International Association
for Cryptologic Research

In this paper, we introduce the syntax and security notions of multi-adjustable join (M-Adjoin) schemes as an extension of the adjustable join (Adjoin) schemes [Popa-Zeldovich 2012]. An M-Adjoin is a symmetric-key primitive that enables a user to securely outsource his database to a server, and later to privately issue the join queries for a list of column labels (instead of a pair in an Adjoin scheme). The security definitions of Adjoin [Mironov-Segev-Shahaf 2017] extends to M-Adjoin in a straightforward way. It turns out that even though the 3Partition security does capture the minimal leakage of an Adjoin scheme, it does not carry the expected minimal leakage of an M-Adjoin scheme. We propose a new security notion for this purpose, which we refer to as M3Partition. The gap between 3Partition and M3Partition is filled with a sequence $\{\textrm{M3Pk}\}_{k \in N}$ of security definitions where $\textrm{M3P}_1$ and $\textrm{M3P}_{\infty}$, respectively, correspond to 3Partition and M3Partition. We propose constructions for achieving both M3Partition and M3Pk security levels. Our M3Partition-secure scheme joins m columns, each containing $n$ elements, in time $O(n^{(m-1)})$ with minimal leakage. Our M3Pk-secure scheme uses ideas from secret sharing in its construction and does the job in time $O((m - 1)\cdot n^k/k)$ with some leakage that we refer to as the k-monotonous leakage. It remains open if this barrier is inherent to the security definitions. Our schemes are substantially more efficient (both in computation and storage) than the previous ones due to the type of pairing (asymmetric vs symmetric) and the hardness assumption that we rely on. Additionally, we present some separation results between different security definitions, which were left open in previous works.

Event date: 28 June 2019

Event date: 1 July to 2 July 2019

Event date: 15 December to 18 December 2019
Submission deadline: 1 August 2019
Notification: 1 October 2019

Bootstrapping of FHE over the integer with large message is a open problem, which is to evaluate double modulo $(c ~\text{mod}~ p )~\mod~ Q$ arithmetic homomorphically for large $Q$. In this paper, we express this double modulo reduction circuit as a arithmetic circuit of degree at most $\theta^2 \log^2\theta/2$, with $O(\theta \log^2\theta)$ multiplication gates, where $\theta= \frac{\lambda}{\log \lambda}$ and $\lambda$ is the security parameter. The complexity of decryption circuit is independent of the message space size $Q$ with a constraint $Q> \theta \log^2\theta/2$.

Though it is well known that the roots of any affine polynomial over finite field can be computed by a system of linear equations by using a normal base of the field, such solving approach appears to be difficult to apply when the field is fairly large. Thus, it may be of great interest to find explicit representation of the solutions independently of the field base. This was previously done only for quadratic equations over binary finite field. This paper gives explicit representation of solutions for much wider class of affine polynomials over binary prime field.

Recently one new key recovery method for a filter generator was proposed. It is based on so-called planar approximations of such a generator. This paper contains the numerical part of the research of the Boolean functions properties which allow to protect the generator against this method. The main theoretical part of this research is presented at the CTCrypt 2019 conference.

We give a number of approaches which, to a newcomer, may seem like natural ways to attack the SIDH/SIKE protocol, and explain why each of these approaches seems to fail, at least with the specific setup and parameters of SIKE. Our aim is to save some time for others who are looking to assess the security of SIDH/SIKE. We include methods that fail to attack the pure isogeny problem, namely: looking at the $\mathbb F_p$-subgraph, lifting to characteristic zero, and using Weil restrictions. We also include methods that fail to make use of the public 2-power and 3-power torsion points, namely: interpolation techniques, any purely group-theoretic approaches, and constructing an endomorphism à la Petit to exploit the auxiliary points, but with balanced parameters.

