Papers tagged as 2019
1. eprint.iacr.org
Bernardo David, Rafael Dowsley, and Mario Larangeira

While many tailor made card game protocols are known, the vast majority of those suffer from three main issues: lack of mechanisms for distributing financial rewards and punishing cheaters, lack of composability guarantees and little flexibility, focusing on the specific game of poker. Even though folklore holds that poker protocols can be used to play any card game, this conjecture remains unproven and, in fact, does not hold for a number of protocols (including recent results). We both tackle the problem of constructing protocols for general card games and initiate a treatment of such protocols in the Universal Composability (UC) framework, introducing an ideal functionality that captures general card games constructed from a set of core card operations. Based on this formalism, we introduce Royale, the first UC-secure general card games which supports financial rewards/penalties enforcement. We remark that Royale also yields the first UC-secure poker protocol. Interestingly, Royale performs better than most previous works (that do not have composability guarantees), which we highlight through a detailed concrete complexity analysis and benchmarks from a prototype implementation.

2. eprint.iacr.org
Xavier Bultel and Pascal Lafourcade

Trick-Taking Games (TTGs) are card games in which each player plays one of his cards in turn according to a given rule. The player with the highest card then wins the trick, i.e., he gets all the cards that have been played during the round. For instance, Spades is a famous TTG proposed by online casinos, where each player must play a card that follows the leading suit when it is possible. Otherwise, he can play any of his cards. In such a game, a dishonest user can play a wrong card even if he has cards of the leading suit. Since his other cards are hidden, there is no way to detect the cheat. Hence, the other players realize the problem later, i.e., when the cheater plays a card that he is not supposed to have. In this case, the game is biased and is canceled. Our goal is to design protocols that prevent such a cheat for TTGs. We give a security model for secure Spades protocols, and we design a scheme called SecureSpades. This scheme is secure under the Decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption in the random oracle model. Our model and our scheme can be extended to several other TTGs, such as Belotte, Whist, Bridge, etc.

3. eprint.iacr.org
Nimrod Aviram, Kai Gellert, and Tibor Jager

The TLS 1.3 0-RTT mode enables a client reconnecting to a server to send encrypted application-layer data in “0-RTT” (“zero round-trip time”), without the need for a prior interactive handshake. This fundamentally requires the server to reconstruct the previous session’s encryption secrets upon receipt of the client’s first message. The standard techniques to achieve this are Session Caches or, alternatively, Session Tickets. The former provides forward security and resistance against replay attacks, but requires a large amount of server-side storage. The latter requires negligible storage, but provides no forward security and is known to be vulnerable to replay attacks.

In this paper, we first formally define session resumption protocols as an abstract perspective on mechanisms like Session Caches and Session Tickets. We give a new generic construction that provably provides forward security and replay resilience, based on puncturable pseudorandom functions (PPRFs). This construction can immediately be used in TLS 1.3 0-RTT and deployed unilaterally by servers, without requiring any changes to clients or the protocol.

We then describe two new constructions of PPRFs, which are particularly suitable for use for forward-secure and replay-resilient session resumption in TLS~1.3. The first construction is based on the strong RSA assumption. Compared to standard Session Caches, for “128-bit security” it reduces the required server storage by a factor of almost 20, when instantiated in a way such that key derivation and puncturing together are cheaper on average than one full exponentiation in an RSA group. Hence, a 1 GB Session Cache can be replaced with only about 51 MBs of storage, which significantly reduces the amount of secure memory required. For larger security parameters or in exchange for more expensive computations, even larger storage reductions are achieved. The second construction combines a standard binary tree PPRF with a new “domain extension” technique. For a reasonable choice of parameters, this reduces the required storage by a factor of up to 5 compared to a standard Session Cache. It employs only symmetric cryptography, is suitable for high-traffic scenarios, and can serve thousands of tickets per second.

4. eprint.iacr.org
Joanne Woodage and Dan Shumow

We investigate the security properties of the three deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) mechanisms in the NIST SP 800-90A standard [2]. This standard received a considerable amount of negative attention, due to the controversy surrounding the now retracted DualEC-DRBG, which was included in earlier versions. Perhaps because of the attention paid to the DualEC, the other algorithms in the standard have received surprisingly patchy analysis to date, despite widespread deployment. This paper addresses a number of these gaps in analysis, with a particular focus on HASH-DRBG and HMAC-DRBG. We uncover a mix of positive and less positive results. On the positive side, we prove (with a caveat) the robustness [16] of HASH-DRBG and HMAC-DRBG in the random oracle model (ROM). Regarding the caveat, we show that if an optional input is omitted, then – contrary to claims in the standard — HMAC-DRBG does not even achieve the (weaker) property of forward security. We also conduct a more informal and practice-oriented exploration of flexibility in implementation choices permitted by the standard. Specifically, we argue that these DRBGs have the property that partial state leakage may lead security to break down in unexpected ways. We highlight implementation choices allowed by the overly flexible standard that exacerbate both the likelihood, and impact, of such attacks. While our attacks are theoretical, an analysis of two open source implementations of CTR-DRBG shows that potentially problematic implementation choices are made in the real world.

