## CryptoDB

### Jeremiah Blocki

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2022
EUROCRYPT
The Schnorr signature scheme is an efficient digital signature scheme with short signature lengths, i.e., $4k$-bit signatures for $k$ bits of security. A Schnorr signature $\sigma$ over a group of size $p\approx 2^{2k}$ consists of a tuple $(s,e)$, where $e \in \{0,1\}^{2k}$ is a hash output and $s\in \mathbb{Z}_p$ must be computed using the secret key. While the hash output $e$ requires $2k$ bits to encode, Schnorr proposed that it might be possible to truncate the hash value without adversely impacting security. In this paper, we prove that \emph{short} Schnorr signatures of length $3k$ bits provide $k$ bits of multi-user security in the (Shoup's) generic group model and the programmable random oracle model. We further analyze the multi-user security of key-prefixed short Schnorr signatures against preprocessing attacks, showing that it is possible to obtain secure signatures of length $3k + \log S + \log N$ bits. Here, $N$ denotes the number of users and $S$ denotes the size of the hint generated by our preprocessing attacker, e.g., if $S=2^{k/2}$, then we would obtain secure $3.75k$-bit signatures for groups of up to $N \leq 2^{k/4}$ users. Our techniques easily generalize to several other Fiat-Shamir-based signature schemes, allowing us to establish analogous results for Chaum-Pedersen signatures and Katz-Wang signatures. As a building block, we also analyze the $1$-out-of-$N$ discrete-log problem in the generic group model, with and without preprocessing.
2022
CRYPTO
Memory-hard functions (MHFs) are a useful cryptographic primitive which can be used to design egalitarian proof of work puzzles and to protect low entropy secrets like passwords against brute-force attackers. Intuitively, a memory hard function is a function whose evaluation costs are dominated by memory costs even if the attacker uses specialized hardware (FPGAs/ASICs) and several cost metrics have been proposed to quantify this intution. For example, space-time cost looks at the product of running time and the maximum space usage over the entire execution of an algorithm. Alwen and Serbinenko (STOC 2015) observed that the space-time cost of evaluating a function multiple times may not scale linearly in the number of instances being evaluated and introduced the stricter requirement that a memory hard function has high cumulative memory complexity (CMC) to ensure that an attacker's amortized space-time costs remain large even if the attacker evaluates the function on multiple different inputs in parallel. Alwen et al. (EUROCRYPT 2018) observed that the notion of CMC still gives the attacker undesirable flexibility in selecting space-time tradeoffs e.g., while the MHF $\scrypt$ has maximal CMC $\Omega(N^2)$ an attacker could evaluate the function with constant $O(1)$ memory in time $O(N^2)$. Alwen et al. introduced an even stricter notion of Sustained Space complexity and designed an MHF which has $s=\Omega(N/\log N)$ sustained complexity $t=\Omega(N)$ i.e., any algorithm evaluating the function in the parallel random oracle model must have at least $t=\Omega(N)$ steps where the memory usage is at least $\Omega(N/\log N)$. In this work we use dynamic pebbling games and dynamic graphs to explore tradeoffs between sustained space complexity and cumulative memory complexity for data-dependent memory hard functions such as Argon2id and scrypt. We design our own dynamic graph (dMHF) with the property that {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either (1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N)$ space, or (2) has CMC $\Omega(N^{3-\epsilon})$ --- substantially larger than $N^2$. For Argon2id we show that {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either(1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N^{1-\epsilon})$ space, or (2) has CMC $\omega(N^2)$. We also present a dynamic version of DRSample (Alwen et al. 2017) for which {\em any} dynamic pebbling strategy either (1) has $\Omega(N)$ rounds with $\Omega(N/\log N)$ space, or (2) has CMC $\Omega(N^3/\log N)$.
2022
TCC
The classical (parallel) black pebbling game is a useful abstraction which allows us to analyze the resources (space, space-time, cumulative space) necessary to evaluate a function $f$ with a static data-dependency graph $G$. Of particular interest in the field of cryptography are data-independent memory-hard functions $f_{G,H}$ which are defined by a directed acyclic graph (DAG) $G$ and a cryptographic hash function $H$. The pebbling complexity of the graph $G$ characterizes the amortized cost of evaluating $f_{G,H}$ multiple times as well as the total cost to run a brute-force preimage attack over a fixed domain $\mathcal{X}$, i.e., given $y \in \{0,1\}^*$ find $x \in \mathcal{X}$ such that $f_{G,H}(x)=y$. While a classical attacker will need to evaluate the function $f_{G,H}$ at least $m=|\mathcal{X}|$ times a quantum attacker running Grover's algorithm only requires $O(\sqrt{m})$ blackbox calls to a quantum circuit $C_{G,H}$ evaluating