In non-zero inner product encryption (NIPE) schemes, ciphertexts and secret keys are associated with vectors and decryption is possible whenever the inner product of these vectors does not equal zero. So far, much effort on constructing bilinear map-based NIPE schemes have been made and this has lead to many efficient schemes. However, the constructions of NIPE schemes without bilinear maps are much less investigated. The only known other NIPE constructions are based on lattices, however, they are all highly inefficient due to the need of converting inner product operations into circuits or branching programs.To remedy our rather poor understanding regarding NIPE schemes without bilinear maps, we provide two methods for constructing NIPE schemes: a direct construction from lattices and a generic construction from schemes for inner products (LinFE). For our first direct construction, it highly departs from the traditional lattice-based constructions and we rely heavily on new tools concerning Gaussian measures over multi-dimensional lattices to prove security. For our second generic construction, using the recent constructions of LinFE schemes as building blocks, we obtain the first NIPE constructions based on the DDH and DCR assumptions. In particular, we obtain the first NIPE schemes without bilinear maps or lattices.

Revocable identity-based encryption (RIBE) is an extension of IBE that supports a key revocation mechanism, which is an indispensable feature for practical cryptographic schemes. Due to this extra feature, RIBE is often required to satisfy a strong security notion unique to the revocation setting called decryption key exposure resistance (DKER). Additionally, hierarchal IBE (HIBE) is another orthogonal extension of IBE that supports key delegation functionalities allowing for scalable deployments of cryptographic schemes. So far, R(H)IBE constructions with DKER are only known from bilinear maps, where all constructions rely heavily on the so-called key re-randomization property to achieve the DKER and/or hierarchal feature. Since lattice-based schemes seem to be inherently ill-fit with the key re-randomization property, no construction of lattice-based R(H)IBE schemes with DKER are known.In this paper, we propose the first lattice-based RHIBE scheme with DKER without relying on the key re-randomization property, departing from all the previously known methods. We start our work by providing a generic construction of RIBE schemes with DKER, which uses as building blocks any two-level standard HIBE scheme and (weak) RIBE scheme without DKER. Based on previous lattice-based RIBE constructions without DKER, our result implies the first lattice-based RIBE scheme with DKER. Then, building on top of our generic construction, we construct the first lattice-based RHIBE scheme with DKER, by further exploiting the algebraic structure of lattices. To this end, we prepare a new tool called the level conversion keys, which enables us to achieve the hierarchal feature without relying on the key re-randomization property.

In a non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proof, a prover can non-interactively convince a verifier of a statement without revealing any additional information. Thus far, numerous constructions of NIZKs have been provided in the common reference string (CRS) model (CRS-NIZK) from various assumptions, however, it still remains a long standing open problem to construct them from tools such as pairing-free groups or lattices. Recently, Kim and Wu (CRYPTO’18) made great progress regarding this problem and constructed the first lattice-based NIZK in a relaxed model called NIZKs in the preprocessing model (PP-NIZKs). In this model, there is a trusted statement-independent preprocessing phase where secret information are generated for the prover and verifier. Depending on whether those secret information can be made public, PP-NIZK captures CRS-NIZK, designated-verifier NIZK (DV-NIZK), and designated-prover NIZK (DP-NIZK) as special cases. It was left as an open problem by Kim and Wu whether we can construct such NIZKs from weak paring-free group assumptions such as DDH. As a further matter, all constructions of NIZKs from Diffie-Hellman (DH) type assumptions (regardless of whether it is over a paring-free or paring group) require the proof size to have a multiplicative-overhead $$|C| \cdot \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$|C|·poly(κ), where |C| is the size of the circuit that computes the $$\mathbf {NP}$$NP relation.In this work, we make progress of constructing (DV, DP, PP)-NIZKs with varying flavors from DH-type assumptions. Our results are summarized as follows:DV-NIZKs for $$\mathbf {NP}$$NP from the CDH assumption over pairing-free groups. This is the first construction of such NIZKs on pairing-free groups and resolves the open problem posed by Kim and Wu (CRYPTO’18).DP-NIZKs for $$\mathbf {NP}$$NP with short proof size from a DH-type assumption over pairing groups. Here, the proof size has an additive-overhead $$|C|+\mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$|C|+poly(κ) rather then an multiplicative-overhead $$|C| \cdot \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$|C|·poly(κ). This is the first construction of such NIZKs (including CRS-NIZKs) that does not rely on the LWE assumption, fully-homomorphic encryption, indistinguishability obfuscation, or non-falsifiable assumptions.PP-NIZK for $$\mathbf {NP}$$NP with short proof size from the DDH assumption over pairing-free groups. This is the first PP-NIZK that achieves a short proof size from a weak and static DH-type assumption such as DDH. Similarly to the above DP-NIZK, the proof size is $$|C|+\mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$|C|+poly(κ). This too serves as a solution to the open problem posed by Kim and Wu (CRYPTO’18). Along the way, we construct two new homomorphic authentication (HomAuth) schemes which may be of independent interest.

