International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Non-interactive publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) schemes enables (re-)sharing of secrets in a decentralized setting in the presence of malicious parties. A recently proposed application of PVSS schemes is to enable permissionless proof-of-stake blockchains to ``keep a secret" via a sequence of committees that share that secret. These committees can use the secret to produce signatures on the blockchain's behalf, or to disclose hidden data conditioned on consensus that some event has occurred. That application needs very large committees with thousands of parties, so the PVSS scheme in use must be efficient enough to support such large committees, in terms of both computation and communication. Yet, previous PVSS schemes have large proofs and/or require many exponentiations over large groups. We present a non-interactive PVSS scheme in which the underlying encryption scheme is based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem. While lattice-based encryption schemes are very fast, they often have long ciphertexts and public keys. We use the following two techniques to conserve bandwidth: First, we adapt the Peikert-Vaikuntanathan-Waters (PVW) encryption scheme to the multi-receiver setting, so that the bulk of the parties' keys is a common random string. The resulting scheme yields $\Omega(1)$ amortized plaintext/ciphertext rate, where concretely the rate is $\approx 1/60$ for 100 parties, $\approx 1/8$ for 1000 parties, and approaching 1/2 as the number of parties grows. Second, we use bulletproofs over a DL-group of order about 256 bits to get compact proofs of correct encryption/decryption of shares. Alternating between the lattice and DL settings is relatively painless, as we equate the LWE modulus with the order of the group. We also show how to reduce the the number of exponentiations in the bulletproofs by applying Johnson-Lindenstrauss-like compression to reduce the dimension of the vectors whose properties must be verified. An implementation of our PVSS with 1000 parties showed that it is feasible even at that size, and should remain so even with one or two order of magnitude increase in the committee size.

This talk is about the past, present and future of fully homomorphic encryption. I will try to convince you that, over the last decade (or so), FHE has made an amazing transformation from proof of concept to a tool that is actually practical and usable. I will review a few homomorphic encryptions schemes (including non-fully homomorphic ones) to demonstrate commonalities in how we start from a homomorphism, and use masking techniques to defeat common attacks (especially linear algebra) on the homomorphism, to obtain semantically secure homomorphic encryption. And, finally, I will try to delineate the search space for fundamentally new FHE schemes that fall outside of the current framework.

The inherent difficulty of maintaining stateful environments over long periods of time gave rise to the paradigm of serverless computing, where mostly-stateless components are deployed on demand to handle computation tasks, and are teared down once their task is complete. Serverless architecture could offer the added benefit of improved resistance to targeted denial-of-service attacks, by hiding from the attacker the physical machines involved in the protocol until after they complete their work. Realizing such protection, however, requires that the protocol only uses stateless parties, where each party sends only one message and never needs to speaks again. Perhaps the most famous example of this style of protocols is the Nakamoto consensus protocol used in Bitcoin: A peer can win the right to produce the next block by running a local lottery (mining), all while staying covert. Once the right has been won, it is executed by sending a single message. After that, the physical entity never needs to send more messages. We refer to this as the You-Only-Speak-Once (YOSO) property, and initiate the formal study of it within a new model that we call the YOSO model. Our model is centered around the notion of roles, which are stateless parties that can only send a single message. Crucially, our modelling separates the protocol design, that only uses roles, from the role-assignment mechanism, that assigns roles to actual physical entities. This separation enables studying these two aspects separately, and our YOSO model in this work only deals with the protocol-design aspect. We describe several techniques for achieving YOSO MPC; both computational and information theoretic. Our protocols are synchronous and provide guaranteed output delivery (which is important for application domains such as blockchains), assuming honest majority of roles in every time step. We describe a practically efficient computationally-secure protocol, as well as a proof-of-concept information theoretically secure protocol.

Private information retrieval (PIR) lets a client retrieve an entry from a database without the server learning which entry was retrieved. Here we study a weaker variant that we call random-index PIR (RPIR), where the retrieved index is an output rather than an input of the protocol, and is chosen at random. RPIR is clearly weaker than PIR, but it suffices for some interesting applications and may be realized more efficiently than full-blown PIR. We report here on two lines of work, both tied to RPIR but otherwise largely unrelated. The first line of work studies RPIR as a primitive on its own. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that RPIR is in fact equivalent to PIR when there are no restrictions on the number of communication rounds. On the other hand, RPIR can be implemented in a “noninteractive” setting (with preprocessing), which is clearly impossible for PIR. For two-server RPIR we show a truly noninteractive solution, offering information-theoretic security without any pre-processing. The other line of work, which was the original motivation for our work, uses RPIR to improve on the recent work of Benhamouda et al. (TCC’20) for maintaining secret values on public blockchains. Their solution depends on a method for selecting many random public keys from a PKI while hiding most of the selected keys from an adversary. However, the method they proposed is vulnerable to a double-dipping attack, limiting its resilience. Here we observe that an RPIR protocol, where the client is implemented via secure MPC, can eliminate that vulnerability. We thus get a secrets-on-blockchain protocol (and more generally large-scale MPC), resilient to any fraction f < 1/2 of corrupted parties, resolving the main open problem left from the work of Benhamouda et al. As the client in this solution is implemented via secure MPC, it really brings home the need to make it as efficient as possible. We thus strive to explore whatever efficiency gains we can get by using RPIR rather than PIR. We achieve more gains by using batch RPIR where multiple indexes are retrieved at once. Lastly, we observe that this application can make do with a weaker security guarantee than full RPIR, and show that this weaker variant can be realized even more efficiently. We discuss one protocol in particular, that may be attractive for practical implementations.

