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24 September 2024
Dakshita Khurana, Kabir Tomer
ePrint Report
Recent oracle separations [Kretschmer, TQC'21, Kretschmer et. al., STOC'23] have raised the tantalizing possibility of building quantum cryptography from sources of hardness that persist even if the polynomial heirarchy collapses. We realize this possibility by building quantum bit commitments and secure computation from unrelativized, well-studied mathematical problems that are conjectured to be hard for $\mathsf{P}^{\#\mathsf{P}}$ -- such as approximating the permanents of complex gaussian matrices, or approximating the output probabilities of random quantum circuits. Indeed, we show that as long as \any one of the conjectures underlying sampling-based quantum advantage (e.g., BosonSampling, Random Circuit Sampling, IQP, etc.) is true, quantum cryptography can be based on the extremely mild assumption that $\mathsf{P}^{\#\mathsf{P}} \not\subseteq \mathsf{(io)BQP}/\mathsf{qpoly}$.
Our techniques uncover strong connections between the hardness of approximating the probabilities of outcomes of quantum processes, the existence of ``one-way'' state synthesis problems, and the existence of useful cryptographic primitives such as one-way puzzles and quantum bit commitments. Specifically, we prove that the following hardness assumptions are equivalent under $\mathsf{BQP}$ reductions.
1. The hardness of approximating the probabilities of outcomes of certain efficiently sampleable distributions. That is, there exist quantumly efficiently sampleable distributions for which it is hard to approximate the probability assigned to a randomly chosen string in the support of the distribution (upto inverse polynomial multiplicative error).
2. The existence of one-way puzzles, where a quantum sampler outputs a pair of classical strings -- a puzzle and its key -- and where the hardness lies in finding the key corresponding to a random puzzle. These are known to imply quantum bit commitments [Khurana and Tomer, STOC'24].
3. The existence of state puzzles, or one-way state synthesis, where it is hard to synthesize a secret quantum state given a public classical identifier. These capture the hardness of search problems with quantum inputs (secrets) and classical outputs (challenges).
These are the first constructions of quantum cryptographic primitives (one-way puzzles, quantum bit commitments, state puzzles) from concrete, well-founded mathematical assumptions that do not imply the existence of classical cryptography.
Along the way, we also show that distributions that admit efficient quantum samplers but cannot be pseudo-deterministically efficiently sampled imply quantum commitments.
Nishanth Chandran, Juan Garay, Ankit Kumar Misra, Rafail Ostrovsky, Vassilis Zikas
ePrint Report
The problem of reliable/secure all-to-all communication over low-degree networks has been essential for communication-local (CL) n-party MPC (i.e., MPC protocols where every party directly communicates only with a few, typically polylogarithmic in n, parties) and more recently for communication over ad hoc networks, which are used in blockchain protocols. However, a limited number of adaptively secure solutions exist, and they all make relatively strong assumptions on the ability of parties to act in some specific manner before the adversary can corrupt them. Two such assumptions were made in the work of Chandran et al. [ITCS ’15]---parties can (a) multisend messages to several receivers simultaneously; and (b) securely erase the message and the identities of the receivers, before the adversary gets a chance to corrupt the sender (even if a receiver is corrupted). A natural question to ask is: Are these assumptions necessary for adaptively secure CL MPC? In this paper, we characterize the feasibility landscape for all-to-all reliable message transmission (RMT) under these two assumptions, and use this characterization to obtain (asymptotically) tight feasibility results for CL MPC.
– First, we prove a strong impossibility result for a broad class of RMT protocols, termed here store-and-forward protocols, which includes all known communication protocols for CL MPC from standard cryptographic assumptions. Concretely, we show that no such protocol with a certain expansion rate can tolerate a constant fraction of parties being corrupted.
– Next, under the assumption of only a PKI, we show that assuming secure erasures, we can obtain an RMT protocol between all pairs of parties with polylogarithmic locality (even without assuming multisend) for the honest majority setting. We complement this result by showing a negative result for the setting of dishonest majority.
– Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, under stronger assumptions (i.e., trapdoor permutations with a reverse domain sampler, and compact and malicious circuit-private FHE), we construct a polylogarithmic-locality all-to-one RMT protocol, which is adaptively secure and tolerates any constant fraction of corruptions, without assuming either secure erasures or multisend. This last result uses a novel combination of adaptively secure (e.g., non-committing) encryption and (static) FHE to bypass the impossibility of compact adaptively secure FHE by Katz et al. [PKC’13], which we believe may be of independent interest. Intriguingly, even such assumptions do not allow reducing all-to-all RMT to all-to-one RMT (a reduction which is trivial in the non-CL setting). Still, we can implement what we call sublinear output-set RMT (SOS-RMT for short). We show how SOS-RMT can be used for SOS-MPC under the known bounds for feasibility of MPC in the standard (i.e., non-CL) setting assuming, in addition to SOS-RMT, an anonymous PKI.
