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2015-04-01
15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

We propose a method for integrating NTRUEncrypt into the ntor key exchange protocol as a means of achieving a quantum-safe variant of forward secrecy. The proposal is a minimal change to ntor, essentially consisting of an NTRUEncrypt-based key exchange performed in parallel with the ntor handshake. Performance figures are provided demonstrating that the client bears most of the additional overhead, and that the added load on the router side is acceptable.

We make this proposal for two reasons. First, we believe it to be an interesting case study into the practicality of quantum-safe cryptography and into the difficulties one might encounter when transitioning to quantum-safe primitives within real-world protocols and code-bases. Second, we believe that Tor is a strong candidate for an early transition to quantum-safe primitives; users of Tor may be justifiably concerned about adversaries who record traffic in the present and store it for decryption when technology or cryptanalytic techniques improve in the future.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Precomputation techniques are useful to improve real-time performance of complex algorithms at the expense of extra memory, and extra preparatory computations. This practice is neglected especially in the embedded context where energy and memory space is limited. Instead, the embedded space favors the immediate reduction of energy and memory footprint. However, the embedded platforms of the future may be different from the traditional ones. Energy-harvesting sensor nodes may extract virtually limitless energy from their surrounding, while at the same time they are able to store more data at cheaper cost, thanks to Moore\'s law. Yet, minimizing the run-time energy and latency will still be primary targets for today\'s as well as future real-time embedded systems. Another important challenge for the future systems is to provide efficient public-key based solutions that can thwart quantum-cryptanalysis. In this article, we address these two concepts. We apply precomputation techniques on two post-quantum digital signature schemes: hash-based and lattice-based digital signatures. We first demonstrate that precomputation methods are extensible to post-quantum cryptography and are applicable on current energy-harvesting platforms. Then, we quantify its impact on energy, execution time, and the overall system yield. The results show that precomputation can improve the run-time latency and energy consumption up to a factor of 82.7$\\times$ and 11.8$\\times$, respectively. Moreover, for a typical energy-harvesting profile, it can triple the total number of generated signatures. We reveal that precomputation enables very complex and even probabilistic algorithms to achieve acceptable real-time performance on resource-constrained platforms. Thus, it will expand the scope of post-quantum algorithms to a broader range of platforms and applications.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

A new lightweight stream cipher, Sprout, has been presented at FSE 2015. The main concern in the design philosophy of the cipher is to decrease the internal state size without compromising the security against Time-Memory-Data (TMD) tradeoff attacks. In this work, we have mounted a TMD tradeoff attack to Sprout using $2^d$ output bits in $2^{71.7-d}$ encryptions of Sprout along with $2^{d}$ table lookups. The memory complexity is $2^{85-d}$ where $d\\leq 40$. In one instance, it is possible to recover the key in faster than $2^{33}$ encryption time if we have $2^{40}$ bits of keystream output by using tables of 770 Terabytes in total. The offline phase of preparing the tables consists of solving roughly $2^{42}$ system of linear equations with 20 unknowns.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Pairing-based cryptography has exploded over the last decade, as this algebraic setting offers good functionality and efficiency. However, there is a huge security gap between how schemes are usually analyzed in the academic literature and how they are typically implemented. The issue at play is that there exist multiple types of pairings: Type-I called \"symmetric\" is typically how schemes are presented and proven secure in the literature, because it is simpler and the complexity assumptions can be weaker; however, Type-III called \"asymmetric\" is typically the most efficient choice for an implementation in terms of bandwidth and computation time.

There are two main complexities when moving from one pairing type to another. First, the change in algebraic setting invalidates the original security proof. Second, there are usually multiple (possibly thousands) of ways to translate from a Type-I to a Type-III scheme, and the \"best\" translation may depend on the application.

Our contribution is the design, development and evaluation of a new software tool, AutoGroup+, that automatically translates from Type-I to Type-III pairings. The output of AutoGroup+ is: (1) \"secure\" provided the input is \"secure\" and (2) optimal based on the user\'s efficiency constraints (excluding software and run-time errors). Prior automation work for pairings was either not guaranteed to be secure or only partially automated and impractically slow. This work addresses the pairing security gap by realizing a fast and secure translation tool.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

The single-shot collision attack on RSA proposed by Hanley et al. is studied focusing on the difference between two operands of multipliers. There are two consequences. Firstly, designing order of operands can be a cost-effective countermeasure. We show a concrete example in which operand order determines success and failure of the attack. Secondly, countermeasures can be ineffective if the asymmetric leakage is considered. In addition to the main results, the attack by Hanley et al. is extended using the signal-processing technique of the big mac attack. An experimental result to successfully analyze an FPGA implementation of RSA with the multiply-always method is also presented.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Secure and private computations over RAM are preferred over computations with circuits or Turing machines. Secure and private RAM executions become more and more important in the scope avoiding information leakage when executing programs over a single computer as well as over the clouds. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme for evaluating RAM programs without revealing any information on the computation including the program the data and the result. We use the Shamir secret sharing to share all the program instructions and private string matching technique to ensure the execution of the right instruction sequence. We stress that our scheme obtains information theoretic security and does not rely on any computational hardness assumptions, therefore, gaining indefinite private and secure RAM execution of perfectly unrevealed programs.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Providing an efficient revocation mechanism for attribute-based encryption (ABE) is of

utmost importance since over time an user\'s credentials may be revealed or expired. All previously

known revocable ABE (RABE) constructions (a) essentially utilize the complete subtree (CS) scheme

for revocation purpose, (b) are bounded in the sense that the size of the public parameters depends

linearly on the size of the attribute universe and logarithmically on the number of users in the

system, and (c) are either selectively secure, which seems unrealistic in a dynamic system such as

