FE can be used for obtaining IO. We show any single-key FE for function families with “short” enough outputs (specifically the output is less than ciphertext length by a value at least \(\omega (n + \mathrm {\kappa })\), where n is the message length and \(\mathrm {\kappa }\) is the security parameter) is insufficient for IO even when non-black-box use of the underlying FE is allowed to some degree. Namely, our impossibility result holds even if we are allowed to plant FE sub-routines as gates inside the circuits for which functional secret-keys are issued (which is exactly how the known FE to IO constructions work).

Complementing our negative result, we show that our condition of “short” enough is almost tight. More specifically, we show that any compact single-key FE with functional secret-key output length strictly larger than ciphertext length is sufficient for IO. Furthermore, we show that non-black-box use of the underlying FE is necessary for such a construction, by ruling out any fully black-box construction of IO from FE even with arbitrary long output.

Lin and Tessaro (ePrint 2017) recently proposed indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) and functional encryption (FE) candidates and proved their security based on two assumptions: a standard assumption on bilinear maps and a non-standard assumption on “Goldreich-like” pseudorandom generators. In a nutshell, their second assumption requires the existence of pseudorandom generators \(G:[q]^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^m\) for some \(\mathsf {poly}(n)\)-size alphabet q, each of whose output bits depend on at most two in put alphabet symbols, and which achieve sufficiently large stretch. We show polynomial-time attacks against such generators, invalidating the security of the IO and FE candidates. Our attack uses tools from the literature on two-source extractors (Chor and Goldreich, SICOMP 1988) and efficient refutation of random 2-XOR instances (Charikar and Wirth, FOCS 2004).

There is some evidence that indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) requires either exponentially many assumptions or (sub)exponentially hard assumptions, and indeed, all known ways of building obfuscation suffer one of these two limitations. As such, any application built from iO suffers from these limitations as well. However, for most applications, such limitations do not appear to be inherent to the application, just the approach using iO. Indeed, several recent works have shown how to base applications of iO instead on functional encryption (FE), which can in turn be based on the polynomial hardness of just a few assumptions. However, these constructions are quite complicated and recycle a lot of similar techniques.

We provide a new construction of functional encryption (FE) for circuits in the bounded collusion model. In this model, security of the scheme is guaranteed as long as the number of colluding adversaries can be a-priori bounded by some polynomial Q. Our construction supports arithmetic circuits in contrast to all prior work which support Boolean circuits. The ciphertext of our scheme is sublinear in the circuit size for the circuit class \(\mathsf{NC}_1\); this implies the first construction of arithmetic reusable garbled circuits for \(\mathsf{NC}_1\).

Additionally, our construction achieves several desirable features:

Security of our reusable garbled circuits construction for \(\mathsf{NC_1}\) is based on the Ring Learning With Errors assumption (RLWE), while the bounded collusion construction (with non-succinct ciphertext) may also be based on the standard Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption. To achieve our result, we provide new public key and ciphertext evaluation algorithms. These algorithms are general, and may find application elsewhere.

A constrained pseudorandom function (PRF) is a secure PRF for which one can generate constrained keys that can only be used to evaluate the PRF on a subset of the domain. Constrained PRFs are used widely, most notably in applications of indistinguishability obfuscation (\(i\mathcal {O}\)). In this paper we show how to constrain an invertible PRF (IPF), which is significantly harder. An IPF is a secure injective PRF accompanied by an inversion algorithm. A constrained key for an IPF can only be used to evaluate the IPF on a subset S of the domain, and to invert the IPF on the image of S. We first define the notion of a constrained IPF and then give two main constructions: one for puncturing an IPF and the other for (single-key) circuit constraints. Both constructions rely on recent work on private constrained PRFs. We also show that constrained pseudorandom permutations for many classes of constraints are impossible under our definition.

In a constrained PRF, the owner of the PRF key K can generate constrained keys \(K_f\) that allow anyone to evaluate the PRF on inputs x that satisfy the predicate f (namely, where f(x) is “true”) but reveal no information about the PRF evaluation on the other inputs. A private constrained PRF goes further by requiring that the constrained key \(K_f\) hides the predicate f.

