International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We develop new constructions of lattice-based PRFs using keyed pseudorandom synthesizers. We generalize all of the known `basic' parallel lattice-based PRFs--those of [BPR12], [BLMR13], and [BP14]--to build highly parallel lattice-based PRFs with smaller modulus (and thus better reductions from worst-case lattice problems) while still maintaining computational efficiency asymptotically equal to the fastest known lattice-based PRFs at only the cost of larger key sizes.

In particular, we build several parallel (in $NC^{2}$) lattice-based PRFs with modulus independent of the number of PRF input bits based on both standard LWE and ring LWE. Our modulus for these PRFs is just $O \left(m^{ f \left(m \right)} \right)$ for lattice dimension $m$ and any function $f \left(m \right) \in \omega \left(1 \right)$. The only known parallel construction of a lattice-based PRF with such a small modulus is a construction from Banerjee's thesis, and some of our parallel PRFs with equivalently small modulus have smaller key sizes and are very slightly faster (when using FFT multiplication). These PRFs also asymptotically match the computational efficiency of the most efficient PRFs built from any LWE- or ring LWE-based assumptions known (potentially excluding some concurrent work), respectively, and concretely require less computation per output than any known parallel lattice-based PRFs (again when using FFT multiplication).

We additionally use our techniques to build other efficient PRFs with very low circuit complexity (but higher modulus) which improve known results on highly parallel lattice PRFs. For instance, for input length $\lambda$, we show that there exists a ring LWE-based PRF in $NC^{1}$ with modulus proportional to $m^{\lambda^{c}}$ for any $c \in \left(0, 1 \right)$. Constructions from lattices with this circuit depth were only previously known from larger moduli.

Coin toss has been extensively studied in the cryptography literature, and the well-accepted notion of fairness (henceforth called strong fairness) requires that a corrupt coalition cannot cause non-negligible bias. It is well-understood that two-party coin toss is impossible if one of the parties can prematurely abort; further, this impossibility generalizes to multiple parties with a corrupt majority (even if the adversary is computationally bounded and fail-stop only).

Interestingly, the original proposal of (two-party) coin toss protocols by Blum in fact considered a weaker notion of fairness: imagine that the (randomized) transcript of the coin toss protocol defines a winner among the two parties. Now Blum's notion requires that a corrupt party cannot bias the outcome in its favor (but self-sacrificing bias is allowed). Blum showed that this weak notion is indeed attainable for two parties assuming the existence of one-way functions.

In this paper, we ask a very natural question which, surprisingly, has been overlooked by the cryptography literature: can we achieve Blum's weak fairness notion in multi-party coin toss? What is particularly interesting is whether this relaxation allows us to circumvent the corrupt majority impossibility that pertains to strong fairness. Even more surprisingly, in answering this question, we realize that it is not even understood how to define weak fairness for multi-party coin toss. We propose several natural notions drawing inspirations from game theory, all of which equate to Blum's notion for the special case of two parties. We show, however, that for multiple parties, these notions vary in strength and lead to different feasibility and infeasibility results.

The rapid distribution of lightweight devices raised the demand for efficient encryption and authenticated encryption schemes for small messages. For this purpose, Andreeva et al. recently proposed forkciphers, which fork the middle state within a cipher and encrypt it twice further under two smaller independent permutations. So, forkciphers can produce two output blocks which can allow to authenticate and encrypt small messages more efficiently. As instance of particular interest, Andreeva et al. proposed ForkAES, a tweakable forkcipher based on the AES-128 round function, which forks the state after five out of ten rounds. While their authenticated encrypted schemes were accompanied by proofs, the security discussion for ForkAES could not be covered in their work, and founded on existing results on the AES and KIASU-BC; so, the study of advanced differential attacks remained to be filled by the community. This work tries to foster the understanding of the security of ForkAES. It outlines a rectangle and an impossible-differential attack on nine rounds in the single-key related-tweak model; moreover, it describes a rectangle attack on ten rounds for a fraction of approximately $2^{32}$ keys. We emphasize that our results do not break ForkAES in the single-key setting, but shed more light on its security margin.

It is well known that Canright’s tower field construction leads to a very small, unprotected AES S-box circuit by recursively embedding Galois Field operations into smaller fields. The current size record for the AES S-box by Boyar, Matthews and Peralta improves the original design with optimal subcomponents, while maintaining the overall tower-field structure. Similarly, all small state-of-the-art first-order SCA-secure AES S-box constructions are based on a tower field structure. We demonstrate that a smaller first-order secure AES S-box is achievable by representing the field inversion as a multiplication chain of length 4. Based on this representation, we showcase a very compact S-box circuit with only one GF($2^8$)-multiplier instance. Thereby, we introduce a new high-level representation of the AES S-box and set a new record for the smallest first-order secure implementation

In this work, we propose a faster homomorphic linear transform algorithm for structured matrices such as the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and linear transformations in bootstrapping.

