In large-scale protests, a repressive government will often disable the Internet to thwart communication between protesters. Smartphone mesh networks, which route messages over short range, possibly ephemeral, radio connections between nearby phones, allow protesters to communicate without relying on centralized Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, prior work on mesh networks does not efficiently support cryptographically secure group messaging (a crucial requirement for protests); prior...

In this work, we present a new paradigm for constructing Group Authenticated Key Exchange (GAKE). This result is the first tightly secure GAKE scheme in a strong security model that allows maximum exposure attacks (MEX) where the attacker is allowed to either reveal the secret session state or the long-term secret of all communication partners. Moreover, our protocol features the strong and realistic notion of (full) perfect forward secrecy (PFS), that allows the attacker to actively modify...

The Signal Protocol is a two-party secure messaging protocol used in applications such as Signal, WhatsApp, Google Messages and Facebook Messenger and is used by billions daily. It consists of two core components, one of which is the Double Ratchet protocol that has been the subject of a line of work that aims to understand and formalise exactly what security it provides. Existing models capture strong guarantees including resilience to state exposure in both forward security (protecting...

We consider indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) for multi-output circuits $C:\{0,1\}^n\to\{0,1\}^n$ of size s, where s is the number of AND/OR/NOT gates in C. Under the worst-case assumption that NP $\nsubseteq$ BPP, we establish that there is no efficient indistinguishability obfuscation scheme that outputs circuits of size $s + o(s/ \log s)$. In other words, to be secure, an efficient iO scheme must incur an $\Omega(s/ \log s)$ additive overhead in the size of the obfuscated circuit. The...

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...

This paper initiates a concrete-security treatment of two-party secure computation. The first step is to propose, as target, a simple, indistinguishability-based definition that we call InI. This could be considered a poor choice if it were weaker than standard simulation-based definitions, but it is not; we show that for functionalities satisfying a condition called invertibility, that we define and show is met by functionalities of practical interest like PSI and its variants, the two...

Forward-Secure Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (FS-KEM; Canetti et al. Eurocrypt 2003) allows Alice to encapsulate a key $k$ to Bob for some time $t$ such that Bob can decapsulate it at any time $t'\leq t$. Crucially, a corruption of Bob's secret key after time $t$ does not reveal $k$. In this work, we generalize and extend this idea by also taking Post-Compromise Security (PCS) into account and call it Interval Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (IKEM). Thus, we do not only protect confidentiality...

Identity-based threshold signature (IDTS) enables the generation of valid signatures without revealing cryptographic keys in the signing process. While current protocols have achieved much progress in their efficiency, many schemes easily suffer from denial-of-service attacks in which misbehaving parties could keep from generating signatures without being caught. The identifiable abort property is designed to withstand such an attack in some recent IDTS protocols. However, all these schemes...

We propose a new wide encryption (WE) mode of operation that satisfies robust authenticated encryption (RAE) and committing security with minimum ciphertext expansion. WE is attracting much attention in the last few years, and its advantage includes RAE security that provides robustness against wide range of misuses, combined with the encode-then-encipher (EtE) construction. Unfortunately, WE-based EtE does not provide good committing security, and there is a recent constant-time CMT-4...

The virtualization of network functions is a promising technology, which can enable mobile network operators to provide more flexibility and better resilience for their infrastructure and services. Yet, virtualization comes with challenges, as 5G operators will require a means of verifying the state of the virtualized network components (e.g. Virtualized Network Functions (VNFs) or managing hypervisors) in order to fulfill security and privacy commitments. One such means is the use of...

A security proof for a key exchange protocol requires writing down a security definition. Authors typically have a clear idea of the level of security they aim to achieve, e.g., forward secrecy. Defining the model formally additionally requires making choices on games vs. simulation-based models, partnering, on having one or more Test queries and on adopting a style of avoiding trivial attacks: exclusion, penalizing or filtering. We elucidate the consequences, advantages and disadvantages of...

The rectangle attack has shown to be a very powerful form of cryptanalysis against block ciphers. Given a rectangle distinguisher, one expects to mount key recovery attacks as efficiently as possible. In the literature, there have been four algorithms for rectangle key recovery attacks. However, their performance varies from case to case. Besides, numerous are the applications where the attacks lack optimality. In this paper, we delve into the rectangle key recovery and propose a unified and...

Handling congestion in blockchain systems is a fundamental problem given that the security and decentralization objectives of such systems lead to designs that compromise on (horizontal) scalability (what sometimes is referred to as the ``blockchain trilemma''). Motivated by this, we focus on the question whether it is possible to design a transaction inclusion policy for block producers that facilitates fee and delay predictability while being incentive compatible at the same time....

