International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Two-message witness indistinguishable protocols were first constructed by Dwork and Naor (FOCS 00). They have since proven extremely useful in the design of several cryptographic primitives. However, so far no two-message arguments for NP provided statistical privacy against malicious verifiers.

In this paper, we construct the first: - Two-message statistical witness indistinguishable (SWI) arguments for NP. - Two-message statistical zero-knowledge arguments for NP with super-polynomial simulation (Statistical SPS-ZK). These were previously believed to be impossible to construct via black-box reductions (Chung et al., ePrint 2012). - Two-message statistical distributional weak zero-knowledge (SwZK) arguments for NP with polynomial simulation, where the instance is sampled by the prover in the second round.

These protocols are based on quasi-polynomial hardness of two-message oblivious transfer (OT) with game-based security, which can in turn be based on quasi-polynomial DDH or QR or N'th residuosity. We also demonstrate simple applications of these arguments to constructing more secure forms of oblivious transfer.

Along the way, we show that the Kalai and Raz (Crypto 09) transform compressing interactive proofs to two-message arguments can be generalized to compress certain types of interactive arguments. We introduce and construct a new technical tool, which is a variant of extractable two-message statistically hiding commitments, by extending the work of Khurana and Sahai (FOCS 17). These techniques may be of independent interest.

We study the round complexity of zero-knowledge (ZK) proof systems. While five round ZK proofs for NP are known from standard assumptions [Goldreich-Kahan, J. Cryptology'96], Katz [TCC'08] proved that four rounds are insufficient for this task w.r.t. black-box simulation.

In this work, we study the feasibility of ZK proofs using non-black-box simulation. Our main result is that three round private-coin ZK proofs for NP do not exist (even w.r.t. non-black-box simulation), under certain assumptions on program obfuscation. Our approach builds upon the recent work of Kalai et al. [Crypto'17] who ruled out constant round public-coin ZK proofs under the same assumptions as ours.

Polynomial-based authentication algorithms, such as GCM and Poly1305, have seen widespread adoption in practice. Due to their importance, a significant amount of attention has been given to understanding and improving both proofs and attacks against such schemes. At EUROCRYPT 2005, Bernstein published the best known analysis of the schemes when instantiated with PRPs, thereby establishing the most lenient limits on the amount of data the schemes can process per key. A long line of work, initiated by Handschuh and Preneel at CRYPTO 2008, finds the best known attacks, advancing our understanding of the fragility of the schemes. Yet surprisingly, no known attacks perform as well as the predicted worst-case attacks allowed by Bernstein's analysis, nor has there been any advancement in proofs improving Bernstein's bounds, and the gap between attacks and analysis is significant. We settle the issue by finding a novel attack against polynomial-based authentication algorithms using PRPs, and combine it with new analysis, to show that Bernstein's bound, and our attacks, are optimal.

The random-oracle model by Bellare and Rogaway (CCS'93) is an indispensable tool for the security analysis of practical cryptographic protocols. However, the traditional random-oracle model fails to guarantee security when a protocol is composed with arbitrary protocols that use the same random oracle. Canetti, Jain, and Scafuro (CCS'14) put forth a global but non-programmable random oracle in the Generalized UC framework and showed that some basic cryptographic primitives with composable security can be efficiently realized in their model. Because their random-oracle functionality is non-programmable, there are many practical protocols that have no hope of being proved secure using it. In this paper, we study alternative definitions of a global random oracle and, perhaps surprisingly, show that these allow one to prove GUC-secure existing, very practical realizations of a number of essential cryptographic primitives including public-key encryption, non-committing encryption, commitments, Schnorr signatures, and hash-and-invert signatures. Some of our results hold generically for any suitable scheme proven secure in the traditional ROM, some hold for specific constructions only. Our results include many highly practical protocols, for example, the folklore commitment scheme H(m|r) (where m is a message and r is the random opening information) which is far more efficient than the construction of Canetti et al.

We present an unconditional transformation from any honest-verifier statistical zero-knowledge (HVSZK) protocol to standard SZK that preserves round complexity and efficiency of both the verifier and the prover. This improves over currently known transformations, which either rely on some computational assumptions or introduce significant computational overhead. Our main conceptual contribution is the introduction of instance-dependent SZK proofs for NP, which serve as a building block in our transformation. Instance-dependent SZK for NP can be constructed unconditionally based on instance-dependent commitment schemes of Ong and Vadhan (TCC'08).

