International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Naccache-Stern (NS) knapsack cryptosystem is an original yet little-known public-key encryption scheme. In this scheme, the ciphertext is obtained by multiplying public-keys indexed by the message bits modulo a prime $p$. The cleartext is recovered by factoring the ciphertext raised to a secret power modulo $p$. NS encryption requires a multiplication per two plaintext bits on the average. Decryption is roughly as costly as an RSA decryption. However, NS features a bandwidth sublinear in $\log p$, namely $\log p/\log \log p$. As an example, for a $2048$-bit prime $p$, NS encryption features a 233-bit bandwidth for a 59-kilobyte public key size. This paper presents new NS variants achieving bandwidths {\sl linear} in $\log p$. As linear bandwidth claims a public-key of size $\log^3 p/\log \log p$, we recommend to combine our scheme with other bandwidth optimization techniques presented here. For a $2048$-bit prime $p$, we obtain figures such as 169-bit plaintext for a 10-kilobyte public key, 255-bit plaintext for a 20-kilobyte public key or a 781-bit plaintext for a 512-kilobyte public key. Encryption and decryption remain unaffected by our optimizations: As an example, the 781-bit variant requires 152 multiplications per encryption.

At Eurocrypt'03, Goh and Jarecki showed that, contrary to other signature schemes in the discrete-log setting, the EDL signature scheme has a tight security reduction, namely to the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) problem, in the Random Oracle (RO) model. They also remarked that EDL can be turned into an off-line/on-line signature scheme using the technique of Shamir and Tauman, based on chameleon hash functions. In this paper, we propose a new signature scheme that also has a tight security reduction to CDH but whose resulting signatures are smaller than EDL signatures. Further, similarly to the Schnorr signature scheme (but contrary to EDL), our signature is naturally efficient on-line: no additional trick is needed for the off-line phase and the verification process is unchanged. For example, in elliptic curve groups, our scheme results in a 25% improvement on the state-of-the-art discrete-log based schemes, with the same security level. This represents to date the most efficient scheme of any signature scheme with a tight security reduction in the discrete-log setting.

In this paper we describe a simple protocol for securely delegating elliptic-curve pairings. A computationally limited device (typically a smart-card) will delegate the computation of the pairing e(A,B) to a more powerful device (for example a PC), in such a way that: 1. the powerful device learns nothing about the points being paired (A and B), nor about the pairing?s result e(A,B), 2. and the limited device is able to detect when the powerful device is cheating. We also describe more efficient variants of our protocol when one of the points or both are already known, and further efficiency gains when constant points are used.

In a famous paper of Crypto'01, Boneh and Franklin proposed the first identity-based encryption scheme (IBE), around fifteen years after the concept was introduced by Shamir. Their scheme security (more precisely, the notion of resistance against an IND-ID-CCA attacker) relies in the random oracle model. However, the reduction is far from being tight, and notably depends on the number of extractions queries. In this paper, we present an efficient modification to the Boneh-Franklin scheme that provides a tight reduction. Our scheme is basically an IBE under two keys, one of which is (randomly) detained by the recipient. It can be viewed as a continuation of an idea introduced by Katz and Wang; we will however show how our construction improves this last scheme. Our scheme features a tight reduction to the list bilinear Diffie-Hellman (LBDH) problem, which can be itself reduced tightly either to the gap bilinear Diffie-Hellman (GBDH) or the decisional bilinear Diffie-Hellman (DBDH) problems. Furthermore, for a relaxed notion of tightness (called weak-tightness) that we introduce and discuss in our paper, we show that there is a weakly tight reduction from our scheme to the computational bilinear Diffie-Hellman (CBDH) problem. Our scheme is very efficient, as one can precompute most of the quantity involved in the encryption process. Furthermore, the ciphertext size is very short: for proposed parameters, they are |M|+330 bits long.

This paper presents the theoretical blueprint of a new secure token called the Externalized Microprocessor (XmP). Unlike a smart-card, the XmP contains no ROM at all. While exporting all the device's executable code to potentially untrustworthy terminals poses formidable security problems, the advantages of ROM-less secure tokens are numerous: chip masking time disappears, bug patching becomes a mere terminal update and hence does not imply any roll-out of cards in the field. Most importantly, code size ceases to be a limiting factor. This is particularly significant given the steady increase in on-board software complexity. After describing the machine's instruction-set we will introduce two XmP variants. The first design is a public-key oriented architecture which relies on a new RSA screening scheme and features a relatively low communication overhead at the cost of computational complexity, whereas the second variant is secret-key oriented and relies on simple MACs and hash functions but requires more communication. For each of these two designs, we propose two protocols that execute and dynamically authenticate arbitrary programs. We also provide a strong security model for these protocols and prove their security under appropriate complexity assumptions.

This paper introduces simple methods to convert a cryptographic algorithm into an algorithm protected against simple side-channel attacks. Contrary to previously known solutions, the proposed techniques are not at the expense of the execution time. Moreover, they are generic and apply to virtually any algorithm. In particular, we present several novel exponentiation algorithms, namely a protected square-and-multiply algorithm, its right-to-left counterpart, and several protected sliding-window algorithms. We also illustrate our methodology applied to point multiplication on elliptic curves. All these algorithms share the common feature that the complexity is globally unchanged compared to the corresponding unprotected implementations.