We reconsider Cleve's famous 1986 impossibility result on coin-flipping without an honest majority. Recently proposed constructions have circumvented this limit by using cryptographic delay functions. We show that this is necessary: a (weak) notion of delay functions is in fact implied by the existence of a protocol circumventing Cleve's impossibility. However, such delay functions are weaker than those used in existing constructions. We complete our result by showing an equivalence, that...

Decentralized storage networks, including IPFS and Filecoin, have created a marketplace where individuals exchange storage space for profit. These networks employ protocols that reliably ensure data storage providers accurately store data without alterations, safeguarding the interests of storage purchasers. However, these protocols lack an effective and equitable payment mechanism for data retrieval, particularly when multiple data queriers are involved. This necessitates a protocol that...

The problem of reliable/secure all-to-all communication over low-degree networks has been essential for communication-local (CL) n-party MPC (i.e., MPC protocols where every party directly communicates only with a few, typically polylogarithmic in n, parties) and more recently for communication over ad hoc networks, which are used in blockchain protocols. However, a limited number of adaptively secure solutions exist, and they all make relatively strong assumptions on the ability of parties...

Rollups are special applications on distributed state machines (aka blockchains) for which the underlying state machine only logs, but does not execute transactions. Rollups have become a popular way to scale applications on Ethereum and there is now growing interest in running rollups on Bitcoin. Rollups scale throughput and reduce transaction costs by using auxiliary machines that have higher throughput and lower cost of executing transactions than the underlying blockchain. State updates...

As the use of the internet and digital devices has grown rapidly, keeping digital communications secure has become very important. Authenticated Key Agreement (AKA) protocols play a vital role in securing digital communications. These protocols enable the communicating parties to mutually authenticate and securely establish a shared secret key. The emergence of quantum computers makes many existing AKA protocols vulnerable to their immense computational power. Consequently, designing new...

We study the problem of implementing unconditionally secure reliable and private communication (and hence secure computation) in dynamic incomplete networks. Our model assumes that the network is always $k$-connected, for some $k$, but the concrete connection graph is adversarially chosen in each round of interaction. We show that, with $n$ players and $t$ malicious corruptions, perfectly secure communication is possible if and only if $k > 2t$. This disproves a conjecture from earlier...

Byzantine Reliable Broadcast is one of the most popular communication primitives in distributed systems. Byzantine reliable broadcast ensures that processes agree to deliver a message from an initiator even if some processes (perhaps including the initiator) are Byzantine. In asynchronous settings it is known since the prominent work of Bracha [Bracha87] that Byzantine reliable broadcast can be implemented deterministically if $n \geq 3t+1$ where $t$ is an upper bound on the...

Asynchronous Verifiable Information Dispersal (AVID) allows a dealer to disperse a message $M$ across a collection of server replicas consistently and efficiently, such that any future client can reliably retrieve the message $M$ if some servers fail. Since AVID was introduced by Cachin and Tessaro in 2005, several works improved the asymptotic communication complexity of AVID protocols. However, recent gains in communication complexity have come at the expense of sub-optimal storage,...

We give a new protocol for reliable broadcast with improved communication complexity for long messages. Namely, to reliably broadcast a message a message $m$ over an asynchronous network to a set of $n$ parties, of which fewer than $n/3$ may be corrupt, our protocol achieves a communication complexity of $1.5 |m| n + O( \kappa n^2 \log(n) )$, where $\kappa$ is the output length of a collision-resistant hash function. This result improves on the previously best known bound for long...

Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) based BFT protocols balance consensus efforts across different parties and maintain high throughput even when some designated parties fail. However, existing DAG-based BFT protocols exhibit long latency to commit decisions, primarily because they have a \emph{leader} every 2 or more ``rounds''. Recent works, such as Shoal (FC'23) and Mysticeti, have deemed supporting a leader vertex in each round particularly difficult, if not impossible. Consequently, even under...

This work models a secure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system as a wiretap channel with action-dependent channel states and channel output feedback, e.g., obtained through reflections. The transmitted message is split into a common and a secure message, both of which must be reliably recovered at the legitimate receiver, while the secure message needs to be kept secret from the eavesdropper. The transmitter actions, such as beamforming vector design, affect the corresponding...

EdDSA, standardized by both IRTF and NIST, is a variant of the well-known Schnorr signature scheme based on Edwards curves, benefitting from stateless and deterministic derivation of nonces (i.e., it does not require a reliable source of randomness or state continuity). Recently, NIST called for multi-party threshold EdDSA signatures in one mode of verifying such nonce derivation via zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. However, it is challenging to translate the stateless and deterministic benefits...

We observe that most fixed-party distributed protocols can be rewritten by replacing a party with a ledger (such as a blockchain system) and the authenticated channel communication between parties with cross-chain relayers. This transform is useful because blockchain systems are always online and have battle-tested security assumptions. We provide a definitional framework that captures this analogy. We model the transform formally, and posit and prove a generic metatheorem that allows...