The one-time pad cipher is renowned for its theoretical perfect security, yet its practical deployment is primarily hindered by the key-size and distribution challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach to key distribution called q-stream, designed to make symmetric-key cryptography, and the one-time pad cipher in particular, a viable option for contemporary secure communications, and specifically, post-quantum cryptography, leveraging quantum noise and combinatorics to ensure secure...

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...

Dynamic searchable encryption (DSE) with forward and backward privacy reduces leakages in early-stage schemes. Security enhancement comes with a price -- maintaining updatable keyword-wise state information. State information, if stored locally, incurs significant client-side storage overhead for keyword-rich datasets, potentially hindering real-world deployments. We propose DISCO, a simple and efficient framework for designing DSE schemes using constant client state. DISCO combines...

End-to-End (E2E) encrypted messaging, which prevents even the service provider from learning communication contents, is gaining popularity. Since users care about maintaining access to their data even if their devices are lost or broken or just replaced, these systems are often paired with cloud backup solutions: Typically, the user will encrypt their messages with a fixed key, and upload the ciphertexts to the server. Unfortunately, this naive solution has many drawbacks. First, it often...

Boolean Searchable Symmetric Encryption (SSE) enables secure outsourcing of databases to an untrusted server in encrypted form and allows the client to execute secure Boolean queries involving multiple keywords. The leakage of keyword pair result pattern (KPRP) in a Boolean search poses a significant threat, which reveals the intersection of documents containing any two keywords involved in a search and can be exploited by attackers to recover plaintext information about searched keywords...

For security issue, data in cloud is encrypted. Searching encrypted data (without decryption) is a practical and important problem. Public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) enables the retrieval of encrypted data, while resisting the insider keyword guessing attacks (IKGAs). Most PAEKS schemes only work with single-receiver model, exhibiting very limited applicability. To address this concern, there have been researches on broadcast authenticated encryption with...

A Verifiable Random Function (VRF) can be evaluated on an input by a prover who holds a secret key, generating a pseudorandom output and a proof of output validity that can be verified using the corresponding public key. VRFs are a central building block of committee election mechanisms that sample parties to execute tasks in cryptographic protocols, e.g. generating blocks in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain or executing a round of MPC protocols. We propose the notion, and a matching...

Running machine learning algorithms on encrypted data is a way forward to marry functionality needs common in industry with the important concerns for privacy when working with potentially sensitive data. While there is already a growing field on this topic and a variety of protocols, mostly employing fully homomorphic encryption or performing secure multiparty computation (MPC), we are the first to propose a protocol that makes use of a specialized encryption scheme that allows to do secure...

Timed cryptography studies primitives that retain their security only for a predetermined amount of time, such as proofs of sequential work and time-lock puzzles. This feature has proven to be useful in a large number of practical applications, e.g. randomness generation, sealed-bid auctions, and fair multi-party computation. However, the current state of affairs in timed cryptography is unsatisfactory: Virtually all efficient constructions rely on a single sequentiality assumption, namely...

Biometric authentication eliminates the need for users to remember secrets and serves as a convenient mechanism for user authentication. Traditional implementations of biometric-based authentication store sensitive user biometry on the server and the server becomes an attractive target of attack and a source of large-scale unintended disclosure of biometric data. To mitigate the problem, we can resort to privacy-preserving computation and store only protected biometrics on the server. While...

Ciphertext-independent updatable encryption (UE) allows to rotate encryption keys and update ciphertexts via a token without the need to first download the ciphertexts. Although, syntactically, UE is a symmetric-key primitive, ciphertext-independent UE with forward secrecy and post-compromise security is known to imply public-key encryption (Alamati, Montgomery and Patranabis, CRYPTO 2019). Constructing post-quantum secure UE turns out to be a difficult task. While lattices offer the...

Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) have been a potent choice for enabling low-cost, secure communication. However, in most applications, one party holds the PUF, and the other securely stores the challenge-response pairs (CRPs). It does not remove the need for secure storage entirely, which is one of the goals of PUFs. This paper proposes a PUF-based construction called Harmonizing PUFs ($\textsf{H_PUF}$s), allowing two independent PUFs to generate the same outcome without storing...

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...

Introducing Small Cell Networks (SCN) has significantly improved wireless link quality, spectrum efficiency and network capacity, which has been viewed as one of the key technologies in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. However, this technology increases the frequency of handover (HO) procedures caused by the dense deployment of cells in the network with reduced cell coverage, bringing new security and privacy issues. The current 5G-AKA and HO protocols are vulnerable to security...

Two recent proposals by Bernstein and Pornin emphasize the use of deterministic signatures in DSA and its elliptic curve-based variants. Deterministic signatures derive the required ephemeral key value in a deterministic manner from the message to be signed and the secret key instead of using random number generators. The goal is to prevent severe security issues, such as the straight-forward secret key recovery from low quality random numbers. Recent developments have raised skepticism...

