International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Enforcement of policy regulations and availability of auditing mechanisms are crucial building blocks for the adoption of distributed payment systems. This paper reviews a number of existing proposals for distributed payment systems that offer some form of auditability for regulators. We identify two major distinct lines of work: payment systems that are not privacy-preserving such as Bitcoin, where regulation functionalities are typically tailored for organizations controlling many accounts, and privacy-preserving payment systems where regulation functionalities are typically targeted to user level. We provide a systematization methodology over several axes of characteristics and performance, while highlighting insights and research gaps that we have identified, such as lack of dispute-resolution solutions between the regulator and the entity under audit, and the incompatibility of ledger pruning or off-chain protocols with regulatory requirements. Based on our findings, we propose a number of exciting future research directions.

CRAFT is a lightweight tweakable Substitution-Permutation-Network (SPN) block cipher optimized for efficient protection of its implementations against Differential Fault Analysis (DFA) attacks. In this paper, we present an equivalent description of CRAFT up to a simple mapping on the plaintext, ciphertext and round tweakeys. We show that the new representation, for a sub-class of keys, leads to a new structure which is a Feistel network, i.e., with half state non-linear operation and half state key addition. This has two interesting consequences: First, the new structure of the cipher is less resistant against differential and linear cryptanalyses. Second, it allows a more efficient implementation of the cipher.

In this paper, we show that OAEP transform is indistinguishable under chosen ciphertext attack in the quantum random oracle model if the underlying trapdoor permutation is quantum partial-domain one-way. The existing post-quantum security of OAEP (TCC 2016-B ) requires a modification to the OAEP transform using an extra hash function. We prove the security of the OAEP transform without any modification and this answers an open question in one of the finalists of NIST competition, NTRU submission, affirmatively.

In this paper we propose a faster variant of SNOW-V, called SNOW-Vi, that can perform fast enough not only in cloud settings but also on low grade CPUs. The increase in software performance is around 50% in average, up to 92 Gbps. This makes the applicability of the cipher much wider and it covers more use cases. SNOW-Vi differs in the way how the LFSR is updated and also introduces a new location of the tap $T2$ for a stronger security, while everything else is kept the same as in SNOW-V. The security analyses previously done for SNOW-V are not affected in most aspects, and SNOW-Vi provides the same 256-bit security level as SNOW-V.

We construct the currently most efficient signature schemes with tight multi-user security against adaptive corruptions. It is the first generic construction of such schemes, based on lossy identification schemes (Abdalla etal; JoC 2016), and the first to achieve strong existential unforgeability. It also has significantly more compact signatures than the previously most efficient construction by Gjosteen and Jager (CRYPTO 2018). When instantiated based on the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption, a signature consists of only three exponents.

We propose a new variant of the generic construction of signatures from sequential OR-proofs by Abe, Ohkubo, and Suzuki (ASIACRYPT 2002) and Fischlin, Harasser, and Janson (EUROCRYPT 2020). In comparison to Fischlin etal, who focus on constructing signatures in the non-programmable random oracle model (NPROM), we aim to achieve tight security against adaptive corruptions, maximize efficiency, and to directly achieve strong existential unforgeability (also in the NPROM). This yields a slightly different construction and we use slightly different and additional properties of the lossy identification scheme.

Signatures with tight multi-user security against adaptive corruptions are a commonly-used standard building block for tightly-secure authenticated key exchange protocols. We also show how our construction improves the efficiency of all existing tightly-secure AKE protocols.

In this note, an LWE problem with a hidden trapdoor is introduced. It is used to construct an efficient public-key crypto-system EHT. The new system is significantly different from LWE based NIST candidates like FrodoKEM. The performance of EHT compares favorably with FrodoKEM.