To improve the throughput of Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols, the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) topology has been introduced to parallel data processing, leading to the development of DAG-based BFT consensus. However, existing DAG-based works heavily rely on Reliable Broadcast (RBC) protocols for block broadcasting, which introduces significant latency due to the three communication steps involved in each RBC. For instance, DAGRider, a representative DAG-based protocol,...

To enable parallel processing, the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structure is introduced to the design of asynchronous Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols, known as DAG-based BFT. Existing DAG-based BFT protocols operate in successive waves, with each wave containing three or four Reliable Broadcast (RBC) rounds to broadcast data, resulting in high latency due to the three communication steps required in each RBC. For instance, Tusk, a state-of-the-art DAG-based BFT protocol,...

Previous studies on deep-learning-based side-channel attacks (DL-SCAs) have shown that traditional performance evaluation metrics commonly used in DL, like accuracy and F1 score, are not effective in evaluating DL-SCA performance. Therefore, some previous studies have proposed new alternative metrics for evaluating the performance of DL-SCAs. Notably, perceived information (PI) and effective perceived information (EPI) are major metrics based on information theory. While it has been...

Federated Learning (FL) accomplishes collaborative model training without the need to share local training data. However, existing FL aggregation approaches suffer from inefficiency, privacy vulnerabilities, and neglect of poisoning attacks, severely impacting the overall performance and reliability of model training. In order to address these challenges, we propose SuperFL, an efficient two-server aggregation scheme that is both privacy preserving and secure against poisoning attacks. The...

Motivated by the violation of two fundamental assumptions in secure communication - receiver-privacy and sender-freedom - by a certain entity referred to as ``the dictator'', Persiano et al. introduced the concept of Anamorphic Encryption (AME) for public key cryptosystems (EUROCRYPT 2022). Specifically, they presented receiver/sender-AME, directly tailored to scenarios where receiver privacy and sender freedom assumptions are compromised, respectively. In receiver-AME, entities share a...

The classical distributed key generation protocols (DKG) are resurging due to their widespread applications in blockchain. While efforts have been made to improve DKG communication, practical large-scale deployments are still yet to come due to various challenges, including the heavy computation and communication (particularly broadcast) overhead in their adversarial cases. In this paper, we propose a practical DKG for DLog-based cryptosystems, which achieves (quasi-)linear computation and...

It is well-known that Atomic Broadcast (AB) in asynchronous networks requires randomisation and that at most $t < n/3$ out of $n$ players are Byzantine corrupted. This is opposed to synchronous AB which can tolerate $t < n/2$ corruptions and can be deterministic. We show that these requirements can be conceptually separated by constructing an asynchronous AB protocol which tolerates $t < n/2$ corruptions from blackbox use of Common Coin and Reliable Broadcast (RB). We show the power of this...

We present a deterministic synchronous protocol for binary Byzantine Agreement against a corrupt minority with adaptive $O(n\cdot f)$ communication complexity, where $f$ is the exact number of corruptions. Our protocol improves the previous best-known deterministic Byzantine Agreement protocol developed by Momose and Ren (DISC 2021), whose communication complexity is quadratic, independent of the exact number of corruptions. Our approach combines two distinct primitives that we introduce...

A wiretap coding scheme for a pair of noisy channels $(\mathsf{ChB},\mathsf{ChE})$ enables Alice to reliably communicate a message to Bob by sending its encoding over $\mathsf{ChB}$, while hiding the message from an adversary Eve who obtains the same encoding over $\mathsf{ChE}$. A necessary condition for the feasibility of wiretap coding is that $\mathsf{ChB}$ is not a degradation of $\mathsf{ChE}$, namely Eve cannot simulate Bob’s view. While insufficient in the information-theoretic...

In this paper, we explore the feasibility of reliable and private communication in dynamic networks, where in each round the adversary can choose which direct peer-to-peer links are available in the network graph, under the sole condition that the graph is k-connected at each round (for some k). We show that reliable communication is possible in such a dynamic network if and only if k > 2t. We also show that if k = cn > 2t for a constant c, we can achieve reliable communication with...

Due to the completeness, reliability and zero-knowledge nature, the zero-knowledge proof is widely used to designed various protocols, including zero-knowledge authentication protocols. However, the existing zero-knowledge proof scheme cannot realize bidirectional authentication. In this paper, we design a series of bidirectional zero-knowledge protocols based on two new flavors of operations applicable to multiplicative cyclic group. The two notions are formally defined in this paper. We...