Confidentiality and authentication are two main security goals in secure electronic mail (e-mail). Furthermore, deniability is also a significant security property for some e-mail applications to protect the privacy of the sender. Although searchable encryption solves the keyword searching problem in a secure e-mail system, it also breaks the deniability of the system. Because the adversary can obtain the information of the data sender and data user from the trapdoor as well as ciphertext...

This paper belongs to a sequence of manuscripts that discuss generic and easy-to-apply security metrics for Strong Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs). These metrics cannot and shall not fully replace in-depth machine learning (ML) studies in the security assessment of Strong PUF candidates. But they can complement the latter, serve in initial complexity analyses, and allow simple iterative design optimization. Moreover, they are computationally more efficient and far easier to...

Weak forward secrecy (wFS) of authenticated key exchange (AKE) protocols is a passive variant of (full) forward secrecy (FS). A natural mechanism to upgrade from wFS to FS is the use of key confirmation messages which compute a message authentication code (MAC) over the transcript. Unfortunately, Gellert, Gjøsteen, Jacobson and Jager (GGJJ, CRYPTO 2023) show that this mechanism inherently incurs a loss proportional to the number of users, leading to an overall non-tight reduction, even if...

The iMessage PQ3 protocol is an end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol designed for exchanging data in long-lived sessions between two devices. It aims to provide classical and post-quantum confidentiality for forward secrecy and post-compromise secrecy, as well as classical authentication. Its initial authenticated key exchange is constructed from digital signatures plus elliptic curve Diffie–Hellman and post-quantum key exchanges; to derive per-message keys on an ongoing basis, it employs...

In differential-like attacks, the process typically involves extending a distinguisher forward and backward with probability 1 for some rounds and recovering the key involved in the extended part. Particularly in rectangle attacks, a holistic key recovery strategy can be employed to yield the most efficient attacks tailored to a given distinguisher. In this paper, we treat the distinguisher and the extended part as an integrated entity and give a one-step framework for finding rectangle...

We study single-server private information retrieval (PIR) where a client wishes to privately retrieve the $x$-th entry from a database held by a server without revealing the index $x$. In our work, we focus on PIR with client pre-processing where the client may compute hints during an offline phase. The hints are then leveraged during queries to obtain sub-linear online time. We present Plinko that is the first single-server PIR with client pre-processing that obtains optimal trade-offs...

Decoy accounts are often used as an indicator of the compromise of sensitive data, such as password files. An attacker targeting only specific known-to-be-real accounts might, however, remain undetected. A more effective method proposed by Juels and Rivest at CCS'13 is to maintain additional fake passwords associated with each account. An attacker who gains access to the password file is unable to tell apart real passwords from fake passwords, and the attempted usage of a false password...

In 2016, NIST announced an open competition with the goal of finding and standardizing a suitable quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithm, with the standard to be drafted in 2023. These algorithms aim to implement post-quantum secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) and digital signatures. However, the proposed algorithm does not consider authentication and is vulnerable to attacks such as man-in-the-middle. In this paper, we propose an authenticated key exchange algorithm to solve the...

We explore the issue of anonymously proving account ownership (anonymous PAO). Such proofs allow a prover to prove to a verifier that it owns a valid account at a server without being tracked by the server or the verifier, without requiring any changes at the server's end and without even revealing to it that any anonymous PAO is taking place. This concept is useful in sensitive applications like whistleblowing. The first introduction of anonymous PAOs was by Wang et al., who also introduced...

IDentity-based Password Authentication and Key Establishment (ID-PAKE) is an interesting trade-off between the security and efficiency, specially due to the removal of costly Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). However, we observe that previous PAKE schemes such as Beguinet et al. (ACNS 2023), Pan et al. (ASIACRYPT 2023) , Abdallah et al. (CRYPTO 2020) etc. fail to achieve important security properties such as weak/strong Perfect Forward Secrecy (s-PFS), user authentication and resistance to...

Anonymous Zether, proposed by Bunz et al. (FC, 2020) and subsequently improved by Diamond (IEEE S&P, 2021) is an account-based confidential payment mechanism that works by using a smart contract to achieve privacy (i.e. identity of receivers to transactions and payloads are hidden). In this work, we look at simplifying the existing protocol while also achieving batching of transactions for multiple receivers, while ensuring consensus and forward secrecy. To the best of our knowledge, this...

The recently standardized secure group messaging protocol Messaging Layer Security (MLS) is designed to ensure asynchronous communications within large groups, with an almost-optimal communication cost and the same security level as point-to-point se- cure messaging protocols such as Signal. In particular, the core sub-protocol of MLS, a Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) called TreeKEM, must generate a common group key that respects the fundamental security properties of post-compromise...