Boneh, Kim and Montgomery (EUROCRYPT 2017) recently presented a construction of private constrained PRF for point function constraints, and Canetti and Chen (EUROCRYPT 2017) presented a completely different construction for more general NC\(^1\) constraints. In this work, we show two constructions of LWE-based constraint-hiding constrained PRFs for general predicates described by polynomial-size circuits.

The two constructions are based on two distinct techniques that we show have further applicability, by constructing weak attribute-hiding predicate encryption schemes. In a nutshell, the first construction imports the technique of modulus switching from the FHE world into the domain of trapdoor extension and homomorphism. The second construction shows how to use the duality between FHE secret-key/randomness and ABE randomness/secret-key to construct a scheme with dual use of the same values for both FHE and ABE purposes.

We introduce two new cryptographic notions in the realm of public and symmetric key encryption.

We construct encryption schemes with deniable and invisible edits for any polynomial-time computable edit function under minimal assumptions: in the public-key setting we require the existence of standard public-key encryption and in the symmetric-key setting require the existence of one-way functions.

The solutions to both problems use common ideas, however there is a significant conceptual difference between deniable edits and invisible edits. Whereas encryption with deniable edits enables a user to modify the meaning of a single ciphertext in hindsight, the goal of encryption with invisible edits is to enable ongoing modifications of multiple ciphertexts.

The Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transformation (CRYPTO 1999 and Journal of Cryptology 2013) turns any weakly secure public-key encryption scheme into a strongly (i.e., \(\mathsf {IND}\text {-}\mathsf {CCA}\)) secure one in the random oracle model. Unfortunately, the FO analysis suffers from several drawbacks, such as a non-tight security reduction, and the need for a perfectly correct scheme. While several alternatives to the FO transformation have been proposed, they have stronger requirements, or do not obtain all desired properties.

In this work, we provide a fine-grained and modular toolkit of transformations for turning weakly secure into strongly secure public-key encryption schemes. All of our transformations are robust against schemes with correctness errors, and their combination leads to several tradeoffs among tightness of the reduction, efficiency, and the required security level of the used encryption scheme. For instance, one variant of the FO transformation constructs an \(\mathsf {IND}\text {-}\mathsf {CCA}\) secure scheme from an \(\mathsf {IND}\text {-}\mathsf {CPA}\) secure one with a tight reduction and very small efficiency overhead. Another variant assumes only an \(\mathsf {OW}\text {-}\mathsf {CPA}\) secure scheme, but leads to an \(\mathsf {IND}\text {-}\mathsf {CCA}\) secure scheme with larger ciphertexts.

We note that we also analyze our transformations in the quantum random oracle model, which yields security guarantees in a post-quantum setting.

Starting with any selectively secure identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme, we give generic constructions of fully secure IBE and selectively secure hierarchical IBE (HIBE) schemes. Our HIBE scheme allows for delegation arbitrarily many times.

We study the security of symmetric encryption schemes in settings with multiple users and realistic adversaries who can adaptively corrupt encryption keys. To avoid confinement to any particular definitional paradigm, we propose a general framework for multi-key security definitions. By appropriate settings of the parameters of the framework, we obtain multi-key variants of many of the existing single-key security notions.

This framework is instrumental in establishing our main results. We show that for all single-key secure encryption schemes satisfying a minimal key uniqueness assumption and almost any instantiation of our general multi-key security notion, any reasonable reduction from the multi-key game to a standard single-key game necessarily incurs a linear loss in the number of keys. We prove this result for all three classical single-key security notions capturing confidentiality, authenticity and the combined authenticated encryption notion.

Argon2i is a data-independent memory hard function that won the password hashing competition. The password hashing algorithm has already been incorporated into several open source crypto libraries such as libsodium. In this paper we analyze the cumulative memory cost of computing Argon2i. On the positive side we provide a lower bound for Argon2i. On the negative side we exhibit an improved attack against Argon2i which demonstrates that our lower bound is nearly tight. In particular, we show that

