We consider 3 related cryptographic primitives, private information retrieval (PIR) protocols, conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) protocols, and secret-sharing schemes; these primitives have many applications in cryptography. We study these primitives requiring information-theoretic security. The complexity of these primitives has been dramatically improved in the last few years are they are closely related, i.e., the the 2-server PIR protocol of Dvir and Gopi (J. ACM 2016) was...

We develop and implement AlgoROM, a tool to systematically analyze the security of a wide class of symmetric primitives in idealized models of computation. The schemes that we consider are those that can be expressed over an alphabet consisting of XOR and function symbols for hash functions, permutations, or block ciphers. We implement our framework in OCaml and apply it to a number of prominent constructions, which include the Luby–Rackoff (LR), key-alternating Feistel (KAF), and...

SQIsign is a well-known post-quantum signature scheme due to its small combined signature and public-key size. However, SQIsign suffers from notably long signing times, and verification times are not short either. To improve this, recent research has explored both one-dimensional and two-dimensional variants of SQIsign, each with distinct characteristics. In particular, SQIsign2D’s efficient signing and verification times have made it a focal point of recent research. However, the absence...

In modern business to customer interactions, handling private or confidential data is essential. Private Function Evaluation (PFE) protocols ensure the privacy of both the customers' input data and the business' function evaluated on it which is often sensitive intellectual property (IP). However, fully hiding the function in PFE results in high performance overhead. Semi-Private Function Evaluation (SPFE) is a generalization of PFE to only partially hide the function, whereas specific...

Cryptographic proof systems have a plethora of applications: from building other cryptographic tools (e.g., malicious security for MPC protocols) to concrete settings such as private transactions or rollups. In several settings it is important for proof systems to be non-malleable: an adversary should not to be able to modify a proof they have observed into another for a statement for which they do not know the witness. Proof systems that have been deployed in practice should arguably...

Stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to another asset to maintain a stable price, have become an important part of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Prior studies have primarily focused on examining the security of stablecoins from technical and theoretical perspectives, with limited investigation into users’ risk perceptions and security behaviors in stablecoin practices. To address this research gap, we conducted a mixed-method study that included constructing a stablecoin interaction...

Time-lock puzzles are unique cryptographic primitives that use computational complexity to keep information secret for some period of time, after which security expires. This topic, while over 25 years old, is still in a state where foundations are not well understood: For example, current analysis techniques of time-lock primitives provide no sound mechanism to build composed multi-party cryptographic protocols which use expiring security as a building block. Further, there are analyses...

In scenarios where a seller holds sensitive data $x$, like employee / patient records or ecological data, and a buyer seeks to obtain an evaluation of specific function $f$ on this data, solutions in trustless digital environments like blockchain-based Web3 systems typically fall into two categories: (1) Smart contract-powered solutions and (2) cryptographic solutions leveraging tools such as adaptor signatures. The former approach offers atomic transactions where the buyer learns the...

To date, the strongest notions of security achievable for two-round publicly-verifiable cryptographic proofs for $\mathsf{NP}$ are witness indistinguishability (Dwork-Naor 2000, Groth-Ostrovsky-Sahai 2006), witness hiding (Bitansky-Khurana-Paneth 2019, Kuykendall-Zhandry 2020), and super-polynomial simulation (Pass 2003, Khurana-Sahai 2017). On the other hand, zero-knowledge and even weak zero-knowledge (Dwork-Naor-Reingold-Stockmeyer 1999) are impossible in the two-round publicly-verifiable...

With the standardization of NIST post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) schemes, optimizing these PQC schemes across various platforms presents significant research value. While most existing software implementation efforts have concentrated on ARM platforms, research on PQC implementations utilizing various RISC-V instruction set architectures (ISAs) remains limited. In light of this gap, this paper proposes comprehensive and efficient optimizations of Keccak, Kyber, and Dilithium on...

We enhance the provable soundness of FRI, an interactive oracle proof of proximity (IOPP) for Reed-Solomon codes introduced by Ben-Sasson et al. in ICALP 2018. More precisely, we prove the soundness error of FRI is less than $\max\left\{O\left(\frac{1}{\eta}\cdot \frac{n}{|\mathbb{F}_q|}\right), (1-\delta)^{t}\right\}$, where $\delta\le 1-\sqrt{\rho}-\eta$ is within the Johnson bound and $\mathbb{F}_q$ is a finite field with characteristic greater than $2$. Previously, the best-known...

In the rapidly evolving Web3 ecosystem, transparent auditing has emerged as a critical component for both applications and users. However, there is a significant gap in understanding how users perceive this new form of auditing and its implications for Web3 security. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach that incorporates a case study, user interviews, and social media data analysis, our study leverages a risk perception model to comprehensively explore Web3 users' perceptions regarding...

