Fully Automated Selfish Mining Analysis in Efficient Proof Systems Blockchains
https://iacr.org/news/item/23096
ePrint Report: Fully Automated Selfish Mining Analysis in Efficient Proof Systems Blockchains
Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amirali Ebrahim-Zadeh, Mehrdad Karrabi, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michelle Yeo, Djordje Zikelic
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov decision process (MDP). We then present a formal analysis procedure which computes an $\epsilon$-tight lower bound on the optimal expected relative revenue in the MDP and a strategy that achieves this $\epsilon$-tight lower bound, where $\epsilon>0$ may be any specified precision. Our analysis is fully automated and provides formal guarantees on the correctness. We evaluate our selfish mining attack and observe that it achieves superior expected relative revenue compared to two considered baselines.
In concurrent work [Sarenche FC'24] does an automated analysis on selfish mining in predictable longest-chain blockchains based on efficient proof systems. Predictable means the randomness for the challenges is fixed for many blocks (as used e.g., in Ouroboros), while
we consider unpredictable (Bitcoin-like) chains where the challenge is derived from the previous block.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23096
ePrint Report: Fully Automated Selfish Mining Analysis in Efficient Proof Systems Blockchains
Krishnendu Chatterjee, Amirali Ebrahim-Zadeh, Mehrdad Karrabi, Krzysztof Pietrzak, Michelle Yeo, Djordje Zikelic
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal selfish mining attack which maximizes expected relative revenue of the adversary, thus minimizing the chain quality. To this end, we propose a novel selfish mining attack that aims to maximize this objective and formally model the attack as a Markov decision process (MDP). We then present a formal analysis procedure which computes an $\epsilon$-tight lower bound on the optimal expected relative revenue in the MDP and a strategy that achieves this $\epsilon$-tight lower bound, where $\epsilon>0$ may be any specified precision. Our analysis is fully automated and provides formal guarantees on the correctness. We evaluate our selfish mining attack and observe that it achieves superior expected relative revenue compared to two considered baselines.
In concurrent work [Sarenche FC'24] does an automated analysis on selfish mining in predictable longest-chain blockchains based on efficient proof systems. Predictable means the randomness for the challenges is fixed for many blocks (as used e.g., in Ouroboros), while
we consider unpredictable (Bitcoin-like) chains where the challenge is derived from the previous block.
Security Analysis of Signal's PQXDH Handshake
https://iacr.org/news/item/23094
ePrint Report: Security Analysis of Signal's PQXDH Handshake
Rune Fiedler, Felix Günther
Signal recently deployed a new handshake protocol named PQXDH to protect against "harvest-now-decrypt-later" attacks of a future quantum computer. To this end, PQXDH adds a post-quantum KEM to the Diffie-Hellman combinations of the prior X3DH handshake.
In this work, we give a reductionist security analysis of Signal's PQXDH handshake in a game-based security model that captures the targeted "maximum-exposure" security, allowing fine-grained compromise of user's long-term, semi-static, and ephemeral key material. We augment prior such models to capture not only the added KEM component but also the signing of public keys, which prior analyses did not capture but which adds an additional flavor of post-quantum security in PQXDH. We then establish a fully parameterized, concrete security bound for the session key security of PQXDH, in particular shedding light on a KEM binding property we require for PQXDH's security, and how to avoid it.
Our discussion of KEM binding complements the tool-based analysis of PQXDH by Bhargavan, Jacomme, Kiefer, and Schmidt, which pointed out a potential re-encapsulation attack if the KEM shared secret does not bind the public key. We show that both Kyber (used in PQXDH) and its current NIST draft standard ML-KEM (foreseen to replace Kyber once standardized) satisfy a novel binding notion we introduce and rely on for our PQXDH analysis, which may be of independent interest.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23094
ePrint Report: Security Analysis of Signal's PQXDH Handshake
Rune Fiedler, Felix Günther
Signal recently deployed a new handshake protocol named PQXDH to protect against "harvest-now-decrypt-later" attacks of a future quantum computer. To this end, PQXDH adds a post-quantum KEM to the Diffie-Hellman combinations of the prior X3DH handshake.
In this work, we give a reductionist security analysis of Signal's PQXDH handshake in a game-based security model that captures the targeted "maximum-exposure" security, allowing fine-grained compromise of user's long-term, semi-static, and ephemeral key material. We augment prior such models to capture not only the added KEM component but also the signing of public keys, which prior analyses did not capture but which adds an additional flavor of post-quantum security in PQXDH. We then establish a fully parameterized, concrete security bound for the session key security of PQXDH, in particular shedding light on a KEM binding property we require for PQXDH's security, and how to avoid it.
Our discussion of KEM binding complements the tool-based analysis of PQXDH by Bhargavan, Jacomme, Kiefer, and Schmidt, which pointed out a potential re-encapsulation attack if the KEM shared secret does not bind the public key. We show that both Kyber (used in PQXDH) and its current NIST draft standard ML-KEM (foreseen to replace Kyber once standardized) satisfy a novel binding notion we introduce and rely on for our PQXDH analysis, which may be of independent interest.
Sublinear Distributed Product Checks on Replicated Secret-Shared Data over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ without Ring Extensions
https://iacr.org/news/item/23092
ePrint Report: Sublinear Distributed Product Checks on Replicated Secret-Shared Data over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ without Ring Extensions
Yun Li, Daniel Escudero, Yufei Duan, Zhicong Huang, Cheng Hong, Chao Zhang, Yifan Song
Multiple works have designed or used maliciously secure honest majority MPC protocols over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ using replicated secret sharing (e.g. Koti et al. USENIX’21, and the references therein). A recent trend in the design of such MPC protocols is to first execute a semi-honest protocol, and then use a check that verifies the correctness of the computation requiring only sublinear amount of communication in terms of the circuit size. The so-called Galois ring extensions are needed in order to execute such checks over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$, but these rings incur incredibly high computation overheads, which completely undermine any potential benefits the ring $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ had to begin with.