Cryptographic hash functions have wide applications including password hashing, pricing functions for spam and denial-of-service countermeasures and proof of work in cryptocurrencies. Recent progress on ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) hash engines raise concerns about the security of the above applications. This leads to a growing interest in ASIC resistant hash function and ASIC resistant proof of work schemes, i.e., those that do not give ASICs a huge advantage. The standard approach towards ASIC resistance today is through memory hard functions or memory hard proof of work schemes. However, we observe that the memory hardness approach is an incomplete solution. It only attempts to provide resistance to an ASIC’s area advantage but overlooks the more important energy advantage. In this paper, we propose the notion of bandwidth hard functions to reduce an ASIC’s energy advantage. CPUs cannot compete with ASICs for energy efficiency in computation, but we can rely on memory accesses to reduce an ASIC’s energy advantage because energy costs of memory accesses are comparable for ASICs and CPUs. We propose a model for hardware energy cost that has sound foundations in practice. We then analyze the bandwidth hardness property of ASIC resistant candidates. We find scrypt, Catena-BRG and Balloon are bandwidth hard with suitable parameters. Lastly, we observe that a capacity hard function is not necessarily bandwidth hard, with a stacked double butterfly graph being a counterexample.

Several cryptographic schemes and applications are based on functions that are both reasonably efficient to compute and moderately hard to invert, including client puzzles for Denial-of-Service protection, password protection via salted hashes, or recent proof-of-work blockchain systems. Despite their wide use, a definition of this concept has not yet been distilled and formalized explicitly. Instead, either the applications are proven directly based on the assumptions underlying the function, or some property of the function is proven, but the security of the application is argued only informally. The goal of this work is to provide a (universal) definition that decouples the efforts of designing new moderately hard functions and of building protocols based on them, serving as an interface between the two.

On a technical level, beyond the mentioned definitions, we instantiate the model for four different notions of hardness. We extend the work of Alwen and Serbinenko (STOC 2015) by providing a general tool for proving security for the first notion of memory-hard functions that allows for provably secure applications. The tool allows us to recover all of the graph-theoretic techniques developed for proving security under the older, non-composable, notion of security used by Alwen and Serbinenko. As an application of our definition of moderately hard functions, we prove the security of two different schemes for proofs of effort (PoE). We also formalize and instantiate the concept of a non-interactive proof of effort (niPoE), in which the proof is not bound to a particular communication context but rather any bit-string chosen by the prover.

Blockchain technology has the potential to disrupt how cryptography is done. In this work, we propose to view blockchains as an “enabler”, much like indistinguishability obfuscation [5, 23, 46] or one-way functions, for building a variety of cryptographic systems. Our contributions in this work are as follows:

Protocols for secure two-party computation enable a pair of mutually distrustful parties to carry out a joint computation of their private inputs without revealing anything but the output. One important security property that has been considered is that of fairness which guarantees that if one party learns the output then so does the other. In the case of two-party computation, fairness is not always possible, and in particular two parties cannot fairly toss a coin (Cleve, 1986). Despite this, it is actually possible to securely compute many two-party functions with fairness (Gordon et al., 2008 and follow-up work). However, all known two-party protocols that achieve fairness have the unique property that the effective input of the corrupted party is determined at an arbitrary point in the protocol. This is in stark contrast to almost all other known protocols that have an explicit fixed round at which the inputs are committed.

In this paper, we ask whether or not the property of not having an input committal round is inherent for achieving fairness for two parties. In order to do so, we revisit the definition of security of Micali and Rogaway (Technical report, 1992), that explicitly requires the existence of such a committal round. We adapt the definition of Canetti in the two-party setting to incorporate the spirit of a committal round, and show that under such a definition, it is impossible to achieve fairness for any non-constant two-party function. This result deepens our understanding as to the type of protocol construction that is needed for achieving fairness. In addition, our result discovers a fundamental difference between the definition of security of Micali and Rogaway and that of Canetti (Journal of Cryptology, 2000) which has become the standard today. Specifically, many functions can be securely computed with fairness under the definition of Canetti but no non-constant function can be securely computed with fairness under the definition of Micali and Rogaway.

In a sense, a two-party protocol achieves fairness if the output from the computation is obtained simultaneously by both parties. A seminal result by Cleve (STOC 1986) states that fairness is impossible, in general. Surprisingly, Gordon et al. (JACM 2011) showed that there exist interesting functions that are computable with fairness. The two results give rise to a distinction between fair functions and unfair ones. The question of characterizing these functions has been studied in a sequence of works leading to the complete characterization of (symmetric) Boolean functions by Asharov et al. (TCC 2015). In this paper, we design new fully secure protocols for functions that were previously unknown to be fair. To this end, our main technical contribution is a generic construction of a fully secure (fair) protocol, starting with a constant-round protocol satisfying limited security requirements. Our construction introduces new conceptual tools for the analysis of fairness that apply to arbitrary (constant-domain) functions. While the characterization remains open, we believe that our results lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of fairness.

