International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Ring signatures enable a signer to sign a message on behalf of a group anonymously, without revealing her identity. Similarly, threshold ring signatures allow several signers to sign the same message on behalf of a group; while the combined signature reveals that some threshold t of group members signed the message, it does not leak anything else about the signers’ identities. Anonymity is a central feature in threshold ring signature applications, such as whistleblowing, e-voting and privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies: it is often crucial for signers to remain anonymous even from their fellow signers. When the generation of a signature requires interaction, this is diffcult to achieve. There exist threshold ring signatures with non-interactive signing — where signers locally produce partial signatures which can then be aggregated — but a limitation of existing threshold ring signature constructions is that all of the signers must agree on the group on whose behalf they are signing, which implicitly assumes some coordination amongst them. The need to agree on a group before generating a signature also prevents others — from outside that group — from endorsing a message by adding their signature to the statement post-factum. We overcome this limitation by introducing extendability for ring signatures, same-message linkable ring signatures, and threshold ring signatures. Extendability allows an untrusted third party to take a signature, and extend it by enlarging the anonymity set to a larger set. In the extendable threshold ring signature, two signatures on the same message which have been extended to the same anonymity set can then be combined into one signature with a higher threshold. This enhances signers’ anonymity, and enables new signers to anonymously support a statement already made by others. For each of those primitives, we formalize the syntax and provide a meaningful security model which includes different flavors of anonymous extendability. In addition, we present concrete realizations of each primitive and formally prove their security relying on signatures of knowledge and the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. We also describe a generic transformation to obtain extendable threshold ring signatures from same-message-linkable extendable ring signatures. Finally, we implement and benchmark our constructions.

We advance the state-of-the art for zero-knowledge commit-and-prove SNARKs (CP-SNARKs). CP-SNARKs are an important class of SNARKs which, using commitments as ``glue'', allow to efficiently combine proof systems---e.g., general-purpose SNARKs (an efficient way to prove statements about circuits) and $\Sigma$-protocols (an efficient way to prove statements about group operations). Thus, CP-SNARKs allow to efficiently provide zero-knowledge proofs for composite statements such as $h=H(g^{x})$ for some hash-function $H$. Our main contribution is providing the first construction of CP-SNARKs where the proof size is succinct in the number of commitments. We achieve our result by providing a general technique to compile Algebraic Holographic Proofs (AHP) (an underlying abstraction used in many modern SNARKs) with special ``decomposition'' properties into an efficient CP-SNARK. We then show that some of the most efficient AHP constructions---Marlin, PLONK, and Sonic---satisfy our compilation requirements. Our resulting SNARKs achieve universal and updatable reference strings, which are highly desirable features as they greatly reduce the trust needed in the SNARK setup phase.

The FHEW cryptosystem introduced the idea that an arbitrary function can be evaluated within the bootstrap procedure as a table lookup. The faster bootstraps of TFHE strengthened this approach, which was later named Functional Bootstrap (Boura et al., CSCML’19). From then on, little effort has been made towards defining efficient ways of using it to implement functions with high precision. In this paper, we introduce two methods to combine multiple functional bootstraps to accelerate the evaluation of reasonably large look-up tables and highly precise functions. We thoroughly analyze and experimentally validate the error propagation in both methods, as well as in the functional bootstrap itself. We leverage the multi-value bootstrap of Carpov et al. (CT-RSA’19) to accelerate (single) lookup table evaluation, and we improve it by lowering the complexity of its error variance growth from quadratic to linear in the value of the output base. Compared to previous literature using TFHE’s functional bootstrap, our methods are up to 2.49 times faster than the lookup table evaluation of Carpov et al. (CT-RSA’19) and up to 3.19 times faster than the 32-bit integer comparison of Bourse et al. (CT-RSA’20). Compared to works using logic gates, we achieved speedups of up to 6.98, 8.74, and 3.55 times over 8-bit implementations of the functions ReLU, Addition, and Maximum, respectively.

We study masking countermeasures for side-channel attacks against signature schemes constructed from the MPC-in-the-head paradigm, specifically when the MPC protocol uses preprocessing. This class of signature schemes includes Picnic, an alternate candidate in the third round of the NIST post-quantum standardization project. The only previously known approach to masking MPC-in-the-head signatures suffers from interoperability issues and increased signature sizes. Further, we present a new attack to demonstrate that known countermeasures are not sufficient when the MPC protocol uses a preprocessing phase, as in Picnic3.We overcome these challenges by showing how to mask the underlying zero-knowledge proof system due to Katz–Kolesnikov–Wang (CCS 2018) for any masking order, and by formally proving that our approach meets the standard security notions of non-interference for masking countermeasures. As a case study, we apply our masking technique to Picnic. We then implement different masked versions of Picnic signing providing first order protection for the ARM Cortex M4 platform, and quantify the overhead of these different masking approaches. We carefully analyze the side-channel risk of hashing operations, and give optimizations that reduce the CPU cost of protecting hashing in Picnic by a factor of five. The performance penalties of the masking countermeasures ranged from 1.8 to 5.5, depending on the degree of masking applied to hash function invocations.

Deterministic generation of per-signature randomness has been a widely accepted solution to mitigate the catastrophic risk of randomness failure in Fiat--Shamir type signature schemes. However, recent studies have practically demonstrated that such de-randomized schemes, including EdDSA, are vulnerable to differential fault attacks, which enable adversaries to recover the entire secret signing key, by artificially provoking randomness reuse or corrupting computation in other ways. In order to balance concerns of both randomness failures and the threat of fault injection, some signature designs are advocating a ``hedged'' derivation of the per-signature randomness, by hashing the secret key, message, and a nonce. Despite the growing popularity of the hedged paradigm in practical signature schemes, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no attempt to formally analyze the fault resilience of hedged signatures. We perform a formal security analysis of the fault resilience of signature schemes constructed via the Fiat--Shamir transform. We propose a model to characterize bit-tampering fault attacks, and investigate their impact across different steps of the signing operation. We prove that, for some types of faults, attacks are mitigated by the hedged paradigm, while attacks remain possible for others. As concrete case studies, we then apply our results to XEdDSA, a hedged version of EdDSA used in the Signal messaging protocol, and to Picnic2, a hedged Fiat--Shamir signature scheme in Round 2 of the NIST Post-Quantum standardization process.

The PRESENT block cipher was one of the first hardware-oriented proposals for implementation in extremely resource-constrained environments. Its design is based on 4-bit S-boxes and a 64-bit permutation, a far from optimal choice to achieve good performance in software. As a result, most software implementations require large lookup tables in order to meet efficiency goals. In this paper, we describe a new portable and efficient software implementation of PRESENT, fully protected against timing attacks. Our implementation uses a novel decomposition of the permutation layer, and bitsliced computation of the S-boxes using optimized Boolean formulas, not requiring lookup tables. The implementations are evaluated in embedded ARM CPUs ranging from microcontrollers to full-featured processors equipped with vector instructions. Timings for our software implementation show a significant performance improvement compared to the numbers from the FELICS benchmarking framework. In particular, encrypting 128 bits using CTR mode takes about 2100 cycles on a Cortex-M3, improving on the best Assembly implementation in FELICS by a factor of 8. Additionally, we present the fastest masked implementation of PRESENT for protection against timing and other side-channel attacks in the scenario we consider, improving on related work by 15%. Hence, we conclude that PRESENT can be remarkably efficient in software if implemented with our techniques, and even compete with a software implementation of AES in terms of latency while offering a much smaller code footprint.