In this work we revisit the task of designing sublinear distributed product checks on replicated secret-shared data over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ among three parties with an honest majority. We present a novel technique for verifying the correctness of a set of multiplication (in fact, inner product) triples, involving a sublinear cost in terms of the amount of multiplications. Most importantly, unlike previous works, our tools entirely avoid Galois ring extensions, and only require computation over rings of the form $\mathbb{Z}_{2^l}$ . In terms of communication, our checks are 3∼5× lighter than existing checks using ring extensions, which is already quite remarkable. However, our most noticeable improvement is in terms of computation: avoiding extensions allows our checks to be 17.7∼44.2× better than previous approaches, for many parameter regimes of interest. Our experimental results show that checking a 10 million gate circuit with the 3PC protocol from (Boyle et al., CCS’19) takes about two minutes, while our approach takes only 2.82 seconds.
Finally, our techniques are not restricted to the three-party case, and we generalize them to replicated secret-sharing with an arbitrary number of parties n. Even though the share size in this scheme grows exponentially with n, prior works have used it for n = 4 or n = 5—or even general n for feasibility results—and our distributed checks also represent improvements in these contexts.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23092
ePrint Report: Sublinear Distributed Product Checks on Replicated Secret-Shared Data over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ without Ring Extensions
Yun Li, Daniel Escudero, Yufei Duan, Zhicong Huang, Cheng Hong, Chao Zhang, Yifan Song
Multiple works have designed or used maliciously secure honest majority MPC protocols over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ using replicated secret sharing (e.g. Koti et al. USENIX’21, and the references therein). A recent trend in the design of such MPC protocols is to first execute a semi-honest protocol, and then use a check that verifies the correctness of the computation requiring only sublinear amount of communication in terms of the circuit size. The so-called Galois ring extensions are needed in order to execute such checks over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$, but these rings incur incredibly high computation overheads, which completely undermine any potential benefits the ring $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ had to begin with.
In this work we revisit the task of designing sublinear distributed product checks on replicated secret-shared data over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ among three parties with an honest majority. We present a novel technique for verifying the correctness of a set of multiplication (in fact, inner product) triples, involving a sublinear cost in terms of the amount of multiplications. Most importantly, unlike previous works, our tools entirely avoid Galois ring extensions, and only require computation over rings of the form $\mathbb{Z}_{2^l}$ . In terms of communication, our checks are 3∼5× lighter than existing checks using ring extensions, which is already quite remarkable. However, our most noticeable improvement is in terms of computation: avoiding extensions allows our checks to be 17.7∼44.2× better than previous approaches, for many parameter regimes of interest. Our experimental results show that checking a 10 million gate circuit with the 3PC protocol from (Boyle et al., CCS’19) takes about two minutes, while our approach takes only 2.82 seconds.
Finally, our techniques are not restricted to the three-party case, and we generalize them to replicated secret-sharing with an arbitrary number of parties n. Even though the share size in this scheme grows exponentially with n, prior works have used it for n = 4 or n = 5—or even general n for feasibility results—and our distributed checks also represent improvements in these contexts.
Quantum Unpredictability
https://iacr.org/news/item/23093
ePrint Report: Quantum Unpredictability
Tomoyuki Morimae, Shogo Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa
Unpredictable functions (UPFs) play essential roles in classical cryptography, including message authentication codes (MACs) and digital signatures. In this paper, we introduce a quantum analog of UPFs, which we call unpredictable state generators (UPSGs). UPSGs are implied by pseudorandom function-like states generators (PRFSs), which are a quantum analog of pseudorandom functions (PRFs), and therefore UPSGs could exist even if one-way functions do not exist, similar to other recently introduced primitives like pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), one-way state generators (OWSGs), and EFIs. In classical cryptography, UPFs are equivalent to PRFs, but in the quantum case, the equivalence is not clear, and UPSGs could be weaker than PRFSs. Despite this, we demonstrate that all known applications of PRFSs are also achievable with UPSGs. They include IND-CPA-secure secret-key encryption and EUF-CMA-secure MACs with unclonable tags. Our findings suggest that, for many applications, quantum unpredictability, rather than quantum pseudorandomness, is sufficient.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23093
ePrint Report: Quantum Unpredictability
Tomoyuki Morimae, Shogo Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa
Unpredictable functions (UPFs) play essential roles in classical cryptography, including message authentication codes (MACs) and digital signatures. In this paper, we introduce a quantum analog of UPFs, which we call unpredictable state generators (UPSGs). UPSGs are implied by pseudorandom function-like states generators (PRFSs), which are a quantum analog of pseudorandom functions (PRFs), and therefore UPSGs could exist even if one-way functions do not exist, similar to other recently introduced primitives like pseudorandom state generators (PRSGs), one-way state generators (OWSGs), and EFIs. In classical cryptography, UPFs are equivalent to PRFs, but in the quantum case, the equivalence is not clear, and UPSGs could be weaker than PRFSs. Despite this, we demonstrate that all known applications of PRFSs are also achievable with UPSGs. They include IND-CPA-secure secret-key encryption and EUF-CMA-secure MACs with unclonable tags. Our findings suggest that, for many applications, quantum unpredictability, rather than quantum pseudorandomness, is sufficient.
