International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News

Here you can see all recent updates to the IACR webpage. These updates are also available:

email icon
via email
RSS symbol icon
via RSS feed

21 October 2024

Shweta Agrawal, Simran Kumari, Shota Yamada
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We construct the first multi-input functional encryption (MIFE) and indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) schemes for pseudorandom functionalities, where the output of the functionality is pseudorandom for every input seen by the adversary. Our MIFE scheme relies on LWE and evasive LWE (Wee, Eurocrypt 2022 and Tsabary, Crypto 2022) for constant arity functions, and a strengthening of evasive LWE for polynomial arity. Thus, we obtain the first MIFE and iO schemes for a nontrivial functionality from conjectured post-quantum assumptions.

Along the way, we identify subtle issues in the proof of witness encryption from evasive LWE by prior work and believe that a similar strengthening of evasive LWE should also be required for their proof, for the same reasons as ours. We demonstrate the power of our new tools via the following applications:

1. Multi Input Predicate Encryption for Constant Arity. Assuming evasive LWE and LWE, we construct a multi-input predicate encryption scheme (MIPE) for P, supporting constant arity. The only prior work to support MIPE for P with constant arity by Agrawal et al. (Crypto, 2023) relies on a strengthening of Tensor LWE in addition to LWE and evasive LWE.

2. Multi Input Predicate Encryption for Polynomial Arity. Assuming a stronger variant of evasive LWE and LWE, we construct MIPE for P for polynomial arity. MIPE for polynomial arity supporting P was not known before, to the best of our knowledge.

3. Two Party ID Based Key Exchange. Assuming a stronger variant of evasive LWE and LWE, along with Decision Bilinear Diffie-Hellman, we provide the first two-party ID based Non-Interactive Key Exchange (ID-NIKE) scheme in the standard model. This leads to the first ID-NIKE in the standard model without using multilinear maps or indistinguishability obfuscation.

4. Instantiating the Random Oracle. We use our pseudorandom iO to instantiate the random oracle in several applications that previously used iO (Hohenberger, Sahai and Waters, Eurocrypt 2014) such as full-domain hash signature based on trapdoor permutations and more.

Our tools of MIFE and iO for pseudorandom functionalities appear quite powerful and yield extremely simple constructions when used in applications. We believe they provide a new pathway for basing “extreme” cryptography, which has so far required full fledged iO, on the presumably weaker evasive LWE in the post quantum regime.
Expand
Shweta Agrawal, Simran Kumari, Shota Yamada
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We provide the first construction of compact Functional Encryption (FE) for pseudorandom functionalities from the evasive LWE and LWE assumptions. Intuitively, a pseudorandom functionality means that the output of the circuit is indistinguishable from uniform for every input seen by the adversary. This yields the first compact FE for a nontrivial class of functions which does not rely on pairings.

We demonstrate the power of our new tool by using it to achieve optimal parameters for both key-policy and ciphertext-policy Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) schemes for circuits of unbounded depth, from just the LWE and evasive LWE assumptions. This improves prior work along the twin axes of assumptions and performance. In more detail, this allows to: (i) replace the assumption of circular evasive LWE used in the work of Hseih, Lin and Luo (FOCS 2023) by plain evasive LWE, (ii) remove the need for the circular tensor LWE assumption in the work of Agrawal, Kumari and Yamada (CRYPTO, 2024), (iii) improve parameters obtained by both aforementioned works to achieve asymptotic optimality.