Suppose that a problem $\Pi$ has a statistical zero-knowledge (SZK) proof with communication complexity $m$. The question of batch verification for SZK asks whether one can prove that $k$ instances $x_1,\ldots,x_k$ all belong to $\Pi$ with a statistical zero-knowledge proof whose communication complexity is better than $k \cdot m$ (which is the complexity of the trivial solution of executing the original protocol independently on each input).

In a recent work, Kaslasi et al. (TCC, 2020) constructed such a batch verification protocol for any problem having a non-interactive SZK (NISZK) proof-system. Two drawbacks of their result are that their protocol is private-coin and is only zero-knowledge with respect to the honest verifier.

In this work, we eliminate these two drawbacks by constructing a public-coin malicious-verifier SZK protocol for batch verification of NISZK. Similarly to the aforementioned prior work, the communication complexity of our protocol is $\big(k+poly(m) \big) \cdot polylog(k,m)$.

To factor an integer $N$ we construct $n$ triples of $p_n$-smooth integers $u,v,|u-vN|$ for the $n$-th prime $p_n$. Denote such triple a fac-relation. We get fac-relations from a nearly shortest vector of the lattice $\mathcal{L}(\mathbf{R}_{n,f})$ with basis matrix $\mathbf{R}_{n,f} \in \mathbb{R}^{(n+1)\times (n+1)}$ where $f : [1,n] \rightarrow [1,n]$ is a permutation of $[1,2,...,n]$ and $(N f(1),...,N f(n))$ is the diagonal of $\mathbf{R}_{n,f}$. We get an independent fac-relation from an independent permutation $f'$. We find sufficiently short lattice vectors by strong primal-dual reduction of $\mathbf{R}_{n,f}$. We factor $N \approx 2^{400}$ by n = 47 and $N \approx 2^{800}$ by n = 95. Our accelerated strong primal-dual reduction of [Gama, Nguyen 2008] factors integers $N \approx 2^{400}$ and $N \approx 2^{800}$ by $4.2 \cdot 10^9$ and $8.4 \cdot 10^{10}$ arithmetic operations, much faster then the quadratic sieve {\bf QS} and the number field sieve {\bf NFS} and using much smaller primes $p_n$. This destroyes the RSA cryptosystem.

Oblivious RAM (ORAM) enables a user to read/write her outsourced cloud data without access-pattern leakage. Not all users want a fully functional ORAM all the time since it always creates inefficiency. We show that forward-private/backward-private (FP/BP) ORAMs are also good alternatives for reducing the search-pattern leakage of dynamic searchable encryption (DSE). We introduce the FP/BP-ORAM definitions and present LL-ORAM, the first FP/BP-ORAM that achieves near-zero client storage, single-round-trip read/write, worst-case sublinear search time, and an extremely simple implementation. LL-ORAM consists of a set of switchable protocols whose security can be switched among forward privacy, backward privacy, and perfect security at any time. The construction involves a novel tree data structure named LL-tree, whose advantage is that it supports fast computation in the cloud with an access-pattern-reduced leakage profile. LL-ORAM security is formally proven under forward and backward privacy. The experimental results demonstrate that LL-ORAM is efficient and can be practically employed by DSE applications.

Restoring the security of maliciously implemented cryptosystems has been widely considered challenging due to the fact that the subverted implementation could arbitrarily deviate from the official specification. Achieving security against adversaries that can arbitrarily subvert implementations seems to inherently require trusted component assumptions and/or architectural properties. At ASIACRYPT 2016, Russell et al. proposed an attractive model where a watchdog is used to test and approve individual components of an implementation before or during deployment. Such a detection-based strategy has been useful for designing various cryptographic schemes that are provably resilient to subversion.

We consider Russell et al.'s watchdog model from a practical perspective regarding watchdog efficiency. We find that the asymptotic definitional framework, while permitting strong positive theoretical results, does not yet guarantee practical watchdogs, due to the fact that the running time of a watchdog is only bounded by an abstract polynomial. Hence, in the worst case, the running time of the watchdog might exceed the running time of the adversary, which seems impractical for most applications. We adopt Russell et al.'s watchdog model to the concrete security setting and design the first subversion-resilient public-key encryption scheme which allows for extremely efficient watchdogs with only linear running time.