BUFFing FALCON without Increasing the Signature Size
https://iacr.org/news/item/23102
ePrint Report: BUFFing FALCON without Increasing the Signature Size
Samed Düzlü, Rune Fiedler, Marc Fischlin
This work shows how FALCON can achieve the Beyond UnForgeability Features (BUFF) introduced by Cremers et al. (S&P'21) more efficiently than by applying the generic BUFF transform. Specifically, we show that applying a transform of Pornin and Stern (ACNS'05), dubbed PS-3 transform, already suffices for FALCON to achieve BUFF security. For FALCON, this merely means to include the public key in the hashing step in signature generation and verification, instead of hashing only the nonce and the message; the other signature computation steps and the signature output remain untouched. In comparison to the BUFF transform, which appends a hash value to the final signature, the PS-3 transform therefore achieves shorter signature sizes, without incurring additional computations.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23102
ePrint Report: BUFFing FALCON without Increasing the Signature Size
Samed Düzlü, Rune Fiedler, Marc Fischlin
This work shows how FALCON can achieve the Beyond UnForgeability Features (BUFF) introduced by Cremers et al. (S&P'21) more efficiently than by applying the generic BUFF transform. Specifically, we show that applying a transform of Pornin and Stern (ACNS'05), dubbed PS-3 transform, already suffices for FALCON to achieve BUFF security. For FALCON, this merely means to include the public key in the hashing step in signature generation and verification, instead of hashing only the nonce and the message; the other signature computation steps and the signature output remain untouched. In comparison to the BUFF transform, which appends a hash value to the final signature, the PS-3 transform therefore achieves shorter signature sizes, without incurring additional computations.
Large-Scale MPC: Scaling Private Iris Code Uniqueness Checks to Millions of Users
https://iacr.org/news/item/23097
ePrint Report: Large-Scale MPC: Scaling Private Iris Code Uniqueness Checks to Millions of Users
Remco Bloemen, Daniel Kales, Philipp Sippl, Roman Walch
In this work we tackle privacy concerns in biometric verification systems that typically require server-side processing of sensitive data (e.g., fingerprints and Iris Codes). Concretely, we design a solution that allows us to query whether a given Iris Code is similar to one contained in a given database, while all queries and datasets are being protected using secure multiparty computation (MPC). Addressing the substantial performance demands of operational systems like World ID and aid distributions by the Red Cross, we propose new protocols to improve performance by more than three orders of magnitude compared to the recent state-of-the-art system Janus (S&P 24). Our final protocol can achieve a throughput of over a million Iris Code comparisons per second on a single CPU core, while protecting the privacy of both the query and database Iris Codes. We additionally investigate GPU acceleration for some building blocks of our protocol, which results in further speedups of over 38x compared to the respective multi-threaded CPU implementation.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23097
ePrint Report: Large-Scale MPC: Scaling Private Iris Code Uniqueness Checks to Millions of Users
Remco Bloemen, Daniel Kales, Philipp Sippl, Roman Walch
In this work we tackle privacy concerns in biometric verification systems that typically require server-side processing of sensitive data (e.g., fingerprints and Iris Codes). Concretely, we design a solution that allows us to query whether a given Iris Code is similar to one contained in a given database, while all queries and datasets are being protected using secure multiparty computation (MPC). Addressing the substantial performance demands of operational systems like World ID and aid distributions by the Red Cross, we propose new protocols to improve performance by more than three orders of magnitude compared to the recent state-of-the-art system Janus (S&P 24). Our final protocol can achieve a throughput of over a million Iris Code comparisons per second on a single CPU core, while protecting the privacy of both the query and database Iris Codes. We additionally investigate GPU acceleration for some building blocks of our protocol, which results in further speedups of over 38x compared to the respective multi-threaded CPU implementation.
Non-Transferable Anonymous Tokens by Secret Binding
https://iacr.org/news/item/23103
ePrint Report: Non-Transferable Anonymous Tokens by Secret Binding
F. Betül Durak, Laurane Marco, Abdullah Talayhan, Serge Vaudenay
Non-transferability (NT) is a security notion which ensures that credentials are only used by their intended owners. Despite its importance, it has not been formally treated in the context of anonymous tokens (AT) which are lightweight anonymous credentials. In this work, we consider a client who "buys" access tokens which are forbidden to be transferred although anonymously redeemed. We extensively study the trade-offs between privacy (obtained through anonymity) and security in AT through the notion of non-transferability. We formalise new security notions, design a suite of protocols with various flavors of NT, prove their security, and implement the protocols to assess their efficiency. Finally, we study the existing anonymous credentials which offer NT, and show that they cannot automatically be used as AT without security and complexity implications.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23103
ePrint Report: Non-Transferable Anonymous Tokens by Secret Binding
F. Betül Durak, Laurane Marco, Abdullah Talayhan, Serge Vaudenay
Non-transferability (NT) is a security notion which ensures that credentials are only used by their intended owners. Despite its importance, it has not been formally treated in the context of anonymous tokens (AT) which are lightweight anonymous credentials. In this work, we consider a client who "buys" access tokens which are forbidden to be transferred although anonymously redeemed. We extensively study the trade-offs between privacy (obtained through anonymity) and security in AT through the notion of non-transferability. We formalise new security notions, design a suite of protocols with various flavors of NT, prove their security, and implement the protocols to assess their efficiency. Finally, we study the existing anonymous credentials which offer NT, and show that they cannot automatically be used as AT without security and complexity implications.
A Note of $\mathsf{Anemoi}$ Gröbner Bases
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/693
Recently, [eprint/2024/250] and [eprint/2024/347] proposed two algebraic attacks on the $\mathsf{Anemoi}$ permutation [Crypto '23]. In this note, we construct a Gröbner basis for the ideal generated by the naive modeling of the $\mathsf{CICO}$ problem associated to $\mathsf{Anemoi}$, in odd and in even characteristics, for one and several branches. We also infer the degree of the ideal from this Gröbner basis, while previous works relied on upper bounds.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/693
Recently, [eprint/2024/250] and [eprint/2024/347] proposed two algebraic attacks on the $\mathsf{Anemoi}$ permutation [Crypto '23]. In this note, we construct a Gröbner basis for the ideal generated by the naive modeling of the $\mathsf{CICO}$ problem associated to $\mathsf{Anemoi}$, in odd and in even characteristics, for one and several branches. We also infer the degree of the ideal from this Gröbner basis, while previous works relied on upper bounds.