Previously, optimal parameters for ABE schemes were only achieved using compact FE for P (Jain, Lin and Luo, Eurocrypt 2023) – we show that compact FE for a much weaker class (albeit with incomparable security) suffices. Thus we obtain the first optimal ABE schemes for unbounded depth circuits which can be conjectured post-quantum secure. Along the way, we define and construct a new primitive which we term laconic pseudorandom obfuscation from the same assumptions – this may be of independent interest.
Expand
Olivier Bernard, Marc Joye, Nigel P. Smart, Michael Walter
ePrint Report ePrint Report
There are two security notions for FHE schemes the traditional notion of IND-CPA, and a more stringent notion of IND-CPA$^D$. The notions are equivalent if the FHE schemes are perfectly correct, however for schemes with negligible failure probability the FHE parameters needed to obtain IND-CPA$^D$ security can be much larger than those needed to obtain IND-CPA security. This paper uses the notion of ciphertext drift in order to understand the practical difference between IND-CPA and IND-CPA$^D$ security in schemes such as FHEW, TFHE and FINAL. This notion allows us to define a modulus switching operation (the main culprit for the difference in parameters) such that one does not require adapting IND-CPA cryptographic parameters to meet the IND-CPA$^D$ security level. Further, the extra cost incurred by the new techniques has no noticeable performance impact in practical applications. The paper also formally defines a stronger version for IND-CPA$^D$ security called sIND-CPA$^D$, which is proved to be strictly separated from the IND-CPA$^D$ notion. Criterion for turning an IND-CPA$^D$ secure public-key encryption into an sIND-CPA$^D$ one is also provided.
Expand
Atsuki Momose
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We present an asynchronous secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that is practically efficient. Our protocol can evaluate any arithmetic circuit with linear communication in the number of parties per multiplication gate, while relying solely on computationally lightweight cryptography such as hash function and symmetric encryption. Our protocol is optimally resilient and tolerates $t$ malicious parties among $n = 3t+1$ parties.

At the technical level, we manage to apply the \emph{player-elimination} paradigm to asynchronous MPC. This framework enables the detection and eviction of cheating parties by repeatedly attempting to generate Beaver triples. Once all malicious parties are eliminated, honest parties can proceed with efficient Beaver triple generation. While this approach is standard in synchronous MPC, it presents several technical challenges when adopted in an asynchronous network, which we address in this work.
Expand
Pedro Branco, Nico Döttling, Akshayaram Srinivasan
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We give the first construction of a rate-1 statistical non-interactive zero-knowledge argument of knowledge. For the $\mathsf{circuitSAT}$ language, our construction achieves a proof length of $|w| + |w|^\epsilon \cdot \mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$ where $w$ denotes the witness, $\lambda$ is the security parameter, $\epsilon$ is a small constant less than 1, and $\mathsf{poly}(\cdot)$ is a fixed polynomial that is independent of the instance or the witness size. The soundness of our construction follows from either the LWE assumption, or the $O(1)$-$\mathsf{LIN}$ assumption on prime-order groups with efficiently computable bilinear maps, or the sub-exponential DDH assumption. Previously, Gentry et al. (Journal of Cryptology, 2015) achieved NIZKs with statistical soundness and computational zero-knowledge with the aforementioned proof length by relying on the Learning with Errors (LWE) assumption.
Expand
Haiyue Dong, Qian Guo
ePrint Report ePrint Report
In this paper, we introduce OT-PCA, a novel approach for conducting Plaintext-Checking (PC) oracle based side-channel attacks, specifically designed for Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC). By calling the publicly accessible HQC decoder, we build offline templates that enable efficient extraction of soft information for hundreds of secret positions with just a single PC oracle call. Our method addresses critical challenges in optimizing key-related information extraction, including maximizing decryption output entropy and ensuring error pattern independence, through the use of genetic-style algorithms.

Extensive simulations demonstrate that our new attack method significantly reduces the required number of oracle calls, achieving a 2.4-fold decrease for hqc-128 and even greater reductions for hqc-192 and hqc-256 compared to current state-of-the-art methods. Notably, the attack shows strong resilience against inaccuracy in the PC oracle—when the oracle accuracy decreases to 95%, the reduction factor in oracle call requirements increases to 7.6 for hqc-128.

