International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Anonymous credentials, first proposed by Chaum in 1985, enable individuals to prove attributes about themselves without revealing personal information. For example, they can prove that they live in Ontario without revealing their full home address. The award celebrates a sequence of results, starting in 2001, that developed the first efficient and fully anonymous credential schemes. This is an active area of research with many beautiful results by many talented cryptographers. We hope that this recognition will encourage further adoption of this technology.

Proving the security of complex protocols is a crucial and very challenging task. A widely used approach for reasoning about such protocols in a modular way is universal composability. A perfect model for universal composability should provide a sound basis for formal proofs and be very flexible in order to allow for modeling a multitude of different protocols. It should also be easy to use, including useful design conventions for repetitive modeling aspects, such as corruption, parties, sessions, and subroutine relationships, such that protocol designers can focus on the core logic of their protocols.While many models for universal composability exist, including the UC, GNUC, and IITM models, none of them has achieved this ideal goal yet. As a result, protocols cannot be modeled faithfully and/or using these models is a burden rather than a help, often even leading to underspecified protocols and formally incorrect proofs.Given this dire state of affairs, the goal of this work is to provide a framework for universal composability which combines soundness, flexibility, and usability in an unmatched way. Developing such a security framework is a very difficult and delicate task, as the long history of frameworks for universal composability shows.We build our framework, called iUC, on top of the IITM model, which already provides soundness and flexibility while lacking sufficient usability. At the core of iUC is a single simple template for specifying essentially arbitrary protocols in a convenient, formally precise, and flexible way. We illustrate the main features of our framework with example functionalities and realizations.

In structure-preserving cryptography over bilinear groups, cryptographic schemes are restricted to exchange group elements only, and their correctness must be verifiable only by evaluating pairing product equations. Several primitives, such as structure-preserving signatures, commitments, and encryption schemes, have been proposed. Although deterministic primitives, such as verifiable pseudorandom functions or verifiable unpredictable functions, play an important role in the construction of cryptographic protocols, no structure-preserving realizations of them are known. This is not coincident: In this paper, we show that it is impossible to construct algebraic structure-preserving deterministic primitives that provide provability, uniqueness, and unpredictability. This includes verifiable random functions, unique signatures, and verifiable unpredictable functions as special cases. The restriction of structure-preserving primitives to be algebraic is natural, otherwise it would not be known how to verify correctness only by evaluating pairing product equations. We further extend our negative result to pseudorandom functions and deterministic public key encryption as well as non-strictly structure-preserving primitives, where target group elements are also allowed in their ranges and public keys.

With computer networks spreading into a variety of new environments, the need to authenticate and secure communication grows. Many of these new environments have particular requirements on the applicable cryptographic primitives. For instance, a frequent requirement is that the communication overhead inflicted be small and that many messages be processable at the same time. In this paper, we consider the suitability of public key signatures in the latter scenario. That is, we consider (1) signatures that are short and (2) cases where many signatures from (possibly) different signers on (possibly) different messages can be verified quickly. Prior work focused almost exclusively on batching signatures from the same signer.We propose the first batch verifier for messages from many (certified) signers without random oracles and with a verification time where the dominant operation is independent of the number of signatures to verify. We further propose a new signature scheme with very short signatures, for which batch verification for many signers is also highly efficient. Combining our new signatures with the best known techniques for batching certificates from the same authority, we get a fast batch verifier for certificates and messages combined. Although our new signature scheme has some restrictions, it is very efficient and still practical for some communication applications.