Masked Computation the Floor Function and its Application to the FALCON Signature
https://iacr.org/news/item/23101
ePrint Report: Masked Computation the Floor Function and its Application to the FALCON Signature
Justine Paillet, Pierre-Augustin Berthet, Cédric Tavernier
FALCON is candidate for standardization of the new Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) primitives by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). However, it remains a challenge to define efficient countermeasures against side-channel attacks (SCA) for this algorithm. FALCON is a lattice-based signature that relies on rational numbers which is unusual in the cryptography field. While recent work proposed a solution to mask the addition and the multiplication, some roadblocks remain, most noticeably how to protect the floor function. We propose in this work to complete the existing first trials of hardening FALCON against SCA. We perform the mathematical proofs of our methods as well as formal security proof in the probing model using the Non-Interference concepts.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23101
ePrint Report: Masked Computation the Floor Function and its Application to the FALCON Signature
Justine Paillet, Pierre-Augustin Berthet, Cédric Tavernier
FALCON is candidate for standardization of the new Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) primitives by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). However, it remains a challenge to define efficient countermeasures against side-channel attacks (SCA) for this algorithm. FALCON is a lattice-based signature that relies on rational numbers which is unusual in the cryptography field. While recent work proposed a solution to mask the addition and the multiplication, some roadblocks remain, most noticeably how to protect the floor function. We propose in this work to complete the existing first trials of hardening FALCON against SCA. We perform the mathematical proofs of our methods as well as formal security proof in the probing model using the Non-Interference concepts.
Lower-Bounds on Public-Key Operations in PIR
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/694
Private information retrieval (PIR) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a user to fetch a database entry without revealing to the server which database entry it learns. PIR becomes non-trivial if the server communication is less than the database size. We show that building (even) very weak forms of single-server PIR protocols, without pre-processing, requires the number of public-key operations to scale linearly in the database size. This holds irrespective of the number of symmetric-key operations performed by the parties.
We then use this bound to examine the related problem of communication efficient oblivious transfer (OT) extension.
Oblivious transfer is a crucial building block in secure multi-party computation (MPC). In most MPC protocols, OT invocations are the main bottleneck in terms of computation and communication. OT extension techniques allow one to minimize the number of public-key operations in MPC protocols. One drawback of all existing OT extension protocols is their communication overhead. In particular, the sender’s communication is roughly double what is information-theoretically optimal.
We show that OT extension with close to optimal sender communication is impossible, illustrating that the communication overhead is inherent. Our techniques go much further; we can show many lower bounds on communication-efficient MPC. E.g., we prove that to build high-rate string OT from generic groups, the sender needs to do linearly many group operations
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/694
Private information retrieval (PIR) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a user to fetch a database entry without revealing to the server which database entry it learns. PIR becomes non-trivial if the server communication is less than the database size. We show that building (even) very weak forms of single-server PIR protocols, without pre-processing, requires the number of public-key operations to scale linearly in the database size. This holds irrespective of the number of symmetric-key operations performed by the parties.
We then use this bound to examine the related problem of communication efficient oblivious transfer (OT) extension.
Oblivious transfer is a crucial building block in secure multi-party computation (MPC). In most MPC protocols, OT invocations are the main bottleneck in terms of computation and communication. OT extension techniques allow one to minimize the number of public-key operations in MPC protocols. One drawback of all existing OT extension protocols is their communication overhead. In particular, the sender’s communication is roughly double what is information-theoretically optimal.
We show that OT extension with close to optimal sender communication is impossible, illustrating that the communication overhead is inherent. Our techniques go much further; we can show many lower bounds on communication-efficient MPC. E.g., we prove that to build high-rate string OT from generic groups, the sender needs to do linearly many group operations
Automated Generation of Fault-Resistant Circuits
https://iacr.org/news/item/23100
ePrint Report: Automated Generation of Fault-Resistant Circuits
Nicolai Müller, Amir Moradi
Fault Injection (FI) attacks, which involve intentionally introducing faults into a system to cause it to behave in an unintended manner, are widely recognized and pose a significant threat to the security of cryptographic primitives implemented in hardware, making fault tolerance an increasingly critical concern. However, protecting cryptographic hardware primitives securely and efficiently, even with well-established and documented methods such as redundant computation, can be a time-consuming, error-prone, and expertise-demanding task.
In this research, we present a comprehensive and fully-automated software solution for the Automated Generation of Fault-Resistant Circuits (AGEFA). Our application employs a generic and extensively researched methodology for the secure integration of countermeasures based on Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs) into cryptographic hardware circuits. Our software tool allows designers without hardware security expertise to develop fault-tolerant hardware circuits with pre-defined correction capabilities under a comprehensive fault adversary model. Moreover, our tool applies to masked designs without violating the masking security requirements, in particular to designs generated by the tool AGEMA. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on various block ciphers and demonstrate its ability to produce fault-tolerant circuits. Additionally, we assess the security of examples generated by AGEFA against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and FI using state-of-the-art leakage and fault evaluation tools.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23100
ePrint Report: Automated Generation of Fault-Resistant Circuits
Nicolai Müller, Amir Moradi
Fault Injection (FI) attacks, which involve intentionally introducing faults into a system to cause it to behave in an unintended manner, are widely recognized and pose a significant threat to the security of cryptographic primitives implemented in hardware, making fault tolerance an increasingly critical concern. However, protecting cryptographic hardware primitives securely and efficiently, even with well-established and documented methods such as redundant computation, can be a time-consuming, error-prone, and expertise-demanding task.