Lastly, a real-world evaluation conducted using power analysis on a platform with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller validates the practical applicability and effectiveness of our approach.
Expand
Trevor Nestor
ePrint Report ePrint Report
The Shortest Vector Problem (SVP) is a cornerstone of lattice-based cryptography, underpinning the security of numerous cryptographic schemes like NTRU. Given its NP-hardness, efficient solutions to SVP have profound implications for both cryptography and computational complexity theory. This paper presents an innovative framework that integrates concepts from quantum gravity, noncommutative geometry, spectral theory, and post-SUSY particle physics to address SVP. By mapping high-dimensional lattice points to spin foam networks and by means of Hamiltonian engineering, it is theoretically possible to devise new algorithms that leverage the interactions topologically protected Majorana fermion particles have with the gravitational field through the spectral action principle to loop through these spinfoam networks where SVP vectors could then be encoded onto the spectrum of the corresponding Dirac operators within the system. We establish a novel approach that leverages post-SUSY physics and theories of quantum gravity to achieve algorithmic speedups beyond those expected by conventional quantum computers. This interdisciplinary methodology not only proposes potential polynomial-time algorithms for SVP but also bridges gaps between theoretical physics and cryptographic applications, providing further insights into the Riemann Hypothesis (RH) and the Hilbert-Polya Conjecture.
Expand
Megan Chen, Pousali Dey, Chaya Ganesh, Pratyay Mukherjee, Pratik Sarkar, Swagata Sasmal
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZK) are essential building blocks in threshold cryptosystems like multiparty signatures, distributed key generation, and verifiable secret sharing, allowing parties to prove correct behavior without revealing secrets. Furthermore, universally composable (UC) NIZKs enable seamless composition in the larger cryptosystems. A popular way to construct NIZKs is to compile interactive protocols using the Fiat-Shamir transform. Unfortunately, Fiat-Shamir transformed NIZK requires rewinding the adversary and is not $\textit{straight-line extractable}$, making it at odds with UC. Using Fischlin's transform gives straight-line extractability, but at the expense of many repetitions of the underlying protocol leading to poor concrete efficiency and difficulty in setting parameters.

In this work, we propose a simple new transform that compiles a Sigma protocol for an algebraic relation into a UC-NIZK protocol $\textit{without any overheads of repetition}$.

- Given a Sigma protocol for proving m algebraic statements over n witnesses, we construct a compiler to transform it into a $\textit{straight-line extractable}$ protocol using an additively homomorphic encryption scheme AHE. Our prover executes the Sigma protocol's prover once and computes 2n encryptions. The verification process involves running the Sigma protocol verifier once and then computing n encryptions, which are homomorphically verified against the prover generated encryptions.

- We apply the Fiat-Shamir transform to the above straight-line extractable Sigma protocol to obtain a UC-NIZK. We instantiate AHE using class group-based encryption where the public key of the encryption scheme is obliviously sampled using a suitable hash function. This yields a UC-NIZK protocol in the random oracle model.
Expand
Guowei Ling, Peng Tang, Weidong Qiu
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Private Set Intersection (PSI) allows two mutually untrusted parties to compute the intersection of their private sets without revealing additional information. In general, PSI operates in a static setting, where the computation is performed only once on the input sets of both parties. Badrinarayanan et al. (\textit{PoPETs} 2022) initiated the study of Updatable PSI (UPSI), which extends this capability to dynamically updating sets, enabling both parties to securely compute the intersection as their sets are modified while incurring significantly less overhead than re-executing a conventional PSI. However, existing UPSI protocols either do not support arbitrary deletion of elements or incur high computational and communication overhead. In this work, we combine asymmetric PSI with Private Set Union (PSU) to present a novel UPSI protocol. Our UPSI protocol supports arbitrary additions and deletions of elements, offering a flexible approach to update sets. Furthermore, our protocol enjoys extremely low communication overhead, scaling linearly with the size of the update set while remaining independent of the total set size. We implement our protocol and compare it against state-of-the-art conventional PSI and UPSI protocols. Experimental results demonstrate that our UPSI protocol incurs $587$ to $755$ times less communication overhead than the recently proposed UPSI protocol (\textit{AsiaCrypt} 2024) that supports arbitrary additions and deletions. Moreover, our UPSI protocol has a significant advantage in low-bandwidth environments due to the exceptionally low communication overhead. Specifically, with an input size of $2^{22}$ and the size of the addition/deletion set being $2^{10}$, the existing UPSI protocol requires approximately $1650.45$, $1789.5$, and $3458.1$ seconds at bandwidths of $200$ Mbps, $50$ Mbps, and $5$ Mbps, respectively, whereas our UPSI protocol only requires around $13.01$, $13.75$, and $22.53$ seconds under the same conditions. Our open-source implementation is available at: \href{https://github.com/ShallMate/upsi}{https://github.com/ShallMate/upsi}.
Expand
Joseph Bonneau, Benedikt Bünz, Miranda Christ, Yuval Efron
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We reconsider Cleve's famous 1986 impossibility result on coin-flipping without an honest majority. Recently proposed constructions have circumvented this limit by using cryptographic delay functions. We show that this is necessary: a (weak) notion of delay functions is in fact implied by the existence of a protocol circumventing Cleve's impossibility. However, such delay functions are weaker than those used in existing constructions. We complete our result by showing an equivalence, that these weaker delay functions are also sufficient to construct not just fair dishonest-majority coin-flipping protocols, but also the stronger notion of a distributed randomness beacon. We also show that this is possible in a weaker communication model than previously considered, without the assumption of reliable broadcast or a public bulletin board.
Expand
Hanwen Feng, Zhenliang Lu, Qiang Tang
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Asynchronous multiparty computation (AMPC) requires an input agreement phase where all participants have a consistent view of the set of private inputs. While the input agreement problem can be precisely addressed by a Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus known as Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS), existing ACS constructions with potential post-quantum security have a large $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^3)$ communication complexity for a network of $n$ nodes. This poses a bottleneck for AMPC in the same setting. In contrast, ACS has optimal constructions with quadratic communication complexity based on bilinear map assumptions.