In May 2020, Zoom Video Communications, Inc. (Zoom) announced a multi-step plan to comprehensively support end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) group video calls and subsequently rolled out basic E2EE support to customers in October 2020. In this work we provide the first formal security analysis of Zoom's E2EE protocol, and also lay foundation to the general problem of E2EE group video communication. We observe that the vast security literature analyzing asynchronous messaging does not translate...

Attribute-Based Encryption is widely recognized as a leap forward in the field of public key encryption. It allows to enforce an access control on encrypted data. Decryption time in ABE schemes can be long depending on the number of attributes and pairing operations. This drawback hinders their adoption on a broader scale. In this paper, we propose a non-monotone CP-ABE scheme that has no restrictions on the size of attribute sets and policies, allows fast decryption and is adaptively...

We explore a new pathway to designing unclonable cryptographic primitives. We propose a new notion called unclonable puncturable obfuscation (UPO) and study its implications for unclonable cryptography. Using UPO, we present modular (and in some cases, arguably, simple) constructions of many primitives in unclonable cryptography, including, public-key quantum money, quantum copy-protection for many classes of functionalities, unclonable encryption, and single-decryption encryption....

The notion of ``efficiently testable circuits'' (ETC) was recently put forward by Baig et al.~(ITCS'23). Informally, an ETC compiler takes as input any Boolean circuit $C$ and outputs a circuit/inputs tuple $(C',\mathbb{T})$ where (completeness) $C'$ is functionally equivalent to $C$ and (security) if $C'$ is tampered in some restricted way, then this can be detected as $C'$ will err on at least one input in the small test set $\mathbb{T}$. The compiler of Baig et al. detects tampering...

We consider the mainstream model in secure computation known as the bare PKI setup, also as the {bulletin-board PKI}. It allows players to broadcast once and non-interactively before they receive their inputs and start the execution. A bulletin-board PKI is essentially the minimum setup known so far to implement the model known as {messages-authentication}, i.e., when $P$ is forwarded a signed message, it considers it to be issued by $R$ if and only if $R$ signed it. It is known since...

In this work, we consider the problem of secure key leasing, also known as revocable cryptography (Agarwal et. al. Eurocrypt' 23, Ananth et. al. TCC' 23), as a strengthened security notion of its predecessor put forward in Ananth et. al. Eurocrypt' 21. This problem aims to leverage unclonable nature of quantum information to allow a lessor to lease a quantum key with reusability for evaluating a classical functionality. Later, the lessor can request the lessee to provably delete the key and...

In proof-of-stake blockchains, liveness is ensured by repeatedly selecting random groups of parties as leaders, who are then in charge of proposing new blocks and driving consensus forward. The lotteries that elect those leaders need to ensure that adversarial parties are not elected disproportionately often and that an adversary can not tell who was elected before those parties decide to speak, as this would potentially allow for denial-of-service attacks. Whenever an elected party...

Sponge paradigm, used in the design of SHA-3, is an alternative hashing technique to the popular Merkle-Damgård paradigm. We revisit the problem of finding $B$-block-long collisions in sponge hash functions in the auxiliary-input random permutation model, in which an attacker gets a piece of $S$-bit advice about the random permutation and makes $T$ (forward or inverse) oracle queries to the random permutation. Recently, significant progress has been made in the Merkle-Damgård setting and...

In this paper, we improve the cube attack by exploiting low-degree factors of the superpoly w.r.t. certain "special" index set of cube (ISoC). This can be viewed as a special case of the correlation cube attack proposed at Eurocrypt 2018, but under our framework more beneficial equations on the key variables can be obtained in the key-recovery phase. To mount our attack, one has two challenging problems: (1) effectively recover algebraic normal form of the superpoly and extract out its...

Updatable public key encryption has recently been introduced as a solution to achieve forward-security in the context of secure group messaging without hurting efficiency, but so far, no efficient lattice-based instantiation of this primitive is known. In this work, we construct the first LWE-based UPKE scheme with polynomial modulus-to-noise rate, which is CPA-secure in the standard model. At the core of our security analysis is a generalized reduction from the standard LWE problem to (a...

Reversed multiplication friendly embedding (RMFE) amortization has been playing an active role in the state-of-the-art constructions of MPC protocols over rings (in particular, the ring $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$). As far as we know, this powerful technique has NOT been able to find applications in the crown jewel of two-party computation, the non-interactive secure computation (NISC), where the requirement of the protocol being non-interactive constitutes a formidable technical bottle-neck. We...