– First, we prove a strong impossibility result for a broad class of RMT protocols, termed here store-and-forward protocols, which includes all known communication protocols for CL MPC from standard cryptographic assumptions. Concretely, we show that no such protocol with a certain expansion rate can tolerate a constant fraction of parties being corrupted.
– Next, under the assumption of only a PKI, we show that assuming secure erasures, we can obtain an RMT protocol between all pairs of parties with polylogarithmic locality (even without assuming multisend) for the honest majority setting. We complement this result by showing a negative result for the setting of dishonest majority.
– Finally, and somewhat surprisingly, under stronger assumptions (i.e., trapdoor permutations with a reverse domain sampler, and compact and malicious circuit-private FHE), we construct a polylogarithmic-locality all-to-one RMT protocol, which is adaptively secure and tolerates any constant fraction of corruptions, without assuming either secure erasures or multisend. This last result uses a novel combination of adaptively secure (e.g., non-committing) encryption and (static) FHE to bypass the impossibility of compact adaptively secure FHE by Katz et al. [PKC’13], which we believe may be of independent interest. Intriguingly, even such assumptions do not allow reducing all-to-all RMT to all-to-one RMT (a reduction which is trivial in the non-CL setting). Still, we can implement what we call sublinear output-set RMT (SOS-RMT for short). We show how SOS-RMT can be used for SOS-MPC under the known bounds for feasibility of MPC in the standard (i.e., non-CL) setting assuming, in addition to SOS-RMT, an anonymous PKI.
Gennaro Avitabile, Vincenzo Botta, Daniele Friolo, Daniele Venturi, Ivan Visconti
ePrint Report
At CRYPTO '94, Cramer, Damgaard, and Schoenmakers introduced a general technique for constructing
honest-verifier zero-knowledge proofs of partial knowledge (PPK), where a prover Alice wants to prove to a verifier Bob she knows $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ claims out of $k$ claims without revealing the indices of those $\tau$ claims.
Their solution starts from a base honest-verifier zero-knowledge proof of knowledge $\Sigma$ and requires to run in parallel $k$ execution of the base protocol, giving a complexity of $O(k\gamma(\Sigma))$, where $\gamma(\Sigma)$ is the communication complexity of the base protocol.
However, modern practical scenarios require communication-efficient zero-knowledge proofs tailored to handle partial knowledge in specific application-dependent formats.
In this paper we propose a technique to compose a large class of $\Sigma$-protocols for atomic statements into $\Sigma$-protocols for PPK over formulae in conjunctive normal form (CNF) that overlap, in the sense that there is a common subset of literals among all clauses of the formula. In such formulae, the statement is expressed as a conjunction of $m$ clauses, each of which consists of a disjunction of $k$ literals (i.e., each literal is an atomic statement) and $k$ literals are shared among clauses. The prover, for a threshold parameter $\tau \le k$, proves knowledge of at least $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ distinct literals in each clause. At the core of our protocol, there is a new technique to compose $\Sigma$-protocols for regular CNF relations (i.e., when $ \tau=1$) that exploits the overlap among clauses and that we then generalize to formulae where $\tau>1$ providing improvements over state-of-the-art constructions.
In this paper we propose a technique to compose a large class of $\Sigma$-protocols for atomic statements into $\Sigma$-protocols for PPK over formulae in conjunctive normal form (CNF) that overlap, in the sense that there is a common subset of literals among all clauses of the formula. In such formulae, the statement is expressed as a conjunction of $m$ clauses, each of which consists of a disjunction of $k$ literals (i.e., each literal is an atomic statement) and $k$ literals are shared among clauses. The prover, for a threshold parameter $\tau \le k$, proves knowledge of at least $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ distinct literals in each clause. At the core of our protocol, there is a new technique to compose $\Sigma$-protocols for regular CNF relations (i.e., when $ \tau=1$) that exploits the overlap among clauses and that we then generalize to formulae where $\tau>1$ providing improvements over state-of-the-art constructions.