In this paper, we bridge this gap by introducing a nearly optimal ACS, which solely relies on the blackbox use of collision-resistant hash functions. It exhibits $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(n^2)$ communication complexity, expected constant round complexity, and security against adaptive adversaries who can corrupt up to $n/3$ nodes and perform ``after-fact-removal'' attacks.

At the core of our new ACS is the first nearly optimal hash-based Multi-valued Validated Byzantine Agreement (MVBA). To reduce cubic communication while avoiding heavy cryptographic tools, we introduce a new design paradigm, with several new components. We define and analyze our MVBA and components within the UC-framework, facilitating their modular use in broader applications, particularly in AMPC.
Expand
Xiuhan Lin, Mehdi Tibouchi, Yang Yu, Shiduo Zhang
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Falcon is one of the three postquantum signature schemes already selected by NIST for standardization. It is the most compact among them, and offers excellent efficiency and security. However, it is based on a complex algorithm for lattice discrete Gaussian sampling which presents a number of implementation challenges. In particular, it relies on (possibly emulated) floating-point arithmetic, which is often regarded as a cause for concern, and has been leveraged in, e.g., side-channel analysis. The extent to which Falcon's use of floating point arithmetic can cause security issues has yet to be thoroughly explored in the literature.

In this paper, we contribute to filling this gap by identifying a way in which Falcon's lattice discrete Gaussian sampler, due to specific design choices, is singularly sensitive to floating-point errors. In the presence of small floating-point discrepancies (which can occur in various ways, including the use of the two almost but not quite equivalent signing procedures ``dynamic'' and ``tree'' exposed by the Falcon API), we find that, when called twice on the same input, the Falcon sampler has a small but significant chance (on the order of once in a few thousand calls) of outputting two different lattice points with a very structured difference, that immediately reveals the secret key. This is in contrast to other lattice Gaussian sampling algorithms like Peikert's sampler and Prest's hybrid sampler, that are stable with respect to small floating-point errors.