The redundant of multimedia data made an unnecessary waste in encrypted cloud storage, unlike text with completely consistent content, multimedia data allows a certain degree of similarity in deduplication, In this work, we focus on the multimedia data which takes a seriously proportion of storage in scenarios such as data outsourcing to propose secure fuzzy deduplication without the additional servers based on Convergent Encryption(CE), say the Single-server Fuzzy Deduplication (SSFD)....

On the Internet of Connected Vehicles, a vehicle has to communicate bi-directionally with several devices for establishing a shared network for inter-vehicle and intra-vehicle connectivity. These connection protocols are commonly structured to connect all the individual components with an implicit degree of trust, which is supposed to protect the whole system from unauthorized users. Technologies like Automotive Ethernet tend to increase security by reducing the implicit trust within the...

Microarchitectural side-channel vulnerabilities in modern processors are known to be a powerful attack vector that can be utilized to bypass common security boundaries like memory isolation. As shown by recent variants of transient execution attacks related to Spectre and Meltdown, those side channels allow to leak data from the microarchitecture to the observable architectural state. The vast majority of attacks currently build on the cache-timing side channel, since it is easy to exploit...

We study the problem of privacy-preserving proofs on streamed authenticated data. In this setting, a server receives a continuous stream of data from a trusted data provider, and is requested to prove computations over the data to third parties in a correct and private way. In particular, the third party learns no information on the data beyond the validity of claimed results. A challenging requirement here, is that the third party verifies the validity with respect to the specific data...

The distributed source coding problem is extended by positing that noisy measurements of a remote source are the correlated random variables that should be reconstructed at another terminal. We consider a secure and private distributed lossy source coding problem with two encoders and one decoder such that (i) all terminals noncausally observe a noisy measurement of the remote source; (ii) a private key is available to each legitimate encoder and all private keys are available to the...

The emergence of distributed digital currencies has raised the need for a reliable consensus mechanism. In proof-of-stake cryptocur- rencies, the participants periodically choose a closed set of validators, who can vote and append transactions to the blockchain. Each valida- tor can become a leader with the probability proportional to its stake. Keeping the leader private yet unique until it publishes a new block can significantly reduce the attack vector of an adversary and improve the...

Physically Unclonable Functions~(PUFs) have been a potent choice for enabling low-cost, secure communication. However, the state-of-the-art strong PUFs generate single-bit response. So, we propose PUF-COTE: a high throughput architecture based on linear feedback shift register and a strong PUF as the ``base''-PUF. At the same time, we obfuscate the challenges to the ``base''-PUF of the final construction. We experimentally evaluate the quality of the construction by implementing it on Artix...

The protection of confidential information is a global issue and block encryption algorithms are the most reliable option for securing data. The famous information theorist, Claude Shannon has given two desirable characteristics that should exist in a strong cipher which are substitution and permutation in their fundamental research on "Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems.” block ciphers strictly follow the substitution and permutation principle in an iterative manner to generate a...

This paper studies Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) under asynchronous networks, and improves the state-of-the-art protocols from the following aspects. Near-optimal communication cost: We propose two new BRB protocols for $n$ nodes and input message $M$ that has communication cost $O(n|M|+n^2\log n)$, which is near-optimal due to the lower bound of $\Omega(n|M|+n^2)$. The first RBC protocol assumes threshold signature but is easy to understand, while the second RBC protocol is error-free...

The problem of secure source coding with multiple terminals is extended by considering a remote source whose noisy measurements are the correlated random variables used for secure source reconstruction. The main additions to the problem include 1) all terminals noncausally observe a noisy measurement of the remote source; 2) a private key is available to all legitimate terminals; 3) public communication link between the encoder and decoder is rate-limited; and 4) secrecy leakage to the...

Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) is one of the most fundamental primitives in fault-tolerant distributed computing. It is well-known that the best BRB protocol one can hope for has $O(nL+n^2)$ communication. It is unclear if this bound is achievable. This paper provides a novel BRB protocol---BRB1, which achieves $O(nL + kn + n^2 log n)$ communication, where $n$, $L$, and $k$ are the number of replicas, the message length, and the security parameter, respectively. Our protocol is...

We tackle the atypical challenge of supporting post-quantum cryptography (PQC) and its significant overhead in safety-critical vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications, dealing with strict overhead and latency restrictions within the limited radio spectrum for V2V. For example, we show that the current use of spectrum to support signature verification in V2V makes it nearly impossible to adopt PQC. Accordingly, we propose a scheduling technique for message signing certificate transmissions...

A wiretap coding scheme (Wyner, Bell Syst. Tech. J. 1975) enables Alice to reliably communicate a message m to an honest Bob by sending an encoding c over a noisy channel chB, while at the same time hiding m from Eve who receives c over another noisy channel chE. Wiretap coding is clearly impossible when chB is a degraded version of chE, in the sense that the output of chB can be simulated using only the output of chE. A classic work of Csiszár and Körner (IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, 1978)...