Stefan-Lukas Gazdag, Sophia Grundner-Culemann
ePrint Report
Are we there yet? Are we there yet? No, kids, the road to
quantum-safety is long and sturdy. But let me tell you a story:
Once upon a time, science discovered a great threat to Cryptography World: The scalable quantum computer! Nobody had ever seen one, but everyone understood it would break the mechanisms used to secure Internet communication since times of yore (or the late 20th century, anyway). The greatest minds from all corners of the land were gathered to invent, implement, and test newer, stronger tools. They worked day and night, but alas, when smaller quantum computers already started to emerge, no end to their research was in sight. How could that be?
This paper provides a collection of carefully wrought, more or less cre- ative and more or less consistent metaphors to explain to audiences at all expertise levels the manifold challenges researchers and practitioners face in the ongoing quest for post-quantum migration.
Once upon a time, science discovered a great threat to Cryptography World: The scalable quantum computer! Nobody had ever seen one, but everyone understood it would break the mechanisms used to secure Internet communication since times of yore (or the late 20th century, anyway). The greatest minds from all corners of the land were gathered to invent, implement, and test newer, stronger tools. They worked day and night, but alas, when smaller quantum computers already started to emerge, no end to their research was in sight. How could that be?
This paper provides a collection of carefully wrought, more or less cre- ative and more or less consistent metaphors to explain to audiences at all expertise levels the manifold challenges researchers and practitioners face in the ongoing quest for post-quantum migration.
Brent Waters, Daniel Wichs
ePrint Report
Attribute-based encryption (ABE) enables fine-grained control over which ciphertexts various users can decrypt. A master authority can create secret keys $sk_f$ with different functions (circuits) $f$ for different users. Anybody can encrypt a message under some attribute $x$ so that only recipients with a key $sk_f$ for a function such that $f(x)=1$ will be able to decrypt. There are a number of different approaches toward achieving selectively secure ABE, where the adversary has to decide on the challenge attribute $x$ ahead of time before seeing any keys, including constructions via bilinear maps (for NC1 circuits), learning with errors, or witness encryption. However, when it comes adaptively secure ABE, the problem seems to be much more challenging and we only know of two potential approaches: via the ``dual systems'' methodology from bilinear maps, or via indistinguishability obfuscation. In this work, we give a new approach that constructs adaptively secure ABE from witness encryption (along with statistically sound NIZKs and one-way functions). While witness encryption is a strong assumption, it appears to be fundamentally weaker than indistinguishability obfuscation. Moreover, we have candidate constructions of witness encryption from some assumptions (e.g., evasive LWE) from which we do not know how to construct indistinguishability obfuscation, giving us adaptive ABE from these assumptions as a corollary of our work.
Mahdi Rahimi
ePrint Report
Mix networks (mixnets) enhance anonymity by routing client messages through multiple hops, intentionally delaying or reordering these messages to ensure unlinkability. However, this process increases end-to-end latency, potentially degrading the client experience. To address this issue, LARMix (NDSS, 2024) proposed a low-latency routing methodology specifically designed for stratified mixnet architectures. Our paper extends this concept to Free Routes mixnet designs, where, unlike stratified topologies, there are no restrictions on node connections. We adapt several state-of-the-art low-latency routing strategies from both mix and Tor networks to optimize the Free Routes topology. Despite the benefits, low-latency routing can cause certain mixnodes to receive disproportionate amounts of traffic. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a novel load-balancing algorithm that evenly distributes traffic among nodes without significantly compromising low-latency characteristics. Our analytical and simulation experiments demonstrate a considerable reduction in latency compared to uniform routing methods, with negligible loss in message anonymity, defined as the confusion an adversary experiences when correlating messages exiting the mixnet to an initially targeted input message. Additionally, we provide an analysis of adversarial strategies, revealing a balanced trade-off between low latency and adversary advantages.
Claude Carlet, Irene Villa
ePrint Report
We study those $(n,n)$-permutations, and more generally those balanced $(n,m)$-functions, whose component functions all admit a derivative equal to constant function 1 (this property itself implies balancedness). We call these functions quadratic-like permutations (resp. quadratic-like balanced functions) since all quadratic balanced functions have this property. We show that all Feistel permutations, all crooked permutations and (more generally) all balanced strongly plateaued functions have this same property and we observe that the notion is affine invariant. We also study in each of these classes and in the class of quadratic-like APN permutations the "reversed" property that every derivative in a nonzero direction has a component function equal to constant function 1, and we show that this property can be satisfied only if $m\ge n$. We also show that all the quadratic-like power permutations $F(x)=x^d$, $x\in \mathbb F_{2^n}$ must be quadratic, which generalizes a well-known similar result on power crooked functions. We give several constructions of quadratic-like permutations and balanced functions outside the three classes of quadratic balanced functions, permutations affine equivalent to Feistel permutations and crooked permutations. We characterize the property by the Walsh transform.