In a group signature scheme, users can anonymously sign messages on behalf of the group they belong to, yet it is possible to trace the signer when needed. Since the first proposal of lattice-based group signatures in the random oracle model by Gordon, Katz, and Vaikuntanathan (ASIACRYPT 2010), the realization of them in the standard model from lattices has attracted much research interest, however, it has remained unsolved. In this paper, we make progress on this problem by giving the first such construction. Our schemes satisfy CCA-selfless anonymity and full traceability, which are the standard security requirements for group signatures proposed by Bellare, Micciancio, and Warinschi (EUROCRYPT 2003) with a slight relaxation in the anonymity requirement suggested by Camenisch and Groth (SCN 2004). We emphasize that even with this relaxed anonymity requirement, all previous group signature constructions rely on random oracles or NIZKs, where currently NIZKs are not known to be implied from lattice-based assumptions. We propose two constructions that provide tradeoffs regarding the security assumption and efficiency:Our first construction is proven secure assuming the standard LWE and the SIS assumption. The sizes of the public parameters and the signatures grow linearly in the number of users in the system.Our second construction is proven secure assuming the standard LWE and the subexponential hardness of the SIS problem. The sizes of the public parameters and the signatures are independent of the number of users in the system. Technically, we obtain the above schemes by combining a secret key encryption scheme with additional properties and a special type of attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme, thus bypassing the utilization of NIZKs. More specifically, we introduce the notion of indexed ABS, which is a relaxation of standard ABS. The above two schemes are obtained by instantiating the indexed ABS with different constructions. One is a direct construction we propose and the other is based on previous work.

A non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) protocol allows a prover to non-interactively convince a verifier of the truth of the statement without leaking any other information. In this study, we explore shorter NIZK proofs for all $$\mathbf{NP }$$ languages. Our primary interest is NIZK proofs from falsifiable pairing/pairing-free group-based assumptions. Thus far, NIZKs in the common reference string model (CRS-NIZKs) for $$\mathbf{NP }$$ based on falsifiable pairing-based assumptions all require a proof size at least as large as $$O(|C| \kappa )$$, where C is a circuit computing the $$\mathbf{NP }$$ relation and $$\kappa $$ is the security parameter. This holds true even for the weaker designated-verifier NIZKs (DV-NIZKs). Notably, constructing a (CRS, DV)-NIZK with proof size achieving an additive-overhead $$O(|C|) + \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$, rather than a multiplicative-overhead $$|C| \cdot \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$, based on any falsifiable pairing-based assumptions is an open problem.In this work, we present various techniques for constructing NIZKs with compact proofs, i.e., proofs smaller than $$O(|C|) + \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$, and make progress regarding the above situation. Our result is summarized below. We construct CRS-NIZK for all $$\mathbf{NP }$$ with proof size $$|C| +\mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$ from a (non-static) falsifiable Diffie-Hellman (DH) type assumption over pairing groups. This is the first CRS-NIZK to achieve a compact proof without relying on either lattice-based assumptions or non-falsifiable assumptions. Moreover, a variant of our CRS-NIZK satisfies universal composability (UC) in the erasure-free adaptive setting. Although it is limited to $$\mathbf{NP }$$ relations in $$\mathbf{NC }^1$$, the proof size is $$|w| \cdot \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$ where w is the witness, and in particular, it matches the state-of-the-art UC-NIZK proposed by Cohen, shelat, and Wichs (CRYPTO’19) based on lattices.We construct (multi-theorem) DV-NIZKs for $$\mathbf{NP }$$ with proof size $$|C|+\mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$ from the computational DH assumption over pairing-free groups. This is the first DV-NIZK that achieves a compact proof from a standard DH type assumption. Moreover, if we further assume the $$\mathbf{NP }$$ relation to be computable in $$\mathbf{NC }^1$$ and assume hardness of a (non-static) falsifiable DH type assumption over pairing-free groups, the proof size can be made as small as $$|w| + \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$. Another related but independent issue is that all (CRS, DV)-NIZKs require the running time of the prover to be at least $$|C|\cdot \mathsf {poly}(\kappa )$$. Considering that there exists NIZKs with efficient verifiers whose running time is strictly smaller than |C|, it is an interesting problem whether we can construct prover-efficient NIZKs. To this end, we construct prover-efficient CRS-NIZKs for $$\mathbf{NP }$$ with compact proof through a generic construction using laconic functional evaluation schemes (Quach, Wee, and Wichs (FOCS’18)). This is the first NIZK in any model where the running time of the prover is strictly smaller than the time it takes to compute the circuit C computing the $$\mathbf{NP }$$ relation.Finally, perhaps of an independent interest, we formalize the notion of homomorphic equivocal commitments, which we use as building blocks to obtain the first result, and show how to construct them from pairing-based assumptions.