In this work, we revisit the Hosoyamada-Iwata (HI) proof for the quantum CPA security of the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction and identify a gap that appears to undermine the security proof. We emphasize that this is not an attack, and the construction may still achieve the claimed security level. However, this gap raises concerns about the feasibility of establishing a formal security proof for the 4-round Luby-Rackoff construction. In fact, the issue persists even if the number of rounds...

We introduce $\mathsf{pKt}$ complexity, a new notion of time-bounded Kolmogorov complexity that can be seen as a probabilistic analogue of Levin's $\mathsf{Kt}$ complexity. Using $\mathsf{pKt}$ complexity, we upgrade two recent frameworks that characterize one-way functions ($\mathsf{OWF}$) via symmetry of information and meta-complexity, respectively. Among other contributions, we establish the following results: - $\mathsf{OWF}$ can be based on the worst-case assumption that ...

Blind signatures have garnered significant attention in recent years, with several efficient constructions in the random oracle model relying on well-understood assumptions. However, this progress does not apply to pairing-free cyclic groups: fully secure constructions over cyclic groups rely on pairings, remain inefficient, or depend on the algebraic group model or strong interactive assumptions. To address this gap, Chairattana-Apirom, Tessaro, and Zhu (CTZ, Crypto 2024) proposed a new...

Achieving malicious security with high efficiency in dishonest-majority secure multiparty computation is a formidable challenge. The milestone works SPDZ and TinyOT have spawn a large family of protocols in this direction. For boolean circuits, state-of-the-art works (Cascudo et. al, TCC 2020 and Escudero et. al, CRYPTO 2022) have proposed schemes based on reverse multiplication-friendly embedding (RMFE) to reduce the amortized cost. However, these protocols are theoretically described and...

The impossible differential (ID) attack is one of the most important cryptanalytic techniques for block ciphers. There are two phases to finding an ID attack: searching for the distinguisher and building a key recovery upon it. Previous works only focused on automated distinguisher discovery, leaving key recovery as a manual post-processing task, which may lead to a suboptimal final complexity. At EUROCRYPT~2023, Hadipour et al. introduced a unified constraint programming (CP) approach based...

A linear error-correcting code exhibits proximity gaps if each affine line of words either consists entirely of words which are close to the code or else contains almost no such words. In this short note, we prove that for each linear code which exhibits proximity gaps within the unique decoding radius, that code's interleaved code also does. Combining our result with an argument suggested to us by Angeris, Evans and Roh ('24), we extend those authors' sharpening of the tensor-based...

The Doubly-Efficient Private Information Retrieval (DEPIR) protocol of Lin, Mook, and Wichs (STOC'23) relies on a Homomorphic Encryption (HE) scheme that is algebraic, i.e., whose ciphertext space has a ring structure that matches the homomorphic operations. While early HE schemes had this property, modern schemes introduced techniques to manage noise growth. This made the resulting schemes much more efficient, but also destroyed the algebraic property. In this work, we study algebraic HE...

Clinical trials are crucial in the development of new medical treatment methods. To ensure the correctness of clinical trial results, medical institutes need to collect and process large volumes of participant data, which has prompted research on privacy preservation and data reliability. However, existing solutions struggle to resolve the trade-off between them due to the trust gap between the physical and digital worlds, limiting their practicality. To tackle the issues above, we present...

The recent VOLE-based interactive zero-knowledge (VOLE-ZK) protocols along with non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs based on MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) and VOLE-in-the-Head (VOLEitH) extensively utilize the commitment schemes, which adopt a circular correlation robust (CCR) hash function as the core primitive. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art CCR hash construction by Guo et al. (S&P'20), building from random permutations, can only provide 128-bit security, when it is instantiated...

Let $N=pq$ be the product of two balanced prime numbers $p$ and $q$. In 2002, Elkamchouchi, Elshenawy and Shaban introduced an RSA-like cryptosystem that uses the key equation $ed - k (p^2-1)(q^2-1) = 1$, instead of the classical RSA key equation $ed - k (p-1)(q-1) = 1$. Another variant of RSA, presented in 2017 by Murru and Saettone, uses the key equation $ed - k (p^2+p+1)(q^2+q+1) = 1$. Despite the authors' claims of enhanced security, both schemes remain vulnerable to adaptations...

The Extended Greatest Common Divisor (XGCD) computation is a critical component in various cryptographic applications and algorithms, including both pre- and post-quantum cryptosystems. In addition to computing the greatest common divisor (GCD) of two integers, the XGCD also produces Bezout coefficients $b_a$ and $b_b$ which satisfy $\mathrm{GCD}(a,b) = a\times b_a + b\times b_b$. In particular, computing the XGCD for large integers is of significant interest. Most recently, XGCD computation...

In this work, we continue the analysis of the binding properties of implicitly-rejecting key-encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) obtained via the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transform. These binding properties, in earlier literature known under the term robustness, thwart attacks that can arise when using KEMs in larger protocols. Recently, Cremers et al. (ePrint'24) introduced a framework for binding notions, encompassing previously existing but also new ones. While implicitly-rejecting KEMs have...