In this research, we present a comprehensive and fully-automated software solution for the Automated Generation of Fault-Resistant Circuits (AGEFA). Our application employs a generic and extensively researched methodology for the secure integration of countermeasures based on Error-Correcting Codes (ECCs) into cryptographic hardware circuits. Our software tool allows designers without hardware security expertise to develop fault-tolerant hardware circuits with pre-defined correction capabilities under a comprehensive fault adversary model. Moreover, our tool applies to masked designs without violating the masking security requirements, in particular to designs generated by the tool AGEMA. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on various block ciphers and demonstrate its ability to produce fault-tolerant circuits. Additionally, we assess the security of examples generated by AGEFA against Side-Channel Analysis (SCA) and FI using state-of-the-art leakage and fault evaluation tools.
Beale Cipher 1 and Cipher 3: Numbers With No Messages
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/695
This paper's purpose is to give a new method of analyzing Beale Cipher 1 and Cipher 3 and to show that there is no key which will decipher them into sentences.
Previous research has largely used statistical methods to
either decipher them or prove they have no solution. Some
of these methods show that there is a high probability, but not certainty that they are unsolvable. Both ciphers remain unsolved.
The methods used in this paper are not statistical ones
based on thousands of samples. The evidence given here shows there is a high correlation between locations of certain numbers in the ciphers with locations in the written text that was given with these ciphers in the 1885 pamphlet called "The Beale Papers".
Evidence is correlated with a long monotonically increasing Gillogly String in Cipher 1, when translated with the Declaration of Independence given in the pamphlet.
The Beale Papers' writer was anonymous, and words in the three written letters in the 1885 pamphlet are compared with locations of numbers in the ciphers to show who the writer was.
Emphasis is on numbers which are controllable by the encipherer. Letter location sums are used when they are the most plausible ones found.
Evidence supports the statement that Cipher 1 and Cipher 3 are unintelligible. It also supports the statement that they were designed to have no intelligible sentences because they were part of a complex game made by the anonymous writer of The Beale Papers.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/695
This paper's purpose is to give a new method of analyzing Beale Cipher 1 and Cipher 3 and to show that there is no key which will decipher them into sentences.
Previous research has largely used statistical methods to
either decipher them or prove they have no solution. Some
of these methods show that there is a high probability, but not certainty that they are unsolvable. Both ciphers remain unsolved.
The methods used in this paper are not statistical ones
based on thousands of samples. The evidence given here shows there is a high correlation between locations of certain numbers in the ciphers with locations in the written text that was given with these ciphers in the 1885 pamphlet called "The Beale Papers".
Evidence is correlated with a long monotonically increasing Gillogly String in Cipher 1, when translated with the Declaration of Independence given in the pamphlet.
The Beale Papers' writer was anonymous, and words in the three written letters in the 1885 pamphlet are compared with locations of numbers in the ciphers to show who the writer was.
Emphasis is on numbers which are controllable by the encipherer. Letter location sums are used when they are the most plausible ones found.
Evidence supports the statement that Cipher 1 and Cipher 3 are unintelligible. It also supports the statement that they were designed to have no intelligible sentences because they were part of a complex game made by the anonymous writer of The Beale Papers.
Towards a Polynomial Instruction Based Compiler for Fully Homomorphic Encryption Accelerators
https://iacr.org/news/item/23099
ePrint Report: Towards a Polynomial Instruction Based Compiler for Fully Homomorphic Encryption Accelerators
Sejun Kim, Wen Wang, Duhyeong Kim, Adish Vartak, Michael Steiner, Rosario Cammarota
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a transformative technology that enables computations on encrypted data without requiring decryption, promising enhanced data privacy. However, its adoption has been limited due to significant performance overheads. Recent advances include the proposal of domain-specific, highly-parallel hardware accelerators designed to overcome these limitations.
This paper introduces PICA, a comprehensive compiler framework designed to simplify the programming of these specialized FHE accelerators and integration with existing FHE libraries. PICA leverages a novel polynomial Instruction Set Architecture (p-ISA), which abstracts polynomial rings and their arithmetic operations, serving as a fundamental data type for the creation of compact, efficient code embracing high-level operations on polynomial rings, referred to as kernels, e.g., encompassing FHE primitives like arithmetic and ciphertext management. We detail a kernel generation framework that translates high-level FHE operations into pseudo-code using p-ISA, and a subsequent tracing framework that incorporates p-ISA functionalities and kernels into established FHE libraries. Additionally, we introduce a mapper to coordinate multiple FHE kernels for optimal application performance on targeted hardware accelerators. Our evaluations demonstrate PICA's efficacy in creation of compact and efficient code, when compared with an x64 architecture. Particularly in managing complex FHE operations such as relinearization, where we observe a 25.24x instruction count reduction even when a large batch size (8192) is taken into account.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23099
ePrint Report: Towards a Polynomial Instruction Based Compiler for Fully Homomorphic Encryption Accelerators
Sejun Kim, Wen Wang, Duhyeong Kim, Adish Vartak, Michael Steiner, Rosario Cammarota
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a transformative technology that enables computations on encrypted data without requiring decryption, promising enhanced data privacy. However, its adoption has been limited due to significant performance overheads. Recent advances include the proposal of domain-specific, highly-parallel hardware accelerators designed to overcome these limitations.
