## CryptoDB

### Christoph Striecks

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2022
PKC
A $1$-out-of-$N$ ring signature scheme, introduced by Rivest, Shamir, and Tauman-Kalai (ASIACRYPT '01), allows a signer to sign a message as part of a set of size $N$ (the so-called ring'') which are anonymous to any verifier, including other members of the ring. Threshold ring (or thring'') signatures generalize ring signatures to $t$-out-of-$N$ parties, with $t \geq 1$, who anonymously sign messages and show that they are distinct signers (Bresson et al., CRYPTO'02). Until recently, there was no construction of ring signatures that both $(i)$ had logarithmic signature size in $N$, and $(ii)$ was secure in the plain model. The work of Backes et al. (EUROCRYPT'19) resolved both these issues. However, threshold ring signatures have their own particular problem: with a threshold $t \geq 1$, signers must often reveal their identities to the other signers as part of the signing process. This is an issue in situations where a ring member has something controversial to sign; he may feel uncomfortable requesting that other members join the threshold, as this reveals his identity. Building on the Backes et al. template, in this work we present the first construction of a thring signature that is logarithmic-sized in $N$, in the plain model, and does not require signers to interact with each other to produce the thring signature. We also present a linkable counterpart to our construction, which supports a fine-grained control of linkability. Moreover, our thring signatures can easily be adapted to achieve the recent notions of claimability and repudiability (Park and Sealfon, CRYPTO'19).
2021
PKC
Cryptographic objects with updating capabilities have been proposed by Bellare, Goldreich and Goldwasser (CRYPTO'94) under the umbrella of incremental cryptography. They have recently seen increased interest, motivated by theoretical questions (Ananth et al., EC'17) as well as concrete practical motivations (Lehmann et al., EC'18; Groth et al. CRYPTO'18; Klooß et al., EC'19). In this work, the form of updatability we are particularly interested in is that primitives are key-updatable and allow to update ''old'' cryptographic objects, e.g., signatures or message authentication codes, from the ''old'' key to the updated key at the same time without requiring full access to the new key (i.e., only via a so-called update token). Inspired by the rigorous study of updatable encryption by Lehmann and Tackmann (EC'18) and Boyd et al. (CRYPTO'20), we introduce a definitional framework for updatable signatures (USs) and message authentication codes (UMACs). We discuss several applications demonstrating that such primitives can be useful in practical applications, especially around key rotation in various domains, as well as serve as building blocks in other cryptographic schemes. We then turn to constructions and our focus there is on ones that are secure and practically efficient. In particular, we provide generic constructions from key-homomorphic primitives (signatures and PRFs) as well as direct constructions. This allows us to instantiate these primitives from various assumptions such as DDH or CDH (latter in bilinear groups), or the (R)LWE and the SIS assumptions. As an example, we obtain highly practical US schemes from BLS signatures or UMAC schemes from the Naor-Pinkas-Reingold PRF.
2021
JOFC
Forward secrecy is considered an essential design goal of modern key establishment (KE) protocols, such as TLS 1.3, for example. Furthermore, efficiency considerations such as zero round-trip time (0-RTT), where a client is able to send cryptographically protected payload data along with the very first KE message, are motivated by the practical demand for secure low-latency communication. For a long time, it was unclear whether protocols that simultaneously achieve 0-RTT and full forward secrecy exist. Only recently, the first forward-secret 0-RTT protocol was described by Günther et al. ( Eurocrypt , 2017). It is based on puncturable encryption. Forward secrecy is achieved by “puncturing” the secret key after each decryption operation, such that a given ciphertext can only be decrypted once (cf. also Green and Miers, S&P 2015). Unfortunately, their scheme is completely impractical, since one puncturing operation takes between 30 s and several minutes for reasonable security and deployment parameters, such that this solution is only a first feasibility result, but not efficient enough to be deployed in practice. In this paper, we introduce a new primitive that we term Bloom filter encryption (BFE), which is derived from the probabilistic Bloom filter data structure. We describe different constructions of BFE schemes and show how these yield new puncturable encryption mechanisms with extremely efficient puncturing. Most importantly, a puncturing operation only involves a small number of very efficient computations, plus the deletion of certain parts of the secret key, which outperforms previous constructions by orders of magnitude. This gives rise to the first forward-secret 0-RTT protocols that are efficient enough to be deployed in practice. We believe that BFE will find applications beyond forward-secret 0-RTT protocols.