Attribute-based signature (ABS), originally introduced by Maji et al. (CT-RSA’11), represents an essential mechanism to allow for fine-grained authentication. A user associated with an attribute x can sign w.r.t. a given public policy C only if his attribute satisfies C, i.e., $$C(x)=1$$ C(x)=1. So far, much effort on constructing bilinear map-based ABS schemes have been made, where the state-of-the-art scheme of Sakai et al. (PKC’16) supports the very wide class of unbounded circuits as policies. However, construction of ABS schemes without bilinear maps are less investigated, where it was not until recently that Tsabary (TCC’17) showed a lattice-based ABS scheme supporting bounded circuits as policies, at the cost of weakening the security requirement.In this work, we affirmatively close the gap between ABS schemes based on bilinear maps and lattices by constructing the first lattice-based ABS scheme for unbounded circuits in the random oracle model. We start our work by providing a generic construction of ABS schemes for unbounded-circuits in the rand om oracle model, which in turn implies that one-way functions are sufficient to construct ABS schemes. To prove security, we formalize and prove a generalization of the Forking Lemma, which we call “general multi-forking lemma with oracle access”, capturing the situation where the simulator is interacting with some algorithms he cannot rewind, and also covering many features of the recent lattice-based ZKPs. This, in fact, was a formalization lacking in many existing anonymous signatures from lattices so far (e.g., group signatures). Therefore, this formalization is believed to be of independent interest. Finally, we provide a concrete instantiation of our generic ABS construction from lattices by introducing a new $$\varSigma $$ Σ-protocol, that highly departs from the previously known techniques, for proving possession of a valid signature of the lattice-based signature scheme of Boyen (PKC’10).

In (STOC, 2008), Gentry, Peikert, and Vaikuntanathan proposed the first identity-based encryption (GPV-IBE) scheme based on a post-quantum assumption, namely, the learning with errors (LWE) assumption. Since their proof was only made in the random oracle model (ROM) instead of the quantum random oracle model (QROM), it remained unclear whether the scheme was truly post-quantum or not. In (CRYPTO, 2012), Zhandry developed new techniques to be used in the QROM and proved security of GPV-IBE in the QROM, hence answering in the affirmative that GPV-IBE is indeed post-quantum. However, since the general technique developed by Zhandry incurred a large reduction loss, there was a wide gap between the concrete efficiency and security level provided by GPV-IBE in the ROM and QROM. Furthermore, regardless of being in the ROM or QROM, GPV-IBE is not known to have a tight reduction in the multi-challenge setting. Considering that in the real-world an adversary can obtain many ciphertexts, it is desirable to have a security proof that does not degrade with the number of challenge ciphertext.In this paper, we provide a much tighter proof for the GPV-IBE in the QROM in the single-challenge setting. In addition, we also show that a slight variant of the GPV-IBE has an almost tight reduction in the multi-challenge setting both in the ROM and QROM, where the reduction loss is independent of the number of challenge ciphertext. Our proof departs from the traditional partitioning technique and resembles the approach used in the public key encryption scheme of Cramer and Shoup (CRYPTO, 1998). Our proof strategy allows the reduction algorithm to program the random oracle the same way for all identities and naturally fits the QROM setting where an adversary may query a superposition of all identities in one random oracle query. Notably, our proofs are much simpler than the one by Zhandry and conceptually much easier to follow for cryptographers not familiar with quantum computation. Although at a high level, the techniques used for the single and multi-challenge setting are similar, the technical details are quite different. For the multi-challenge setting, we rely on the Katz-Wang technique (CCS, 2003) to overcome some obstacles regarding the leftover hash lemma.

Attribute-based signature (ABS) schemes are advanced signature schemes that simultaneously provide fine-grained authentication while protecting privacy of the signer. Previously known expressive ABS schemes support either the class of deterministic finite automata and circuits from standard assumptions or Turing machines from the existence of indistinguishability obfuscations.In this paper, we propose the first ABS scheme for a very general policy class, all deterministic Turing machines, from a standard assumption, namely, the Symmetric External Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumption. We also propose the first ABS scheme that allows nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) to be used as policies. Although the expressiveness of NFAs are more restricted than Turing machines, this is the first scheme that supports nondeterministic computations as policies.Our main idea lies in abstracting ABS constructions and presenting the concept of history of computations; this allows a signer to prove possession of a policy that accepts the string associated to a message in zero-knowledge while also hiding the policy, regardless of the computational model being used. With this abstraction in hand, we are able to construct ABS for Turing machines and NFAs using a surprisingly weak NIZK proof system. Essentially we only require a NIZK proof system for proving that a (normal) signature is valid. Such a NIZK proof system together with a base signature scheme are, in turn, possible from bilinear groups under the SXDH assumption, and hence so are our ABS schemes.