We revisit Gradecast (Feldman and Micali, STOC'88) in Synchrony and Reliable Broadcast (Bracha, Information and Computation'87) in Asynchrony. For both tasks ,we provide new protocols that have three desirable properties: (1) \emph{optimal resilience}, tolerating $t<n/3$ malicious parties; (2) are \emph{communication-efficient}, where honest parties send just $O(n L)$ bits for a sender with a message of $L = \Omega(n \log n)$ bits; (3) and are \emph{unconditionally secure}, without needing...

This paper improves upon two fundamental and closely related primitives in fault-tolerant distributed computing---Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) and asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID). We make improvements asymptotically (for our AVID construction), concretely (much lower hidden constants), and practically (having 3 steps, using hash functions only, and avoiding using online error correction on the bulk data). The state of the art BRB protocol of Das, Xiang, and Ren...

Vehicular-to-Everything (V2X) communications enable vehicles to exchange messages with other entities, including nearby vehicles and pedestrians. V2X is, thus, essential for establishing an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), where vehicles use information from their surroundings to reduce traffic congestion and improve safety. To avoid abuse, V2X messages should be digitally signed using valid digital certificates. Messages sent by unauthorized entities can then be discarded, while...

A decision task is a distributed input-output problem in which each process starts with its input value and eventually produces its output value. Examples of such decision tasks are broad and range from consensus to reliable broadcast to lattice agreement. A distributed protocol solves a decision task if it enables processes to produce admissible output values despite arbitrary (Byzantine) failures. Unfortunately, it has been known for decades that many decision tasks cannot be solved if the...

In this paper, we present near-optimal asynchronous Byzantine reliable broadcast (RBC) protocols with balanced costs and an improved asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID) protocol. Assuming the existence of collision-resistant hash functions, our RBC protocol broadcasts a message $M$ among $n$ nodes with total communication cost $O(n|M|+\kappa n^2)$ and per-node communication cost $O(|M|+\kappa n)$. In contrast, the state-of-the-art reliable broadcast protocol either has...

Asynchronous BFT consensus can implement robust mission-critical decentralized services in the unstable or even adversarial wide-area network without relying on any form of timing assumption. Starting from the work of HoneyBadgerBFT (CCS 2016), several studies tried to push asynchronous BFT towards practice. In particular, in a recent work of Dumbo (CCS 2020), they redesigned the protocol backbone and used one multi-valued validated Byzantine agreement (MVBA) to replace $n$ concurrent...

Transport Layer Security (TLS) constitutes one of the most widely used protocols for securing Internet communications and has also found broad acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. As we progress toward a security environment resistant to quantum computer attacks, TLS needs to be transformed to support post-quantum cryptography. However, post-quantum TLS is still not standardised, and its overall performance, especially in resource-constrained, IoT-capable, embedded devices, is...

Erasure coding is a key tool to reduce the space and communication overhead in fault-tolerant distributed computing. State-of-the-art distributed primitives, such as asynchronous verifiable information dispersal (AVID), reliable broadcast (RBC), multi-valued Byzantine agreement (MVBA), and atomic broadcast, all use erasure coding. This paper introduces an erasure coding proof (ECP) system, which allows the encoder to prove succinctly and non-interactively that an erasure-coded fragment is...

We propose three interactive zero-knowledge arguments for arithmetic circuit of size $N$ in the common random string model, which can be converted to be non-interactive by Fiat-Shamir heuristics in the random oracle model. First argument features $O(\sqrt{\log N})$ communication and round complexities and $O(N)$ computational complexity for the verifier. Second argument features $O(\log N)$ communication and $O(\sqrt{N})$ computational complexity for the verifier. Third argument features...

Large-scale quantum computers will be able to efficiently solve the underlying mathematical problems of widely deployed public key cryptosystems in the near future. This threat has sparked increased interest in the field of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and standardization bodies like NIST, IETF, and ETSI are in the process of standardizing PQC schemes as a new generation of cryptography. This raises the question of how to ensure a fast, reliable, and secure transition to upcoming PQC...

It is known that the agreement property of the Byzantine consensus problem among $n$ processes can be violated in a non-synchronous system if the number of faulty processes exceeds $t_0 = n / 3 - 1$. In this paper, we investigate the accountable Byzantine consensus problem in non-synchronous systems: the problem of solving Byzantine consensus whenever possible (e.g., when the number of faulty processes does not exceed $t_0$) and allowing correct processes to obtain proof of culpability...

We consider a distributed function computation problem in which parties observing noisy versions of a remote source facilitate the computation of a function of their observations at a fusion center through public communication. The distributed function computation is subject to constraints, including not only reliability and storage but also secrecy and privacy. Specifically, 1) the function computed should remain secret from an eavesdropper observing the public communication and correlated...