Debrup Chakraborty, Avishek Majumder, Subhabrata Samajder
ePrint Report
Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) has emerged as a promising tool for facilitating efficient query processing over encrypted data stored in un-trusted cloud servers. Several techniques have been adopted to enhance the efficiency and security of SSE schemes. The query processing costs, storage costs and communication costs of any SSE are directly related to the size of the encrypted index that is stored in the server. To our knowledge, there is no work directed towards minimizing the index size. In this paper we introduce a novel technique to directly reduce the index size of any SSE. Our proposed technique generically transforms any secure single keyword SSE into an equivalently functional and secure version with reduced storage requirements, resulting in faster search and reduced communication overhead. Our technique involves in arranging the set of document identifiers $\mathsf{db}(w)$ related to a keyword $w$ in leaf nodes of a complete binary tree and eventually obtaining a succinct representation of the set $\mathsf{db}(w)$. This small representation of $\mathsf{db}(w)$ leads to smaller index sizes. We do an extensive theoretical analysis of our scheme and prove its correctness. In addition, our comprehensive experimental analysis validates the effectiveness of our scheme on real and simulated data and shows that it can be deployed in practical situations.
Katharina Boudgoust, Mark Simkin
ePrint Report
Proofs of partial knowledge, first considered by Cramer, Damgård and Schoenmakers (CRYPTO'94) and De Santis et al. (FOCS'94), allow for proving the validity of $k$ out of $n$ different statements without revealing which ones those are. In this work, we present a new approach for transforming certain proofs system into new ones that allows for proving partial knowledge. The communication complexity of the resulting proof system only depends logarithmically on the total number of statements $n$ and its security only relies on the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. As an example, we show that our transformation is applicable to the proof systems of Goldreich, Micali, and Wigderson (FOCS'86) for the graph isomorphism and the graph 3-coloring problem.
Our main technical tool, which we believe to be of independent interest, is a new cryptographic primitive called non-adaptively programmable functions (NAPs). Those functions can be seen as pseudorandom functions which allow for re-programming the output at an input point, which must be fixed during key generation. Even when given the re-programmed key, it remains infeasible to find out where re-programming happened. Finally, as an additional technical tool, we also build explainable samplers for any distribution that can be sampled efficiently via rejection sampling and use them to construct NAPs for various output distributions.
Our main technical tool, which we believe to be of independent interest, is a new cryptographic primitive called non-adaptively programmable functions (NAPs). Those functions can be seen as pseudorandom functions which allow for re-programming the output at an input point, which must be fixed during key generation. Even when given the re-programmed key, it remains infeasible to find out where re-programming happened. Finally, as an additional technical tool, we also build explainable samplers for any distribution that can be sampled efficiently via rejection sampling and use them to construct NAPs for various output distributions.
Goichiro Hanaoka, Shuichi Katsumata, Kei Kimura, Kaoru Takemure, Shota Yamada
ePrint Report
One of the most popular techniques to prove adaptive security of identity-based encryptions (IBE) and verifiable random functions (VRF) is the partitioning technique. Currently, there are only two methods to relate the adversary's advantage and runtime $(\epsilon, {\sf T})$ to those of the reduction's ($\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}$) using this technique: One originates to Waters (Eurocrypt 2005) who introduced the famous artificial abort step to prove his IBE, achieving $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q^2/\epsilon^2))$, where $Q$ is the number of key queries. Bellare and Ristenpart (Eurocrypt 2009) provide an alternative analysis for the same scheme removing the artificial abort step, resulting in $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon^2/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. Importantly, the current reductions all loose quadratically in $\epsilon$.
In this paper, we revisit this two decade old problem and analyze proofs based on the partitioning technique through a new lens. For instance, the Waters IBE can now be proven secure with $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon^{3/2}/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$, breaking the quadratic dependence on $\epsilon$. At the core of our improvement is a finer estimation of the failing probability of the reduction in Waters' original proof relying on artificial abort. We use Bonferroni's inequality, a tunable inequality obtained by cutting off higher order terms from the equality derived by the inclusion-exclusion principle.