As an additional contribution, we give a simple constant-round SZK protocol for Statistical-Difference resembling the textbook HVSZK proof of Sahai and Vadhan (J.ACM'03). This yields a conceptually simple constant-round protocol for all of SZK.

Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols allow two parties that only share a password to establish a shared key in a way that is immune to offline attacks. Asymmetric PAKE (aPAKE) strengthens this notion for the more common client-server setting where the server stores a mapping of the password and security is required even upon server compromise, that is, the only allowed attack in this case is an (inevitable) offline exhaustive dictionary attack against individual user passwords. Unfortunately, most suggested aPAKE protocols (that dispense with the use of servers' public keys) allow for pre-computation attacks that lead to the instantaneous compromise of user passwords upon server compromise, thus forgoing much of the intended aPAKE security. Indeed, these protocols use -- in essential ways -- deterministic password mappings or use random "salt" transmitted in the clear from servers to users, and thus are vulnerable to pre-computation attacks. We initiate the study of Strong aPAKE protocols that are secure as aPAKE's but are also secure against pre-computation attacks. We formalize this notion in the Universally Composable (UC) settings and present two modular constructions using an Oblivious PRF as a main tool. The first builds a Strong aPAKE from any aPAKE (which in turn can be constructed from any PAKE [GMR06]) while the second builds a Strong aPAKE from any authenticated key-exchange protocol secure against reverse impersonation (a.k.a. KCI). Using the latter transformation, we show a practical instantiation of a UC-secure Strong aPAKE in the Random Oracle model. The protocol ("OPAQUE") consists of 2 messages (3 with mutual authentication), requires 3 and 4 exponentiations for server and client, respectively (2 to 4 of which can be fixed-base depending on optimizations), provides forward secrecy, is PKI-free, supports user-side hash iterations, and allows a user-transparent server-side threshold implementation.

Tor is a primary tool for maintaining anonymity online. It provides a low-latency, circuit-based, bidirectional secure channel between two parties through a network of onion routers, with the aim of obscuring exactly who is talking to whom, even to adversaries controlling part of the network. Tor relies heavily on cryptographic techniques, yet its onion encryption scheme is susceptible to tagging attacks (Fu and Ling, 2009), which allow an active adversary controlling the first and last node of a circuit to deanonymize with near-certainty. This contrasts with less active traffic correlation attacks, where the same adversary can at best deanonymize with high probability. The Tor project has been actively looking to defend against tagging attacks and its most concrete alternative is proposal 261, which specifies a new onion encryption scheme based on a variable-input-length tweakable cipher.

We provide a formal treatment of low-latency, circuit-based onion encryption, relaxed to the unidirectional setting, by expanding existing secure channel notions to the new setting and introducing circuit hiding to capture the anonymity aspect of Tor. We demonstrate that circuit hiding prevents tagging attacks and show proposal 261's relay protocol is circuit hiding and thus resistant against tagging attacks.

A boomerang attack is a cryptanalysis framework that regards a block cipher $E$ as the composition of two sub-ciphers $E_1\circ E_0$ and builds a particular characteristic for $E$ with probability $p^2q^2$ by combining differential characteristics for $E_0$ and $E_1$ with probability $p$ and $q$, respectively. Crucially the validity of this figure is under the assumption that the characteristics for $E_0$ and $E_1$ can be chosen independently. Indeed, Murphy has shown that independently chosen characteristics may turn out to be incompatible. On the other hand, several researchers observed that the probability can be improved to $p$ or $q$ around the boundary between $E_0$ and $E_1$ by considering a positive dependency of the two characteristics, e.g.~the ladder switch and S-box switch by Biryukov and Khovratovich. This phenomenon was later formalised by Dunkelman et al.~as a sandwich attack that regards $E$ as $E_1\circ E_m \circ E_0$, where $E_m$ satisfies some differential propagation among four texts with probability $r$, and the entire probability is $p^2q^2r$. In this paper, we revisit the issue of dependency of two characteristics in $E_m$, and propose a new tool called Boomerang Connectivity Table (BCT), which evaluates $r$ in a systematic and easy-to-understand way when $E_m$ is composed of a single S-box layer. With the BCT, previous observations on the S-box including the incompatibility, the ladder switch and the S-box switch are represented in a unified manner. Moreover, the BCT can detect a new switching effect, which shows that the probability around the boundary may be even higher than $p$ or $q$. To illustrate the power of the BCT-based analysis, we improve boomerang attacks against Deoxys-BC, and disclose the mechanism behind an unsolved probability amplification for generating a quartet in SKINNY. Lastly, we discuss the issue of searching for S-boxes having good BCT and extending the analysis to modular addition.