Homomorphic Encryption (HE) is a cutting-edge cryptographic technique that enables computations on encrypted data to be mirrored on the original data. This has quickly attracted substantial interest from the research community due to its extensive practical applications, such as in cloud computing and privacy-preserving machine learning. In addition to confidentiality, the importance of authenticity has emerged to ensure data integrity during transmission and evaluation. To address...

In a fully non-interactive multi-signature, resp. aggregate-signature scheme (fNIM, resp. fNIA), signatures issued by many signers on the same message, resp. on different messages, can be succinctly ``combined'', resp. ``aggregated''. fNIMs are used in the Ethereum consensus protocol, to produce the certificates of validity of blocks which are to be verified by billions of clients. fNIAs are used in some PBFT-like consensus protocols, such as the production version of Diem by Aptos, to...

The problem of minimizing the share size of threshold secret-sharing schemes is a basic research question that has been extensively studied. Ideally, one strives for schemes in which the share size equals the secret size. While this is achievable for large secrets (Shamir, CACM '79), no similar solutions are known for the case of binary, single-bit secrets. Current approaches often rely on so-called ramp secret sharing that achieves a constant share size at the expense of a slight gap...

Cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology provide an innovative model for reshaping digital services. Driven by the movement toward Web 3.0, recent systems started to provide distributed services, such as computation outsourcing or file storage, on top of the currency exchange medium. By allowing anyone to join and collect cryptocurrency payments for serving others, these systems create decentralized markets for trading digital resources. Yet, there is still a big gap between the promise of...

Range proofs serve as a protocol for the prover to prove to the verifier that a committed number resides within a specified range, such as $[0,2^n)$, without disclosing the actual value. These proofs find extensive application in various domains, including anonymous cryptocurrencies, electronic voting, and auctions. However, the efficiency of many existing schemes diminishes significantly when confronted with batch proofs encompassing multiple elements. The pivotal challenge arises...

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables secure data processing without compromising data access, but its computational cost and slower execution compared to plaintext operations pose challenges. The growing interest in FHE-based secure computation necessitates the acceleration of homomorphic computations. While existing research primarily targets the reduction of the multiplicative depth (MD) of homomorphic circuits, this paper addresses the trade-off between MD reduction and the increase...

This paper presents a new architecture for metadata-private messaging that counters scalability challenges by offloading most computations to the clients. At the core of our design is a distributed private information retrieval (PIR) protocol, where the responder delegates its work to alleviate PIR's computational bottleneck and catches misbehaving delegates by efficiently verifying their results. We introduce DPIR, a messaging system that uses distributed PIR to let a server storing...

In this short paper we share our experience on instantiating the width-extension construct TLR3, based on a variety of tweakable block cipher constructs. As many of our attempts failed, we highlight the complexity of getting a practical tweakable block cipher and the gap between theory and practice.

Registered attribute-based encryption (Reg-ABE), introduced by Hohenberger et al. (Eurocrypt’23), emerges as a pivotal extension of attribute-based encryption (ABE), aimed at mitigating the key-escrow problem. Although several Reg-ABE schemes with black-box use of cryptography have been proposed so far, there remains a significant gap in the class of achievable predicates between vanilla ABE and Reg-ABE. To narrow this gap, we propose a modular framework for constructing Reg-ABE schemes for a...

Private Set Union (PSU) protocol allows parties, each holding an input set, to jointly compute the union of the sets without revealing anything else. In the literature, scalable PSU protocols follow the “split-execute-assemble” paradigm (Kolesnikov et al., ASIACRYPT 2019); in addition, those fast protocols often use Oblivious Transfer as building blocks. Kolesnikov et al. (ASIACRYPT 2019) and Jia et al. (USENIX Security 2022), pointed out that certain security issues can be introduced in the...

There has been significant progress over the past seven years in model reverse engineering (RE) for neural network (NN) hardware. Although there has been systematization of knowledge (SoK) in an overall sense, however, the treatment from the hardware perspective has been far from adequate. To bridge this gap, this paper systematically categorizes the types of NN hardware used prevalently by the industry/academia, and also the model RE attacks/defenses published in each category. Further, we...

We present an efficient quantum algorithm for solving the semidirect discrete logarithm problem (SDLP) in any finite group. The believed hardness of the semidirect discrete logarithm problem underlies more than a decade of works constructing candidate post-quantum cryptographic algorithms from nonabelian groups. We use a series of reduction results to show that it suffices to consider SDLP in finite simple groups. We then apply the celebrated Classification of Finite Simple Groups to...

Interactive proofs are a cornerstone of modern cryptography and as such used in many areas, from digital signatures to multy-party computation. Often the knowledge error $\kappa$ of an interactive proof is not small enough, and thus needs to be reduced. This is usually achieved by repeating the interactive proof in parallel t times. Recently, it was shown that parallel repetition of any $(k_1, \ldots , k_\mu)$-special-sound multi-round public-coin interactive proof reduces the knowledge...