Our analysis not only improves the reduction of known constructions but also opens the door for new constructions. While a similar improvement to Waters IBE is possible for the lattice-based IBE by Agrawal, Boneh, and Boyen (Eurocrypt 2010), we can slightly tweak the so-called partitioning function in their construction, achieving $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. This is a much better reduction than the previously known $ (O(\epsilon^3/Q^2), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. We also propose the first VRF with proof and verification key sizes sublinear in the security parameter under the standard $d$-LIN assumption, while simultaneously improving the reduction cost compared to all prior constructions.
In this paper, we revisit this two decade old problem and analyze proofs based on the partitioning technique through a new lens. For instance, the Waters IBE can now be proven secure with $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon^{3/2}/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$, breaking the quadratic dependence on $\epsilon$. At the core of our improvement is a finer estimation of the failing probability of the reduction in Waters' original proof relying on artificial abort. We use Bonferroni's inequality, a tunable inequality obtained by cutting off higher order terms from the equality derived by the inclusion-exclusion principle.
Our analysis not only improves the reduction of known constructions but also opens the door for new constructions. While a similar improvement to Waters IBE is possible for the lattice-based IBE by Agrawal, Boneh, and Boyen (Eurocrypt 2010), we can slightly tweak the so-called partitioning function in their construction, achieving $(\epsilon_{\sf proof}, {\sf T}_{\sf proof}) = (O(\epsilon/Q), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. This is a much better reduction than the previously known $ (O(\epsilon^3/Q^2), {\sf T} + O(Q))$. We also propose the first VRF with proof and verification key sizes sublinear in the security parameter under the standard $d$-LIN assumption, while simultaneously improving the reduction cost compared to all prior constructions.
Vasyl Ustimenko
ePrint Report
Jordan-Gauss graphs are bipartite graphs given by special quadratic equations over the commutative ring K with unity with partition sets
K^n and K^m , n ≥m such that the neighbour of each vertex is defined by the system of linear equation given in its row-echelon form.
We use families of this graphs for the construction of new quadratic and cubic surjective multivariate maps F of K^n onto K^m (or K^n onto K^n) with the trapdoor accelerators T , i. e. pieces of information which allows to compute the reimage of the given value of F in poly-nomial time. The technique allows us to use the information on the quadratic map F from K^s to K^r, s ≥ r with the trapdoor accelerator T for the construction of other map G from K^{s+rs} onto K^{r+rs} with trapdoor accelerator. In the case of finite field it can be used for construc-tion of new cryptosystems from known pairs (F, T).
So we can introduce enveloping trapdoor accelerator for Matsumoto-Imai cryptosystem over finite fields of characteristic 2, for the Oil and Vinegar public keys over F_q (TUOV in particular), for quadratic multivariate public keys defined over Jordan-Gauss graphs D(n, K) where K is arbitrary finite commutative ring with the nontrivial multiplicative group.
Amit Agarwal, Alexander Bienstock, Ivan Damgård, Daniel Escudero
ePrint Report
In the context of secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols with guaranteed output delivery (GOD) for the honest majority setting, the state-of-the-art in terms of communication is the work of (Goyal et al. CRYPTO'20), which communicates O(n|C|) field elements, where |C| is the size of the circuit being computed and n is the number of parties. Their round complexity, as usual in secret-sharing based MPC, is proportional to O(depth(C)), but only in the optimistic case where there is no cheating. Under attack, the number of rounds can increase to \Omega(n^2) before honest parties receive output, which is undesired for shallow circuits with depth(C) << n^2. In contrast, other protocols that only require O(depth(C) rounds even in the worst case exist, but the state-of-the-art from (Choudhury and Patra, Transactions on Information Theory, 2017) still requires \Omega(n^4|C|) communication in the offline phase, and \Omega(n^3|C|) in the online (for both point-to-point and broadcast channels). We see there exists a tension between efficient communication and number of rounds. For reference, the recent work of (Abraham et al., EUROCRYPT'23) shows that for perfect security and t
We address this state of affairs by presenting a novel honest majority GOD protocol that maintains O(depth(C)) rounds, even under attack, while improving over the communication of the most efficient protocol in this setting by Choudhury and Patra. More precisely, our protocol has point-to-point (P2P) online communication of O(n|C|), accompanied by O(n|C|) broadcasted (BC) elements, while the offline has O(n^3|C|) P2P communication with O(n^3|C|) BC. This improves over the previous best result, and reduces the tension between communication and round complexity. Our protocol is achieved via a careful use of packed secret-sharing in order to improve the communication of existing verifiable secret-sharing approaches, although at the expense of weakening their robust guarantees: reconstruction of shared values may fail, but only if the adversary gives away the identities of many corrupt parties. We show that this less powerful notion is still useful for MPC, and we use this as a core building block in our construction. Using this weaker VSS, we adapt the recent secure-with-abort Turbopack protocol (Escudero et al. CCS'22) to the GOD setting without significantly sacrificing in efficiency.
