International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We introduce a new notion of {\em multiverse threshold signatures} (MTS). In an MTS scheme, multiple universes -- each defined by a set of (possibly overlapping) signers, their weights, and a specific security threshold -- can co-exist. A universe can be (adaptively) created via a non-interactive asynchronous setup. Crucially, each party in the multiverse holds constant-sized keys and releases compact signatures with size and computation time both independent of the number of universes. Given sufficient partial signatures over a message from the members of a specific universe, an aggregator can produce a short aggregate signature relative to that universe.

We construct an MTS scheme building on BLS signatures. Our scheme is practical, and can be used to reduce bandwidth complexity and computational costs in decentralized oracle networks. As an example data point, consider a multiverse containing 2000 nodes and 100 universes (parameters inspired by Chainlink's use in the wild) each of which contains arbitrarily large subsets of nodes and arbitrary thresholds. Each node computes and outputs 1 group element as its partial signature; the aggregator performs under 0.7 seconds of work for each aggregate signature, and the final signature of size 192 bytes takes 6.4 ms (or 198K EVM gas units) to verify. For this setting, prior approaches when used to construct MTS, yield schemes that have one of the following drawbacks: (i) partial signatures that are 97$\times$ larger, (ii) have aggregation times 311$\times$ worse, or (iii) have signature size 39$\times$ and verification gas costs 3.38$\times$ larger. We also provide an open-source implementation and a detailed evaluation.

Since the invention of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have gained huge popularity. Crypto wallet, as the tool to store and manage the cryptographic keys, is the primary entrance for the public to access cryptocurrency funds. Deterministic wallet is an advanced wallet mecha- nism that has been proposed to achieve some appealing virtues, such as low-maintenance, easy backup and recovery, supporting functionalities required by cryptocurrencies, and so on. However, the existing deter- ministic wallet schemes especially in the quantum world still have a long way to be practical. The first barrier is how to build a deterministic wallet scheme without relying on the state, i.e., stateless. The stateful deterministic wallet scheme must internally maintain and keep refreshing synchronously a parameter named state which makes the implementa- tion in practice become more complex. And once one of the states is leaked, thereafter the security notion of unlinkability is cannot be guar- anteed (referred to as the weak security notion of forward unlinkability). The second barrier is how to derive the session secret keys from the master secret key in one-way. There are security shortfalls in previous works, they suffer a fatal vulnerability when a minor fault happens (say, one derived key is compromised somehow), then the damage is not lim- ited to the leaked derived key, instead, it spreads to the master key and the whole system collapses. The third barrier is how to build a post- quantum secure deterministic wallet scheme supporting hot/cold setting, which is important since nearly all popular cryptocurrencies relied on the hardness problems that can be broken by quantum adversaries, and the hot/cold setting is a widely adopted method to effectively reduce the exposure chance of secret keys and hence improving the security of the system. The last barrier is how to build a deterministic wallet scheme with standard security notion of unforgeability. It is motivated by pre- vious works which are based on a weaker/nonstandard unforgeability notion, in which the adversary is only allowed to query and forge the signatures w.r.t. the public keys that were assigned by the challenger.

In this work, we present a new deterministic wallet scheme in quantum world, which is stateless, supports hot/cold setting, satisfiies stronger security notions, and is more efficient. In particular, we reformalize the syntax and security models for deterministic wallets, capturing the func- tionality and security requirements (including full unlinkability and stan- dard unforgeability) imposed by the practice in cryptocurrency. Then we propose a deterministic wallet construction and prove its security in the quantum random oracle model. Finally, we show our wallet scheme is more practicable by analyzing an instantiation of our wallet scheme based on the signature scheme Falcon.

Multi-signature is a protocol where a set of signatures jointly sign a message so that the final signature is significantly shorter than concatenating individual signatures together. Recently, it finds applications in blockchain, where several users want to jointly authorize a payment through a multi-signature. However, in this setting, there is no centralized authority and it could suffer from a rogue key attack where the attacker can generate his own keys arbitrarily. Further, to minimize the storage on blockchain, it is desired that the aggregated public-key and the aggregated signature are both as short as possible. In this paper, we find a compiler that converts a kind of identification (ID) scheme (which we call a linear ID) to a multi-signature so that both the aggregated public-key and the aggregated signature have a size independent of the number of signers. Our compiler is provably secure. The advantage of our results is that we reduce a multi-party problem to a weakly secure two-party problem. We realize our compiler with two ID schemes. The first is Schnorr ID. The second is a new lattice-based ID scheme, which via our compiler gives the first regular lattice-based multi-signature scheme with key-and-signature compact without a restart during signing process.

