## CryptoDB

### Thomas Schneider

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2020
JOFC
A universal circuit (UC) can be programmed to simulate any circuit up to a given size  n by specifying its program inputs. It provides elegant solutions in various application scenarios, e.g., for private function evaluation (PFE) and for improving the flexibility of attribute-based encryption schemes. The asymptotic lower bound for the size of a UC is $\Omega (n\log n)$ Ω ( n log n ) , and Valiant (STOC’76) provided two theoretical constructions, the so-called 2-way and 4-way UCs (i.e., recursive constructions with 2 and 4 substructures), with asymptotic sizes ${\sim }\,5n\log _2n$ ∼ 5 n log 2 n and ${\sim }\,4.75n\log _2n$ ∼ 4.75 n log 2 n , respectively. In this article, we present and extend our results published in (Kiss and Schneider EUROCRYPT’16) and (Günther et al. ASIACRYPT’17). We validate the practicality of Valiant’s UCs by realizing the 2-way and 4-way UCs in our modular open-source implementation. We also provide an example implementation for PFE using these size-optimized UCs. We propose a 2/4-hybrid approach that combines the 2-way and the 4-way UCs in order to minimize the size of the resulting UC. We realize that the bottleneck in universal circuit generation and programming becomes the memory consumption of the program since the whole structure of size ${\mathcal {O}}(n\log n)$ O ( n log n ) is handled by the algorithms in memory. In this work, we overcome this by designing novel scalable algorithms for the UC generation and programming. Both algorithms use only ${\mathcal {O}}(n)$ O ( n ) memory at any point in time. We prove the practicality of our scalable design with a scalable proof-of-concept implementation for generating Valiant’s 4-way UC. We note that this can be extended to work with optimized building blocks analogously. Moreover, we substantially improve the size of our UCs by including and implementing the recent optimization of Zhao et al. (ASIACRYPT’19) that reduces the asymptotic size of the 4-way UC to  ${\sim }\,4.5n\log _2n$ ∼ 4.5 n log 2 n . Furthermore, we include their optimization in the implementation of our 2/4-hybrid UC which yields the smallest UC construction known so far.
2019
EUROCRYPT
We present a new protocol for computing a circuit which implements the private set intersection functionality (PSI). Using circuits for this task is advantageous over the usage of specific protocols for PSI, since many applications of PSI do not need to compute the intersection itself but rather functions based on the items in the intersection.Our protocol is the first circuit-based PSI protocol to achieve linear communication complexity. It is also concretely more efficient than all previous circuit-based PSI protocols. For example, for sets of size $2^{20}$ it improves the communication of the recent work of Pinkas et al. (EUROCRYPT’18) by more than 10 times, and improves the run time by a factor of 2.8x in the LAN setting, and by a factor of 5.8x in the WAN setting.Our protocol is based on the usage of a protocol for computing oblivious programmable pseudo-random functions (OPPRF), and more specifically on our technique to amortize the cost of batching together multiple invocations of OPPRF.
2018
EUROCRYPT
2017
ASIACRYPT
2017
JOFC
2016
EUROCRYPT
2015
EPRINT
2015
EPRINT
2015
EUROCRYPT
2015
EUROCRYPT
2014
EPRINT
2014
EPRINT
2014
EPRINT
2010
EPRINT
Two-party Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) allows mutually distrusting parties to (jointly) correctly compute a function on their private input data, without revealing the inputs. SFE, properly designed, guarantees to satisfy the most stringent security requirements, even for interactive computation. Two-party SFE can benefit almost any client-server interaction where privacy is required, such as privacy-preserving credit checking, medical classification, or face recognition. Today, SFE is a subject of immense amount of research in a variety of directions, and is not easy to navigate. In this paper, we systematize some of the vast research knowledge on \emph{practically} efficient SFE. It turns out that the most efficient SFE protocols are obtained by combining several basic techniques, such as garbled circuits and computation under homomorphic encryption. As an important practical contribution, we present a framework in which these techniques can be viewed as building blocks with well-defined interfaces. These components can be easily combined to establish a complete efficient solution. Further, our approach naturally lends itself to automated protocol generation (compilation). We believe, today, this approach is the best candidate for implementation and deployment.
2010
EPRINT
The power of side-channel leakage attacks on cryptographic implementations is evident. Today's practical defenses are typically attack-specific countermeasures against certain classes of side-channel attacks. The demand for a more general solution has given rise to the recent theoretical research that aims to build provably leakage-resilient cryptography. This direction is, however, very new and still largely lacks practitioners' evaluation with regard to both efficiency and practical security. A recent approach, One-Time Programs (OTPs), proposes using Yao's Garbled Circuit (GC) and very simple tamper-proof hardware to securely implement oblivious transfer, to guarantee leakage resilience. Our main contributions are (i) a generic architecture for using GC/OTP modularly, and (ii) hardware implementation and efficiency analysis of GC/OTP evaluation. We implemented two FPGA-based prototypes: a system-on-a-programmable-chip with access to hardware crypto accelerator (suitable for smartcards and future smartphones), and a stand-alone hardware implementation (suitable for ASIC design). We chose AES as a representative complex function for implementation and measurements. As a result of this work, we are able to understand, evaluate and improve the practicality of employing GC/OTP as a leakage-resistance approach. Last, but not least, we believe that our work contributes to bringing together the results of both theoretical and practical communities.
2010
CHES