We address this state of affairs by presenting a novel honest majority GOD protocol that maintains O(depth(C)) rounds, even under attack, while improving over the communication of the most efficient protocol in this setting by Choudhury and Patra. More precisely, our protocol has point-to-point (P2P) online communication of O(n|C|), accompanied by O(n|C|) broadcasted (BC) elements, while the offline has O(n^3|C|) P2P communication with O(n^3|C|) BC. This improves over the previous best result, and reduces the tension between communication and round complexity. Our protocol is achieved via a careful use of packed secret-sharing in order to improve the communication of existing verifiable secret-sharing approaches, although at the expense of weakening their robust guarantees: reconstruction of shared values may fail, but only if the adversary gives away the identities of many corrupt parties. We show that this less powerful notion is still useful for MPC, and we use this as a core building block in our construction. Using this weaker VSS, we adapt the recent secure-with-abort Turbopack protocol (Escudero et al. CCS'22) to the GOD setting without significantly sacrificing in efficiency.
University of South Florida
Job Posting
This is an urgent call for interested applicants. A funded Ph.D. student position is available starting January 2025 (all documents submitted by Oct. 15th, 2024) or, if positions are not filled, for Fall 2025 to work on different aspects of Cryptographic Engineering in the CSE department with Dr. Mehran Mozaffari Kermani.
The required expertise includes:
- Master’s in Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering
- Solid background in digital design, VLSI, computer arithmetic, and ASIC/FPGA
- Solid HDL expertise
- Outstanding English (if English tests are taken) to be eligible for department funding
- Motivation to work beyond the expectations from an average Ph.D. student and publish in top tier venues
Please closely observe the admission requirement details before emailing. We are looking for motivated, talented, and hardworking applicants who have background and are interested in working on different aspects of Cryptographic Engineering with emphasis on Side-channel attacks, particularly fault and power analysis attacks. Please send me your updated CV (including list of publications, language test marks, and references), transcripts for B.Sc. (and/or M.Sc.), and a statement of interest to: mehran2 (at) usf.edu as soon as possible.
NOTE: At this time, I consider only the applicants who have already taken TOEFL/IELTS exams with excellent marks. The successful candidate will be asked to apply formally very soon to the department, so all the material has to be ready. We do not require GRE.
Research Webpage: https://cse.usf.edu/~mehran2/
CSE Admissions: https://www.usf.edu/engineering/cse/graduate/prospective-students.aspx
The required expertise includes:
- Master’s in Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering
- Solid background in digital design, VLSI, computer arithmetic, and ASIC/FPGA
- Solid HDL expertise
- Outstanding English (if English tests are taken) to be eligible for department funding
- Motivation to work beyond the expectations from an average Ph.D. student and publish in top tier venues
Please closely observe the admission requirement details before emailing. We are looking for motivated, talented, and hardworking applicants who have background and are interested in working on different aspects of Cryptographic Engineering with emphasis on Side-channel attacks, particularly fault and power analysis attacks. Please send me your updated CV (including list of publications, language test marks, and references), transcripts for B.Sc. (and/or M.Sc.), and a statement of interest to: mehran2 (at) usf.edu as soon as possible.
NOTE: At this time, I consider only the applicants who have already taken TOEFL/IELTS exams with excellent marks. The successful candidate will be asked to apply formally very soon to the department, so all the material has to be ready. We do not require GRE.
Research Webpage: https://cse.usf.edu/~mehran2/
CSE Admissions: https://www.usf.edu/engineering/cse/graduate/prospective-students.aspx
Closing date for applications:
Contact: Prof. Mehran Mozaffari Kermani Email: mehran2 (at) usf.edu
21 September 2024
Ritam Bhaumik, Benoît Cogliati, Jordan Ethan, Ashwin Jha
ePrint Report
In this work, we revisit the Hosoyamada-Iwata (HI) proof for the quantum CPA security of the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction and identify a gap that appears to undermine the security proof. We emphasize that this is not an attack, and the construction may still achieve the claimed security level. However, this gap raises concerns about the feasibility of establishing a formal security proof for the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction. In fact, the issue persists even if the number of rounds is increased arbitrarily. On a positive note, we restore the security of the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction in the non-adaptive setting, achieving security up to $2^{n/6}$ superposition queries. Furthermore, we establish the quantum CPA security of the 4-round MistyR and 5-round MistyL constructions, up to $2^{n/5}$ and $2^{n/7}$ superposition queries, respectively, where $n$ denotes the size of the underlying permutation.