In this paper, we introduce the problem of Asynchronous Data Dissemination (ADD). Intuitively, an ADD protocol disseminates a message to all honest nodes in an asynchronous network, given that at least $t+1$ honest nodes initially hold the message where $t$ is the maximum number of malicious nodes. We design a simple and efficient ADD protocol for $n$ parties that is information-theoretically secure, tolerates up to one-third malicious nodes, and has a communication cost of $O(n|M|+n^2)$ for...

Decentralized storage systems are a crucial component of the rapidly growing blockchain ecosystem. They aim to achieve robustness by proving that they store multiple replicas of every file. They have a serious limitation, though: They cannot prove that file replicas are spread across distinct systems, e.g., different hard drives. Consequently, files are vulnerable to loss in a single, locally catastrophic event. We introduce a new primitive, Proof of Geo-Retrievability or PoGeoRet, that...

We present the Internet Computer Consensus (ICC) family of protocols for atomic broadcast (a.k.a., consensus), which underpin the Byzantine fault-tolerant replicated state machines of the Internet Computer. The ICC protocols are leader-based protocols that assume partial synchrony, and that are fully integrated with a blockchain. The leader changes probabilistically in every round. These protocols are extremely simple and robust: in any round where the leader is corrupt (which itself...

Reliable and verifiable public randomness is not only an essential building block in various cryptographic primitives, but also is a critical component in many distributed and decentralized protocols, e.g., blockchain sharding. A 'good' randomness generator should preserve several distinctive properties, such as public-verifiability, bias-resistance, unpredictability, and availability. However, it is a challenging task to generate such good randomness. For instance, a dishonest party may...

In the model of Perfectly Secure Message Transmission (PSMT), a sender Alice is connected to a receiver Bob via $n$ parallel two-way channels, and Alice holds an $\ell$ symbol secret that she wishes to communicate to Bob. There is an unbounded adversary Eve that controls $t$ of the channels, where $n=2t+1$. Eve is able to corrupt any symbol sent through the channels she controls, and furthermore may attempt to infer Alice's secret by observing the symbols sent through the channels she...

Broadcast is a fundamental primitive in distributed computing. It allows a sender to consistently distribute a message among $n$ recipients. The seminal result of Pease et al. [JACM'80] shows that in a complete network of synchronous bilateral channels, broadcast is achievable if and only if the number of corruptions is bounded by $t < n/3$. To overcome this bound, a fascinating line of works, Fitzi and Maurer [STOC'00], Considine et al. [JC'05] and Raykov [ICALP'15], proposed strengthening...

Secure delegated quantum computing is a two-party cryptographic primitive, where a computationally weak client wishes to delegate an arbitrary quantum computation to an untrusted quantum server in a privacy-preserving manner. Communication via quantum channels is typically assumed such that the client can establish the necessary correlations with the server to securely perform the given task. This has the downside that all these protocols cannot be put to work for the average user unless a...

The common approach in secure communication channel protocols is to rely on ciphertexts arriving in-order and to close the connection upon any rogue ciphertext. Cryptographic security models for channels generally reflect such design. This is reasonable when running atop lower-level transport protocols like TCP ensuring in-order delivery, as for example is the case with TLS or SSH. However, protocols like QUIC or DTLS which run over a non-reliable transport such as UDP, do not---and in fact...

The Internet of Things (IoT) based services are getting a widespread expansion in all the directions and dimensions of the 21st century. The IoT based deployment involves an internet-connected sensor, mobiles, laptops, and other networking and computing de- vices. In most IoT based applications, the sensor collects the data and communicates it to the end-user via gateway device or fog device over a precarious internet channel. The attacker can use this open channel to capture the...

Distributed randomness is very useful for many applications, such as smart contract, proof-of-stake-based blockchain, elliptic curve generation and lottery. Randomness beacon protocols are proposed, which are aimed at continuously distributed randomness generation. However, a reliable source of distributed randomness is gained with difficulty because of Byzantine behavior, which may lead to bias for distributed randomness. These Byzantine behaviors include, but not limited to, the “last...

At present, the access control schemes in the power grid are centralized. In the centralized system, the data of the network sensor nodes is transmitted by centralized nodes, and the data itself may be illegally tamped with or lost, which can lead to reduced system reliability. For this feature, we apply blockchain technology to the design of access control schemes. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based access control scheme that is suitable for multiple scenarios in the smart grid....

Secure channel establishment protocols such as Transport Layer Security (TLS) are some of the most important cryptographic protocols, enabling the encryption of Internet traffic. Reducing latency (the number of interactions between parties before encrypted data can be transmitted) in such protocols has become an important design goal to improve user experience. The most important protocols addressing this goal are TLS 1.3, the latest TLS version standardized in 2018 to replace the widely...