Web3 applications based on blockchains regularly need access to randomness that is unbiased, unpredictable, and publicly verifiable. For Web3 gaming applications, this becomes a crucial selling point to attract more users by providing credibility to the "random reward" distribution feature. A verifiable random function (VRF) protocol satisfies these requirements naturally, and there is a tremendous rise in the use of VRF services. As most blockchains cannot maintain the secret keys required...

Focusing on its cryptographic core, we provide the first formal description of the Matrix secure group messaging protocol. Observing that no existing secure messaging model in the literature captures the relationships (and shared state) between users, their devices and the groups they are a part of, we introduce the Device-Oriented Group Messaging model to capture these key characteristics of the Matrix protocol. Utilising our new formalism, we determine that Matrix achieves the basic...

The Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance has developed the widely adopted FIDO2 protocol suite that allows for passwordless online authentication. Cryptographic keys stored on a user's device (e.g. their smartphone) are used as credentials to authenticate to services by performing a challenge-response protocol. Yet, this approach leaves users unable to access their accounts in case their authenticator is lost. The device manufacturer Yubico thus proposed a FIDO2-compliant mechanism that...

Over the last few years, Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) has completely transformed the healthcare industry. It is bringing out the most notable, and unprecedented impacts on human health, and has totally changed the way we look at the healthcare industry. The healthcare sector all around the globe are leapfrogging, and adopting the technology, helping in transforming drastically in a very short span of time. However, as more and more number of medical devices are being connected to IoMT,...

Continuous Group-Key Agreement (CGKA) allows a group of users to maintain a shared key. It is the fundamental cryptographic primitive underlying group messaging schemes and related protocols, most notably TreeKEM, the underlying key agreement protocol of the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, a standard for group messaging by the IETF. CKGA works in an asynchronous setting where parties only occasionally must come online, and their messages are relayed by an untrusted server. The...

The majority of secure messengers have single, centralized service providers that relay ciphertexts between users to enable asynchronous communication. However, in some scenarios such as mass protests in censored networks, relying on a centralized provider is fatal. Mesh messengers attempt to solve this problem by building ad hoc networks in which user clients perform the ciphertext-relaying task. Yet, recent analyses of widely deployed mesh messengers discover severe security weaknesses...

With applications in secure messaging, Updatable Public Key Encryption (UPKE) was proposed by Jost et al. (EUROCRYPT '19) and Alwen et al. (CRYPTO '20). It is a natural relaxation of forward-secure public-key encryption. In UPKE, we can update secret keys by using update ciphertexts which any sender can generate. The UPKE schemes proposed so far that satisfy the strong CCA security are Haidar et al.'s concrete construction (CCS '22) and Dodis et al's generic construction that use...

The widely used Signal protocol provides protection against state exposure attacks through forward security (protecting past messages) and post-compromise security (for restoring security). It supports immediate decryption, allowing messages to be re-ordered or dropped at the protocol level without affecting correctness. In this work, we consider strong active attack detection for secure messaging with immediate decryption, where parties are able to immediately detect active attacks under...

This paper presents a security analysis of forward secure log sealing in the journald logging system, which is part of systemd and used in modern Linux distributions. Forward secure log sealing is a cryptographic technique used to ensure the integrity of past log entries even in the event of a full system compromise. We analyze the implementation of this technique in journald, identifying multiple security vulnerabilities resulting from a gap between the model of the cryptographic primitives...

A standard paradigm for building key exchange protocols with full forward secrecy (and explicit authentication) is to add key confirmation messages to an underlying protocol having only weak forward secrecy (and implicit authentication). Somewhat surprisingly, we show through an impossibility result that this simple trick must nevertheless incur a linear tightness loss in the number of parties for many natural protocols. This includes Krawczyk's HMQV protocol (CRYPTO 2005) and the protocol...

Confidentiality, authentication, and anonymity are the basic security requirements in broadcast communication, that can be achieved by Digital Signature (DS), encryption, and pseudo-identity (PID) techniques. Signcryption offers both DS and encryption more efficiently than "sign-then-encrypt,". However, compared to hybrid signcryption, it has higher computational and communication costs. Our paper proposes an Anonymous Multi-receiver Certificateless Hybrid Signcryption (AMCLHS) for secure...

The present work builds on previous investigations of the authors (and their collaborators) regarding bridges, a certain type of morphisms between encryption schemes, making a step forward in developing a (category theory) language for studying relations between encryption schemes. Here we analyse the conditions under which bridges can be performed sequentially, formalizing the notion of composability. One of our results gives a sufficient condition for a pair of bridges to be composable. We...