Correctly generated Falcon signatures include a salt that should in principle prevent the sampler to ever be called on the same input twice. In that sense, our observation has little impact on the security of Falcon signatures per se (beyond echoing warnings about the dangers of repeated randomness). On the other hand, it is critical for derandomized variants of Falcon, which have been proposed for use in numerous settings. One can mention in particular identity-based encryption, SNARK-friendly signatures, and sublinear signature aggregation. For all these settings, small floating point discrepancies have a chance of resulting in full private key exposure, even when using the slower, integer-based emulated floating-point arithmetic of Falcon's reference implementation.
Expand
Amine Bahi, Seny Kamara, Tarik Moataz, Guevara Noubir
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We propose a dynamic, low-latency encrypted multi-map (EMM) that operates in two modes: low-leakage mode, which reveals minimal information such as data size, expected response length, and query arrival rate; and subliminal mode, which reveals only the data size while hiding metadata including query and update times, the number of operations executed, and even whether an operation was executed at all---albeit at the cost of full correctness. We achieve this by exploiting a tradeoff between leakage and latency, a previously underexplored resource in EMM design. In low-leakage mode, our construction improves upon existing work both asymptotically and empirically: it achieves optimal server-side storage, as well as communication and computational complexity that is independent of the maximum response length. In subliminal mode, it is the first construction to hide metadata.

To analyze the latency and client-side storage of our construction, we utilize queuing theory and introduce a new queuing model, which may be of independent interest. To examine its metadata-hiding properties, we extend standard security definitions to account for metadata and prove a surprising result: if a scheme is subliminal in that it hides the execution of its operations, then it absorbs the leakage of any scheme that makes black-box use of it without sending additional messages. In other words, if a scheme is subliminal, then any scheme that makes black-box use of it will also be subliminal.

We implement and evaluate our construction, demonstrating that our empirical results align with our theoretical analysis and that the scheme achieves a median query latency below $10$ milliseconds, making it practical for some applications.
Expand
Eli Goldin, Tomoyuki Morimae, Saachi Mutreja, Takashi Yamakawa
ePrint Report ePrint Report
We construct a quantum oracle relative to which $\mathbf{BQP}=\mathbf{QCMA}$ but quantum-computation-classical-communication (QCCC) key exchange, QCCC commitments, and two-round quantum key distribution exist. We also construct an oracle relative to which $\mathbf{BQP}=\mathbf{QMA}$, but quantum lightning (a stronger variant of quantum money) exists. This extends previous work by Kretschmer [Kretschmer, TQC22], which showed that there is a quantum oracle relative to which $\mathbf{BQP}=\mathbf{QMA}$ but pseudorandom state generators (a quantum variant of pseudorandom generators) exist. We also show that QCCC key exchange, QCCC commitments, and two-round quantum key distribution can all be used to build one-way puzzles. One-way puzzles are a version of "quantum samplable" one-wayness and are an intermediate primitive between pseudorandom state generators and EFI pairs, the minimal quantum primitive. In particular, one-way puzzles cannot exist if $\mathbf{BQP}=\mathbf{PP}$. Our results together imply that aside from pseudorandom state generators, there is a large class of quantum cryptographic primitives which can exist even if $\mathbf{BQP} = \mathbf{QCMA}$, but are broken if $\mathbf{BQP} = \mathbf{PP}$. Furthermore, one-way puzzles are a minimal primitive for this class. We denote this class "CountCrypt".
Expand
Benoit COGLIATI, Gilles Macariot-Rat, Jacques Patarin, Pierre Varjabedian
ePrint Report ePrint Report
HFE (that stands for Hidden Field Equations) belongs to multivariate cryptography and was designed by Jacques Patarin in 1996 as a public key trapdoor suitable for encryption or signature. This original basic version is unfortunately known to have a super-polynomial attack, but as imagined since the beginning, it comes with various variants, one can describe as combinations of “modifiers”. In this work, we first present the state of the art of these HFE modifiers, along with their effect on the complexity of the main cryptanalysis techniques against HFE-based schemes. This allows us, in a second time, to identify a combination of two modifiers that has not yet been explored and may still be secure with efficient parameters. Based on our analysis, we propose a new signature scheme that offers extremely short signature sizes, with reasonable public key sizes and performance. In particular, we rely on the classical Feistel-Patarin technique to reduce signature sizes below two times the security parameter.
Expand
Yuan Su, Yuan Lu, Jiliang Li, Yuyi Wang, Chengyi Dong, Qiang Tang
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Fully asynchronous multi-party computation (AMPC) has superior robustness in realizing privacy and guaranteed output delivery (G.O.D.) against asynchronous adversaries that can arbitrarily delay communications. However, none of these protocols are truly practical, as they either have sub-optimal resilience, incur cumbersome communication cost, or suffer from an online phase with extra cryptographic overhead. The only attempting implementation---HoneyBadgerMPC (hbMPC)---merely ensures G.O.D. in some implausible optimistic cases due to a non-robust offline pre-processing phase.