First, we proposed new method to evaluate the DFT homomorphically for a given packed ciphertext from the Cooley-Tukey fast Fourier transform algorithm. While the previous method requires $O(\sqrt n)$ rotations and $O(n)$ constant vector multiplications, our method only needs $O(\log n)$ rotations/multiplications by consuming $O(\log n)$ depth for the length of input vector $n$.

Second, we apply the same method to the linear transform of bootstrapping for $\textsf{HEAAN}$. To achieve this, we construct a recursive relation of matrices in those linear transformations. Accordingly, we can highly accelerate the linear transformation part of bootstrapping: the number of homomorphic operations becomes logarithmic to the number of slots, as in homomorphic DFT.

We also implement both algorithms. Our homomorphic DFT with length $2^{14}$ only takes about 8 seconds which is about 150 times faster result than previous one. The bootstrapping for $\textsf{HEAAN}$ with our linear transform algorithm takes about 2 minutes for $\mathbb{C}^{32768}$ plaintext space with 8 bit precision, which takes 26 hours using the previous method.

This paper investigates the construction of lightweight MDS matrices with generalized Feistel structures (GFS). The approach developed by this paper consists in deriving MDS matrices from the product of several sparser ones. This can be seen as a generalization to several matrices of the recursive construction which derives MDS matrices as the powers of a single companion matrix. The first part of this paper gives some theoretical results on the iteration of GFS and the second part gives concrete instantiations. The results match the best known lightweight $4\times 4$ MDS matrix and improve the best known $6\times 6$ and $8\times 8$ MDS matrices. Based on GFS structure, we propose some types of sparse matrices that are called EGFS matrices. Then, by applying binary linear functions to several round of EGFS matrices, we propose lightweight $4\times 4$, $6\times 6$ and $8\times 8$ MDS matrices which are implemented with 67, 158 and 272 XOR for 8-bit input, respectively. The major work of this paper is the design of an $8\times 8$ MDS matrix with 272 XOR for 8-bit input, since the best known result is 392 XOR.

In conventional PKI, CAs are assumed to be fully trusted. However, in practice, CAs' absolute responsibility for providing trustworthiness caused major security and privacy issues. To prevent such issues, Google introduced the concept of Certificate Transparency (CT) in 2013. Later, several new PKI models (e.g., AKI, ARPKI, and DTKI) are proposed to reduce the level of trust to the CAs. However, all of these proposals are still vulnerable to split-world attacks if the adversary is capable of showing different views of the log to the targeted victims. In this paper, we propose a new PKI architecture with certificate transparency based on blockchain, what we called CertLedger, to eliminate the split-world attacks and to provide an ideal certificate/revocation transparency. All TLS certificates, their revocation status, entire revocation process, and trusted CA management are conducted in the CertLedger. CertLedger provides a unique, efficient, and trustworthy certificate validation process eliminating the conventional inadequate and incompatible certificate validation processes implemented by different software vendors. TLS clients in the CertLedger also do not require to make certificate validation and store the trusted CA certificates anymore. We analyze the security and performance of the CertLedger and provide a comparison with the previous proposals.

The FHE (fully homomorphic encryption) schemes [7, 13] based on the modified AGCD problem (noise-free AGCD problem) are vulnerable to quantum attacks, because its security relies partly on the hardness of factoring, and some FHE schemes based on the decisional AGCD without the noise-free assumption, for example [1], has a drawback that its ciphertexts are very large. In this paper, we construct a new batch FHE scheme based on the decisional AGCD problem to overcome these weaknesses and prove its security.

Non-malleable codes were introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak, and Wichs (JACM 2018) as a generalization of standard error correcting codes to handle severe forms of tampering on codewords. This notion has attracted a lot of recent research, resulting in various explicit constructions, which have found applications in tamper-resilient cryptography and connections to other pseudorandom objects in theoretical computer science.

We continue the line of investigation on explicit constructions of non-malleable codes in the information theoretic setting, and give explicit constructions for several new classes of tampering functions. These classes strictly generalize several previously studied classes of tampering functions, and in particular extend the well studied split-state model which is a "compartmentalized" model in the sense that the codeword is partitioned a prior into disjoint intervals for tampering. Specifically, we give explicit non-malleable codes for the following classes of tampering functions.

(1) Interleaved split-state tampering: Here the codeword is partitioned in an unknown way by an adversary, and then tampered with by a split-state tampering function.

(2) Linear function composed with split-state tampering: In this model, the codeword is first tampered with by a split-state adversary, and then the whole tampered codeword is further tampered with by a linear function. In fact our results are stronger, and we can handle linear function composed with interleaved split-state tampering.