the function $f_{G,H}$. Thus, to analyze the cost of a quantum attack it is crucial to understand the space-time cost (equivalently width times depth) of the quantum circuit $C_{G,H}$. We first observe that a legal black pebbling strategy for the graph $G$ does not necessarily imply the existence of a quantum circuit with comparable complexity --- in contrast to the classical setting where any efficient pebbling strategy for $G$ corresponds to an algorithm with comparable complexity evaluating $f_{G,H}$. Motivated by this observation we introduce a new parallel reversible pebbling game which captures additional restrictions imposed by the No-Deletion Theorem in Quantum Computing. We apply our new reversible pebbling game to analyze the reversible space-time complexity of several important graphs: Line Graphs, Argon2i-A, Argon2i-B, and DRSample. Specifically, (1) we show that a line graph of size $N$ has reversible space-time complexity at most $O(N^{1+\frac{2}{\sqrt{\log N}}})$. (2) We show that any $(e,d)$-reducible DAG has reversible space-time complexity at most $O(Ne+dN2^d)$. In particular, this implies that the reversible space-time complexity of Argon2i-A and Argon2i-B are at most $O(N^2 \log \log N/\sqrt{\log N})$ and $O(N^2/\sqrt[3]{\log N})$, respectively. (3) We show that the reversible space-time complexity of DRSample is at most $O(N^2 \log \log N/\log N)$. We also study the cumulative pebbling cost of reversible pebblings extending a (non-reversible) pebbling attack of Alwen and Blocki on depth-reducible graphs.
2019
CRYPTO
Memory-hard functions (MHFs) are a key cryptographic primitive underlying the design of moderately expensive password hashing algorithms and egalitarian proofs of work. Over the past few years several increasingly stringent goals for an MHF have been proposed including the requirement that the MHF have high sequential space-time (ST) complexity, parallel space-time complexity, amortized area-time (aAT) complexity and sustained space complexity. Data-Independent Memory Hard Functions (iMHFs) are of special interest in the context of password hashing as they naturally resist side-channel attacks. iMHFs can be specified using a directed acyclic graph (DAG) G with $N=2^n$ nodes and low indegree and the complexity of the iMHF can be analyzed using a pebbling game. Recently, Alwen et al. [ABH17] constructed a DAG called DRSample that has aAT complexity at least $\varOmega \!\left( N^2/{\text {log}} N\right)$ . Asymptotically DRSample outperformed all prior iMHF constructions including Argon2i, winner of the password hashing competition (aAT cost ${\mathcal {O}} \!\left( N^{1.767}\right)$ ), though the constants in these bounds are poorly understood. We show that the greedy pebbling strategy of Boneh et al. [BCS16] is particularly effective against DRSample e.g., the aAT cost is ${\mathcal {O}} (N^2/{\text {log}} N)$ . In fact, our empirical analysis reverses the prior conclusion of Alwen et al. that DRSample provides stronger resistance to known pebbling attacks for practical values of $N \le 2^{24}$ . We construct a new iMHF candidate (DRSample+BRG) by using the bit-reversal graph to extend DRSample. We then prove that the construction is asymptotically optimal under every MHF criteria, and we empirically demonstrate that our iMHF provides the best resistance to known pebbling attacks. For example, we show that any parallel pebbling attack either has aAT cost $\omega (N^2)$ or requires at least $\varOmega (N)$ steps with $\varOmega (N/{\text {log}} N)$ pebbles on the DAG. This makes our construction the first practical iMHF with a strong sustained space-complexity guarantee and immediately implies that any parallel pebbling has aAT complexity $\varOmega (N^2/{\text {log}} N)$ . We also prove that any sequential pebbling (including the greedy pebbling attack) has aAT cost $\varOmega \!\left( N^2\right)$ and, if a plausible conjecture holds, any parallel pebbling has aAT cost $\varOmega (N^2 \log \log N/{\text {log}} N)$ —the best possible bound for an iMHF. We implement our new iMHF and demonstrate that it is just as fast as Argon2. Along the way we propose a simple modification to the Argon2 round function that increases an attacker’s aAT cost by nearly an order of magnitude without increasing running time on a CPU. Finally, we give a pebbling reduction that proves that in the parallel random oracle model (PROM) the cost of evaluating an iMHF like Argon2i or DRSample+BRG is given by the pebbling cost of the underlying DAG. Prior pebbling reductions assumed that the iMHF round function concatenates input labels before hashing and did not apply to practical iMHFs such as Argon2i, DRSample or DRSample+BRG where input labels are instead XORed together.
2018
EUROCRYPT
2017
EUROCRYPT
2017
TCC
2016
CRYPTO
2016
TCC
2013
ASIACRYPT

Crypto 2022
Crypto 2021
Crypto 2020
TCC 2020
Crypto 2018

#### Coauthors

Joël Alwen (3)
Manuel Blum (1)
Anupam Datta (1)
Ben Harsha (1)
Blake Holman (2)
Siteng Kang (1)
Seunghoon Lee (3)
Krzysztof Pietrzak (2)
Lu Xing (1)
Hong-Sheng Zhou (1)
Samson Zhou (2)