Blockchains are gaining traction and acceptance, not just for cryptocurrencies, but increasingly as an architecture for distributed computing. In this work we seek solutions that allow a \emph{public} blockchain to act as a trusted long-term repository of secret information: Our goal is to deposit a secret with the blockchain, specify how it is to be used (e.g., the conditions under which it is released), and have the blockchain keep the secret and use it only in the specified manner (e.g., release only it once the conditions are met). This simple functionality enables many powerful applications, including signing statements on behalf of the blockchain, using it as the control plane for a storage system, performing decentralized program-obfuscation-as-a-service, and many more. Using proactive secret sharing techniques, we present a scalable solution for implementing this functionality on a public blockchain, in the presence of a mobile adversary controlling a small minority of the participants. The main challenge is that, on the one hand, scalability requires that we use small committees to represent the entire system, but, on the other hand, a mobile adversary may be able to corrupt the entire committee if it is small. For this reason, existing proactive secret sharing solutions are either non-scalable or insecure in our setting. We approach this challenge via "player replaceability", which ensures the committee is anonymous until after it performs its actions. Our main technical contribution is a system that allows sharing and re-sharing of secrets among the members of small dynamic committees, without knowing who they are until after they perform their actions and erase their secrets. Our solution handles a fully mobile adversary corrupting roughly 1/4 of the participants at any time, and is scalable in terms of both the number of parties and the number of time intervals.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is often viewed as impractical, both in communication and computation. Here we provide an additively homomorphic encryption scheme based on (ring) LWE with nearly optimal rate ($$1-\epsilon $$ for any $$\epsilon >0$$). Moreover, we describe how to compress many Gentry-Sahai-Waters (GSW) ciphertexts (e.g., ciphertexts that may have come from a homomorphic evaluation) into (fewer) high-rate ciphertexts.Using our high-rate HE scheme, we are able for the first time to describe a single-server private information retrieval (PIR) scheme with sufficiently low computational overhead so as to be practical for large databases. Single-server PIR inherently requires the server to perform at least one bit operation per database bit, and we describe a rate-(4/9) scheme with computation which is not so much worse than this inherent lower bound. In fact it is probably less than whole-database AES encryption – specifically about 2.3 mod-q multiplication per database byte, where q is about 50 to 60 bits. Asymptotically, the computational overhead of our PIR scheme is $$\tilde{O}(\log \log \mathsf {\lambda }+ \log \log \log N)$$, where $$\mathsf {\lambda }$$ is the security parameter and N is the number of database files, which are assumed to be sufficiently large.

We describe a somewhat homomorphic GSW-like encryption scheme, natively encrypting matrices rather than just single elements. This scheme offers much better performance than existing homomorphic encryption schemes for evaluating encrypted (nondeterministic) finite automata (NFAs). Differently from GSW, we do not know how to reduce the security of this scheme from LWE, instead we reduce it from a stronger assumption, that can be thought of as an inhomogeneous variant of the NTRU assumption. This assumption (that we term iNTRU) may be useful and interesting in its own right, and we examine a few of its properties. We also examine methods to encode regular expressions as NFAs, and in particular explore a new optimization problem, motivated by our application to encrypted NFA evaluation. In this problem, we seek to minimize the number of states in an NFA for a given expression, subject to the constraint on the ambiguity of the NFA.

We give a framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures (SAS) that unifies and simplifies prior work and leads to new results. The framework is based on ideal ciphers over large domains, which have recently been shown to be realizable in the random oracle model. The basic idea is to replace the random oracle in the full-domain-hash signature scheme with an ideal cipher. Each signer in sequence applies the ideal cipher, keyed by the message, to the output of the previous signer, and then inverts the trapdoor permutation on the result. We obtain different variants of the scheme by varying additional keying material in the ideal cipher and making different assumptions on the trapdoor permutation. In particular, we obtain the first scheme with lazy verification and signature size independent of the number of signers that does not rely on bilinear pairings.Since existing proofs that ideal ciphers over large domains can be realized in the random oracle model are lossy, our schemes do not currently permit practical instantiation parameters at a reasonable security level, and thus we view our contribution as mainly conceptual. However, we are optimistic tighter proofs will be found, at least in our specific application.