The end-users communicating over a network path currently have no control over the path. For a better quality of service, the source node often opts for a superior (or premium) network path in order to send packets to the destination node. However, the current Internet architecture provides no assurance that the packets indeed follow the designated path. Network path validation schemes address this issue and enable each node present on a network path to validate whether each packet has...

The problem of reliably certifying the outcome of a computation performed by a quantum device is rapidly gaining relevance. We present two protocols for a classical verifier to verifiably delegate a quantum computation to two non-communicating but entangled quantum provers. Our protocols have near-optimal complexity in terms of the total resources employed by the verifier and the honest provers, with the total number of operations of each party, including the number of entangled pairs of...

In this work, we revisit multi-authority attribute based signatures (MA-ABS), and elaborate on the limitations of the current MA-ABS schemes to provide a hard to achieve (yet very useful) combination of features, i.e., decentralization, periodic usage limitation, dynamic revocation of users and attributes, reliable threshold traceability, and authority hiding. In contrast to previous work, we disallow even the authorities to de-anonymize an ABS, and only allow joint tracing by threshold-many...

The importance of efficient MPC in today's world needs no retelling. An obvious barebones requirement to execute protocols for MPC is the ability of parties to communicate with each other. Traditionally, we solve this problem by assuming that every pair of parties in the network share a dedicated secure link that enables reliable message transmission. This assumption is clearly impractical as the number of nodes in the network grows, as it has today. In their seminal work, Dwork, Peleg,...

Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying physical network attributes: communication capacity and speed-of-light propagation delay. Existing systems operate far away from these physical limits. In this work we introduce Prism, a new proof-of-work blockchain protocol, which can achieve 1) security...

We consider information-theoretic secure two-party computation in the plain model where no reliable channels are assumed, and all communication is performed over the binary symmetric channel (BSC) that flips each bit with fixed probability. In this reality-driven setting we investigate feasibility of communication-optimal noise-resilient semi-honest two-party computation i.e., efficient computation which is both private and correct despite channel noise. We devise an information-theoretic...

A reliable source of randomness is not only an essential building block in various cryptographic, security, and distributed systems protocols, but also plays an integral part in the design of many new blockchain proposals. Consequently, the topic of publicly-verifiable, bias-resistant and unpredictable randomness has recently enjoyed increased attention. In particular random beacon protocols, aimed at continuous operation, can be a vital component for current Proof-of-Stake based distributed...

In recent years, many leakage-resilient schemes have been published. These schemes guarantee security against side-channel attacks given bounded leakage of the underlying primitive. However, it is a challenging task to reliably determine these leakage bounds from physical properties. In this work, we present a novel approach to find reliable leakage bounds for side channels of cryptographic implementations when the input data complexity is limited such as in leakage-resilient schemes. By...

Secure messaging apps have enjoyed huge uptake, and with the headline figure of one billion active WhatsApp users there has been a corresponding burst of academic research on the topic. One might therefore wonder: how far is the academic community from providing concrete, applicable guarantees about the apps that are currently in widespread use? We argue that there are still significant gaps between the security properties that users might expect from a communication app, and the security...

Secure instant messaging is utilized in two variants: one-to-one communication and group communication. While the first variant has received much attention lately (Frosch et al., EuroS&P16; Cohn-Gordon et al., EuroS&P17; Kobeissi et al., EuroS&P17), little is known about the cryptographic mechanisms and security guarantees of secure group communication in instant messaging. To approach an investigation of group instant messaging protocols, we first provide a comprehensive and realistic...

Certificate authorities serve as trusted parties to help secure web communications. They are a vital component for ensuring the security of cloud infrastructures and big data repositories. Unfortunately, recent attacks using mis-issued certificates show this model is severely broken. Much research has been done to enhance certificate management in order to create more secure and reliable cloud architectures. However, none of it has been widely adopted yet, and it is hard to judge which one...

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems such as BitTorrent and Bitcoin are susceptible to serious attacks from byzantine nodes that join as peers. Research has explored many adversarial models with additional assumptions, ranging from mild (such as pre-established PKI) to strong (such as the existence of common random coins). One such widely-studied model is the general-omission model, which yields simple protocols with good efficiency, but has been considered impractical or unrealizable since it...

Group signature schemes (GSS) represent an important privacy-enhancing technology. However, their practical applicability is restricted due to inefficiencies of existing membership revocation mechanisms that often place a too large computational burden and communication overhead on the involved parties. Moreover, it seems that the general belief (or unwritten law) of avoiding online authorities by all means artificially and unnecessarily restricts the efficiency and practicality of...

Password-protected secret sharing (PPSS) schemes allow a user to publicly share its high-entropy secret across different servers and to later recover it by interacting with some of these servers using only his password without requiring any authenticated data. In particular, this secret will remain safe as long as not too many servers get corrupted. However, servers are not always reliable and the communication can be altered. To address this issue, a robust PPSS should additionally...