At the core of our construction is a new variant of a combiner for key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) by Giacon et al. (PKC'18). We combine this construction with a new subversion-resilient randomness generator that also can be checked by an efficient watchdog, even in constant time, which could be of independent interest for the design of other subversion-resilient cryptographic schemes. Our work thus shows how to apply Russell et al.'s watchdog model to design subversion-resilient cryptography with efficient watchdogs. We insist that this work does not intend to show that the watchdog model outperforms other defense approaches, but to demonstrate that practical watchdogs are practically achievable.

This research revisits the fundamental problem of processing privacy-preserving Boolean queries over outsourced databases on untrusted public clouds. Many current Searchable Encryption (SE) schemes try to seek an appropriate trade-off between security and efficiency, yet most of them suffer from an unacceptable query leakage due to their conjunctive/disjunctive terms that are processed individually. We show, however, this trade-off still can be deeply optimized for more security. We consider a Boolean formula as a set of deterministic finite automatons (DFAs) and propose a novel approach to running an encrypted DFA, which can be effectively and efficiently processed by the cloud. We give three constructions for conjunctive, disjunctive, and Boolean queries, respectively. Their notable advantages are single-round, highly-efficient, adaptively-secure, and leakage-minimized. A lot of experiments are made to evaluate overall efficiency. Testing results show that the schemes achieve enhanced security almost without sacrificing anything of search efficiency.

Constructing interactive zero-knowledge arguments from simple assumptions with small communication complexity and good computational efficiency is an important, but difficult problem. In this work, we study interactive arguments with noticeable soundness error in their full generality and for the specific purpose of constructing concretely efficient shuffle arguments.

To counterbalance the effects of a larger soundness error, we show how to transform such three-move arguments into publicly-accountable ones which allow the verifier to convince third parties of detected misbehavior by a cheating prover. This may be particularly interesting for applications where a malicious prover has to balance the profits it can make from cheating successfully and the losses it suffers from being caught. %In contrast to standard sequential repetition, our transformation increases the round and communication complexity by only a small additive factor.

We construct interactive, public-coin, zero-knowledge arguments with noticeable soundness error for proving that a target vector of commitments is a pseudorandom permutation of a source vector. Our arguments do not rely on any trusted setup and only require the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. The communication complexity of our arguments is \emph{independent} of the length of the shuffled vector. For a soundness error of $2^{-5}=1/32$, the communication cost is $153$ bytes without and $992$ bytes with public accountability, meaning that our arguments are shorter than shuffle arguments realized using Bulletproofs (IEEE S\&P 2018) and even competitive in size with SNARKs, despite only relying on simple assumptions.

In this work, we first present general methods to construct information rate-1 PKE that is $\KDM^{(n)}$-secure with respect to \emph{block-affine} functions for any unbounded polynomial $n$. To achieve this, we propose a new notion of extractor that satisfies \emph{reusability}, \emph{homomorphic}, and \emph{security against correlated-source attacks}, and show how to use this extractor to improve the information rate of the \KDM-secure PKE of Brakerski et al.~(Eurocrypt 18). Then, we show how to amplify \KDM~security from block-affine function class into general bounded size circuits via a variant of the technique of Applebaum (Eurocrypt 11), achieving better efficiency. Furthermore, we show how to generalize these approaches to the IBE setting.

Additionally, our PKE and IBE schemes are also leakage resilient, with leakage rates $1-o(1)$ against a slightly smaller yet still general class -- block leakage functions. We can instantiate the required building blocks from $\LWE$ or $\DDH$.

