International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Non-malleable codes, defined by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs (ICS \'10), provide roughly the following guarantee: if a codeword $c$ encoding some message $x$ is tampered to $c\' = f(c)$ such that $c\' \\neq c$, then the tampered message $x\'$ contained in $c\'$ reveals no information about $x$. Non-malleable codes have applications to immunizing cryptosystems against tampering attacks and related-key attacks.

One cannot have an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all efficient tampering functions $f$. However, in this work we show ``the next best thing\'\': for any polynomial bound $s$ given a-priori, there is an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all tampering functions $f$ computable by a circuit of size $s$. More generally, for any family of tampering functions $\\F$ of size $|\\F| \\leq 2^{s}$, there is an efficient non-malleable code that protects against all $f \\in \\F$. The rate of our codes, defined as the ratio of message to codeword size, approaches $1$. Our results are information-theoretic and our main proof technique relies on a careful probabilistic method argument using limited independence. As a result, we get an efficiently samplable family of efficient codes, such that a random member of the family is non-malleable with overwhelming probability. Alternatively, we can view the result as providing an efficient non-malleable code in the ``common reference string\'\' (CRS) model.

We also introduce a new notion of non-malleable key derivation, which uses randomness $x$ to derive a secret key $y = h(x)$ in such a way that, even if $x$ is tampered to a different value $x\' = f(x)$, the derived key $y\' = h(x\')$ does not reveal any information about $y$. Our results for non-malleable key derivation are analogous to those for non-malleable codes.

As a useful tool in our analysis, we rely on the notion of ``leakage-resilient storage\'\' of Davi, Dziembowski and Venturi (SCN \'10) and, as a result of independent interest, we also significantly improve on the parameters of such schemes.