Polynomial commitment schemes allow a prover to commit to a polynomial and later reveal the evaluation of the polynomial on an arbitrary point along with proof of validity. This object is central in the design of many cryptographic schemes such as zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable secret sharing. In the standard definition, the polynomial is known to the prover whereas the evaluation points are not private. In this paper, we put forward the notion of private polynomial commitments that...

Computing the quantile of a massive data stream has been a crucial task in networking and data management. However, existing solutions assume a centralized model where one data owner has access to all data. In this paper, we put forward a study of secure quantile aggregation between private data streams, where data streams owned by different parties would like to obtain a quantile of the union of their data without revealing anything else about their inputs. To this end, we designed efficient...

Public-key encryption with keyword search (PEKS) was first proposed by Boneh et al. (EUROCRYPT 2004), achieving the ability to search for ciphertext files. Nevertheless, it is vulnerable to inside keyword guessing attacks (IKGA). Public-key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS), introduced by Huang et al. (Inf. Sci. 2017), on the other hand, is secure against IKGA. Nonetheless, it is susceptible to quantum computing attacks. Liu et al. and Cheng et al. addressed this problem...

In this work we are interested in evaluating the possibility of extracting information from radio-enabled embedded-systems from a long distance. That is, our focus is capturing information from sources in the micrometer to tens of centimeters scale, such as intra- or inter- device busses, board-level routing traces etc. Moreover, we focus on distances in the range of millimeters to tens of centimeters from the (on-chip or on-board) embedded-system Tx Antenna to the signal source....

We propose hinTS --- a new threshold signature scheme built on top of the widely used BLS signatures. Our scheme enjoys the following attractive features: \begin{itemize} \item A {\em silent setup} process where the joint public key of the parties is computed as a deterministic function of their locally computed public keys. \item Support for {\em dynamic} choice of thresholds and signers, after the silent setup, without further interaction. \item Support for {\em general}...

Recent work on dynamic structured and searchable symmetric encryption has focused on achieving the notion of forward-privacy. This is mainly motivated by the claim that forward-privacy protects against adaptive file injection attacks (Zhang, Katz, Papamanthou, Usenix Security, 2016). In this work, we revisit the notion of forward-privacy in several respects. First, we observe that forward-privacy does not necessarily guarantee security against adaptive file injection attacks if a scheme...

Spiking neural networks gain attention due to low power properties and event-based operation, making them suitable for usage in resource constrained embedded devices. Such edge devices allow physical access opening the door for side-channel analysis. In this work, we reverse engineer the parameters of a feed-forward spiking neural network implementation with correlation power analysis. Localized measurements of electro-magnetic emanations enable our attack, despite inherent parallelism and...

Side-channel analysis (SCA) attacks manifest a significant challenge to the security of cryptographic devices. In turn, it is generally quite expensive to protect from SCAs (energy, area, performance etc.). In this work we exhibit a significant change in paradigm for SCA attacks: our proposed attack is quite different from conventional SCA attacks and is able to filter out physical measurement noise, algorithmic noise, as well as thwart various countermeasures, and extract information from...

We put forward a non-interactive verifiable secret sharing (NI-VSS) scheme using class groups – we call it cgVSS. Our construction follows the standard framework of encrypting the shares to a set of recipients and generating a non-interactive proof of correct sharing. However, as opposed to prior works, such as Groth’s [Eprint 2021], or Gentry et al.’s [Eurocrypt 2022], we do not require any range proof - this is possible due to the unique structure of class groups, that enables efficient...

In this paper, we propose a generic construction of forward secure public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (FS-PAEKS) from PAEKS. In addition to PAEKS, we employ 0/1 encodings proposed by Lin et al. (ACNS 2005). Here, forward security means that a newly generated ciphertext is not allowed to be searched by previously generated trapdoors. We also show that the Jiang et al. FS-PAEKS scheme (The Computer Journal 2023) does not provide forward security. Our generic construction...

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) lets a evolving group of clients agree on a sequence of group keys. An important application of CGKA is scalable asynchronous end-to-end (E2E) encrypted group messaging. A major problem preventing the use of CGKA over unreliable infrastructure are so-called forks. A fork occurs when group members have diverging views of the group's history (and thus its current state); e.g. due to network or server failures. Once communication channels are restored,...

The Extended Access Control (EAC) protocol for authenticated key agreement is mainly used to secure connections between machine-readable travel documents (MRTDs) and inspection terminals, but it can also be adopted as a universal solution for attribute-based access control with smart cards. The security of EAC is currently based on the Diffie-Hellman problem, which may not be hard when considering quantum computers. In this work we present PQ-EAC, a quantum-resistant version of the EAC...

This paper puts forward a multi-round quantum key search model for symmetric ciphers. We turn an unstructured key search for symmetric ciphers into a nested structured quantum search. By the preimage of punctured ciphertexts (or keystream), we get a convergent sequence of subspaces of the full key space. In each round, our search is performed only in a subspace containing the real key, while the rest part is removed from search space. We find out several parameters, the length $s$ of...