We propose Dumbo-MPC a concretely efficient AMPC-as-a-service design with all phases G.O.D. and optimal resilience against $t
We also implement and extensively evaluate Dumbo-MPC (particularly its offline phase) in varying network settings with up to 31 AWS servers. To our knowledge, we provide the first implementation of AMPC with all-phase G.O.D. A recent asynchronous triple generation protocol from Groth and Shoup (GS23) is also implemented and experimentally compared. When $n = 31$, Dumbo-MPC generates 94 triples/sec (almost twice of GS23) in the pessimistic case and 349 triples/sec (6X of GS23) in the good case, such that 31 parties require only 2-8 min to prepare a private Vickrey auction of 100 bidders or 10-36 min for a mixing network of $2^{10}$ inputs.
Expand
Lior Rotem, Gil Segev, Eylon Yogev
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Multi-signature schemes are gaining significant interest due to their blockchain applications. Of particular interest are two-round schemes in the plain public-key model that offer key aggregation, and whose security is based on the hardness of the DLOG problem. Unfortunately, despite substantial recent progress, the security proofs of the proposed schemes provide rather insufficient concrete guarantees (especially for 256-bit groups). This frustrating situation has so far been approached either by relying on the security of seemingly stronger assumptions or by considering restricted classes of attackers (e.g., algebraic attackers, which are assumed to provide an algebraic justification of each group element that they produce).

We present a complementing approach by constructing multi-signature schemes that satisfy two relaxed notions of security, whose applicability nevertheless ranges from serving as drop-in replacements to enabling expressive smart contract validation procedures. Our first notion, one-time unforgeability, extends the analogous single-signer notion by considering attackers that obtain a single signature for some message and set of signers of their choice. We construct a non-interactive one-time scheme based on any ring-homomorphic one-way function, admitting efficient instantiations based on the DLOG and RSA assumptions. Aggregated verification keys and signatures consist of two group elements and a single group element, respectively, and our security proof consists of a single application of the forking lemma (thus avoiding the substantial security loss exhibited by the proposed two-round schemes). Additionally, we demonstrate that our scheme naturally extends to a $t$-time scheme, where aggregated verification keys consist of $t+1$ group elements, while aggregated signatures still consist of a single group element.