Gennaro Avitabile, Nico Döttling, Bernardo Magri, Christos Sakkas, Stella Wohnig
ePrint Report
Signature-based witness encryption (SWE) is a recently proposed notion that allows to encrypt a message with respect to a tag $T$ and a set of signature verification keys. The resulting ciphertext can only be decrypted by a party who holds at least $k$ different valid signatures w.r.t. $T$ and $k$ different verification keys out of the $n$ keys specified at encryption time. Natural applications of this primitive involve distributed settings (e.g., blockchains), where multiple parties sign predictable messages, such as polling or randomness beacons. However, known SWE schemes without trusted setup have ciphertexts that scale linearly in the number of verification keys. This quickly becomes a major bottleneck as the system gets more distributed and the number of parties increases.
Towards showing the feasibility of SWE with ciphertext size sub-linear in the number of keys, we give a construction based on indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for Turing machines and strongly puncturable signatures (SPS).
Mihir Bellare, Rishabh Ranjan, Doreen Riepel, Ali Aldakheel
ePrint Report
This paper initiates a concrete-security treatment of two-party secure computation. The first step is to propose, as target, a simple, indistinguishability-based definition that we call InI. This could be considered a poor choice if it were weaker than standard simulation-based definitions, but it is not; we show that for functionalities satisfying a condition called invertibility, that we define and show is met by functionalities of practical interest like PSI and its variants, the two definitions are equivalent. Based on this, we move forward to study the concrete security of a canonical OPRF-based construction of PSI, giving a tight proof of InI security of the constructed PSI protocol based on the security of the OPRF. This leads us to the concrete security of OPRFs, where we show how different DH-style assumptions on the underlying group yield proofs of different degrees of tightness, including some that are tight, for the well-known and efficient 2H-DH OPRF, and thus for the corresponding DH PSI protocol. We then give a new PSI protocol, called salted-DH PSI, that is as efficient as DH-PSI, yet enjoys tighter proofs.
Cong Ling, Jingbo Liu, Andrew Mendelsohn
ePrint Report
This paper addresses the spinor genus, a previously unrecognized classification of quadratic forms in the context of cryptography, related to the lattice isomorphism problem (LIP). The spinor genus lies between the genus and equivalence class, thus refining the concept of genus. We present algorithms to determine whether two quadratic forms belong to the same spinor genus. If they do not, it provides a negative answer to the distinguishing variant of LIP. However, these algorithms have very high complexity, and we show that the proportion of genera splitting into multiple spinor genera is vanishing (assuming rank $n \geq 3$). For the special case of anisotropic integral binary forms ($n = 2$) over number fields with class number 1, we offer an efficient quantum algorithm to test if two forms lie in the same spinor genus. Our algorithm does not apply to the HAWK protocol, which uses integral binary Hermitian forms over number fields with class number greater than 1.
Parisa Amiri Eliasi, Koustabh Ghosh, Joan Daemen
ePrint Report
We present a tweakable wide block cipher called Mystrium and show it as the fastest such primitive on low-end processors that lack dedicated AES or other cryptographic instructions, such as ARM Cortex-A7.
Mystrium is based on the provably secure double-decker mode, that requires a doubly extendable cryptographic keyed (deck) function and a universal hash function.
We build a new deck function called Xymmer that for its compression part uses Multimixer-128, the fastest universal hash for such processors, and for its expansion part uses a newly designed permutation, $\mathcal{G}_{512}$.
Deck functions can also be used in modes to build encryption, authenticated encryption, and authentication schemes, and hence, Xymmer is of independent interest.
The current state-of-the-art wide tweakable block cipher Adiantum-XChaCha12-AES encrypts 4096-byte messages at 11.5 cycles per byte on ARM Cortex-A7, while for Mystrium it is 6.8 cycles per byte while having a higher claimed security.