We revisit the exact round complexity of secure two-party computation. While four rounds are known to be sufficient for securely computing general functions that provide output to one party [Katz-Ostrovsky, CRYPTO’04], Goldreich-Krawczyk [SIAM J. Computing’96] proved that three rounds are insufficient for this task w.r.t. black-box simulation.

In this work, we study the feasibility of secure computation in three rounds using non-black-box simulation. Our main result is a three-round two-party computation protocol for general functions against adversaries with auxiliary inputs of a priori bounded size. This result relies on a new two round input-extraction protocol based on succinct randomized encodings.

We also provide a partial answer to the question of achieving security against non-uniform adversaries. Assuming sub-exponentially secure iO and one-way functions, we rule out three-round protocols that achieve polynomial simulation-based security against the output party and exponential indistinguishability-based security against the other party.

We construct a 4-round multi-party computation protocol in the plain model for any functionality, secure against a malicious adversary. Our protocol relies on the sub-exponential hardness of the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem with slightly super-polynomial noise ratio, and on the existence of adaptively secure commitments based on standard assumptions. Our round complexity matches a lower bound of Garg et al. (EUROCRYPT ’16), and outperforms the state of the art of 6 rounds based on similar assumptions to ours, and 5 rounds relying on indistinguishability obfuscation and other strong assumptions.

In this work we continue the study on the round complexity of secure two-party computation with black-box simulation.

Katz and Ostrovsky in CRYPTO 2004 showed a 5 (optimal) round construction assuming trapdoor permutations for the general case where both players receive the output. They also proved that their result is round optimal. This lower bound has been recently revisited by Garg et al. in Eurocrypt 2016 where a 4 (optimal) round protocol is showed assuming a simultaneous message exchange channel. Unfortunately there is no instantiation of the protocol of Garg et al. under standard polynomial-time hardness assumptions.

In this work we close the above gap by showing a 4 (optimal) round construction for secure two-party computation in the simultaneous message channel model with black-box simulation, assuming trapdoor permutations against polynomial-time adversaries.

Our construction for secure two-party computation relies on a special 4-round protocol for oblivious transfer that nicely composes with other protocols in parallel. We define and construct such special oblivious transfer protocol from trapdoor permutations. This building block is clearly interesting on its own. Our construction also makes use of a recent advance on non-malleability: a delayed-input 4-round non-malleable zero knowledge argument.

In this work we start from the following two results in the state-of-the art:

We improve the state-of-the art on NMZK and MPCT by presenting the following two results:

Both \(\varPi _{\mathsf {NMZK}}\) and \(\varPi _{\mathsf {MPCT}}\) make use of a special proof of knowledge that offers additional security guarantees when played in parallel with other protocols. The new technique behind such a proof of knowledge is an additional contribution of this work and is of independent interest.

In this paper, we study the round complexity of concurrently secure multi-party computation (MPC) with super-polynomial simulation (SPS) in the plain model. In the plain model, there are known explicit attacks that show that concurrently secure MPC with polynomial simulation is impossible to achieve; SPS security is the most widely studied model for concurrently secure MPC in the plain model. We obtain the following results:

Prior to our work, to the best of our knowledge, concurrent MPC with SPS security required roughly 20 rounds, although we are not aware of any work that even gave an approximation of the constant round complexity sufficient for the multi-party setting. We also improve over the previous best round complexity for the two-party setting, where 5 rounds were needed (Garg, Kiyoshima, and Pandey, Eurocrypt 2017).

We present a unified framework for obtaining black-box constructions of Universal Composable (UC) protocol in trusted setup models. Our result is analogous to the unified framework of Lin, Pass, and Venkitasubramaniam [STOC’09, Asiacrypt’12] that, however, only yields non-black-box constructions of UC protocols. Our unified framework shows that to obtain black-box constructions of UC protocols, it suffices to implement a special purpose commitment scheme that is, in particular, concurrently extractable using a given trusted setup. Using our framework, we improve black-box constructions in the common reference string and tamper-proof hardware token models by weakening the underlying computational and setup assumptions.