CryptoDB

Russell W. F. Lai

Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2019
PKC
Sanitizable signatures allow designated parties (the sanitizers) to apply arbitrary modifications to some restricted parts of signed messages. A secure scheme should not only be unforgeable, but also protect privacy and hold both the signer and the sanitizer accountable. Two important security properties that are seemingly difficult to achieve simultaneously and efficiently are invisibility and unlinkability. While invisibility ensures that the admissible modifications are hidden from external parties, unlinkability says that sanitized signatures cannot be linked to their sources. Achieving both properties simultaneously is crucial for applications where sensitive personal data is signed with respect to data-dependent admissible modifications. The existence of an efficient construction achieving both properties was recently posed as an open question by Camenisch et al. (PKC’17). In this work, we propose a solution to this problem with a two-step construction. First, we construct (non-accountable) invisible and unlinkable sanitizable signatures from signatures on equivalence classes and other basic primitives. Second, we put forth a generic transformation using verifiable ring signatures to turn any non-accountable sanitizable signature into an accountable one while preserving all other properties. When instantiating in the generic group and random oracle model, the efficiency of our construction is comparable to that of prior constructions, while providing stronger security guarantees.
2019
EUROCRYPT
A proof of sequential work allows a prover to convince a verifier that a certain amount of sequential steps have been computed. In this work we introduce the notion of incremental proofs of sequential work where a prover can carry on the computation done by the previous prover incrementally, without affecting the resources of the individual provers or the size of the proofs.To date, the most efficient instance of proofs of sequential work [Cohen and Pietrzak, Eurocrypt 2018] for N steps require the prover to have $\sqrt{N}$N memory and to run for $N + \sqrt{N}$N+N steps. Using incremental proofs of sequential work we can bring down the prover’s storage complexity to $\log N$logN and its running time to N.We propose two different constructions of incremental proofs of sequential work: Our first scheme requires a single processor and introduces a poly-logarithmic factor in the proof size when compared with the proposals of Cohen and Pietrzak. Our second scheme assumes $\log N$logN parallel processors but brings down the overhead of the proof size to a factor of 9. Both schemes are simple to implement and only rely on hash functions (modelled as random oracles).
2019
CRYPTO
We put forward the notion of subvector commitments (SVC): An SVC allows one to open a committed vector at a set of positions, where the opening size is independent of length of the committed vector and the number of positions to be opened. We propose two constructions under variants of the root assumption and the CDH assumption, respectively. We further generalize SVC to a notion called linear map commitments (LMC), which allows one to open a committed vector to its images under linear maps with a single short message, and propose a construction over pairing groups.Equipped with these newly developed tools, we revisit the “CS proofs” paradigm [Micali, FOCS 1994] which turns any arguments with public-coin verifiers into non-interactive arguments using the Fiat-Shamir transform in the random oracle model. We propose a compiler that turns any (linear, resp.) PCP into a non-interactive argument, using exclusively SVCs (LMCs, resp.). For an approximate 80 bits of soundness, we highlight the following new implications:1.There exists a succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (SNARK) with public-coin setup with proofs of size 5360 bits, under the adaptive root assumption over class groups of imaginary quadratic orders against adversaries with runtime $2^{128}$. At the time of writing, this is the shortest SNARK with public-coin setup.2.There exists a non-interactive argument with private-coin setup, where proofs consist of 2 group elements and 3 field elements, in the generic bilinear group model.
2018
ASIACRYPT
Homomorphic signatures (HS) allows the derivation of the signature of the message-function pair (m, g), where $m = g(m_1, \ldots , m_K)$, given the signatures of each of the input messages $m_k$ signed under the same key. Multi-key HS (M-HS) introduced by Fiore et al.  (ASIACRYPT’16) further enhances the utility by allowing evaluation of signatures under different keys. The unforgeability of existing M-HS notions assumes that all signers are honest. We consider a setting where an arbitrary number of signers can be corrupted, called unforgeability under corruption, which is typical for natural applications (e.g., verifiable multi-party computation) of M-HS. Surprisingly, there is a huge gap between M-HS (for arbitrary circuits) with and without unforgeability under corruption: While the latter can be constructed from standard lattice assumptions (ASIACRYPT’16), we show that the former likely relies on non-falsifiable assumptions. Specifically, we propose a generic construction of M-HS with unforgeability under corruption from zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (ZK-SNARK) (and other standard assumptions), and then show that such M-HS implies zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments (ZK-SNARG). Our results leave open the pressing question of what level of authenticity and utility can be achieved in the presence of corrupt signers under standard assumptions.
2018
ASIACRYPT
Homomorphic secret sharing (HSS) allows n clients to secret-share data to m servers, who can then homomorphically evaluate public functions over the shares. A natural application is outsourced computation over private data. In this work, we present the first plain-model homomorphic secret sharing scheme that supports the evaluation of polynomials with degree higher than 2. Our construction relies on any degree-k (multi-key) homomorphic encryption scheme and can evaluate degree-$\left( (k+1)m -1 \right)$ polynomials, for any polynomial number of inputs n and any sub-logarithmic (in the security parameter) number of servers m. At the heart of our work is a series of combinatorial arguments on how a polynomial can be split into several low-degree polynomials over the shares of the inputs, which we believe is of independent interest.
2015
EPRINT