The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) brings about transformative potential across sectors, but its dual-use nature also amplifies risks. Governments globally are grappling with the challenge of regulating GenAI, balancing innovation against safety. China, the United States (US), and the European Union (EU) are at the forefront with initiatives like the Management of Algorithmic Recommendations, the Executive Order, and the AI Act, respectively. However, the rapid evolution of GenAI capabilities...

We prove that the permutation computed by a reversible circuit with $\widetilde{O}(nk\cdot \log(1/\epsilon))$ random $3$-bit gates is $\epsilon$-approximately $k$-wise independent. Our bound improves on currently known bounds in the regime when the approximation error $\epsilon$ is not too small. We obtain our results by analyzing the log-Sobolev constants of appropriate Markov chains rather than their spectral gaps.

The increasing importance of graph databases and cloud storage services prompts the study of private queries on graphs. We propose PathGES, a graph encryption scheme (GES) for single-pair shortest path queries. PathGES is efficient and mitigates the state-of-the-art attack by Falzon and Paterson (2022) on the GES by Ghosh, Kamara, and Tamassia (2021), while only incurring an additional logarithmic factor in storage overhead. PathGES leverages a novel data structure that minimizes leakage and...

We revisit the question of the overhead to achieve full security (i.e., guaranteed output delivery) in secure multiparty computation (MPC). Recent works have closed the gap between full security and semi-honest security, by introducing protocols where the parties first compute the circuit using a semi-honest protocol and then run a verification step with sublinear communication in the circuit size. However, in these works the number of interaction rounds in the verification step is also...

We revisit the construction of multiparty non-interactive key-exchange protocols with fine-grained security, which was recently studied in (Afshar et al., Eurocrypt 2023). Their work introduced a 4-party non-interactive key exchange with quadratic hardness, and proved it secure in Shoup's generic group model. This positive result was complemented with a proof that $n$-party non-interactive key exchange with superquadratic security cannot exist in Maurer's generic group model, for any $n\geq...

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is one of the most popular serialization languages. Since many security protocols are built using XML, it also provides cryptographic functionality. A central framework in this area is the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML). This standard is one of the most widely used options for implementing Single Sign-On (SSO), which allows users to authenticate to different service providers using the credentials from a single identity provider. Like all other...

Over the last two decades, microarchitectural side channels have been the focus of a large body of research on the development of new attack techniques, exploiting them to attack various classes of targets and designing mitigations. One line of work focuses on increasing the speed of the attacks, achieving higher levels of temporal resolution that can allow attackers to learn finer-grained information. The most recent addition to this line of work is Prime+Scope [CCS '21], which only...

A verifiable delay function (VDF) is a cryptographic primitive that requires a long time to compute (even with parallelization), but produces a unique output that is efficiently and publicly verifiable. We prove that VDFs with \emph{imperfect completeness} and \emph{computational uniqueness} do not exist in the random oracle model. This also rules out black-box constructions of VDFs from other cryptographic primitives, such as one-way permutations and collision-resistant hash...

Asymmetric Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (aPAKE) protocols, particularly Strong aPAKE (saPAKE) have enjoyed significant attention, both from academia and industry, with the well-known OPAQUE protocol currently undergoing standardization. In (s)aPAKE, a client and a server collaboratively establish a high-entropy key, relying on a previously exchanged password for authentication. A main feature is its resilience against offline and precomputation (for saPAKE) attacks. OPAQUE, as well as...

Simulation extractability is a strong security notion of zkSNARKs that guarantees that an attacker who produces a valid proof must know the corresponding witness, even if the attacker had prior access to proofs generated by other users. Notably, simulation extractability implies that proofs are non-malleable and is of fundamental importance for applications of zkSNARKs in distributed systems. In this work, we study sufficient and necessary conditions for constructing simulation-extractable...

Time-lock puzzles are unique cryptographic primitives that use computational complexity to keep information secret for some period of time, after which security expires. Unfortunately, current analysis techniques of time-lock primitives provide no sound mechanism to build multi-party cryptographic protocols which use expiring security as a building block. We explain in this paper that all other attempts at this subtle problem lack either composability, a fully consistent analysis, or...

Functional Encryption (FE) allows users to extract specific function-related information from encrypted data while preserving the privacy of the underlying plaintext. Though significant research has been devoted to developing secure and efficient Multi-Input Functional Encryption schemes supporting diverse functions, there remains a noticeable research gap in the development of verifiable FE schemes. Functionality and performance have received considerable attention, however, the crucial...

In this note, we improve the space-efficient variant of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm [Reg23] proposed by Ragavan and Vaikuntanathan [RV24] by constant factors in space and/or size. This allows us to bridge the significant gaps in concrete efficiency between the circuits by [Reg23] and [RV24]; [Reg23] uses far fewer gates, while [RV24] uses far fewer qubits. The main observation is that the space-efficient quantum modular exponentiation technique by [RV24] can be modified to...