Our second notion, single-set unforgeability, considers attackers that obtain any polynomial number of signatures but are restricted to a single set of signers of their choice. We transform any non-interactive one-time scheme into a two-round single-set scheme via a novel forking-free construction that extends the seminal Naor-Yung tree-based approach to the multi-signer setting. Aggregated verification keys are essentially identical to those of the underlying one-time scheme, and the length of aggregated signatures is determined by that of the underlying scheme while scaling linearly with the length of messages (noting that long messages can always be hashed using a collision-resistant function). Instantiated with our one-time scheme, we obtain aggregated verification keys and signatures whose lengths are completely independent of the number of signers.
Expand
Chunling Chen, Xianhui Lu, Ruida Wang, Zhihao Li, Xuan Shen, Benqiang Wei
ePrint Report ePrint Report
The FHEW-like gate bootstrapping framework operates in a 2-bit plaintext space, where logic gates such as NAND, XOR, and AND are implemented by adding two ciphertexts and extracting the most significant bit. However, each gate operation requires bootstrapping with a primary cost of one blind rotation, which is expensive, when processing circuit operations for applications. We propose a novel Free-XOR gate bootstrapping framework based on a single-bit plaintext space, in which the XOR operation is realized by simply adding two ciphertexts, resulting in an almost free computational cost. To form a minimal complete set for logical operations, we design an algorithm for the AND gate within this framework. The AND gate cost of our Free-XOR gate bootstrapping involves two blind rotations. However, by utilizing a single-bit plaintext space to enhance noise tolerance and swapping some operations of the bootstrapping process, we can adopt a more compact parameter setting, which in turn accelerates the speed of blind rotation. We propose an instantiation of the NTRU-based AND gate operation, which requires two blind rotations. Despite the additional rotation, the overall computational cost is marginally lower than the state-of-the-art gate bootstrapping scheme LLW+ [TCHES24], which utilizes only a single blind rotation. In addition, our approach achieves a significant reduction in key size, reducing it to 3.3 times the size of LLW+ [TCHES24].
Expand
Diego F. Aranha, Antonio Guimarães, Clément Hoffmann, Pierrick Méaux
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Transciphering (or Hybrid-Homomorphic Encryption, HHE) is an es- tablished technique for avoiding ciphertext expansion in HE applications, saving communication and storage resources. Recently, it has also been shown to be a fundamental component in the practical construction of HE-based multi-party computation (MPC) protocols, being used both for input data and intermediary results (Smart, IMACC 2023). In these protocols, however, ciphers are used with keys that are jointly generated by multiple (possibly malicious) parties, which may require additional security assumptions that have been so far overlooked in the HHE literature. In this paper, we formalize this issue as a security against related-key attacks (RKA) problem and provide efficient solutions for it. We start by presenting an efficient method for homomorphically evaluating Mixed-Filter-Permutator (MFP) ciphers in leveled mode, enabling speedups of up to thousands of times compared to previous literature. For the multi-party scenario, we focus specifically on the Margrethe cipher (Hoffmann et al., INDOCRYPT 2023). We show that, contrary to other commonly used HHE ciphers (e.g. FLIP), Margrethe is out-of-the-box secure for any protocols that allow malicious parties to learn up to two related key streams, enabling security for the vast majority of static MPC protocols. For other cases, we quantify the loss of security based on the number of related key streams (which often depends on the number of malicious parties and specific protocol). Performance-wise, our implementation of Margrethe takes just 3.9 ms to transcipher 4 bit messages, being significantly faster than the state of the art in terms of latency.
Expand
Varun Narayanan, Shubham Vivek Pawar, Akshayaram Srinivasan
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Reductions are the workhorses of cryptography. They allow constructions of complex cryptographic primitives from simple building blocks. A prominent example is the non-interactive reduction from securely computing a ``complex" function $f$ to securely computing a ``simple" function $g$ via randomized encodings.

Prior work equated simplicity with functions of small degree. In this work, we consider a different notion of simplicity where we require $g$ to only take inputs from a small number of parties. In other words, we want the arity of $g$ to be as small as possible.

In more detail, we consider the problem of reducing secure computation of arbitrary functions to secure computation of functions with arity two (two is the minimal arity required to compute non-trivial functions). Specifically, we want to compute a function $f$ via a protocol that makes parallel calls to 2-ary functions. We want this protocol to be secure against malicious adversaries that could corrupt an arbitrary number of parties. We obtain the following results: - Negative Result: We show that there exists a degree-2 polynomial $p$ such that no protocol that makes parallel calls to 2-ary functions can compute $p$ with statistical security with abort. - Positive Results: We give two ways to bypass the above impossibility result. 1. Weakening the Security Notion. We show that every degree-2 polynomial can be computed with statistical privacy with knowledge of outputs (PwKO) by making parallel calls to 2-ary functions. Privacy with knowledge of outputs is weaker than security with abort. 2. Computational Security. We prove that for every function $f$, there exists a protocol for computing $f$ that makes parallel calls to 2-ary functions and achieves security with abort against computationally-bounded adversaries. The security of this protocol relies on the existence of semi-honest secure oblivious transfer. - Applications: We give connections between this problem and the task of reducing the encoding complexity of Multiparty Randomized Encodings (MPRE) (Applebaum, Brakerski, and Tsabary, TCC 2018). Specifically, we show that under standard computational assumptions, there exists an MPRE where the encoder can be implemented by an $\mathrm{NC}^0$ circuit with constant fan-out. - Extensions: We explore this problem in the honest majority setting and give similar results assuming one-way functions. We also show that if the parties have access to 3-ary functions then we can construct a computationally secure protocol in the dishonest majority setting assuming one-way functions.
Expand
◄ Previous Next ►