This paper introduces PICA, a comprehensive compiler framework designed to simplify the programming of these specialized FHE accelerators and integration with existing FHE libraries. PICA leverages a novel polynomial Instruction Set Architecture (p-ISA), which abstracts polynomial rings and their arithmetic operations, serving as a fundamental data type for the creation of compact, efficient code embracing high-level operations on polynomial rings, referred to as kernels, e.g., encompassing FHE primitives like arithmetic and ciphertext management. We detail a kernel generation framework that translates high-level FHE operations into pseudo-code using p-ISA, and a subsequent tracing framework that incorporates p-ISA functionalities and kernels into established FHE libraries. Additionally, we introduce a mapper to coordinate multiple FHE kernels for optimal application performance on targeted hardware accelerators. Our evaluations demonstrate PICA's efficacy in creation of compact and efficient code, when compared with an x64 architecture. Particularly in managing complex FHE operations such as relinearization, where we observe a 25.24x instruction count reduction even when a large batch size (8192) is taken into account.
A Theoretical Take on a Practical Consensus Protocol
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/696
The Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS) problem is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. Very recently, Das et al. (2024) developed a new ACS protocol with several desirable properties: (i) it provides optimal resilience, tolerating up to $t < n/3$ corrupt parties out of $n$ parties in total, (ii) it does not rely on a trusted set up, (iii) it utilizes only "lighweight" cryptography, which can be instantiated using just a hash function, and (iv) it has expected round complexity $O(1)$ and expected communication complexity $O(\kappa n^3)$, where $\kappa$ is the output-length of the hash function. The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed, self-contained exposition and analysis of this protocol from the point of view of modern theoretcal cryptography, fleshing out a number of details of the definitions and proofs, providing a complete security analysis based on concrete security assumptions on the hash function (i.e., without relying on random oracles), and developing all of the underlying theory in the universal composability framework.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/696
The Asynchronous Common Subset (ACS) problem is a fundamental problem in distributed computing. Very recently, Das et al. (2024) developed a new ACS protocol with several desirable properties: (i) it provides optimal resilience, tolerating up to $t < n/3$ corrupt parties out of $n$ parties in total, (ii) it does not rely on a trusted set up, (iii) it utilizes only "lighweight" cryptography, which can be instantiated using just a hash function, and (iv) it has expected round complexity $O(1)$ and expected communication complexity $O(\kappa n^3)$, where $\kappa$ is the output-length of the hash function. The purpose of this paper is to give a detailed, self-contained exposition and analysis of this protocol from the point of view of modern theoretcal cryptography, fleshing out a number of details of the definitions and proofs, providing a complete security analysis based on concrete security assumptions on the hash function (i.e., without relying on random oracles), and developing all of the underlying theory in the universal composability framework.
Linicrypt in the Ideal Cipher Model
https://iacr.org/news/item/23098
ePrint Report: Linicrypt in the Ideal Cipher Model
Zahra Javar, Bruce M. Kapron
We extend the Linicrypt framework for characterizing hash function security as proposed by McQuoid, Swope, and Rosulek (TCC 2018) to support constructions in the ideal cipher model.
In this setting, we give a characterization of collision- and second-preimage-resistance in terms of a linear-algebraic condition on Linicrypt programs, and present an efficient algorithm for determining whether a program satisfies the condition. As an application, we consider the case of the block cipherbased hash functions proposed by Preneel, Govaerts, and Vandewall (Crypto 1993), and show that the semantic analysis of PGV given by Black et. al. (J. Crypto. 2010) can be captured as a special case of our characterization. In addition, We model hash functions constructed through the Merkle-Damgård transformation within the Linicrypt framework. Finally, we appy this model to an analysis of how various attacks on the underlying compression functions can compromise the collision resistance of the resulting hash function.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23098
ePrint Report: Linicrypt in the Ideal Cipher Model
Zahra Javar, Bruce M. Kapron
We extend the Linicrypt framework for characterizing hash function security as proposed by McQuoid, Swope, and Rosulek (TCC 2018) to support constructions in the ideal cipher model.
In this setting, we give a characterization of collision- and second-preimage-resistance in terms of a linear-algebraic condition on Linicrypt programs, and present an efficient algorithm for determining whether a program satisfies the condition. As an application, we consider the case of the block cipherbased hash functions proposed by Preneel, Govaerts, and Vandewall (Crypto 1993), and show that the semantic analysis of PGV given by Black et. al. (J. Crypto. 2010) can be captured as a special case of our characterization. In addition, We model hash functions constructed through the Merkle-Damgård transformation within the Linicrypt framework. Finally, we appy this model to an analysis of how various attacks on the underlying compression functions can compromise the collision resistance of the resulting hash function.