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is a powerful Privacy-Enhancing Technology (PET) that enables computations on encrypted data without having access to the secret key. While FHE holds immense potential for enhancing data privacy and security, creating its practical applications is associated with many difficulties. A significant barrier is the absence of easy-to-use, standardized components that developers can utilize as foundational building blocks. Addressing this gap requires...

In this work, we analyze the so-called Beyond UnForgeability Features (BUFF) security of the submissions to the current standardization process of additional signatures by NIST. The BUFF notions formalize security against maliciously generated keys and have various real-world use cases, where security can be guaranteed despite misuse potential on a protocol level. Consequently, NIST declared the security against the BUFF notions as desirable features. Despite NIST's interest, only $6$ out of...

Recently, a paper by Chen (eprint 2024/555) has claimed to construct a quantum polynomial-time algorithm that solves the Learning With Errors Problem (Regev, JACM 2009), for a range of parameters. As a byproduct of Chen's result, it follows that Chen's algorithm solves the Gap Shortest Vector Problem, for gap $g(n) = \tilde{O}\left( n^{4.5} \right)$. In this short note we point to an error in the claims of Chen's paper.

Software solutions to address computational challenges are ubiquitous in our daily lives. One specific application area where software is often used is in embedded systems, which, like other digital electronic devices, are vulnerable to side-channel analysis attacks. Although masking is the most common countermeasure and provides a solid theoretical foundation for ensuring security, recent research has revealed a crucial gap between theoretical and real-world security. This shortcoming stems...

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools across various domains within cyber security. Notably, recent studies are increasingly exploring LLMs applied to the context of blockchain security (BS). However, there remains a gap in a comprehensive understanding regarding the full scope of applications, impacts, and potential constraints of LLMs on blockchain security. To fill this gap, we undertake a literature review focusing on the studies that apply LLMs in blockchain...

Verifiable Random Functions (VRFs) play a pivotal role in Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain due to their applications in secret leader election protocols. However, the original definition by Micali, Rabin and Vadhan is by itself insufficient for such applications. The primary concern is that adversaries may craft VRF key pairs with skewed output distribution, allowing them to unfairly increase their winning chances. To address this issue David, Gaži, Kiayias and Russel (2017/573) proposed a...

We study secure multiparty computation in the asynchronous setting with perfect security and optimal resilience (less than one-fourth of the participants are malicious). It has been shown that every function can be computed in this model [Ben-OR, Canetti, and Goldreich, STOC'1993]. Despite 30 years of research, all protocols in the asynchronous setting require $\Omega(n^2C)$ communication complexity for computing a circuit with $C$ multiplication gates. In contrast, for nearly 15 years, in...

Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) allows two or more parties to compute any public function over their privately-held inputs, without revealing any information beyond the result of the computation. Modern protocols for MPC generate a large amount of input-independent preprocessing material called multiplication triples, in an offline phase. This preprocessing can later be used by the parties to efficiently instantiate an input-dependent online phase computing the function. To date, the...

We demonstrate that under believable cryptographic hardness assumptions, Gap versions of standard meta-complexity problems, such as the Minimum Circuit Size problem (MCSP) and the Minimum Time-Bounded Kolmogorov Complexity problem (MKTP) are not NP-complete w.r.t. Levin (i.e., witness-preserving many-to-one) reductions. In more detail: - Assuming the existence of indistinguishability obfuscation, and subexponentially-secure one-way functions, an appropriate Gap version of MCSP is not...

Multiparty private set intersection (mPSI) protocol is capable of finding the intersection of multiple sets securely without revealing any other information. However, its limitation lies in processing only those elements present in every participant's set, which proves inadequate in scenarios where certain elements are common to several, but not all, sets. In this paper, we introduce an innovative variant of the mPSI protocol named unbalanced quorum PSI to fill in the gaps of the mPSI...

In this work we consider the task of designing information-theoretic MPC protocols for which the state of a given party can be recovered from a small amount of parties, a property we refer to as local repairability. This is useful when considering MPC over dynamic settings where parties leave and join a computation, a scenario that has gained notable attention in recent literature. Thanks to the results of (Cramer et al. EUROCRYPT'00), designing such protocols boils down to...

With the rapidly evolving landscape of cryptography, blockchain technology has advanced to cater to diverse user requirements, leading to the emergence of a multi-chain ecosystem featuring various use cases characterized by distinct transaction speed and decentralization trade-offs. At the heart of this evolution lies digital signature schemes, responsible for safeguarding blockchain-based assets such as ECDSA, Schnorr, and EdDSA, among others. However, a critical gap exists in the...

Causal reasoning plays an important role in the comprehension of communication, but it has been elusive so far how causality should be properly preserved by instant messaging services. To the best of our knowledge, causality preservation is not even treated as a desired security property by most (if not all) existing secure messaging protocols like Signal. This is probably due to the intuition that causality seems already preserved when all received messages are intact and displayed...