We introduce a new concept called brokered delegation. Brokered delegation allows users to flexibly delegate credentials and rights for a range of service providers to other users and third parties. We explore how brokered delegation can be implemented using novel trusted execution environments (TEEs). We introduce a system called DelegaTEE that enables users (Delegatees) to log into different online services using the credentials of other users (Owners). Credentials in DelegaTEE are never revealed to Delegatees and Owners can restrict access to their accounts using a range of rich, contextually dependent delegation policies.

DelegaTEE fundamentally shifts existing access control models for centralized online services. It does so by using TEEs to permit access delegation at the user's discretion. DelegaTEE thus effectively reduces mandatory access control (MAC) in this context to discretionary access control (DAC). The system demonstrates the significant potential for TEEs to create new forms of resource sharing around online services without the direct support from those services.

We present a full implementation of DelegaTEE using Intel SGX and demonstrate its use in four real-world applications: email access (SMTP/IMAP), restricted website access using a HTTPS proxy, e-banking/credit card, and a third-party payment system (PayPal).

The counter mode (CTR) is a simple, efficient and widely used encryption mode using a block cipher. It comes with a security proof that guarantees no attacks up to the birthday bound (i.e. as long as the number of encrypted blocks $\sigma$ satisfies $\sigma \ll 2^{n/2}$), and a matching attack that can distinguish plaintext/ciphertext pairs from random using about $2^{n/2}$ blocks of data.

The main goal of this paper is to study attacks against the counter mode beyond this simple distinguisher. We focus on message recovery attacks, with realistic assumptions about the capabilities of an adversary, and evaluate the full time complexity of the attacks rather than just the query complexity. Our main result is an attack to recover a block of message with complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(2^{n/2})$. This shows that the actual security of CTR is similar to that of CBC, where collision attacks are well known to reveal information about the message.

To achieve this result, we study a simple algorithmic problem related to the security of the CTR mode: the missing difference problem. We give efficient algorithms for this problem in two practically relevant cases: where the missing difference is known to be in some linear subspace, and when the amount of data is higher than strictly required.

As a further application, we show that the second algorithm can also be used to break some polynomial MACs such as GMAC and Poly1305, with a universal forgery attack with complexity $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(2^{2n/3})$.

In this paper, we describe a new variant of cube attacks called correlation cube attack. The new attack recovers the secret key of a cryptosystem by exploiting conditional correlation properties between the superpoly of a cube and a specific set of low-degree polynomials that we call a basis, which satisfies that the superpoly is a zero constant when all the polynomials in the basis are zeros. We present a detailed procedure of correlation cube attack for the general case, including how to find a basis of the superpoly of a given cube. One of the most significant advantages of this new analysis technique over other variants of cube attacks is that it converts from a weak-key distinguisher to a key recovery attack.

As an illustration, we apply the attack to round-reduced variants of the stream cipher Trivium. Based on the tool of numeric mapping introduced by Liu at CRYPTO 2017, we develop a specific technique to efficiently find a basis of the superpoly of a given cube as well as a large set of potentially good cubes used in the attack on Trivium variants, and further set up deterministic or probabilistic equations on the key bits according to the conditional correlation properties between the superpolys of the cubes and their bases. For a variant when the number of initialization rounds is reduced from 1152 to 805, we can recover about 7-bit key information on average with time complexity $2^{44}$, using $2^{45}$ keystream bits and preprocessing time $2^{51}$. For a variant of Trivium reduced to 835 rounds, we can recover about 5-bit key information on average with the same complexity. All the attacks are practical and fully verified by experiments. To the best of our knowledge, they are thus far the best known key recovery attacks for these variants of Trivium, and this is the first time that a weak-key distinguisher on Trivium stream cipher can be converted to a key recovery attack.

