International Association for Cryptologic Research

# IACR News Central

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Further sources to find out about changes are CryptoDB, ePrint RSS, ePrint Web, Event calender (iCal).

2015-05-27
12:17 [Pub][ePrint]

The Norwegian government ran trials of internet remote voting during the 2011 municipal elections and the 2013 parliamentary elections. From a simplified version of the voting protocol used there, the essential cryptographic operations of the voting protocol has been put together into a cryptosystem in which one can build the voting protocol on top of.

This paper proposes a new instantiation of the underlying cryp- tosystem, improving our confidence in the security of the cryptosys- tem. The new instantiation is mostly similar to a previously defined instantiation, but allows parts of the security proof to be significantly improved.

12:17 [Pub][ePrint]

We introduce and study the iterated random permutation problem, which asks how hard it is to distinguish, in a black-box way, the r-th power of a random permutation from a uniformly random permutation of a set of size N. We show that this requires Omega(N) queries (even for a two-sided, adaptive adversary). As a direct application of this result, we show that cascading a block cipher with the same key cannot degrade its security (as a pseudorandom permutation) more than negligibly.

2015-05-26
21:56 [Job][New]

CloudFlare is looking for a cryptography intern!

CloudFlare is expanding its global footprint. In order to keep our network secure we are investing in technologies to improve the security of our key management infrastructure. We are looking for an ambitious intern to help kickstart one of our cryptographic projects.

Requirements:

• Experience in the theory and implementation of standard cryptographic primitives (AES, RSA, ECC)

• Extensive development experience in C and/or Go

• A deep understanding of reverse engineering techniques

• An unquenchable thirst for understanding and mitigating cryptographic attack vectors

• Outside-the-box thinking and self-starter attitude

Bonus requirements:

• Experience with the cryptol programming language

• Experience with LLVM or other compiler technology

• Knowledge of the theory and implementation of white-box cryptography

Internship length: 4-6 months.

Sound like somewhere you’d thrive? If so, then we’d love to hear from you. Send us your resume and a short paragraph introducing yourself. Please include a brief description of how you solved a customer problem or enhanced a customer\'s understanding of a technical service.

CloudFlare is a security company. All prospective employees will be subject to an extensive background check.

CloudFlare is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate against any employee or applicant on the basis of age, color, disability, gender, national origin, race, religion, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any classification protected by federal, state, or local law.

• 21:56 [Event][New]

From August 31 to September 3
Location: Irvine, CA, USA

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

By selecting the largest possible value of k ∈ (n/2,2n/3], we further reduce the AND and XOR gate complexities of the CRT-based hybrid parallel GF(2^n) polynomial pasis multipliers for the irreducible trinomial f = u^n + u^k + 1 over GF(2): they are always less than those of the current fastest parallel multipliers - quadratic multipliers, i.e., n^2 AND gates and n^2−1 XOR gates. Our experimental results show that among the 539 values of n ∈ [5,999] such that f is irreducible for some k ∈ [2,n−2], there are 317 values of n such that k ∈ (n/2,2n/3]. For these irreducible trinomials, the AND and XOR gate complexities of the CRT-based hybrid multipliers are reduced by 15.3% on average. Especially, for the 124 values of such n, the two kinds of multipliers have the same time complexity, but the space complexities are reduced by 15.5% on average. As a comparison, the previous CRT-based multipliers consider the case k ∈ [2,n/2], and the improvement rate is only 8.4% on average.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

We describe a new technique for conducting partitioning arguments\'\'. Partitioning arguments are a popular way to prove the security of a cryptographic scheme. For instance, to prove the security of a signature scheme, a partitioning argument could divide the set of messages into signable\'\' messages for which a signature can be simulated during the proof, and unsignable\'\' ones for which any signature would allow to solve a computational problem. During the security proof, we would then hope that an adversary only requests signatures for signable messages, and later forges a signature for an unsignable one.

In this work, we develop a new class of partitioning arguments from simple assumptions. Unlike previous partitioning strategies, ours is based upon an algebraic property of the partitioned elements (e.g., the signed messages), and not on their bit structure. This allows to perform the partitioning efficiently in a hidden\'\' way, such that already a single slot\'\' for a partitioning operation in the scheme can be used to implement many different partitionings sequentially, one after the other. As a consequence, we can construct complex partitionings out of simple basic (but algebraic) partitionings in a very space-efficient way.