In the consensus problem, $n$ parties want to agree on a common value, even if some of them are corrupt and arbitrarily misbehave. If the parties have a common input $m$, then they must agree on $m$. Protocols solving consensus assume either a synchronous communication network, where messages are delivered within a known time, or an asynchronous network with arbitrary delays. Asynchronous protocols only tolerate $t_a < n/3$ corrupt parties. Synchronous ones can tolerate $t_s < n/2$...

Memory-hard functions (MHF) are functions whose evaluation provably requires a lot of memory. While MHFs are an unkeyed primitive, it is natural to consider the notion of trapdoor MHFs (TMHFs). A TMHF is like an MHF, but when sampling the public parameters one also samples a trapdoor which allows evaluating the function much cheaper. Biryukov and Perrin (Asiacrypt'17) were the first to consider TMHFs and put forth a candidate TMHF construction called Diodon that is based on the Scrypt MHF...

The Hidden Number Problem (HNP) has found extensive applications in side-channel attacks against cryptographic schemes, such as ECDSA and Diffie-Hellman. There are two primary algorithmic approaches to solving the HNP: lattice-based attacks and Fourier analysis-based attacks. Lattice-based attacks exhibit better efficiency and require fewer samples when sufficiently long substrings of the nonces are known. However, they face significant challenges when only a small fraction of the nonce is...

Physical attacks pose a substantial threat to the secure implementation of cryptographic algorithms. While considerable research efforts are dedicated to protecting against passive physical attacks (e.g., side-channel analysis (SCA)), the landscape of protection against other types of physical attacks remains a challenge. Fault attacks (FA), though attracting growing attention in research, still lack the prevalence of provably secure designs when compared to SCA. The realm of combined...

Since its introduction by Wagner (CRYPTO `02), the $k$-list algorithm has found significant utility in cryptanalysis. One important application thereof is in computing forgeries on several interactive signature schemes that implicitly rely on the hardness of the ROS problem formulated by Schnorr (ICICS `01). The current best attack strategy for these schemes relies the conjectured runtime of the $k$-list algorithm over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. The tightest known analysis of Wagner's algorithm over...

Polynomial commitment scheme allows a prover to commit to a polynomial $f \in \mathcal{R}[X]$ of degree $L$, and later prove that the committed function was correctly evaluated at a specified point $x$; in other words $f(x)=u$ for public $x,u \in\mathcal{R}$. Most applications of polynomial commitments, e.g. succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs), require that (i) both the commitment and evaluation proof are succinct (i.e., polylogarithmic in the degree $L$) - with the...

We present a new method for efficient look-up table (LUT) evaluation in homomorphic encryption (HE), based on Ring-LWE-based HE schemes, including both integer-message schemes such as Brakerski-Gentry-Vaikuntanathan (BGV) and Brakerski/Fan-Vercauteren (BFV), and complex-number-message schemes like the Cheon-Kim-Kim-Song (CKKS) scheme. Our approach encodes bit streams into codewords and translates LUTs into low-degree multivariate polynomials, allowing for the simultaneous evaluation of...

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) allows a set of $n$ parties to jointly compute a function on their private inputs. In this work, we focus on the information-theoretic MPC in the \emph{asynchronous network} setting with optimal resilience ($t<n/3$). The best-known result in this setting is achieved by Choudhury and Patra [J. Cryptol '23], which requires $O(n^4\kappa)$ bits per multiplication gate, where $\kappa$ is the size of a field element. An asynchronous complete secret...

The Linear Code Equivalence (LCE) Problem has received increased attention in recent years due to its applicability in constructing efficient digital signatures. Notably, the LESS signature scheme based on LCE is under consideration for the NIST post-quantum standardization process, along with the MEDS signature scheme that relies on an extension of LCE to the rank metric, namely the Matrix Code Equivalence (MCE) Problem. Building upon these developments, a family of signatures with...

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) allows a set of $n$ parties to jointly compute a function over their private inputs. The seminal works of Ben-Or, Canetti and Goldreich [STOC '93] and Ben-Or, Kelmer and Rabin [PODC '94] settled the feasibility of MPC over asynchronous networks. Despite the significant line of work devoted to improving the communication complexity, current protocols with information-theoretic security and optimal resilience $t<n/3$ communicate $\Omega(n^4C)$ field...

Nova is a new type of recursive proof system that uses a folding scheme as its core building block. This brilliant idea of folding relations can significantly reduce the recursion overhead. In this paper, we study some issues related to Nova’s soundness proof, which relies on the soundness of the folding scheme in a recursive manner. First, due to its recursive nature, the proof strategy inevitably causes the running time of the recursive extractor to expand polynomially for each...