Signal security aims to prevent the adversary from copying communication signals---so it is with quantum cryptography. Information security focuses on preventing the adversary from knowing plaintext or cheating users---so it is with classical cryptography. Communication reliability means that the intended receiver can recover the right communication signals sent by the sender. In this note, we stress that in the presence of an adversary quantum cryptography can do nothing except for...

In this paper, we propose a universal hardware API for authenticated ciphers, which can be used in any future implementations of authenticated ciphers submitted to the CAESAR competition. A common interface and communication protocol would help in reducing any potential biases, and would make the comparison in hardware more reliable and fair. By design, our proposed API is equally suitable for hardware implementations of authenticated ciphers developed manually (at the register-transfer...

Cyber-physical-social system (CPSS) allows individuals to share personal information collected from not only cyberspace, but also physical space. This has resulted in generating numerous data at a user's local storage. However, it is very expensive for users to store large data sets, and it also causes problems in data management. Therefore, it is of critical importance to outsource the data to cloud servers, which provides users an easy, cost-effective and flexible way to manage data....

Abstract: This work presents an Adaptively Secure Broadcast Mechanism (ASBM) based on threats analytics. It defines the security intelligence of a broadcast system comprehensively with a novel concept of collective intelligence. The algorithmic mechanism is analyzed from the perspectives of security intelligence, communication complexity and computational intelligence. The security intelligence of ASBM is defined in terms of authentication, authorization, correct identification, privacy:...

A fundamental communication primitive in distributed computing is Reliable Message Transmission (RMT), which refers to the task of correctly sending a message from a party to another, despite the presence of Byzantine corruptions. In this work we address the problem in the general adversary model of Hirt and Maurer [5], which subsumes earlier models such as the global or local threshold adversaries. Regarding the topology knowledge, we employ the recently introduced Partial Knowledge Model...

Big data and its applications are attracting more and more research interests in recent years. As the new generation distributed computing platform, cloud computing is believed to be the most potent platform. With the data no longer under users' direct control, data security in cloud computing is becoming one of the most obstacles of the proliferation of cloud. In order to improve service reliability and availability, storing multiple replicas along with original datasets is a common...

We consider secret key agreement by multiple parties observing correlated data and communicating interactively over an insecure communication channel. Our main contribution is a single-shot upper bound on the length of the secret keys that can be generated, without making any assumptions on the distribution of the underlying data. Heuristically, we bound the secret key length in terms of ``how far" is the joint distribution of the initial observations of the parties and the eavesdropper from...

This paper proposes an efficient secret key cryptosystem based on polar codes over Binary Erasure Channel. We introduce a method, for the first time to our knowledge, to hide the generator matrix of the polar codes from an attacker. In fact, our main goal is to achieve secure and reliable communication using finite-length polar codes. The proposed cryptosystem has a significant security advantage against chosen plaintext attacks in comparison with the Rao-Nam cryptosystem. Also, the key...

Distributed key generation (DKG) has been studied extensively in the cryptographic literature. However, it has never been examined outside of the synchronous setting, and the known DKG protocols cannot guarantee safety or liveness over the Internet. In this work, we present the first realistic DKG protocol for use over the Internet. We propose a practical system model for the Internet and define an efficient verifiable secret sharing (VSS) scheme in it. We observe the necessity of Byzantine...

In Secure Message Transmission (SMT) problem, a sender $\cal S$ is connected to a receiver $\cal R$ through $N$ node disjoint bidirectional paths in the network, $t$ of which are controlled by an adversary with \textit{unlimited computational power}. $\cal{S}$ wants to send a message $m$ to $\cal{R}$ in a \textit{reliable} and \textit{private} way. It is proved that SMT is possible if and only if $N\ge2t+1$. In Reliable Message Transmission (RMT) problem, the network setting is the same ...

In this paper we give the minimal connectivity required in a synchronous directed network, which is under the influence of a computationally unbounded \emph{Byzantine} adversary that can corrupt a subset of nodes, so that Secure Message Transmission is possible between sender $S$ and receiver $R$. We also show that secure communication between a pair of nodes in a given synchronous directed network is possible in both directions if and only if reliable communication is possible between...

In this paper, we study the communication complexity of Reliable Message Transmission (RMT) and Secure Message Transmission (SMT) protocols in asynchronous settings. We consider two variants of the problem, namely perfect} (where no error is allowed in the protocol outcome) and statistical (where the protocol may output a wrong outcome with negligible probability). RMT and SMT protocols have been investigated rigorously in synchronous settings. But not too much attention has been paid to the...

We study the problem of unconditionally secure Secret Key Establishment (SKE) when Alice and Bob are connected by two noisy channels in opposite directions, and the channels are eavesdropped by Eve. We consider the case that Alice and Bob do not have any sources of initial randomness at their disposal. We start by discussing special cases of interest where SKE is impossible, and then provide a simple SKE construction over a binary symmetric channel that achieves some rates of secret key. We...