5. eprint.iacr.org
Karl Wüst, Sinisa Matetic, Moritz Schneider, Ian Miers, Kari Kostiainen, and Srdjan Capkun

Cryptocurrencies record transactions between parties in a blockchain maintained by a peer-to-peer network. In most cryptocurrencies, transactions explicitly identify the previous transaction providing the funds they are spending, revealing the amount and sender/recipient pseudonyms. This is a considerable privacy issue. Zerocash resolves this by using zero-knowledge proofs to hide both the source, destination and amount of the transacted funds. To receive payments in Zerocash, however, the recipient must scan the blockchain, testing if each transaction is destined for them. This is not practical for mobile and other bandwidth constrained devices. In this paper, we build ZLiTE, a system that can support the so-called “light clients”, which can receive transactions aided by a server equipped with a Trusted Execution Environment. Even with the use of a TEE, this is not a trivial problem. First, we must ensure that server processing the blockchain does not leak sensitive information via side channels. Second, we need to design a bandwidth efficient mechanism for the client to keep an up-to-date version of the witness needed in order to spend the funds they previously received.

6. eprint.iacr.org
Viet Tung Hoang, David Miller and Ni Trieu

We improve the attack of Durak and Vaudenay (CRYPTO’17) on NIST Format-Preserving Encryption standard FF3, reducing the running time from O(N5) to O(N17/6) for domain ZN×ZN. Concretely, DV’s attack needs about 2^50 operations to recover encrypted 6-digit PINs, whereas ours only spends about 2^30 operations. In realizing this goal, we provide a pedagogical example of how to use distinguishing attacks to speed up slide attacks. In addition, we improve the running time of DV’s known-plaintext attack on 4-round Feistel of domain ZN×ZN from O(N3) time to just O(N5/3) time. We also generalize our attacks to a general domain ZM×ZN, allowing one to recover encrypted SSNs using about 2^50 operations. Finally, we provide some proof-of-concept implementations to empirically validate our results.

7. eprint.iacr.org
Hao Chen, Ilaria Chillotti and Yongsoo Song

Since Cheon et al. introduced a homomorphic encryption scheme for approximate arithmetic (Asiacrypt ’17), it has been recognized as suitable for important real-life usecases of homomorphic encryption, including training of machine learning models over encrypted data. A follow up work by Cheon et al. (Eurocrypt ’18) described an approximate bootstrapping procedure for the scheme. In this work, we improve upon the previous bootstrapping result. We improve the amortized bootstrapping time per plaintext slot by two orders of magnitude, from ∼ 1 second to ∼ 0.01 second. To achieve this result, we adopt a smart level-collapsing technique for evaluating DFT-like linear transforms on a ciphertext. Also, we replace the Taylor approximation of the sine function with a more accurate and numerically stable Chebyshev approximation, and design a modified version of the Paterson-Stockmeyer algorithm for fast evaluation of Chebyshev polynomials over encrypted data.

8. smeiklej.com
Pierre Reibel, Haaroon Yousaf, and Sarah Meiklejohn

Interest in cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed since their introduction a decade ago, with hundreds of billions of dollars now invested across a landscape of thousands of different cryptocurrencies. While there is significant diversity, there is also a significant number of scams as people seek to exploit the current popularity. In this paper, we seek to identify the extent of innovation in the cryptocurrency landscape using the open-source repositories associated with each one. Among other findings, we observe that while many cryptocurrencies are largely unchanged copies of Bitcoin, the use of Ethereum as a platform has enabled the deployment of cryptocurrencies with more diverse functionalities.