As a demonstration of our technique, we provide the first signature and public-key encryption schemes that achieve the following properties simultaneously: they are (almost) tightly secure under a simple assumption, and they are fully compact (in the sense that parameters, keys, and signatures, resp.~ciphertexts only comprise a constant number of group elements).

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Fault injection has become over the years one of the most dangerous threats for embedded devices such as smartcards. It is thus mandatory for any embedded system to implement efficient protections against this hazard. Among the various countermeasures suggested so far, the idea of infective computation seems fascinating, probably due to its aggressive strategy. Originally conceived to protect asymmetric cryptosystems, infective computation has been recently adapted to symmetric systems. This paper investigates the security of a new symmetric infective countermeasure suggested at CHES 2014. By noticing that the number of executed rounds is not protected, we develop four different attacks allowing one to efficiently recover the secret key of the underlying cryptosystem by using any of the three most popular fault models used in literature.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

We reconsider the concept of two-prover (and more generally: multi-prover) commitments, as introduced in the late eighties in the seminal work by Ben-Or et al. As was recently shown by Cr{\\\'e}peau et al., the security of known two-prover commitment schemes not only relies on the explicit assumption that the two provers cannot communicate, but also depends on what their information processing capabilities are. For instance, there exist schemes that are secure against classical provers but insecure if the provers have quantum information processing capabilities, and there are schemes that resist such quantum attacks but become insecure when considering general so-called non-signaling provers, which are restricted solely by the requirement that no communication takes place.

This poses the natural question whether there exists a two-prover commitment scheme that is secure under the sole assumption that no communication takes place, and that does not rely on any further restriction of the information processing capabilities of the dishonest provers; no such scheme is known.

In this work, we give strong evidence for a negative answer: we show that any single-round two-prover commitment scheme can be broken by a non-signaling attack. Our negative result is as bad as it can get: for any candidate scheme that is (almost) perfectly hiding, there exists a strategy that allows the dishonest provers to open a commitment to an arbitrary bit (almost) as successfully as the honest provers can open an honestly prepared commitment, i.e., with probability (almost) $1$ in case of a perfectly sound scheme. In the case of multi-round schemes, our impossibility result is restricted to perfectly hiding schemes.

On the positive side, we show that the impossibility result can be circumvented by considering {\\em three} provers instead: there exists a three-prover commitment scheme that is secure against arbitrary non-signaling attacks.

15:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence from national political control, but also significant limitations in terms of scalability and computational cost. We introduce RSCoin, a cryptocurrency framework in which central banks maintain complete control over the monetary supply, but rely on a distributed set of authorities, or mintettes, to prevent double-spending. While monetary policy is centralized, RSCoin still provides strong transparency and auditability guarantees. We demonstrate, both theoretically and experimentally, the benefits of a modest degree of centralization, such as the elimination of wasteful hashing and a scalable system for avoiding double-spending attacks.

09:17 [Pub][ePrint]

Large-scale datasets of consumer behavior might revolutionize the way we gain competitive advantages and increase our knowledge in the respective domains. At the same time, valuable datasets pose potential privacy risks that are difficult to foresee. In this paper we study the impact that the prices from consumers\' purchase histories have on the consumers\' location privacy. We show that using a small set of low-priced product prices from the consumers\' purchase histories, an adversary can determine the country, city, and local retail store where the transaction occurred with high confidence. Our paper demonstrates that even when the product category, precise time of purchase, and currency are removed from the consumers\' purchase history (e.g., for privacy reasons), information about the consumers\' location is leaked. The results are based on three independent datasets containing thousands of low-priced and frequently-bought consumer products. In addition, we show how to identify the local currency, given only the total price of a consumer purchase in a global currency (e.g., in Bitcoin). The results show the existence of location privacy risks when releasing consumer purchase histories. As such, the results highlight the need for systems that hide transaction details in consumer purchase histories.

09:17 [Pub][ePrint]

We describe a zero-knowledge proof system in which a prover holds a large dataset $M$ and can repeatedly prove NP relations about that dataset. That is, for any (public) relation $R$ and $x$, the prover can prove that $\\exists w: R(M,x,w)=1$. After an initial setup phase (which depends only on $M$), each proof requires only a constant number of rounds and has communication/computation cost proportional to that of a {\\em random-access machine (RAM)} implementation of $R$, up to polylogarithmic factors. In particular, the cost per proof in many applications is sublinear in $|M|$. Additionally, the storage requirement between proofs for the verifier is constant.