Pierre Charbit, Geoffroy Couteau, Pierre Meyer, Reza Naserasr
ePrint Report
We consider the graph-theoretic problem of removing (few) nodes from a directed acyclic graph in order to reduce its depth. While this problem is intractable in the general case, we provide a variety of algorithms in the case where the graph is that of a circuit of fan-in (at most) two, and explore applications of these algorithms to secure multiparty computation with low communication. Over the past few years, a paradigm for low-communication secure multiparty computation has found success based on decomposing a circuit into low-depth ``chunks''. This approach was however previously limited to circuits with a ``layered'' structure. Our graph-theoretic approach extends this paradigm to all circuits. In particular, we obtain the following contributions:
1) Fractionally linear-communication MPC in the correlated randomness model: We provide an $N$-party protocol for computing an $n$-input, $m$-output $\mathsf{F}$-arithmetic circuit with $s$ internal gates (over any basis of binary gates) with communication complexity $(\frac{2}{3}s + n + m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$, which can be improved to $((1+\epsilon)\cdot\frac{2}{5}s+n+m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$ (at the cost of increasing the computational overhead from a small constant factor to a large one). Previously, comparable protocols either used more than $s\cdot N\cdot \log |\mathsf{F}|$ bits of communication, required super-polynomial computation, were restricted to layered circuits, or tolerated a sub-optimal corruption threshold.
2) Sublinear-Communication MPC: Assuming the existence of $N$-party Homomorphic Secret Sharing for logarithmic depth circuits (respectively doubly logarithmic depth circuits), we show there exists sublinear-communication secure $N$-party computation for \emph{all} $\log^{1+o(1)}$-depth (resp.~$(\log\log)^{1+o(1)}$-depth) circuits. Previously, this result was limited to $(\mathcal{O}(\log))$-depth (resp.~$(\mathcal{O}(\log\log))$-depth) circuits, or to circuits with a specific structure (e.g. layered).
3) The 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC: We introduce the `` 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC'' of a function $f$, denoted $C_M(f)$, as the number of oracle calls required to securely compute $f$ in the 1-out-of-M-OT hybrid model. We establish the following upper bound: for every $M\geq 2$, $C_N(f) \leq (1+g(M))\cdot \frac{2 |f|}{5}$, where $g(M)$ is an explicit vanishing function.
We also obtain additional contributions to reducing the amount of bootstrapping for fully homomorphic encryption, and to other types of sublinear-communication MPC protocols such as those based on correlated symmetric private information retrieval.
1) Fractionally linear-communication MPC in the correlated randomness model: We provide an $N$-party protocol for computing an $n$-input, $m$-output $\mathsf{F}$-arithmetic circuit with $s$ internal gates (over any basis of binary gates) with communication complexity $(\frac{2}{3}s + n + m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$, which can be improved to $((1+\epsilon)\cdot\frac{2}{5}s+n+m)\cdot N\cdot\log |\mathsf{F}|$ (at the cost of increasing the computational overhead from a small constant factor to a large one). Previously, comparable protocols either used more than $s\cdot N\cdot \log |\mathsf{F}|$ bits of communication, required super-polynomial computation, were restricted to layered circuits, or tolerated a sub-optimal corruption threshold.
2) Sublinear-Communication MPC: Assuming the existence of $N$-party Homomorphic Secret Sharing for logarithmic depth circuits (respectively doubly logarithmic depth circuits), we show there exists sublinear-communication secure $N$-party computation for \emph{all} $\log^{1+o(1)}$-depth (resp.~$(\log\log)^{1+o(1)}$-depth) circuits. Previously, this result was limited to $(\mathcal{O}(\log))$-depth (resp.~$(\mathcal{O}(\log\log))$-depth) circuits, or to circuits with a specific structure (e.g. layered).
3) The 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC: We introduce the `` 1-out-of-M-OT complexity of MPC'' of a function $f$, denoted $C_M(f)$, as the number of oracle calls required to securely compute $f$ in the 1-out-of-M-OT hybrid model. We establish the following upper bound: for every $M\geq 2$, $C_N(f) \leq (1+g(M))\cdot \frac{2 |f|}{5}$, where $g(M)$ is an explicit vanishing function.
We also obtain additional contributions to reducing the amount of bootstrapping for fully homomorphic encryption, and to other types of sublinear-communication MPC protocols such as those based on correlated symmetric private information retrieval.
Mohammed El Baraka, Siham Ezzouak
ePrint Report
This article presents an in-depth study of isogeny-based cryptographic methods for the development of secure and scalable electronic voting systems. We address critical challenges such as voter privacy, vote integrity, and resistance to quantum attacks. Our work introduces novel cryptographic protocols leveraging isogenies, establishing a robust framework for post-quantum secure electronic voting. We provide detailed mathematical foundations, protocol designs, and security proofs, demonstrating the efficacy and scalability of our proposed system in large-scale elections.