9. ifca.ai
Sanket Kanjalkar, Joseph Kuo, Yunqi Li, and Andrew Miller

We present a new resource exhaustion attack affecting several chain-based proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies, and in particular Qtum, a top 30 cryptocurrency by market capitalization ($300M as of Sep ’18). In brief, these cryptocurrencies do not adequately validate the proof-of-stake before allocating resources to data received from peers. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability, even without any stake at all, simply by connecting to a victim and sending malformed blocks, which the victim stores on disk or in RAM, eventually leading to a crash. We demonstrate and benchmark the attack through experiments attacking our own node on the Qtum main network; in our experiment we are able to fill the victim’s RAM at a rate of 2MB per second, or the disk at a rate of 6MB per second. We have begun a responsible disclosure of this vulnerability to appropriate development teams. Our disclosure includes a Docker-based reproducibility kit using the Python-based test framework. This problem has gone unnoticed for several years. Although the attack can be mitigated, this appears to require giving up optimizations enjoyed by proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, underscoring the difficulty in implementing and deploying chain-based proof-of-stake. 10. eprint.iacr.org Chaya Ganesh, Claudio Orlandi, and Daniel Tschudi Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are emerging as one of the most promising alternative to the wasteful proof-of-work (PoW) protocols for consensus in Blockchains (or distributed ledgers). However, current PoS protocols inherently disclose both the identity and the wealth of the stakeholders, and thus seem incompatible with privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies (such as ZCash, Monero, etc.). In this paper we initiate the formal study for PoS protocols with privacy properties. Our results include: • A (theoretical) feasibility result showing that it is possible to construct a general class of private PoS (PPoS) protocols; and to add privacy to a wide class of PoS protocols, • A privacy-preserving version of a popular PoS protocol, Ouroboros Praos. Towards our result, we define the notion of anonymous verifiable random function, which we believe is of independent interest. 11. eprint.iacr.org Phil Daian, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi Decentralized cryptocurrencies have pushed deployments of distributed consensus to more stringent environments than ever before. Most existing protocols rely on proofs-of-work which require expensive computational puzzles to enforce, imprecisely speaking, “one vote per unit of computation”. The enormous amount of energy wasted by these protocols has been a topic of central debate, and well-known cryptocurrencies have announced it a top priority to alternative paradigms. Among the proposed alternative solutions, proofs-of-stake protocols have been of particular interest, where roughly speaking, the idea is to enforce “one vote per unit of stake”. Although the community have rushed to propose numerous candidates for proofs-of-stake, no existing protocol has offered formal proofs of security, which we believe to be a critical, indispensible ingredient of a distributed consensus protocol, particularly one that is to underly a high-value cryptocurrency system. In this work, we seek to address the following basic questions: • What kind of functionalities and robustness requirements should a consensus candidate offer to be suitable in a proof-of-stake application? • Can we design a provably secure protocol that satisfies these requirements? To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to formally articulate a set of requirements for consensus candidates for proofs-of-stake. We argue that any consensus protocol satisfying these properties can be used for proofs-of-stake, as long as money does not switch hands too quickly. Moreover, we provide the first consensus candidate that provably satisfies the desired robustness properties. 12. eprint.iacr.org Joachim Breitner and Nadia Heninger In this paper, we compute hundreds of Bitcoin private keys and dozens of Ethereum, Ripple, SSH, and HTTPS private keys by carrying out cryptanalytic attacks against digital signatures contained in public blockchains and Internet-wide scans. The ECDSA signature algorithm requires the generation of a per-message secret nonce. If this nonce is not generated uniformly at random, an attacker can potentially exploit this bias to compute the long-term signing key. We use a lattice-based algorithm for solving the hidden number problem to efficiently compute private ECDSA keys that were used with biased signature nonces due to multiple apparent implementation vulnerabilities. 13. eprint.iacr.org Joël Alwen, Sandro Coretti, and Yevgeniy Dodis Signal is a famous secure messaging protocol used by billions of people, by virtue of many secure text messaging applications including Signal itself, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Skype, and Google Allo. At its core it uses the concept of “double ratcheting,” where every message is encrypted and authenticated using a fresh symmetric key; it has many attractive properties, such as forward security, post-compromise security, and “immediate (no-delay) decryption,” which had never been achieved in combination by prior messaging protocols. While the formal analysis of the Signal protocol, and ratcheting in general, has attracted a lot of recent attention, we argue that none of the existing analyses is fully satisfactory. To address this problem, we give a clean and general definition of secure messaging, which clearly indicates the types of security we expect, including forward security, post-compromise security, and immediate decryption. We are the first to explicitly formalize and model the immediate decryption property, which implies (among other things) that parties seamlessly recover if a given message is permanently lost—a property not achieved by any of the recent “provable alternatives to Signal.” We build a modular “generalized Signal protocol” from the following components: (a) continuous key agreement (CKA), a clean primitive we introduce and which can be easily and generically built from public-key encryption (not just Diffie-Hellman as is done in the current Signal protocol) and roughly models “public-key ratchets;” (b) forward-secure authenticated encryption with associated data (FS-AEAD), which roughly captures “symmetric-key ratchets;” and (c) a two-input hash function that is a pseudorandom function (resp. generator with input) in its first (resp. second) input, which we term PRF-PRNG. As a result, in addition to instantiating our framework in a way resulting in the existing, widely-used Diffie-Hellman based Signal protocol, we can easily get post-quantum security and not rely on random oracles in the analysis. We further show that our design can be elegantly extended to include other forms of “fine-grained state compromise” recently studied at CRYPTO’18, but without sacrificing the immediate decryption property. However, we argue that the additional security offered by these modifications is unlikely to justify the efficiency hit of using much heavier public-key cryptography in place of symmetric-key cryptography. 