LINE: Cryptosystem based on linear equations for logarithmic signatures
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/697
The discourse herein pertains to a directional encryption cryptosystem predicated upon logarithmic signatures interconnected via a system of linear equations (we call it LINE). A logarithmic signature serves as a foundational cryptographic primitive within the algorithm, characterized by distinct cryptographic attributes including nonlinearity, noncommutativity, unidirectionality, and factorizability by key. The confidentiality of the cryptosystem is contingent upon the presence of an incomplete system of equations and the substantial ambiguity inherent in the matrix transformations integral to the algorithm. Classical cryptanalysis endeavors are constrained by the potency of the secret matrix transformation and the indeterminacy surrounding solutions to the system of linear equations featuring logarithmic signatures. Such cryptanalysis methodologies, being exhaustive in nature, invariably exhibit exponential complexity. The absence of inherent group computations within the algorithm, and by extension, the inability to exploit group properties associated with the periodicity of group elements, serves to mitigate quantum cryptanalysis to Grover's search algorithm. LINE is predicated upon an incomplete system of linear equations embodies the security levels ranging from 1 to 5, as stipulated by the NIST, and thus presents a promising candidate for the construction of post-quantum cryptosystems.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/697
The discourse herein pertains to a directional encryption cryptosystem predicated upon logarithmic signatures interconnected via a system of linear equations (we call it LINE). A logarithmic signature serves as a foundational cryptographic primitive within the algorithm, characterized by distinct cryptographic attributes including nonlinearity, noncommutativity, unidirectionality, and factorizability by key. The confidentiality of the cryptosystem is contingent upon the presence of an incomplete system of equations and the substantial ambiguity inherent in the matrix transformations integral to the algorithm. Classical cryptanalysis endeavors are constrained by the potency of the secret matrix transformation and the indeterminacy surrounding solutions to the system of linear equations featuring logarithmic signatures. Such cryptanalysis methodologies, being exhaustive in nature, invariably exhibit exponential complexity. The absence of inherent group computations within the algorithm, and by extension, the inability to exploit group properties associated with the periodicity of group elements, serves to mitigate quantum cryptanalysis to Grover's search algorithm. LINE is predicated upon an incomplete system of linear equations embodies the security levels ranging from 1 to 5, as stipulated by the NIST, and thus presents a promising candidate for the construction of post-quantum cryptosystems.
Client-Efficient Online-Offline Private Information Retrieval
https://iacr.org/news/item/23111
ePrint Report: Client-Efficient Online-Offline Private Information Retrieval
Hoang-Dung Nguyen, Jorge Guajardo, Thang Hoang
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) permits clients to query entries from a public database hosted on untrusted servers in a privacy-preserving manner. Traditional PIR model suffers from high computation and/or bandwidth cost due to entire database processing for privacy. Recently, Online-Offline PIR (OO-PIR) has been suggested to improve the practicality of PIR, where query-independent materials are precomputed beforehand to accelerate online access. While state-of-the-art OO-PIR schemes (e.g., S&P’24, CRYPTO’23) successfully reduce the online processing overhead to sublinear, they still impose sustainable bandwidth and storage burdens on the client, especially when operating on large databases.
In this paper, we propose Pirex, a new OO-PIR scheme with eminent client performance while maintaining the sublinear server processing efficiency. Specifically, Pirex offers clients with sublinear processing, minimal inbound bandwidth, and low storage requirements. Our Pirex design is fairly simple yet efficient, where the majority of operations are naturally low-cost and streamlined (e.g., XOR, PRF, modular arithmetic).
We have fully implemented Pirex and evaluated its real-world performance using commodity hardware. Our experimental results demonstrated that Pirex outperforms existing OO-PIR schemes by at least two orders of magnitude. Concretely, with a 1 TB database, Pirex only takes 0.8s to query a 256-KB entry, compared with 30-220s by the state-of-the-art.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23111
ePrint Report: Client-Efficient Online-Offline Private Information Retrieval
Hoang-Dung Nguyen, Jorge Guajardo, Thang Hoang
Private Information Retrieval (PIR) permits clients to query entries from a public database hosted on untrusted servers in a privacy-preserving manner. Traditional PIR model suffers from high computation and/or bandwidth cost due to entire database processing for privacy. Recently, Online-Offline PIR (OO-PIR) has been suggested to improve the practicality of PIR, where query-independent materials are precomputed beforehand to accelerate online access. While state-of-the-art OO-PIR schemes (e.g., S&P’24, CRYPTO’23) successfully reduce the online processing overhead to sublinear, they still impose sustainable bandwidth and storage burdens on the client, especially when operating on large databases.
In this paper, we propose Pirex, a new OO-PIR scheme with eminent client performance while maintaining the sublinear server processing efficiency. Specifically, Pirex offers clients with sublinear processing, minimal inbound bandwidth, and low storage requirements. Our Pirex design is fairly simple yet efficient, where the majority of operations are naturally low-cost and streamlined (e.g., XOR, PRF, modular arithmetic).
We have fully implemented Pirex and evaluated its real-world performance using commodity hardware. Our experimental results demonstrated that Pirex outperforms existing OO-PIR schemes by at least two orders of magnitude. Concretely, with a 1 TB database, Pirex only takes 0.8s to query a 256-KB entry, compared with 30-220s by the state-of-the-art.
Private Computations on Streaming Data
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/698
We present a framework for privacy-preserving streaming algorithms which combine the memory-efficiency of streaming algorithms with strong privacy guarantees. These algorithms enable some number of servers to compute aggregate statistics efficiently on large quantities of user data without learning the user's inputs. While there exists limited prior work that fits within our model, our work is the first to formally define a general framework, interpret existing methods within this general framework, and develop new tools broadly applicable to this model. To highlight our model, we designed and implemented a new privacy-preserving streaming algorithm to compute heavy hitters, which are the most frequent elements in a data stream. We provide a performance comparison between our system and Poplar, the only other private statistics algorithm which supports heavy hitters. We benchmarked ours and Poplar's systems and provided direct performance comparisons within the same hardware platform. Of note, Poplar requires linear space compared to our poly-logarithmic space, meaning our system is the first to compute heavy hitters within the privacy-preserving streaming model. A small memory footprint allows our algorithm (among other benefits) to run efficiently on a very large input sizes without running out of memory or crashing.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/698
We present a framework for privacy-preserving streaming algorithms which combine the memory-efficiency of streaming algorithms with strong privacy guarantees. These algorithms enable some number of servers to compute aggregate statistics efficiently on large quantities of user data without learning the user's inputs. While there exists limited prior work that fits within our model, our work is the first to formally define a general framework, interpret existing methods within this general framework, and develop new tools broadly applicable to this model. To highlight our model, we designed and implemented a new privacy-preserving streaming algorithm to compute heavy hitters, which are the most frequent elements in a data stream. We provide a performance comparison between our system and Poplar, the only other private statistics algorithm which supports heavy hitters. We benchmarked ours and Poplar's systems and provided direct performance comparisons within the same hardware platform. Of note, Poplar requires linear space compared to our poly-logarithmic space, meaning our system is the first to compute heavy hitters within the privacy-preserving streaming model. A small memory footprint allows our algorithm (among other benefits) to run efficiently on a very large input sizes without running out of memory or crashing.