Cleve's celebrated result (STOC'86) showed that a strongly fair multi-party coin-toss is impossible in the presence of majority-sized coalitions. Recently, however, a fascinating line of work studied a relaxed fairness notion called \emph{game-theoretic fairness}, which guarantees that no coalition should be incentivized to deviate from the prescribed protocol. A sequence of works has explored the feasibility of game-theoretic fairness for \emph{two-sided} coin-toss, and indeed...

Over the past decade, cryptocurrencies have garnered attention from academia and industry alike, fostering a diverse blockchain ecosystem and novel applications. The inception of bridges improved interoperability, enabling asset transfers across different blockchains to capitalize on their unique features. Despite their surge in popularity and the emergence of Decentralized Finance (DeFi), trustless bridge protocols remain inefficient, either relaying too much information (e.g.,...

The main goal of this work is to construct authenticated encryption (AE) that is both committing and leakage-resilient. As a first approach for this we consider generic composition as a well-known method for constructing AE schemes. While the leakage resilience of generic composition schemes has already been analyzed by Barwell et al. (AC'17), for committing security this is not the case. We fill this gap by providing a separate analysis of the generic composition paradigms with respect to...

Kyber KEM, the NIST selected PQC standard for Public Key Encryption and Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KEMs) has been subjected to a variety of side-channel attacks, through the course of the NIST PQC standardization process. However, all these attacks targeting the decapsulation procedure of Kyber KEM either require knowledge of the ciphertexts or require to control the value of ciphertexts for key recovery. However, there are no known attacks in a blind setting, where the attacker does not...

After NIST’s selection of Dilithium as the primary future standard for quantum-secure digital signatures, increased efforts to understand its implementation security properties are required to enable widespread adoption on embedded devices. Concretely, there are still many open questions regarding the susceptibility of Dilithium to fault attacks. This is especially the case for Dilithium’s randomized (or hedged) signing mode, which, likely due to devastating implementation attacks on the...

Dual-receiver encryption (DRE) is a special form of public key encryption (PKE) that allows a sender to encrypt a message for two recipients. Without further properties, the difference between DRE and PKE is only syntactical. One such important property is soundness, which requires that no ciphertext can be constructed such that the recipients decrypt to different plaintexts. Many applications rely on this property in order to realize more complex protocols or primitives. In addition, many...

One category of the digital signatures submitted to the NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Process for Additional Digital Signature Schemes comprises proposals constructed leveraging the MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) paradigm. Typically, this framework is characterized by the computation and storage in sequence of large data structures both in signing and verification algorithms, resulting in heavy memory consumption. While some research on the efficiency of these schemes on...

The past years have witnessed a considerable increase in research efforts put into neural network-assisted profiled side-channel analysis (SCA). Studies have also identified challenges, e.g., closing the gap between metrics for machine learning (ML) classification and side-channel attack evaluation. In fact, in the context of NN-assisted SCA, the NN’s output distribution forms the basis for successful key recovery. In this respect, related work has covered various aspects of integrating...

NIST released the draft standard for ML-KEM, and we can expect its widespread use in the embedded world in the near future. Several side-channel attacks have been proposed, and one line of research has focused on attacks against the comparison step of the FO-transform. A work published at TCHES 2022 stressed the need for secure higher-order masked comparisons beyond the $t$-probing model and proposed a higher-order masked comparison method. Subsequently, D'Anvers, Van Beirendonck, and...

In today's systems, privacy is often at odds with utility: users that reveal little information about themselves get restricted functionality, and service providers mistrust them. In practice, systems tip to either full anonymity (e.g. Monero), or full utility (e.g. Bitcoin). Well-known cryptographic primitives for bridging this gap exist: anonymous credentials (AC) let users disclose a subset of their credentials' attributes, revealing to service providers "just what they need"; group...

The size of the authentication tag represents a significant overhead for applications that are limited by bandwidth or memory. Hence, some authenticated encryption designs have a smaller tag than the required privacy level, which was also suggested by the NIST lightweight cryptography standardization project. In the ToSC 2022, two papers have raised questions about the IND-CCA security of AEAD schemes in this situation. These papers show that (a) online AE cannot provide IND-CCA security...

In post-quantum cryptography, permutations are frequently employed to construct cryptographic primitives. Careful design and implementation of sampling random unbiased permutations is essential for efficiency and protection against side-channel attacks. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic research on this topic. Our work seeks to fill this gap by studying the most prominent permutation sampling algorithms and assessing their advantages and limitations. We combine theoretical and...

We investigate proof systems where security holds against rational parties instead of malicious ones. Our starting point is the notion of rational arguments, a variant of rational proofs (Azar and Micali, STOC 2012) where security holds against rational adversaries that are also computationally bounded. Rational arguments are an interesting primitive because they generally allow for very efficient protocols, and in particular sublinear verification (i.e. where the Verifier does not have...

Bulletin boards (BB) are important cryptographic building blocks that, at their core, provide a broadcast channel with memory. BBs are widely used within many security protocols, including secure multi-party computation protocols, e-voting systems, and electronic auctions. Even though the security of protocols crucially depends on the underlying BB, as also highlighted by recent works, the literature on constructing secure BBs is sparse. The so-far only provably secure BBs require trusted...