Group encryption (\textsf{GE}), introduced by Kiayias, Tsiounis and Yung (Asiacrypt'07), is the encryption analogue of group signatures. It allows to send verifiably encrypted messages satisfying certain requirements to certified members of a group, while keeping the anonymity of the receivers. Similar to the tracing mechanism in group signatures, the receiver of any ciphertext can be identified by an opening authority - should the needs arise. The primitive of \textsf{GE} is motivated by a number of interesting privacy-preserving applications, including the filtering of encrypted emails sent to certified members of an organization.

This paper aims to improve the state-of-affairs of \textsf{GE} systems. Our first contribution is the formalization of fully dynamic group encryption (\textsf{FDGE}) - a \textsf{GE} system simultaneously supporting dynamic user enrolments and user revocations. The latter functionality for \textsf{GE} has not been considered so far. As a second contribution, we realize the message filtering feature for \textsf{GE} based on a list of $t$-bit keywords and $2$ commonly used policies: ``permissive'' - accept the message if it contains at least one of the keywords as a substring; ``prohibitive'' - accept the message if all of its $t$-bit substrings are at Hamming distance at least $d$ from all keywords, for $d \geq 1$. This feature so far has not been substantially addressed in existing instantiations of \textsf{GE} based on DCR, DDH, pairing-based and lattice-based assumptions. Our third contribution is the first instantiation of GE under code-based assumptions. The scheme is more efficient than the lattice-based construction of Libert et al. (Asiacrypt'16) - which, prior to our work, is the only known instantiation of \textsf{GE} under post-quantum assumptions. Our scheme supports the $2$ suggested policies for message filtering, and in the random oracle model, it satisfies the stringent security notions for \textsf{FDGE} that we put forward.

Extended Affine (EA) equivalence is the equivalence relation between two vectorial Boolean functions $F$ and $G$ such that there exist two affine permutations $A$, $B$, and an affine function $C$ satisfying $G = A \circ F \circ B + C$. While a priori simple, it is very difficult in practice to test whether two functions are EA-equivalent. This problem has two variants: EA-testing deals with figuring out whether the two functions can be EA-equivalent, and EA-recovery is about recovering the tuple $(A,B,C)$ if it exists. In this paper, we present a new efficient algorithm that efficiently solves the EA-recovery problem for quadratic functions. Though its worst-case complexity is obtained when dealing with APN functions, it supersedes all previously known algorithms in terms of performance, even in this case. This approach is based on the Jacobian matrix of the functions, a tool whose study in this context can be of independent interest. In order to tackle EA-testing efficiently, the best approach in practice relies on class invariants. We provide an overview of the literature on said invariants along with a new one based on the ortho-derivative which is applicable to quadratic APN functions, a specific type of functions that is of great interest, and of which tens of thousands need to be sorted into distinct EA-classes. Our ortho-derivative-based invariant is both very fast to compute, and highly discriminating.

In this paper, we present a new technique which can be used to find better linear approximations in ARX ciphers. Using this technique, we present the first explicitly derived linear approximations for 3 and 4 rounds of ChaCha and, as a consequence, it enables us to improve the recent attacks against ChaCha. Additionally, we present new differentials for 3 and 3.5 rounds of ChaCha that, when combined with the proposed technique, lead to further improvement in the complexity of the Differential-Linear attacks against ChaCha.

Blockchain technologies have received a great amount of attention, and its immutability is paramount to facilitate certain applications requiring persistent records. However, in many other use-cases, tremendous real-world incidents have exposed the harm of strict immutability. For example, illicit data stored in immutable blockchain poses numerous challenge for law enforcement agencies such as Interpol, and millions of dollars are lost due to the vulnerabilities of immutable smart contract. Moreover, ``Right to be Forgotten" (a.k.a. data erasure) has been imposed in new European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, thus causing immutable blockchains no longer compatible with personal data. Therefore, it is imperative (even legally required) to design efficient redactable blockchain protocols in a controlled way.