(3) Bounded communication split-state tampering: In this model, the two split-state tampering adversaries are allowed to participate in a communication protocol with a bounded communication budget. Our results are the first explicit constructions of non-malleable codes in any of these tampering models. We derive all these results from explicit constructions of seedless non-malleable extractors, which we believe are of independent interest. Using our techniques, we also give an improved seedless extractor for an unknown interleaving of two independent sources.

We initiate the study of partial key exposure in ring-LWE-based cryptosystems. Specifically, we

- Introduce the search and decision Leaky-RLWE assumptions (Leaky-SRLWE, Leaky-DRLWE), to formalize the hardness of search/decision RLWE under leakage of some fraction of coordinates of the NTT transform of the RLWE secret and/or error.

- Present and implement an efficient key exposure attack that, given certain $1/4$-fraction of the coordinates of the NTT transform of the RLWE secret, along with RLWE instances, recovers the full RLWE secret for standard parameter settings.

- Present a search-to-decision reduction for Leaky-RLWE for certain types of key exposure.

- Analyze the security of NewHope key exchange under partial key exposure of $1/8$-fraction of the secrets and error.

We show that, assuming that Leaky-DRLWE is hard for these parameters, the shared key $v$ (which is then hashed using a random oracle) is computationally indistinguishable from a random variable with average min-entropy $238$, conditioned on transcript and leakage, whereas without leakage the min-entropy is $256$.

At Crypto 2016, Kaplan et al. proposed the first quantum exponential acceleration of a classical symmetric cryptanalysis technique: they showed that, in the superposition query model, Simon's algorithm could be applied to accelerate the slide attack on the alternate-key cipher. This allows to recover an n-bit key with O(n) quantum time and queries.

In this paper we propose many other types of quantum slide attacks. First, we are able to quantize classical advanced slide attacks on Feistel networks. With modular additions inside branch or key-addition operations, these attacks reach up to two round self-similarity. With only XOR operations, they reach up to four rounds self-similarity, with a cost at most quadratic in the block size.

Moreover, some of these variants combined with whitening keys (FX construction) can be successfully attacked. We show how these results relate to general quantization principles of classical techniques including sliding with a twist, complementation slide and mirror slidex.

Furthermore, we show that some quantum slide attacks can be composed with other quantum attacks to perform efficient key-recoveries even when the round founction is a strong function classically.

Finally, we analyze the case of quantum slide attacks exploiting cycle-finding, that were thought to enjoy an exponential speed up in a paper by Bar-On et al. in 2015, where these attacks were introduced. We show that the speed-up is smaller than expected and less impressive than the above variants, but nevertheless provide improved complexities on the previous known quantum attacks in the superposition model for some self-similar SPN and Feistel constructions.

Since the celebrated work of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC 1989), a number of black-box impossibility results have been established. However, these works only ruled out classical black-box reductions among cryptographic primitives. Therefore it may be possible to overcome these impossibility results by using quantum reductions. To exclude such a possibility, we have to extend these impossibility results to the quantum setting. In this paper, we initiate the study of black-box impossibility in the quantum setting. We first formalize a quantum counterpart of fully-black-box reduction following the formalization by Reingold, Trevisan and Vadhan (TCC 2004). Then we prove that there is no quantum fully-black-box reduction from collision-resistant hash function to one-way permutation (or even trapdoor permutation). This is an extension to the quantum setting of the work of Simon (Eurocrypt 1998) who showed a similar result in the classical setting.

Homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) allows $n$ clients to secret-share data to $m$ servers, who can then homomorphically evaluate public functions over the shares. A natural application is outsourced computation over private data. In this work, we present the first plain-model homomorphic secret sharing scheme that supports the evaluation of polynomials with degree higher than 2. Our construction relies on any degree-$k$ (multi-key) homomorphic encryption scheme and can evaluate degree-$\left( (k+1)m -1 \right)$ polynomials, for any polynomial number of inputs $n$ and any sub-logarithmic (in the security parameter) number of servers $m$. At the heart of our work is a series of combinatorial arguments on how a polynomial can be split into several low-degree polynomials over the shares of the inputs, which we believe is of independent interest.

Similar to digital circuits, analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits are also susceptible to supply-chain attacks such as piracy, overproduction, and Trojan insertion. However, unlike digital circuits, supply-chain security of AMS circuits is less explored. In this work, we propose to perform “logic locking” on digital section of the AMS circuits. The idea is to make the analog design intentionally suffer from the effects of process variations, which impede the operation of the circuit. Only on applying the correct key, the effect of process variations are mitigated, and the analog circuit performs as desired. We provide the theoretical guarantees of the security of the circuit, and along with simulation results for the band-pass filter, low-noise amplifier, and low-dropout regulator, we also show experimental results of our technique on a band-pass filter.