Many applications in finance and healthcare need access to data from multiple organizations. While these organizations can benefit from computing on their joint datasets, they often cannot share data with each other due to regulatory constraints and business competition. One way mutually distrusting parties can collaborate without sharing their data in the clear is to use secure multiparty computation (MPC). However, MPC’s performance presents a serious obstacle for adoption as it is difficult for users who lack expertise in advanced cryptography to optimize. In this paper, we present Silph, a framework that can automatically compile a program written in a high-level language to an optimized, hybrid MPC protocol that mixes multiple MPC primitives securely and efficiently. Compared to prior works, our compilation speed is improved by up to 30000×. On various database analytics and machine learning workloads, the MPC protocols generated by Silph match or outperform prior work by up to 3.6×.

Two multivariate digital signature schemes, Rainbow and GeMSS, made it into the third round of the NIST PQC competition. However, either made its way to being a standard due to devastating attacks (in one case by Beullens, the other by Tao, Petzoldt, and Ding). How should multivariate cryptography recover from this blow? We propose that, rather than trying to fix Rainbow and HFEv- by introducing countermeasures, the better approach is to return to the classical Oil and Vinegar scheme. We show that, if parametrized appropriately, Oil and Vinegar still provides competitive performance compared to the new NIST standards by most measures (except for key size). At NIST security level 1, this results in either 128-byte signatures with 44 kB public keys or 96-byte signatures with 67 kB public keys. We revamp the state-of-the-art of Oil and Vinegar implementations for the Intel/AMD AVX2, the Arm Cortex-M4 microprocessor, the Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA, and the Armv8-A microarchitecture with the Neon vector instructions set.

We present SCALLOP: SCALable isogeny action based on Oriented supersingular curves with Prime conductor, a new group action based on isogenies of supersingular curves. Similarly to CSIDH and OSIDH, we use the group action of an imaginary quadratic order’s class group on the set of oriented supersingular curves. Compared to CSIDH, the main benefit of our construction is that it is easy to compute the class-group structure; this data is required to uniquely represent— and efficiently act by— arbitrary group elements, which is a requirement in, e.g., the CSI-FiSh signature scheme by Beullens, Kleinjung and Vercauteren. The index-calculus algorithm used in CSI-FiSh to compute the class-group structure has complexity L(1/2), ruling out class groups much larger than CSIDH-512, a limitation that is particularly problematic in light of the ongoing debate regarding the quantum security of cryptographic group actions. Hoping to solve this issue, we consider the class group of a quadratic order of large prime conductor inside an imaginary quadratic field of small discriminant. This family of quadratic orders lets us easily determine the size of the class group, and, by carefully choosing the conductor, even exercise significant control on it— in particular supporting highly smooth choices. Although evaluating the resulting group action still has subexponential asymptotic complexity, a careful choice of parameters leads to a practical speedup that we demonstrate in practice for a security level equivalent to CSIDH-1024, a parameter currently firmly out of reach of index-calculus-based methods. However, our implementation takes 35 seconds (resp. 12.5 minutes) for a single group-action evaluation at a CSIDH-512-equivalent (resp. CSIDH-1024-equivalent) security level, showing that, while feasible, the SCALLOP group action does not achieve realistically usable performance yet.