While many tailor made card game protocols are known, the vast majority of those suffer from three main issues: lack of mechanisms for distributing financial rewards and punishing cheaters, lack of composability guarantees and little flexibility, focusing on the specific game of poker. Even though folklore holds that poker protocols can be used to play any card game, this conjecture remains unproven and, in fact, does not hold for a number of protocols (including recent results). We both tackle the problem of constructing protocols for general card games and initiate a treatment of such protocols in the Universal Composability (UC) framework, introducing an ideal functionality that captures general card games constructed from a set of core card operations. Based on this formalism, we introduce Royale, the first UC-secure general card games which supports financial rewards/penalties enforcement. We remark that Royale also yields the first UC-secure poker protocol. Interestingly, Royale performs better than most previous works (that do not have composability guarantees), which we highlight through a detailed concrete complexity analysis and benchmarks from a prototype implementation.

We consider the task of constructing concurrently composable protocols for general secure computation by making only black-box use of underlying cryptographic primitives. Existing approaches for this task first construct a black-box version of CCA-secure commitments which provide a strong form of concurrent security to the committed value(s). This strong form of security is then crucially used to construct higher level protocols such as concurrently secure OT/coin-tossing (and eventually all functionalities).

This work explores a fresh approach. We first aim to construct a concurrently-secure OT protocol whose concurrent security is proven directly using concurrent simulation techniques; in particular, it does not rely on the usual ``non-polynomial oracles'' of CCA-secure commitments. The notion of concurrent security we target is super-polynomial simulation (SPS). We show that such an OT protocol can be constructed from polynomial hardness assumptions in a black-box manner, and within a constant number of rounds. In fact, we only require the existence of (constant round) semi-honest OT and standard collision-resistant hash functions.

Next, we show that such an OT protocol is sufficient to obtain SPS-secure (concurrent) multiparty computation (MPC) for general functionalities. This transformation does not require any additional assumptions; it also maintains the black-box nature as well as the constant round feature of the original OT protocol. Prior to our work, the only known black-box construction of constant-round concurrently composable MPC required stronger assumptions; namely, verifiable perfectly binding homomorphic commitment schemes and PKE with oblivious public-key generation.

In Crypto 2017, Auerbach et al. initiated the study on memory-tight reductions and proved two negative results on the memory-tightness of restricted black-box reductions from multi-challenge security to single-challenge security for signatures and an artificial hash function. In this paper, we revisit the results by Auerbach et al. and show that for a large class of reductions treating multi-challenge security, it is impossible to avoid loss of memory-tightness unless we sacrifice the efficiency of their running-time. Specifically, we show three lower-bound results. Firstly, we show a memory lower-bound of natural black-box reductions from the multi-challenge unforgeability of unique signatures to any computational assumption. Then we show a lower-bound of restricted reductions from multi-challenge security to single-challenge security for a wide class of cryptographic primitives with unique keys in the multi-user setting. Finally, we extend the lower-bound result shown by Auerbach et al. treating a hash function to one treating any hash function with a large-domain.

We propose new constrained pseudorandom functions (CPRFs) in traditional groups. Traditional groups mean cyclic and multiplicative groups of prime order that were widely used in the 1980s and 1990s (sometimes called ``pairing free'' groups). Our main constructions are as follows.

- We propose a selectively single-key secure CPRF for circuits with depth $O(\log n)$ (that is, $\textbf{NC}^1$ circuits) in traditional groups} where $n$ is the input size. It is secure under the $L$-decisional Diffie-Hellman inversion ($L$-DDHI) assumption in the group of quadratic residues $\mathbb{QR}_q$ and the decisional Diffie-Hellman (DDH) assumption in a traditional group of order $q$ in the standard model.

- We propose a selectively single-key private bit-fixing CPRF in traditional groups. It is secure under the DDH assumption in any prime-order cyclic group in the standard model.

- We propose adaptively single-key secure CPRF for $\textbf{NC}^1$ and private bit-fixing CPRF in the random oracle model.

To achieve the security in the standard model, we develop a new technique using correlated-input secure hash functions.

This paper extends the leveled homomorphic encryption scheme for an approximate arithmetic of Cheon et al. (ASIACRYPT 2017) to a fully homomorphic encryption, i.e., we propose a new technique to refresh low-level ciphertexts based on Gentry's bootstrapping procedure.

The modular reduction operation is the main bottleneck in the homomorphic evaluation of the decryption circuit. We exploit a scaled sine function as an approximation of the modular reduction operation and present an efficient evaluation strategy. Our method requires only one homomorphic multiplication for each of iterations and so the total computation cost grows linearly with the depth of the decryption circuit.

We also show how to recrypt packed ciphertexts on the RLWE construction with an open-source implementation. For example, it takes 139.8 seconds to refresh a ciphertext that encrypts 128 numbers with 12 bits of precision, yielding an amortized rate of 1.1 seconds per slot.