Recent advancements in low-cost cryptography have converged upon the use of nanoscale level structural variances as sources of entropy that is unique to each device. Consequently, such delay-based Physically Unclonable Functions or (PUFs) have gained traction for several cryptographic applications. In light of recent machine learning (ML) attacks on delay-based PUFs, the common trend among PUF designers is to either introduce non-linearity using XORs or input transformations applied on the...

Hierarchical Identity Based Encryption (HIBE) is a well studied, versatile tool used in many cryptographic protocols. Yet, since the performance of all known HIBE constructions is broadly considered prohibitive, some real-world applications avoid relying on HIBE at the expense of security. A prominent example for this is secure messaging: Strongly secure messaging protocols are provably equivalent to Key-Updatable Key Encapsulation Mechanisms (KU-KEMs; Balli et al., Asiacrypt 2020); so far,...

Current messaging protocols are incapable of detecting active man-in-the-middle threats. Even common continuous key agreement protocols such as Signal, which offers forward secrecy and post-compromise security, are dependent on the adversary being passive immediately following state compromise, and healing guarantees are lost if the attacker is not. This work offers the first solution for detecting active man-in-the-middle attacks on such protocols by extending authentication beyond the...

Dynamic Symmetric Searchable Encryption (SSE) enables a user to outsource the storage of an encrypted database to an untrusted server, while retaining the ability to privately search and update the outsourced database. The performance bottleneck of SSE schemes typically comes from their I/O efficiency. Over the last few years, a line of work has substantially improved that bottleneck. However, all existing I/O-efficient SSE schemes have a common limitation: they are not forward-secure. Since...

The powerful no-cloning principle of quantum mechanics can be leveraged to achieve interesting primitives, referred to as unclonable primitives, that are impossible to achieve classically. In the past few years, we have witnessed a surge of new unclonable primitives. While prior works have mainly focused on establishing feasibility results, another equally important direction, that of understanding the relationship between different unclonable primitives is still in its nascent stages....

TLS termination, which is essential to network and security infrastructure providers, is an extremely latency sensitive operation that benefits from access to sensitive key material close to the edge. However, increasing regulatory concerns prompt customers to demand sophisticated controls on where their keys may be accessed. While traditional access-control solutions rely on a highly available centralized process to enforce access, the round-trip latency and decreased fault tolerance make...

Since the invention of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies have gained huge popularity. Crypto wallet, as the tool to store and manage the cryptographic keys, is the primary entrance for the public to access cryptocurrency funds. Deterministic wallet is an advanced wallet mech- anism that has been proposed to achieve some appealing virtues, such as low-maintenance, easy backup and recovery, supporting functionali- ties required by cryptocurrencies, and so on. But deterministic wallets still...

On-line/off-line encryption schemes enable the fast encryption of a message from a pre-computed coupon. The paradigm was put forward in the case of digital signatures. This work introduces a compact public-key additively homomorphic encryption scheme. The scheme is semantically secure under the decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption. Compared to Paillier cryptosystem, it merely requires one or two integer additions in the on-line phase and no increase in the ciphertext size. This...

Functional Encryption (FE) is a modern cryptographic technique that allows users to learn only a specific function of the encrypted data and nothing else about its actual content. While the first notions of security in FE revolved around the privacy of the encrypted data, more recent approaches also consider the privacy of the computed function. While in the public key setting, only a limited level of function-privacy can be achieved, in the private-key setting privacy potential is...

Messaging Layer Security (MLS), currently undergoing standardization at the IETF, is an asynchronous group messaging protocol that aims to be efficient for large dynamic groups, while providing strong guarantees like forward secrecy (FS) and post-compromise security (PCS). While prior work on MLS has extensively studied its group key establishment component (called TreeKEM), many flaws in early designs of MLS have stemmed from its group integrity and authentication mechanisms that are not as...

The building blocks for secure messaging apps, such as Signal’s X3DH and Double Ratchet (DR) protocols, have received a lot of attention from the research community. They have notably been proved to meet strong security properties even in the case of compromise such as Forward Secrecy (FS) and Post-Compromise Security (PCS). However, there is a lack of formal study of these properties at the application level. Whereas the research works have studied such properties in the context of a single...

We investigate the security of the NIST Lightweight Crypto Competition’s Finalists against side-channel attacks. We start with a mode-level analysis that allows us to put forward three candidates (As- con, ISAP and Romulus-T) that stand out for their leakage properties and do not require a uniform protection of all their computations thanks to (expensive) implementation-level countermeasures. We then implement these finalists and evaluate their respective performances. Our results confirm...