Critical and widely used cryptographic protocols have repeatedly been found to contain flaws in their design and their implementation. A prominent class of such vulnerabilities is logical attacks, i.e. attacks that solely exploit flawed protocol logic. Automated formal verification methods, based on the Dolev-Yao (DY) attacker, excel at finding such flaws, but operate only on abstract specification models. Fully automated verification of existing protocol implementations is today still out of reach. This leaves open whether widely used protocol implementations are secure. Unfortunately, this blind spot hides numerous attacks, notably recent logical attacks on widely used TLS implementations introduced by implementation bugs. We answer by proposing a novel and effective technique that we call DY model-guided fuzzing, which precludes logical attacks against protocol implementations. The main idea is to consider as possible test cases the set of abstract DY executions of the DY attacker, and use a mutation-based fuzzer to explore this set. The DY fuzzer concretizes each abstract execution to test it on the program under test. This approach enables reasoning at a more structural and security-related level of messages (e.g. decrypt a message and re-encrypt it with a different key) as opposed to random bit-level modifications that are much less likely to produce relevant logical adversarial behaviors. We implement a full-fledged and modular DY protocol fuzzer. We demonstrate its effectiveness by fuzzing three popular TLS implementations, resulting in the discovery of four novel vulnerabilities.

In recent works of Li the noisy subset product problem (also known as subset product with errors) was invented and applied to cryptography. To better understand its hardness, we give a quantum annealing algorithm for it. Our algorithm is the first algorithm for the problem. We also give the first quantum annealing algorithm for the subset product problem. The efficiencies of both algorithms rely on the fundamental efficiency of quantum annealing. At the end we give two lattice algorithms for both problems via solving the closest vector problem. The complexities of the lattice algorithms depend on the complexities of solving the closest vector problem in two special lattices. They are efficient when the special closest vector problems fall into the regime of bounded distance decoding problems that can be efficiently solved using existing methods based on the LLL algorithm or Babai's nearest plane algorithm.

Voting mechanisms allow the expression of the elections by a democratic approach. Any voting scheme must ensure, preferably in an efficient way, a series of safety measures such as confidentiality, integrity and anonymity. Since the 1980s, the concept of electronic voting became more and more of interest, being an advantageous or even necessary alternative for the organization of secure elections. In this paper, we give an overview for the e-voting mechanisms together with the security features they must fulfill. Then we focus on the blind signature paradigm, specifically on the Pairing Free Identity-Based Blind Signature Scheme with Message Recovery (PF-IDBS-MR). Our goal is to give a better understanding on the PF-IDBS-MR scheme by offering an adaptation on the standard voting protocol’s phases. More important, we analyze if the general security requirements and the recommendations proposed by the Council of Europe are met by the scheme.

We introduce incoercible digital signature schemes, a variant of a standard digital signature. Incoercible signatures enable signers, when coerced to produce a signature for a message chosen by an attacker, to generate fake signatures that are indistinguishable from real signatures, even if the signer is compelled to reveal their full history (including their secret signing keys and any randomness used to produce keys/signatures) to the attacker. Additionally, we introduce an authenticator that can detect fake signatures, which ensures that coercion is identified. We present a formal security model for incoercible signature schemes that comprises an established definition of unforgeability and captures new notions of weak receipt-freeness, strong receipt-freeness and coercion-resistance. We demonstrate that an incoercible signature scheme can be viewed as a transformation of any generic signature scheme. Indeed, we present two incoercible signature scheme constructions that are built from a standard signature scheme and a sender-deniable encryption scheme. We prove that our first construction satisfies coercion-resistance, and our second satisfies strong receipt-freeness. We conclude by presenting an extension to our security model: we show that our security model can be extended to the designated verifier signature scheme setting in an intuitive way as the designated verifier can assume the role of the authenticator and detect coercion during the verification process.

In practical operational networks, it is essential to validate path integrity, especially when untrusted intermediate nodes are from numerous network infrastructures operated by several network authorities. Current solutions often reveal the entire path to all parties involved, which may potentially expose the network structures to malicious intermediate attackers. Additionally, there is no prior work done to provide a systematic approach combining the complete lifecycle of packet delivery, i.e., path slicing, path validation and path rerouting, leaving these highly-intertwined modules completely separated. In this work, we present a decentralized privacy-preserving path validation system ?3? that integrates our novel path validation protocol with an efficient path slicing algorithm and a malice-resilient path rerouting mechanism. Specifically, leveraging Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs, our path validation protocol XOR-Hash-NIZK protects the packet delivery tasks against information leakage about multi-hop paths and potentially the underlying network infrastructures. We implemented and evaluated our system on a state-of-the-art 5G Dispersed Computing Testbed simulating a multi-authority network. Our results show that while preserving the privacy of paths and nodes and enhancing the security of network service, our system optimizes the performance trade-off between network service quality and security/privacy.

