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Paper: The Distinction Between Fixed and Random Generators in Group-Based Assumptions

Authors: James Bartusek Fermi Ma Mark Zhandry DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-26951-7_27 (login may be required) Search ePrint Search Google There is surprisingly little consensus on the precise role of the generator g in group-based assumptions such as DDH. Some works consider g to be a fixed part of the group description, while others take it to be random. We study this subtle distinction from a number of angles. In the generic group model, we demonstrate the plausibility of groups in which random-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is hard but fixed-generator DDH (resp. CDH) is easy. We observe that such groups have interesting cryptographic applications.We find that seemingly tight generic lower bounds for the Discrete-Log and CDH problems with preprocessing (Corrigan-Gibbs and Kogan, Eurocrypt 2018) are not tight in the sub-constant success probability regime if the generator is random. We resolve this by proving tight lower bounds for the random generator variants; our results formalize the intuition that using a random generator will reduce the effectiveness of preprocessing attacks.We observe that DDH-like assumptions in which exponents are drawn from low-entropy distributions are particularly sensitive to the fixed- vs. random-generator distinction. Most notably, we discover that the Strong Power DDH assumption of Komargodski and Yogev (Komargodski and Yogev, Eurocrypt 2018) used for non-malleable point obfuscation is in fact false precisely because it requires a fixed generator. In response, we formulate an alternative fixed-generator assumption that suffices for a new construction of non-malleable point obfuscation, and we prove the assumption holds in the generic group model. We also give a generic group proof for the security of fixed-generator, low-entropy DDH (Canetti, Crypto 1997).
BibTeX
@article{crypto-2019-29906,
title={The Distinction Between Fixed and Random Generators in Group-Based Assumptions},
booktitle={Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2019},
series={Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
publisher={Springer},
volume={11693},
pages={801-830},
doi={10.1007/978-3-030-26951-7_27},
author={James Bartusek and Fermi Ma and Mark Zhandry},
year=2019
}