In this work, we put forward the notion of ``efficiently testable circuits'' and provide circuit compilers that transform any circuit into an efficiently testable one. Informally, a circuit is testable if one can detect tampering with the circuit by evaluating it on a small number of inputs from some test set. Our technical contribution is a compiler that transforms any circuit $C$ into a testable circuit $(\widehat{C}, \widehat{T})$ for which we can detect arbitrary tampering with all...

This paper analyses the lightweight, sponge-based NAEAD mode $\textsf{ISAP}$, one of the finalists of the NIST Lightweight Cryptography (LWC) standardisation project, that achieves high-throughput with inherent protection against differential power analysis (DPA). We observe that $\textsf{ISAP}$ requires $256$-bit capacity in the authentication module to satisfy the NIST LWC security criteria. In this paper, we study the analysis carefully and observe that this is primarily due to the...

The double boomerang connectivity table (DBCT) is a new table proposed recently to capture the behavior of two consecutive S-boxes in boomerang attacks. In this paper, we observe an interesting property of DBCT of S-box that the ladder switch and the S-box switch happen in most cases for two continuous S-boxes, and for some S-boxes only S-box switch and ladder switch are possible. This property implies an additional criterion for S-boxes to resist the boomerang attacks and provides as well a...

Today, two-party secure messaging is well-understood and widely adopted on the Internet, e.g., Signal and WhatsApp. Multiparty protocols for secure group messaging on the other hand are less mature and many protocols with different tradeoffs exist. Generally, such protocols require parties to first agree on a shared secret group key and then periodically update it while preserving forward secrecy (FS) and post compromise security (PCS). We present a new framework, called a key lattice,...

During the last decades there has been an increasing interest in Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and, especially, the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) in practice. The rather recent developments of emergent technologies, such as blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT), have motivated researchers and developers to construct new cryptographic hardware accelerators for ECDSA. Different types of optimizations (either platform dependent or algorithmic) were presented in...

A ring signature scheme allows a group member to generate a signature on behalf of the whole group, while the verifier can not tell who computed this signature. However, most predecessors do not guarantee security from the secret key leakage of signers. In 2002, Anderson proposed the forward security mechanism to reduce the effect of such leakage. In this paper, we construct the first lattice-based ring signature scheme with forward security. Our scheme combines the binary tree and lattice...

CRYSTALS-Dilithium has been selected by the NIST as the new stan- dard for post-quantum digital signatures. In this work, we revisit the side-channel countermeasures of Dilithium in three directions. First, we improve its sensitivity analysis by classifying intermediate computations according to their physical security requirements. Second, we provide improved gadgets dedicated to Dilithium, taking advantage of recent advances in masking conversion algorithms. Third, we combine these...

Continuous Group Key Agreement (CGKA) is the basis of modern Secure Group Messaging (SGM) protocols. At a high level, a CGKA protocol enables a group of users to continuously compute a shared (evolving) secret while members of the group add new members, remove other existing members, and perform state updates. The state updates allow CGKA to offer desirable security features such as forward secrecy and post-compromise security. CGKA is regarded as a practical primitive in the...

Forward-secure encryption (FSE) allows communicating parties to refresh their keys across epochs, in a way that compromising the current secret key leaves all prior encrypted communication secure. We investigate a novel dimension in the design of FSE schemes: fast-forwarding (FF). This refers to the ability of a stale communication party, that is "stuck" in an old epoch, to efficiently "catch up" to the newest state, and frequently arises in practice. While this dimension was not explicitly...

Privacy-Preserving Authenticated Key Exchange (PPAKE) provides protection both for the session keys and the identity information of the involved parties. In this paper, we introduce the concept of robustness into PPAKE. Robustness enables each user to confirm whether itself is the target recipient of the first round message in the protocol. With the help of robustness, a PPAKE protocol can successfully avoid the heavy redundant communications and computations caused by the ambiguity of...

We introduce puncturable key wrapping (PKW), a new cryptographic primitive that supports fine-grained forward security properties in symmetric key hierarchies. We develop syntax and security definitions, along with provably secure constructions for PKW from simpler components (AEAD schemes and puncturable PRFs). We show how PKW can be applied in two distinct scenarios. First, we show how to use PKW to achieve forward security for TLS 1.3 0-RTT session resumption, even when the server's...

Anonymity is an (abstract) security goal that is especially important to threatened user groups. Therefore, widely deployed communication protocols implement various measures to hide different types of information (i.e., metadata) about their users. Before actually defining anonymity, we consider an attack vector about which targeted user groups can feel concerned: continuous, temporary exposure of their secrets. Examples for this attack vector include intentionally planted viruses on...