RABE, or fully secure but built in a composite order bilinear group setting, which is undesirable from

the point of view of both efficiency and security. This paper presents the first fully secure unbounded

RABE using subset difference (SD) mechanism for revocation which greatly improves the broadcast

efficiency compared to the CS scheme. Our RABE scheme is built on a prime order bilinear group

setting resulting in practical computation cost, and its security depends on the Decisional Linear

assumption.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

After being introduced in 2009, the first fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme has created significant excitement in academia and industry. Despite rapid advances in the last 6 years, FHE schemes are still not ready for deployment due to an efficiency bottleneck. Here we introduce a custom hardware accelerator optimized for a class of reconfigurable logic to bring LTV based somewhat homomorphic encryption (SWHE) schemes one step closer to deployment in real-life applications. The accelerator we present is connected via a fast PCIe interface to a CPU platform to provide homomorphic evaluation services to any application that needs to support blinded computations. Specifically we introduce a number theoretical transform based multiplier architecture capable of efficiently handling very large polynomials. When synthesized for the Xilinx Virtex 7 family the presented architecture can compute the product of large polynomials in under $6.25$~msec making it the fastest multiplier design of its kind currently available in the literature and is more than 102 times faster than a software implementation. Using this multiplier we can compute a relinearization operation in $526$ msec. When used as an accelerator, for instance, to evaluate the AES block cipher, we estimate a per block homomorphic evaluation performance of $442$~msec yielding performance gains of $28.5$ and $17$ times over similar CPU and GPU implementations, respectively.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Re-Encryption randomized partial checking (RPC) mix nets were introduced by Jakobsson, Juels, and Rivest in 2002 and since then have been employed in prominent modern e-voting systems and in politically binding elections in order to provide verifiable elections in a simple and efficient way. Being one of or even the most used mix nets in practice so far, these mix nets are an interesting and valuable target for rigorous security analysis.

In this paper, we carry out the first formal cryptographic analysis of re-encryption RPC mix nets. We show that these mix nets, with fixes recently proposed by Khazaei and Wikstr{\\\"o}m, provide a good level of verifiability, and more precisely, accountability: cheating mix servers, who try to manipulate the election outcome, are caught with high probability. Moreover, we show that all attacks that would break the privacy of voters\' inputs are caught with a probability of at least $1/4$. In many cases, for example, when penalties are severe or reputation can be lost, adversaries might not be willing to take this risk, and hence, would behave in a way that avoids this risk. Now, for such a class of risk-avoiding\'\' adversaries, we show that re-encryption RPC mix nets provide a good level of privacy, even if only one mix server is honest.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Consider a collection $f$ of polynomials $f_i(x)$, $i=1, \\ldots,s$, with integer coefficients such that polynomials $f_i(x)-f_i(0)$, $i=1, \\ldots,s$, are linearly independent. Denote by $D_m$ the discrepancy for the set of points $\\left(\\frac{f_1(x) \\bmod m}{m},\\ldots,\\frac{f_s(x) \\bmod m}{p^n}\\right)$ for all $x \\in \\{0,1,\\ldots,m\\}$, where $m=p^n$, $n \\in N$, and $p$ is a prime number. We prove that $D_m\\to 0$ as $n\\to\\infty$, and \$D_m

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Security against selective opening attack (SOA) requires that in a multi-user setting, even if an adversary has access to all ciphertexts from users, and adaptively corrupts some fraction of the users by exposing not only their messages but also the random coins, the remaining unopened messages retain their privacy. Recently, Bellare, Waters and Yilek considered SOA-security in the identity-based setting, and presented the first identity-based encryption (IBE) schemes that are proven secure against selective opening chosen plaintext attack (SO-CPA). However, how to achieve SO-CCA security for IBE is still open.

In this paper, we introduce a new primitive called extractable IBE, which is a hybrid of one-bit IBE and identity-based key encapsulation mechanism (IB-KEM), and define its IND-ID-CCA security notion. We present a generic construction of SO-CCA secure IBE from an IND-ID-CCA secure extractable IBE with One-Sided Public Openability\'\'(1SPO), a collision-resistant hash function and a strengthened cross-authentication code. Finally, we propose two concrete constructions of extractable 1SPO-IBE schemes, resulting in the first simulation-based SO-CCA secure IBE schemes without random oracles.