We present a general framework of the related-key linear attack that can be applied to a class of block ciphers including the key-alternating iterative ones with linear or affine key schedules. In contrast with the existing linear attacks that use the linear characteristics with linear correlations up to around \pm 2^{-n/2}, where n is the block length of the block cipher, the proposed attack can use linear characteristics with linear correlations up to around \pm 2^{-k/2}, where k is the key length, by exploiting related-key linear approximations introduced in this work. Thus the new attack can cover more rounds than the current linear attacks when the key length is much larger than the block length. The attack utilizes the key differences as the additional data source and it can use data of size larger than the codebook size. We also present a method of the related-key linear attack using multiple independent linear trails that provides a way to estimate the computational complexity, the data complexity, and the success probability of the attack in terms of the capacity of the system of the linear approximations. It is based on hypothesis testing with new decision rule and can be regarded as an alternative approach of the attack provided by A. Biryukov et al. at Crypto 2004 that is based on maximum likelihood approach and cannot estimate the success probability. By applying the framework to SIMON, we get various attack results, including the first full-round attacks on SIMON 64/128 and SIMON 128/256 Then we justify our claims by presenting experimental results that are close to expected ones with a small-scale variant of SIMON.

We construct an adaptively secure garbling scheme with an online communication complexity of $n+m+\mathsf{poly}(\log |C|, \sec)$ where $C: \{0,1\}^n \rightarrow \{0,1\}^{m}$ is the circuit being garbled, and $\sec$ is the security parameter. The security of our scheme can be based on (polynomial hardness of) the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption, or the Factoring assumption or the Learning with Errors assumption. This is nearly the best achievable in the standard model (i.e., without random oracles) as the online communication complexity must be larger than both $n$ and $m$. The online computational complexity of our scheme is $O(n+m)+\mathsf{poly}(\log |C|, \sec)$. Previously known standard model adaptively secure garbling schemes had asymptotically worse online cost or relied on exponentially hard computational assumptions.

Lattice problems allow the construction of very efficient key exchange and public-key encryption schemes. When using the Learning with Errors (LWE) or Ring-LWE (RLWE) problem such schemes exhibit an interesting trade-off between decryption error rate and security. The reason is that secret and error distributions with a larger standard deviation lead to better security but also increase the chance of decryption failures. As a consequence, various message/key encoding or reconciliation techniques have been proposed that usually encode one payload bit into several coefficients. In this work, we analyze how error-correcting codes can be used to enhance the error resilience of protocols like NewHope, Frodo, or Kyber. For our case study, we focus on the recently introduced NewHope Simple and propose and analyze four different options for error correction: i) BCH code; ii) combination of BCH code and additive threshold encoding; iii) LDPC code; and iv) combination of BCH and LDPC code. We show that lattice-based cryptography can profit from classical and modern codes by combining BCH and LDPC codes. This way we achieve quasi-error-free communication and increase the estimated bit-security against quantum attacks by 20.39% and decrease the communication overhead by 12.8%.

The random oracle paradigm allows us to analyze the security of protocols and construction in an idealized model, where all parties have access to a truly random function. This is one of the most successful and well-studied models in cryptography. However, being such a strong idealized model, it is known to be susceptible to various weaknesses when implemented naively in ``real-life'', as shown by Canetti, Goldreich and Halevi (J. ACM 2004).

As a counter-measure, one could try to identify and implement only one or few of the properties a random oracle possesses that are needed for a specific setting. Such a systematic study was initiated by Canetti (CRYPTO 1997), who showed how to implement the property that the output of the function does not reveal anything regarding the input by constructing a point function obfucator. This property turned out to suffice in many follow-up works and applications.

In this work, we tackle another natural property of random oracles and implement it in the standard model. The property we focus on is non-malleability, where it is guaranteed that the output on an input cannot be used to generate the output on any related point. We construct a point-obfuscator that is both point-hiding (a la Canetti) {\em and} is non-malleable. The cost of our construction is a single exponentiation on top of Canetti's construction and could be used for any application where point obfuscators are used and obtain improved security guarantees. The security of our construction relies on variants of the DDH and power-DDH assumptions.

On the technical side, we introduce a new technique for proving security of a construction based on a DDH-like assumption. We call this technique ``double-exponentiation'' and believe it will be useful in the future.