A large number of studies on passwords make use of passwords leaked by attackers who compromised online services. Frequently, these leaks contain only the passwords themselves, or basic information such as usernames or email addresses. While metadata-rich leaks exist, they are often limited in the variety of demographics they cover.

In this work, we analyze a meta-data rich data leak from a Middle Eastern bank with a demographically-diverse user base. We provide an analysis of passwords created by groups of people of different cultural backgrounds, some of which are under-represented in existing data leaks, e.g., Arab, Filipino, Indian, and Pakistani.

The contributions provided by this work are many-fold. First, our results contribute to the existing body of knowledge regarding how users include personal information in their passwords. Second, we illustrate the differences that exist in how users from different cultural/linguistic backgrounds create passwords. Finally, we study the (empirical and theoretical) guessability of the dataset based on two attacker models, and show that a state of the art password strength estimator inflates the strength of passwords created by users from non-English speaking backgrounds. We improve its estimations by training it with contextually relevant information.

Scalability of distributed ledgers is a key adoption factor. As an alternative to blockchain-based protocols, directed acyclic graph (DAG) protocols are proposed with the intention to allow a higher volume of transactions to be processed. However, there is still limited understanding of the behaviour and security considerations of DAG-based systems. We present an asynchronous, continuous time, and multi-agent simulation framework for DAG-based cryptocurrencies. We model honest and semi-honest actors in the system to analyse the behaviour of one specific cryptocurrency, IOTA. Our simulations show that the agents that have low latency and a high connection degree have a higher probability of having their transactions accepted in the network with honest and semi-honest strategies. Last, the simulator is built with extensibility in mind. We are in the process of implementing SPECTRE as well as including malicious agents.

Designing a secure and efficient handover authentication scheme has always been a concern of cellular networks especially in 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless networks. What makes their handover so complex, is the presence of different types of base stations namely eNodeB (eNB) and Home eNodeB (HeNB). In addition, they cannot directly communicate with each other. Recently, an efficient proxy signature-based handover authentication scheme has been suggested by Qui et al. Despite its better performance and security advantages than previous schemes, it suffers serious vulnerabilities, namely being prone to DoS attack , eNB impersonation attack and lack of perfect forward secrecy. In this paper, we propose an improved handover authentication scheme in LTE wireless networks that resists against such attacks. Further, we validate the security of the proposed scheme using Real-Or- Random (ROR) model and ProVerif analysis tool. The results confirm our security claims of the proposed scheme. In addition, the performance analysis shows that compared to other schemes, our proposed scheme is more efficient.

Event date: 18 May 2019
Submission deadline: 10 February 2019
Notification: 3 March 2019

Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) architectures are attractive targets for side-channel enabled attackers, with their inherently broader attack surface that exposes more per physical core microarchitecture components than cross-core attacks. In this work, we explore SMT execution engine sharing as a side-channel leakage source. We target ports to stacks of execution units to create a high-resolution timing side-channel due to port contention, inherently stealthy since it does not depend on the memory subsystem like other cache or TLB based attacks. Implementing said channel on Intel Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures featuring Hyper-Threading, we mount and end-to-end attack that recovers a P-384 private key from an OpenSSL-powered TLS server using a small number of repeated TLS handshake attempts. Furthermore, we show that traces targeting shared libraries, static builds, and SGX enclaves are essentially identical, hence our channel has wide target application.

Why work at Promise?

We are a high-energy, innovation-focused team of engineers and technologists passionate about leveraging advanced cryptographic primitives. Promise’s environment is highly collaborative, and the ideal candidate will have an eye for detail and be a team player who enjoys working with others to find cutting-edge solutions to tricky problems. Come join us!

What we are looking for in the Senior Cryptography Engineer?

This role is ideal for cryptography scientists who have deep research experience and familiarity with evolving and established post quantum cryptographic protocols and their implementation.

Preferred areas of research interest would be post-quantum cryptography. Candidates are required to have a Ph.D. in Computer Science, ECE or a related area, by the time of appointment and an outstanding research record. Solid background in cryptography, network security, distributed systems, protocols and algorithms, is highly desirable.

What you will be responsible doing?

1. Design and architect post quantum cryptography protocols in distributed p2p systems

2. Work with core internal team and external open source community

3. Collaborate with engineering and product teammates to produce protocol specification that help serve Promise customer objectives

4. Collaborate and support other teams in developing crypto economic consensus protocol

5. Identify and recommend technologies to solve technical challenges such as proof sizes

6. Interest in working in startup environments with a brisk pace and constantly changing challenges

Salary and Benefits:

Please get more information and apply here: https://aquila-1.workable.com/jobs/860808

Closing date for applications:

Contact: Head of Recruiting

jobs (at) promiseprotocols.com

More information: https://aquila-1.workable.com/jobs/860808