An Improved Threshold Homomorphic Cryptosystem Based on Class Groups
https://iacr.org/news/item/23109
ePrint Report: An Improved Threshold Homomorphic Cryptosystem Based on Class Groups
Lennart Braun, Guilhem Castagnos, Ivan Damgård, Fabien Laguillaumie, Kelsey Melissaris, Claudio Orlandi, Ida Tucker
We present distributed key generation and decryption protocols for an additively homomorphic cryptosystem based on class groups, improving on a similar system proposed by Braun, Damgård, and Orlandi at CRYPTO '23. Our key generation is similarly constant round but achieves lower communication complexity than the previous work. This improvement is in part the result of relaxing the reconstruction property required of the underlying integer verifiable secret sharing scheme. This eliminates the reliance on potentially costly proofs of knowledge in unknown order groups. We present a new method to batch zero-knowledge proofs in unknown order groups which strengthens these improvements. We also present a protocol which is proven secure against adaptive adversaries in the single inconsistent player (SIP) model. Our protocols are secure in the universal composability (UC) framework and provide guaranteed output delivery. We demonstrate the relative efficiency of our techniques by presenting the running times and communication costs associated with our implementation of the statically secure protocol and provide a direct comparison with alternate state of the art constructions.
https://iacr.org/news/item/23109
ePrint Report: An Improved Threshold Homomorphic Cryptosystem Based on Class Groups
Lennart Braun, Guilhem Castagnos, Ivan Damgård, Fabien Laguillaumie, Kelsey Melissaris, Claudio Orlandi, Ida Tucker
We present distributed key generation and decryption protocols for an additively homomorphic cryptosystem based on class groups, improving on a similar system proposed by Braun, Damgård, and Orlandi at CRYPTO '23. Our key generation is similarly constant round but achieves lower communication complexity than the previous work. This improvement is in part the result of relaxing the reconstruction property required of the underlying integer verifiable secret sharing scheme. This eliminates the reliance on potentially costly proofs of knowledge in unknown order groups. We present a new method to batch zero-knowledge proofs in unknown order groups which strengthens these improvements. We also present a protocol which is proven secure against adaptive adversaries in the single inconsistent player (SIP) model. Our protocols are secure in the universal composability (UC) framework and provide guaranteed output delivery. We demonstrate the relative efficiency of our techniques by presenting the running times and communication costs associated with our implementation of the statically secure protocol and provide a direct comparison with alternate state of the art constructions.
An Efficient All-to-All GCD Algorithm for Low Entropy RSA Key Factorization
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/699
RSA is an incredibly successful and useful asymmetric encryption algorithm. One of the types of implementation flaws in RSA is low entropy of the key generation, specifically the prime number creation stage. This can occur due to flawed usage of random prime number generator libraries, or on computers where there is a lack of a source of external entropy. These implementation flaws result in some RSA keys sharing prime factors, which means that the full factorization of the public modulus can be recovered incredibly efficiently by performing a computation GCD between the two public key moduli that share the prime factor. However, since one does not know which of the composite moduli share a prime factor a-priori, to determine if any such shared prime factors exist, an all-to-all GCD attack (also known as a batch GCD attack, or a bulk GCD attack) can be performed on the available public keys so as to recover any shared prime factors. This study describes a novel all-to-all batch GCD algorithm, which will be referred to as the binary tree batch GCD algorithm, that is more efficient than the current best batch GCD algorithm (the remainder tree batch GCD algorithm). A comparison against the best existing batch GCD method (which is a product tree followed by a remainder tree computation) is given using a dataset of random RSA moduli that are constructed such that some of the moduli share prime factors. This proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has better runtime than the existing remainder tree batch GCD algorithm, although asymptotically it has nearly identical scaling and its complexity is dependent on how many shared prime factors exist in the set of RSA keys. In practice, the implementation of the proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has a roughly 6x speedup compared to the standard remainder tree batch GCD approach.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/699
RSA is an incredibly successful and useful asymmetric encryption algorithm. One of the types of implementation flaws in RSA is low entropy of the key generation, specifically the prime number creation stage. This can occur due to flawed usage of random prime number generator libraries, or on computers where there is a lack of a source of external entropy. These implementation flaws result in some RSA keys sharing prime factors, which means that the full factorization of the public modulus can be recovered incredibly efficiently by performing a computation GCD between the two public key moduli that share the prime factor. However, since one does not know which of the composite moduli share a prime factor a-priori, to determine if any such shared prime factors exist, an all-to-all GCD attack (also known as a batch GCD attack, or a bulk GCD attack) can be performed on the available public keys so as to recover any shared prime factors. This study describes a novel all-to-all batch GCD algorithm, which will be referred to as the binary tree batch GCD algorithm, that is more efficient than the current best batch GCD algorithm (the remainder tree batch GCD algorithm). A comparison against the best existing batch GCD method (which is a product tree followed by a remainder tree computation) is given using a dataset of random RSA moduli that are constructed such that some of the moduli share prime factors. This proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has better runtime than the existing remainder tree batch GCD algorithm, although asymptotically it has nearly identical scaling and its complexity is dependent on how many shared prime factors exist in the set of RSA keys. In practice, the implementation of the proposed binary tree batch GCD algorithm has a roughly 6x speedup compared to the standard remainder tree batch GCD approach.