This paper generalizes the notable Galbrath's test by introducing the general reciprocity law on function fields. With the help of the extended Galbrath's test, we show the scheme of Boneh, LaVigne and Sabin (BLS) is not anonymous in general. BLS's scheme naturally generalizes Cocks' scheme to higher power residue symbols, but it is less efficient, bandwidth-wise because computing $e$-th power residue symbols is really time-consuming and ciphertexts are expressed as polynomials. We improve the efficiency of BLS's scheme through taking off the part of computing $e$-th power residue symbols in the encryption phase. Our construction also widens BLS's scheme to the case $e$ is square-free. Finally, we provide some methods for computing $e$-th power residue symbols in order to make our scheme more efficient.

How much we say, to whom, and when, is inherently telling, even if the contents of our communication is unclear. In other words: encryption is not enough; neither to secure privacy, nor to maintain confidentiality. Years ago Adi Shamir already predicted that encryption will be bypassed. And it has. The modern dweller of cyber space is routinely violated via her data behavior. Also, often an adversary has the power to compel release of cryptographic keys over well-exposed communication. The front has shifted, and now technology must build cryptographic shields beyond content, and into pattern, even as to existence of communication. We present here tools, solutions, methods to that end. They are based on equivocation. If a message is received by many recipients, it hides the intended one. If a protocol calls for decoy messages, then it protects the identity of the sender of the contents-laden message. BitGrey is a protocol that creates a "grey hole" (of various shades) around the communicating community, so that very little information leaks out. In addition the BitLoop protocol constructs a fixed rate circulating bit flow, traversing through all members of a group. The looping bits appear random, and effectively hide the pattern, even the existence of communication within the group.

In this paper we present a comprehensive comparison between pairing-friendly elliptic curves, considering different curve forms and twists where possible. We define a measure of the efficiency of a parametrized pairing-friendly family that takes into account the number field sieve (NFS) attacks (unlike the $\rho$-value). This measure includes an approximation of the security of the discrete logarithm problem in $\mathbb F_{p^k}^*$, computed via the method of Barbulescu and Duquesne [4]. We compute the security of the families presented by Fotiadis and Konstantinou in [13], compute some new families, and compare the efficiency of both of these with the (adjusted) BLS, KSS, and BN families, and with the new families of [19]. Finally, we present an optimal pairing-friendly elliptic curve for security level 128 and recommend two pairing-friendly elliptic curves for security level 192.

Pseudorandom functions are traditionally built upon block ciphers, but with the trend of permutation based cryptography, it is a natural question to investigate the design of pseudorandom functions from random permutations. We present a generic study of how to build beyond birthday bound secure pseudorandom functions from public random permutations. We first show that a pseudorandom function based on a single permutation call cannot be secure beyond the $2^{n/2}$ birthday bound, where n is the state size of the function. We next consider the Sum of Even-Mansour (SoEM) construction, that instantiates the sum of permutations with the Even-Mansour construction. We prove that SoEM achieves tight $2n/3$-bit security if it is constructed from two independent permutations and two randomly drawn keys. We also demonstrate a birthday bound attack if either the permutations or the keys are identical. Finally, we present the Sum of Key Alternating Ciphers (SoKAC) construction, a translation of Encrypted Davies-Meyer Dual to a public permutation based setting, and show that SoKAC achieves tight $2n/3$-bit security even when a single key is used.

Withthiswork, weintendondemonstratingtheneedfor improvements to the currently standardized AES family of cryptosystems, and provide a solution that meets the requirements of long-term security in the rapidly evolving threat landscape. The solution proposed is flexible, dramatically increases the potential security of the cipher, and strongly mitigates many of the most serious attacks on the AES family of cryptosystems. Further, our solution can be easily integrated into existing AES cryptosystem deployments, with only a few small changes required, thus preserving the large investments in this cipher both in hardware and software.

Non-malleable codes are encoding schemes that provide protections against various classes of tampering attacks. Recently Faust et al. (CRYPTO 2017) initiated the study of space- bounded non-malleable codes that provide such protections against tampering within small- space devices. They put forward a construction based on any non-interactive proof-of-space (NIPoS). However, the scheme only protects against an a priori bounded number of tampering attacks.