An important research direction in secure multi-party computation (MPC) is to improve the efficiency of the protocol. One idea that has recently received attention is to consider a slightly weaker security model than full malicious security -- the so-called setting of $\textit{covert security}$. In covert security, the adversary may cheat but only is detected with certain probability. Several works in covert security consider the offline/online approach, where during a costly offline phase correlated randomness is computed, which is consumed in a fast online phase. State-of-the-art protocols focus on improving the efficiency by using a covert offline phase, but ignore the online phase. In particular, the online phase is usually assumed to guarantee security against malicious adversaries. In this work, we take a fresh look at the offline/online paradigm in the covert security setting. Our main insight is that by weakening the security of the online phase from malicious to covert, we can gain significant efficiency improvements during the offline phase. Concretely, we demonstrate our technique by applying it to the online phase of the well-known TinyOT protocol (Nielsen et al., CRYPTO '12). The main observation is that by reducing the MAC length in the online phase of TinyOT to $t$ bits, we can guarantee covert security with a detection probability of $1- \frac{1}{2^t}$. Since the computation carried out by the offline phase depends on the MAC length, shorter MACs result in a more efficient offline phase and thus speed up the overall computation. Our evaluation shows that our approach reduces the communication complexity of the offline protocol by at least 35% for a detection rate up to $\frac{7}{8}$. In addition, we present a new generic composition result for analyzing the security of online/offline protocols in terms of concrete security.

Applying the pothole method on the factors of numbers of the form $2^n-1$, we prove the inequality $$\iota(2^n-1)\leq n-1+\iota(n)$$ where $\iota(n)$ denotes the length of the shortest addition chain producing $n$.

This paper presents a new profiling side-channel attack on the signature scheme CRYSTALS-Dilithium, which has been selected by the NIST as the new primary standard for quantum-safe digital signatures. This algorithm has a constant-time implementation with consideration for side-channel resilience. However, it does not protect against attacks that exploit intermediate data leakage. We exploit such a leakage on a vector generated during the signing process and whose costly protection by masking is a matter of debate. We design a template attack that enables us to efficiently predict whether a given coefficient in one coordinate of this vector is zero or not. Once this value has been completely reconstructed, one can recover, using linear algebra methods, part of the secret key that is sufficient to produce universal forgeries. While our paper deeply discusses the theoretical attack path, it also demonstrates the validity of the assumption regarding the required leakage model, from practical experiments with the reference implementation on an ARM Cortex-M4.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is one of the most promising techniques for privacy-preserving computations, especially the word-wise HE schemes that allow batched computations over ciphertexts. However, the high computational overhead hinders the deployment of HE in real-word applications. The GPUs are often used to accelerate the execution in such scenarios, while the performance of different HE schemes on the same GPU platform is still absent. In this work, we implement three word-wise HE schemes BGV, BFV, and CKKS on GPU, with both theoretical and engineering optimizations. We optimize the hybrid key-switching technique, reducing the computational and memory overhead of this procedure. We explore several kernel fusing strategies to reuse data, which reduces the memory access and IO latency, and improves the overall performance. By comparing with the state-of-the-art works, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our implementation. Meanwhile, we present a framework that finely integrates our implementation of the three schemes, covering almost all scheme functions and homomorphic operations. We optimize the management of pre-computation, RNS bases and memory in the framework, to provide efficient and low-latency data access and transfer. Based on this framework, we provide a thorough benchmark of the three schemes, which can serve as a reference for scheme selection and implementation in constructing privacy-preserving applications.

On-line/off-line encryption schemes enable the fast encryption of a message from a pre-computed coupon. The paradigm was put forward in the case of digital signatures. This work introduces a compact public-key additively homomorphic encryption scheme. The scheme is semantically secure under the decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption. Compared to Paillier cryptosystem, it merely requires one or two integer additions in the on-line phase and no increase in the ciphertext size. This work also introduces a compact on-line/off-line trapdoor commitment scheme featuring the same fast on-line phase. Finally, applications to chameleon signatures are presented.