2020
ASIACRYPT
Public-key encryption (PKE) schemes or key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) are fundamental cryptographic building blocks to realize secure communication protocols. There are several known transformations that generically turn weakly secure schemes into strongly (i.e., IND-CCA) secure ones. While most of these transformations require the weakly secure scheme to provide perfect correctness, Hofheinz, Hövelmanns, and Kiltz (HHK) (TCC 2017) have recently shown that variants of the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform can work with schemes that have negligible correctness error in the (quantum) random oracle model (QROM). Many recent schemes in the NIST post-quantum competition (PQC) use variants of these transformations. Some of their CPA-secure versions even have a non-negligible correctness error and so the techniques of HHK cannot be applied. In this work, we study the setting of generically transforming PKE schemes with potentially large, i.e., non-negligible, correctness error to ones having negligible correctness error. While there have been previous treatments in an asymptotic setting by Dwork et al. (EUROCRYPT 2004), our goal is to come up with practically efficient compilers in a concrete setting and apply them in two different contexts: firstly, we show how to generically transform weakly secure deterministic or randomized PKEs into CCA-secure KEMs in the (Q)ROM using variants of HHK. This applies to essentially all candidates to the NIST PQC based on lattices and codes with non-negligible error, for which we provide an extensive analysis. We thereby show that it improves some of the code-based candidates. Secondly, we study puncturable KEMs in terms of the Bloom Filter KEM (BFKEM) proposed by Derler et al. (EUROCRYPT 2018) which inherently have a non-negligible correctness error. BFKEMs are a building block to construct fully forward-secret zero round-trip time (0-RTT) key-exchange protocols. In particular, we show how to achieve the first post-quantum secure BFKEM generically from lattices and codes by applying our techniques to identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes with (non-)negligible correctness error.
2018
EUROCRYPT
2018
PKC
We revisit the notion of proxy re-encryption ($\mathsf {PRE}$PRE), an enhanced public-key encryption primitive envisioned by Blaze et al. (Eurocrypt’98) and formalized by Ateniese et al. (NDSS’05) for delegating decryption rights from a delegator to a delegatee using a semi-trusted proxy. $\mathsf {PRE}$PRE notably allows to craft re-encryption keys in order to equip the proxy with the power of transforming ciphertexts under a delegator’s public key to ciphertexts under a delegatee’s public key, while not learning anything about the underlying plaintexts.We study an attractive cryptographic property for $\mathsf {PRE}$PRE, namely that of forward secrecy. In our forward-secret $\mathsf {PRE}$PRE (fs-$\mathsf {PRE}$PRE) definition, the proxy periodically evolves the re-encryption keys and permanently erases old versions while he delegator’s public key is kept constant. As a consequence, ciphertexts for old periods are no longer re-encryptable and, in particular, cannot be decrypted anymore at the delegatee’s end. Moreover, delegators evolve their secret keys too, and, thus, not even they can decrypt old ciphertexts once their key material from past periods has been deleted. This, as we will discuss, directly has application in short-term data/message-sharing scenarios.Technically, we formalize fs-$\mathsf {PRE}$PRE. Thereby, we identify a subtle but significant gap in the well-established security model for conventional $\mathsf {PRE}$PRE and close it with our formalization (which we dub fs-$\mathsf {PRE} ^+$PRE+). We present the first provably secure and efficient constructions of fs-$\mathsf {PRE}$PRE as well as $\mathsf {PRE}$PRE (implied by the former) satisfying the strong fs-$\mathsf {PRE} ^+$PRE+ and $\mathsf {PRE} ^+$PRE+ notions, respectively. All our constructions are instantiable in the standard model under standard assumptions and our central building block are hierarchical identity-based encryption ($\mathsf {HIBE}$HIBE) schemes that only need to be selectively secure.
2015
JOFC
2015
PKC
2013
CRYPTO
2013
EUROCRYPT