We construct non-malleable codes that are resilient to an unbounded polynomial number of space-bounded tamperings. Towards that we introduce a stronger variant of NIPoS called proof-extractable NIPoS (PExt-NIPoS), and propose two approaches of constructing such a primitive. Using a new proof strategy we show that the generic encoding scheme of Faust et al. achieves unbounded tamper-resilience when instantiated with a PExt-NIPoS. We show two methods to construct PExt-NIPoS:

1. The first method uses a special family of “memory-hard” graphs, called challenge-hard graphs (CHG), a notion we introduce here. We instantiate such family of graphs based on an extension of stack of localized expanders (first used by Ren and Devadas in the context of proof-of-space). In addition, we show that the graph construction used as a building block for the proof-of-space by Dziembowski et al. (CRYPTO 2015) satisfies challenge-hardness as well. These two CHG-instantiations lead to continuous space-bounded NMC with different features in the random oracle model.

2. Our second instantiation relies on a new measurable property, called uniqueness of NIPoS. We show that standard extractability can be upgraded to proof-extractability if the NIPoS also has uniqueness. We propose a simple heuristic construction of NIPoS, that achieves (partial) uniqueness, based on a candidate memory-hard function in the standard model and a publicly verifiable computation with small-space verification. Instantiating the encoding scheme of Faust et al. with this NIPoS, we obtain a continuous space-bounded NMC that supports the “most practical” parameters, complementing the provably secure but “relatively impractical” CHG-based constructions. Additionally, we revisit the construction of Faust et al. and observe that due to the lack of uniqueness of their NIPoS, the resulting encoding schemes yield “highly impractical” parameters in the continuous setting.

We conclude the paper with a comparative study of all our non-malleable code constructions with an estimation of concrete parameters.

This paper is focused on an open question regarding the correlation and the power of the NIST statistical test suite. If we found some correlation between these statistical tests, then we can improve the testing strategy by executing only one of the tests that are correlated. Using the Galton-Pearson “product-moment correlation coefficient”, by simulation, we found a high correlation between five couples of this statistical tests: (frequency, cumulative sums forward), (frequency, cumulative sums reverse), (cumulative sums forward, cumulative sums reverse), (random excursions, random excursions variant), and (serial 1, serial 2).

This paper describes a new public coin, succinct interactive zero-knowledge argument for NP under standard cryptographic hardness assumptions—without requiring a trusted setup. In particular, our argument enables a prover to prove the satisfiability of arithmetic circuits over a large finite field (an NP-complete language for which there exist efficient reductions from high-level programs of practical interest) to a verifier. We construct this argument through a novel synthesis of techniques from prior work on short PCPs, MIPs, and doubly-efficient IPs. Specifically, our interactive argument is a succinct variant of the sum-check protocol where the protocol is run with a carefully-constructed low-degree polynomial that encodes a given circuit satisfiability instance. Since our interactive argument is public coin, we make it non-interactive in the random oracle model, thereby obtaining a zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zkSNARK), which we call Spartan.

Spartan is the first zkSNARK without trusted setup (i.e., a “transparent” zkSNARK) where verifying a proof incurs sub-linear costs without requiring data parallelism (or other homogeneity) in the structure of an arithmetic circuit for which a proof is produced. To achieve this, Spartan introduces a notion of computation commitments—a primitive to create a short cryptographic commitment to a mathematical description of an arithmetic circuit. Finally, Spartan is asymptotically efficient with small constants: the prover performs $O(n)$ cryptographic operations to produce a proof of size $O(n^{1/c})$ that can be verified in $O(n^{1-1/c})$ time (after a one-time, public preprocessing of the circuit to create a computation commitment that takes $O(n)$ time), where $n$ denotes the size of an arithmetic circuit and $c \geq 2$ (Spartan can produce $O(\log{n})$-sized proofs, but the verifier incurs $O(n)$ costs).

The Fiat-Shamir heuristic transforms a public-coin interactive proof into a non-interactive argument, by replacing the verifier with a cryptographic hash function that is applied to the protocol’s transcript. Constructing hash functions for which this transformation is sound is a central and long-standing open question in cryptography.