Algorithm hardness can be described by 5 categories: hardness in computation, in sequential computation, in memory, in energy consumption (or bandwidth), in code size. Similarly, hardness can be a concern for solving or for verifying, depending on the context, and can depend on a secret trapdoor or be universally hard. Two main lines of research investigated such problems: cryptographic puzzles, that gained popularity thanks to blockchain consensus systems (where solving must be moderately...

Authenticated PIR enables a server to initially commit to a database of $N$ items, for which a client can later privately obtain individual items with complexity sublinear in $N$, with the added guarantee that the retrieved item is consistent with the committed database. A crucial requirement is privacy with abort, i.e., the server should not learn anything about a query even if it learns whether the client aborts. This problem was recently considered by Colombo et al. (USENIX '23), who...

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the verification algorithm of the CRYSTALS-Dilithium, focusing on a C reference implementation. Limited research has been conducted on its susceptibility to fault attacks, despite its critical role in ensuring the scheme’s security. To fill this gap, we investigate three distinct fault models - randomizing faults, zeroizing faults, and skipping faults - to identify vulnerabilities within the verification process. Based on our analysis, we...

A secret-shared shuffle (SSS) protocol permutes a secret-shared vector using a random secret permutation. It has found numerous applications, however, it is also an expensive operation and often a performance bottleneck. Chase et al. (Asiacrypt'20) recently proposed a highly efficient semi-honest two-party SSS protocol known as the CGP protocol. It utilizes purposely designed pseudorandom correlations that facilitate a communication-efficient online shuffle phase. That said, semi-honest...

Private set intersection protocols allow two parties with private sets of data to compute the intersection between them without leaking other information about their sets. These protocols have been studied for almost 20 years, and have been significantly improved over time, reducing both their computation and communication costs. However, when more than two parties want to compute a private set intersection, these protocols are no longer applicable. While extensions exist to the multi-party...

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) enables (joint) computations on sensitive data while maintaining privacy. In real-world scenarios, asymmetric trust assumptions are often most realistic, where one somewhat trustworthy entity interacts with smaller clients. We generalize previous two-party computation (2PC) protocols like MUSE (USENIX Security'21) and SIMC (USENIX Security'22) to the three-party setting (3PC) with one malicious party, avoiding the performance limitations of...

We study the security of a fundamental family of succinct interactive arguments in the standard model, stemming from the works of Kilian (1992) and Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, and Spooner (``BCS'', 2016). These constructions achieve succinctness by combining probabilistic proofs and vector commitments. Our first result concerns the succinct interactive argument of Kilian, realized with any probabilistically-checkable proof (PCP) and any vector commitment. We establish the tightest known bounds on...

Although we have known about fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) from circular security assumptions for over a decade [Gentry, STOC '09; Brakerski–Vaikuntanathan, FOCS '11], there is still a significant gap in understanding related homomorphic primitives supporting all *unrestricted* polynomial-size computations. One prominent example is attribute-based encryption (ABE). The state-of-the-art constructions, relying on the hardness of learning with errors (LWE) [Gorbunov–Vaikuntanathan–Wee,...

We prove that two variants of the Fujisaki-Okamoto (FO) transformations are selective opening secure (SO) against chosen-ciphertext attacks in the quantum random oracle model (QROM), assuming that the underlying public-key encryption scheme is one-way secure against chosen-plaintext attacks (OW-CPA). The two variants we consider are $\mathsf{FO}^{\not{\bot}}$ (Hofheinz, Hövelmanns, and Kiltz, TCC 2017) and $\mathsf{U}^{\not{\bot}}_\mathsf{m}$ (Jiang et al., CRYPTO 2018). This is the first...

Suppose a prover, in possession of a large body of valuable evidence, wants to quickly convince a verifier by presenting only a small portion of the evidence. We define an Approximate Lower Bound Argument, or ALBA, which allows the prover to do just that: to succinctly prove knowledge of a large number of elements satisfying a predicate (or, more generally, elements of a sufficient total weight when a predicate is generalized to a weight function). The argument is approximate because...

In the ever-evolving landscape of Information Tech- nologies, private decentralized computing on an honest yet curious server has emerged as a prominent paradigm. While numerous schemes exist to safeguard data during computation, the focus has primarily been on protecting the confidentiality of the data itself, often overlooking the potential information leakage arising from the function evaluated by the server. Recognizing this gap, this article aims to address the issue by presenting and...

Tightly secure cryptographic schemes can be implemented with standardized parameters, while still having a sufficiently high security level backed up by their analysis. In a recent work, Pan and Wagner (Eurocrypt 2023) presented the first tightly secure two-round multi-signature scheme without pairings, called Chopsticks. While this is an interesting first theoretical step, Chopsticks is much less efficient than its non-tight counterparts. In this work, we close this gap by proposing a...