2010
EPRINT
Zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) are important building blocks for numerous cryptographic applications. Although ZK-PoK have very useful properties, their real world deployment is typically hindered by their significant complexity compared to other (non-interactive) crypto primitives. Moreover, their design and implementation is time-consuming and error-prone. We contribute to overcoming these challenges as follows: We present a comprehensive specification language and a certifying compiler for ZK-PoK protocols based on $\Sigma$-protocols and composition techniques known in literature. The compiler allows the fully automatic translation of an abstract description of a proof goal into an executable implementation. Moreover, the compiler overcomes various restrictions of previous approaches, e.g., it supports the important class of exponentiation homomorphisms with hidden-order co-domain, needed for privacy-preserving applications such as idemix. Finally, our compiler is certifying, in the sense that it automatically produces a formal proof of security (soundness) of the compiled protocol (currently covering special homomorphisms) using the Isabelle/HOL theorem prover.
2010
EPRINT
Secure two-party computation allows two untrusting parties to jointly compute an arbitrary function on their respective private inputs while revealing no information beyond the outcome. Existing cryptographic compilers can automatically generate secure computation protocols from high-level specifications, but are often limited in their use and efficiency of generated protocols as they are based on either garbled circuits or (additively) homomorphic encryption only. In this paper we present TASTY, a novel tool for automating, i.e., describing, generating, executing, benchmarking, and comparing, efficient secure two-party computation protocols. TASTY is a new compiler that can generate protocols based on homomorphic encryption and efficient garbled circuits as well as combinations of both, which often yields the most efficient protocols available today. The user provides a high-level description of the computations to be performed on encrypted data in a domain-specific language. This is automatically transformed into a protocol. TASTY provides most recent techniques and optimizations for practical secure two-party computation with low online latency. Moreover, it allows to efficiently evaluate circuits generated by the well-known Fairplay compiler. We use TASTY to compare protocols for secure multiplication based on homomorphic encryption with those based on garbled circuits and highly efficient Karatsuba multiplication. Further, we show how TASTY improves the online latency for securely evaluating the AES functionality by an order of magnitude compared to previous software implementations. TASTY allows to automatically generate efficient secure protocols for many privacy-preserving applications where we consider the use cases for private set intersection and face recognition protocols.
2009
ASIACRYPT
2008
EPRINT
Efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (ZK-PoK) are basic building blocks of many practical cryptographic applications such as identification schemes, group signatures, and secure multiparty computation. Currently, first applications that essentially rely on ZK-POKs are being deployed in the real world. The most prominent example is Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA), which was adopted by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) and implemented as one of the functionalities of the cryptographic chip Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Implementing systems using ZK-PoK turns out to be challenging, since ZK-PoK are, loosely speaking, significantly more complex than standard crypto primitives, such as encryption and signature schemes. As a result, implementation cycles of ZK-PoK are time-consuming and error-prone, in particular for developers with minor or no cryptographic skills. To overcome these challenges, we have designed and implemented a compiler with corresponding languages that given a high-level ZK-PoK protocol specification automatically generates a sound implementation of this. The output is given in form of $\Sigma$-protocols, which are the most efficient protocols for ZK-PoK currently known. Our compiler translates ZK-PoK protocol specifications, written in a high-level protocol description language, into Java code or \LaTeX\ documentation of the protocol. The compiler is based on a unified theoretical framework that encompasses a large number of existing ZK-PoK techniques. Within this framework we present a new efficient ZK-PoK protocol for exponentiation homomorphisms in hidden order groups. Our protocol overcomes several limitations of the existing proof techniques.
2008
EPRINT
Secure Evaluation of Private Functions (PF-SFE) allows two parties to compute a private function which is known by one party only on private data of both. It is known that PF-SFE can be reduced to Secure Function Evaluation (SFE) of a Universal Circuit (UC). Previous UC constructions only simulated circuits with gates of $d=2$ inputs while gates with $d>2$ inputs were decomposed into many gates with $2$ inputs which is inefficient for large $d$ as the size of UC heavily depends on the number of gates. We present generalized UC constructions to efficiently simulate any circuit with gates of $d \ge 2$ inputs having efficient circuit representation. Our constructions are non-trivial generalizations of previously known UC constructions. As application we show how to securely evaluate private functions such as neural networks (NN) which are increasingly used in commercial applications. Our provably secure PF-SFE protocol needs only one round in the semi-honest model (or even no online communication at all using non-interactive oblivious transfer) and evaluates a generalized UC that entirely hides the structure of the private NN. This enables applications like privacy-preserving data classification based on private NNs without trusted third party while simultaneously protecting user's data and NN owner's intellectual property.

Eurocrypt 2018
Eurocrypt 2016