We show that solving the End-of-Metered-Line problem is no easier than breaking the soundness of the Fiat-Shamir transformation when applied to the sumcheck protocol. In particular, if the transformed protocol is sound, then any hard problem in #P gives rise to a hard distribution in the class CLS, which is contained in PPAD.

Our main technical contribution is a stateful incrementally verifiable procedure that, given a SAT instance over n variables, counts the number of satisfying assignments. This is accomplished via an exponential sequence of small steps, each computable in time poly(n). Incremental verifiability means that each intermediate state includes a sumcheck-based proof of its correctness, and the proof can be updated and verified in time poly(n).

Combining our construction with a hash family proposed by Canetti et al. [STOC 2019] gives rise to a distribution in the class CLS, which is provably hard under the assumption that any one of a class of fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes has almost-optimal security against quasi-polynomial time adversaries, and under the additional worst-case assumption that there is no polynomial time algorithm for counting the number of satisfying assignments for formulas over a polylogarithmic number of variables.

Wave is a recent digital signature scheme. It is based on a family of trapdoor one-way Preimage Sampleable Functions and is proven EUF-CMA in the random oracle model under two code-based computational assumptions. One of its key properties is to produce signatures uniformly distributed of fixed Hamming weight. This property implies that, if properly implemented, Wave is immune to leakage attack. We describe here the key stages for the implementation of the Wave trapdoor inverse function to integrate all the features to achieve leakage-freeness. A proof of concept implementation was made in SageMath. It allowed us to check that properly generated Wave signatures are uniformly distributed. In particular, we show that the signatures produced by this implementation defeat the Barreto-Persichetti attack. We show which features of the Wave specification were improperly put aside and explain why the claim of breaking Wave is incorrect.

Anonymity is a primary ingredient for our digital life. Several tools have been designed to address it such as, for authentication, blind signatures, group signatures or anonymous credentials and, for confidentiality, randomizable encryption or mix-nets. When it comes to complex electronic voting schemes, random shuffling of ciphertexts with mix-nets is the only known tool. However, it requires huge and complex zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the actual permutation of the initial ciphertexts.

In this paper, we propose a new approach for proving correct shuffling: the mix-servers can simply randomize individual ballots, which means the ciphertexts, the signatures, and the verification keys, with an additional global proof of constant size, and the output will be publicly verifiable. The computational complexity for the mix-servers is linear in the number of ciphertexts. Verification is also linear in the number of ciphertexts, independently of the number of rounds of mixing. This leads to the most efficient technique, that is highly scalable. Our constructions make use of linearly-homomorphic signatures, with new features, that are of independent interest.

Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Identity from trusted public certificates (e.g., national identity cards and/or ePassports; eSIM) is introduced here to permissionless blockchains in order to remove the inefficiencies of Sybil-resistant mechanisms such as Proof-of-Work (i.e., high energy and environmental costs) and Proof-of-Stake (i.e., capital hoarding and lower transaction volume). The proposed solution effectively limits the number of mining nodes a single individual would be able to run while keeping membership open to everyone, circumventing the impossibility of full decentralization and the blockchain scalability trilemma when instantiated on a blockchain with a consensus protocol based on the cryptographic random selection of nodes. Resistance to collusion is also considered. Solving one of the most pressing problems in blockchains, a zk-PoI cryptocurrency is proved to have the following advantageous properties: - an incentive-compatible protocol for the issuing of cryptocurrency rewards based on a unique Nash equilibrium - strict domination of mining over all other PoW/PoS cryptocurrencies, thus the zk-PoI cryptocurrency becoming the preferred choice by miners is proved to be a Nash equilibrium and the Evolutionarily Stable Strategy - PoW/PoS cryptocurrencies are condemned to pay the Price of Crypto-Anarchy, redeemed by the optimal efficiency of zk-PoI as it implements the social optimum - the circulation of a zk-PoI cryptocurrency Pareto dominates other PoW/PoS cryptocurrencies - the network effects arising from the social networks inherent to national identity cards and ePassports dominate PoW/PoS cryptocurrencies - the lower costs of its infrastructure imply the existence of a unique equilibrium where it dominates other forms of payment