The goals of cryptography are achieved using mathematically strong crypto-algorithms, which are adopted for securing data and communication. Even though the algorithms are mathematically secure, the implementation of these algorithms may be vulnerable to side-channel attacks such as timing and power analysis attacks. One of the effective countermeasures against such attacks is Threshold Implementation(TI). However, TI realization in crypto-device introduces hardware complexity, so it shall not be suitable for resource-constrained devices. Therefore, there is a need for efficient and effective countermeasure techniques for resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose a lightweight countermeasure using an Arbiter Physical Unclonable Function (A-PUF) to obfuscate intermediate values in the register for rolled and unrolled implementation of Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The countermeasure is realized in rolled (iterative) implementation of AES in a 65nm Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). We have analyzed the security strength and area of the obfuscated AES using A-PUF and compared it with conventional (rolled AES) and masked TI of AES. Further, we have illustrated the effectiveness of pre-charge and neutralizing countermeasures to strengthen the side channel resistance. We have discussed the complexity of mounting a side channel and modeling attacks on obfuscated AES using A-PUF.

This study presents a proof-of-concept for a cognitive-based authentication system that uses an individual's writing style as a unique identifier to grant access to a system. A machine learning SVM model was trained on these features to distinguish between texts generated by each user. The stylometric feature vector was then used as an input to a key derivation function to generate a unique key for each user. The experiment results showed that the developed system achieved up to 87.42\% accuracy in classifying texts as written, and the generated keys were found to be secure and unique. We explore the intersection between natural intelligence, cognitive science, and cryptography, intending to develop a cognitive cryptography system. The proposed system utilizes behavioral features from linguistic-biometric data to detect and classify users through stylometry. This information is then used to generate a cryptographic key for authentication, providing a new level of security in access control. The field of cognitive cryptography is relatively new and has yet to be fully explored, making this research particularly relevant and essential. Through our study, we aim to contribute to understanding the potential of cognitive cryptography and its potential applications in securing access to sensitive information.

Ransomware is a malware that employs encryption to hold a victim's data, causing irreparable loss and monetary incentives to individuals or business organizations. The occurrence of ransomware attacks has been increasing significantly and as the attackers are investing more creativity and inventiveness into their threats, the struggle of fighting against ill-themed activities has become more difficult and even time and energy-draining. Therefore, recent researches try to shed some light on combining machine learning with defense mechanisms for detecting this type of malware. Machine learning allows anti-ransomware systems to become more accurate at predicting outcomes or behaviors of the attacks and is vastly used in the advanced research of cybersecurity. In this paper we analyze how machine learning can improve malware recognition in order to stand against critical security issues, giving a brief, yet comprehensive overview of this thriving topic in order to facilitate future research. We also briefly present the most important events of 2022 in terms of ransomware attacks, providing details about the ransoms demanded.

Most cryptographic protocols model a player’s knowledge of secrets in a simple way. Informally, the player knows a secret in the sense that she can directly furnish it as a (private) input to a protocol, e.g., to digitally sign a message.

The growing availability of Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) and secure multiparty computation, however, undermines this model of knowledge. Such tools can encumber a secret sk and permit a chosen player to access sk conditionally, without actually knowing sk. By permitting selective access to sk by an adversary, encumbrance of secrets can enable vote-selling in cryptographic voting schemes, illegal sale of credentials for online services, and erosion of deniability in anonymous messaging systems.

Unfortunately, existing proof-of-knowledge protocols fail to demonstrate that a secret is unencumbered. We therefore introduce and formalize a new notion called complete knowledge (CK). A proof (or argument) of CK shows that a prover does not just know a secret, but also has fully unencumbered knowledge, i.e., unrestricted ability to use the secret.

We introduce two practical CK schemes that use special-purpose hardware, specifically TEEs and off-the-shelf mining ASICs. We prove the security of these schemes and explore their practical deployment with a complete, end-to-end prototype that supports both. We show how CK can address encumbrance attacks identified in previous work. Finally, we introduce two new applications enabled by CK that involve proving ownership of blockchain assets.