In this paper, we present a generic approach of designing redactable blockchain protocol in the permissionless setting with instant redaction, applied to both proof-of-stake blockchain and proof-of-stake blockchain with just different instantiations to randomly select ``committees'' according to stake or computational power. Our protocol can achieve the security against 1/2 (mildly adaptive) adversary bound, which is optimal in the blockchain protocol. It also offers public verifiability for redactable chains, where any edited block in the chain is publicly verifiable. Compared to previous solutions in permissionless setting, our redaction operation can be completed instantly, even only within one block in synchronous network, which is desirable for redacting harmful or sensitive data. Moreover, our protocol is compatible with most current blockchains requiring only minimal changes. Furthermore, we define the first ideal functionality of redactable blockchain following the language of universal composition, and prove that our protocol can achieve the security property of redactable common prefix, chain quality, and chain growth. Finally, we develop a proof-of-concept implementation, and conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the overhead incurred by redactions. The experimental results show that the overhead remains minimal for both online nodes and re-spawning nodes, which demonstrates the high efficiency of our design.

In addition to providing quantum-safe traditional PKI, lattices support advanced primitives such as identity-based encryption (IBE). These schemes have shown promising results in terms of practicality, but still have disadvantages such as the reliance on a single master key. Hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE) schemes address this problem, as well as lending themselves to more realistic organisational structures. To date, several HIBE schemes over lattices have been proposed but there has been little in the way of practical evaluation.

This paper provides the first complete C implementation and benchmarking of Latte, a promising HIBE scheme proposed by the United Kingdom (UK) The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in 2017 and endorsed by European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). We also propose further optimisations for the KeyGen, Delegate, and sampling components of Latte. As expected, the KeyGen, Extract, and Delegate components are the most time consuming, with Extract experiencing a 35% decrease in op/s from the first to second hierarchical level at 80-bit security. Our optimised implementation of the Delegate function takes 1 second at this security level on a desktop machine at 4.2GHz, significantly faster than the order of minutes estimated in the ETSI technical report. Furthermore, our optimised Latte Encrypt/Decrypt implementation reaches speeds up to 4.6x faster than the ETSI implementation.

We introduce a new definition for key updates, called backward-leak uni-directional key updates, in updatable encryption (UE). This notion is a variant of uni-directional key updates for UE. We show that there exist UE schemes that are secure in the bi-directional key updates setting, but not secure in the backward-leak uni-directional key updates setting. This result is a contrast to the equivalence theorem by Jiang (Asiacrypt 2020), which says security in the bi-directional key updates setting is equivalent to security in the uni-directional key updates setting (we call the latter ``forward-leak uni-directional'' key updates to distinguish two types of uni-directional key updates in this paper).

We also construct two UE schemes with the following features.

- The first scheme is post-quantum secure in the backward-leak uni-directional key updates setting under the learning with errors assumption.

- The second scheme is secure in the no-directional key updates setting and based on indistinguishability obfuscation and one-way functions. This solves the open problem left by Jiang at Asiacrypt 2020.

We focus on exploring more potential of Longa and Sica's algorithm (ASIACRYPT 2012), which is an elaborate iterated Cornacchia algorithm that can compute short bases for 4-GLV decompositions. The algorithm consists of two sub-algorithms, the first one in the ring of integers $\mathbb{Z}$ and the second one in the Gaussian integer ring $\mathbb{Z}[i]$. We observe that $\mathbb{Z}[i]$ in the second sub-algorithm can be replaced by another Euclidean domain $\mathbb{Z}[\omega]$ $(\omega=\frac{-1+\sqrt{-3}}{2})$. As a consequence, we design a new twofold Cornacchia-type algorithm with a theoretic upper bound of output $C\cdot n^{1/4}$, where $C=\frac{3+\sqrt{3}}{2}\sqrt{1+|r|+|s|}$ with small values $r, s$ given by the curve. Besides, we give some applications of our new algotithm in some cuvres not considered in Longa and Sica's algorithm.