In EUROCRYPT 2008, Kurosawa and Suzuki introduced a very fundamental and interesting concept in coding theory called pseudobasis, which was used to design the first ever efficient and communication optimal two round perfectly secure message transmission (PSMT) protocol tolerating a t-active threshold adversary. Recently in ASIACRYPT 2010, Yang and Desmedt designed first ever efficient two round and three round PSMT protocols tolerating non-threshold adversary in both directed and undirected...

For unconditionally reliable message transmission (URMT) in synchronous directed networks of n nodes, a subset of which may be Byzantine faulty, it is well-known that the minimum connectivity requirements for zero-error (perfect) protocols to exist is strictly higher than those where a negligible yet non-zero error probability is allowed (Monte Carlo protocols). In this work, we study the minimum connectivity requirements for the existence of (a) synchronous Las Vegas protocols, (b)...

Consider the following problem: a sender S and a receiver R are part of an unreliable, connected, distributed network. The distrust in the network is modelled by an entity called adversary, who has unbounded computing power and who can corrupt some of the nodes of the network (excluding S and R)in a variety of ways. S wishes to send to R a message m that consists of \ell elements, where \ell \geq 1, selected uniformly from a finite field F. The challenge is to design a protocol, such that...

In the problem of Secure Message Transmission in the public discussion model (SMT-PD), a Sender wants to send a message to a Receiver privately and reliably. Sender and Receiver are connected by $n$ channels, up to $t<n$ of which may be maliciously controlled by a computationally unbounded adversary, as well as one public channel, which is reliable but not private. The SMT-PD abstraction has been shown instrumental in achieving secure multi-party computation on sparse networks, where a...

Automatic recognition of human faces is becoming increasingly popular in civilian and law enforcement applications that require reliable recognition of humans. However, the rapid improvement and widespread deployment of this technology raises strong concerns regarding the violation of individuals' privacy. A typical application scenario for privacy-preserving face recognition concerns a client who privately searches for a specific face image in the face image database of a server. In this...

In this paper, we re-visit the problem of perfectly secure message transmission (PSMT) in a directed network under the presence of a threshold adaptive Byzantine adversary, having unbounded computing power. Desmedt et.al have given the characterization for three or more phase PSMT protocols over directed networks. Recently, Patra et. al. have given the characterization of two phase PSMT over directed networks. Even though the issue of tradeoff between phase complexity and communication...

In [Solving Multiple Right Hand Sides linear equations. Designs, Codes and Cryptography, 49:147–160, 2008] Raddum and Semaev propose a technique to solve systems of polynomial equations over GF(2) as occurring in algebraic attacks on block ciphers. This approach is known as MRHS, and we present a special purpose architecture to implement MRHS in a dedicated hardware device. Our preliminary performance analysis of this Parallel Elimination Technique Supporting Nice Algebraic Key Elimination...

In this paper, we re-visit the problem of {\it perfectly reliable message transmission} (PRMT) and {\it perfectly secure message transmission}(PSMT) in a {\it directed network} under the presence of a threshold adaptive Byzantine adversary, having {\it unbounded computing power}. Desmedt et.al have given the necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of PSMT protocols in directed networks. In this paper, we first show that the necessary and sufficient condition (characterization)...

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of authenticated throughput-efficient routing in an unreliable and dynamically changing synchronous network in which the majority of malicious insiders try to destroy and alter messages or disrupt communication in any way. More specifically, in this paper we seek to answer the following question: Given a network in which the majority of nodes are controlled by a malicious adversary and whose topology is changing every round, is it...

We consider the problem of probabilistic reliable communication (PRC) over synchronous networks modeled as directed graphs in the presence of a Byzantine adversary when players' knowledge of the network topology is not complete. We show that possibility of PRC is extremely sensitive to the changes in players' knowledge of the topology. This is in complete contrast with earlier known results on the possibility of perfectly reliable communication over undirected graphs where the case of each...

We study the problem of unconditionally reliable message transmission (URMT), where two non-faulty players, the sender S and the receiver R are part of a synchronous network modeled as a directed hypergraph, a part of which may be under the influence of an adversary having unbounded computing power. S intends to transmit a message $m$ to R, such that R should correctly obtain S's message with probability at least $(1-\delta)$ for arbitrarily small $\delta > 0$. However, unlike most of the...

We are interested in this problem: a verifier, with a small and reliable storage, wants to periodically check whether a remote server is keeping a large file $\mathbf{x}$. A dishonest server, by adapting the challenges and responses, tries to discard partial information of $\mathbf{x}$ and yet evades detection. Besides the security requirements, there are considerations on communication, storage size and computation time. Juels et al. \cite{Pors} gave a security model for {\em Proof of...