14. eprint.iacr.org Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Michael Riabzev, Nicholas Spooner, Madars Virza, and Nicholas P. Ward We design, implement, and evaluate a zkSNARK for Rank-1 Constraint Satisfaction (R1CS), a widely-deployed NP-complete language that is undergoing standardization. Our construction uses a transparent setup, is plausibly post-quantum secure, and uses lightweight cryptography. A proof attesting to the satisfiability of n constraints has size O(log2n); it can be produced with O(nlogn) field operations and verified with O(n). At 128 bits of security, proofs are less than 130kB even for several million constraints, more than 20x shorter than prior zkSNARK with similar features. A key ingredient of our construction is a new Interactive Oracle Proof (IOP) for solving a univariate analogue of the classical sumcheck problem [LFKN92], originally studied for multivariate polynomials. Our protocol verifies the sum of entries of a Reed–Solomon codeword over any subgroup of a field. We also provide libiop, an open-source library for writing IOP-based arguments, in which a toolchain of transformations enables programmers to write new arguments by writing simple IOP sub-components. We have used this library to specify our construction and prior ones. 15. eprint.iacr.org Ivan Damgård, Daniel Escudero, Tore Frederiksen, Marcel Keller, Peter Scholl, and Nikolaj Volgushev At CRYPTO 2018 Cramer et al. presented SPDZ2k, a new secret-sharing based protocol for actively secure multi-party computation against a dishonest majority, that works over rings instead of fields. Their protocol uses slightly more communication than competitive schemes working over fields. However, their approach allows for arithmetic to be carried out using native 32 or 64-bit CPU operations rather than modulo a large prime. The authors thus conjectured that the increased communication would be more than made up for by the increased efficiency of implementations. In this work we answer their conjecture in the affirmative. We do so by implementing their scheme, and designing and implementing new efficient protocols for equality test, comparison, and truncation over rings. We further show that these operations find application in the machine learning domain, and indeed significantly outperform their field-based competitors. In particular, we implement and benchmark oblivious algorithms for decision tree and support vector machine (SVM) evaluation. 16. eprint.iacr.org Evgenios M. Kornaropoulos, Charalampos Papamanthou, and Roberto Tamassia Recent works by Kellaris et al. (CCS’16) and Lacharite et al. (SP’18) demonstrated attacks of data recovery for encrypted databases that support rich queries such as range queries. In this paper, we develop the first data recovery attacks on encrypted databases supporting one-dimensional k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) queries, which are widely used in spatial data management. Our attacks exploit a generic k-NN query leakage profile: the attacker observes the identifiers of matched records. We consider both unordered responses, where the leakage is a set, and ordered responses, where the leakage is a k-tuple ordered by distance from the query point. As a first step, we perform a theoretical feasibility study on exact reconstruction, i.e., recovery of the exact plaintext values of the encrypted database. For ordered responses, we show that exact reconstruction is feasible if the attacker has additional access to some auxiliary information that is normally not available in practice. For unordered responses, we prove that exact reconstruction is impossible due to the infinite number of valid reconstructions. As a next step, we propose practical and more realistic approximate reconstruction attacks so as to recover an approximation of the plaintext values. For ordered responses, we show that after observing enough query responses, the attacker can approximate the client’s encrypted database with considerable accuracy. For unordered responses we characterize the set of valid reconstructions as a convex polytope in a k-dimensional space and present a rigorous attack that reconstructs the plaintext database with bounded approximation error. As multidimensional spatial data can be efficiently processed by mapping it to one dimension via Hilbert curves, we demonstrate our approximate reconstruction attacks on privacy-sensitive geolocation data. Our experiments on real-world datasets show that our attacks reconstruct the plaintext values with relative error ranging from 2.9% to 0.003%. 17. eprint.iacr.org Jack Doerner, Yashvanth Kondi, Eysa Lee, and abhi shelat Cryptocurrency applications have spurred a resurgence of interest in the computation of ECDSA signatures using threshold protocols—that is, protocols in which the signing key is secret-shared among n parties, of which any subset of size t must interact in order to compute a signature. Among the resulting works to date, that of Doerner et al. requires the most natural assumptions while also achieving the best practical signing speed. It is, however, limited to the setting in which the threshold is two. We propose an extension of their scheme to arbitrary thresholds, and prove it secure against a malicious adversary corrupting up to one party less than the threshold under only the Computational Diffie-Hellman Assumption in the Global Random Oracle model, an assumption strictly weaker than those under which ECDSA is proven. Whereas the best current schemes for threshold-two ECDSA signing use a Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange to calculate each signature’s nonce, a direct adaptation of this technique to a larger threshold t would incur a round count linear in t; thus we abandon it in favor of a new mechanism that yields a protocol requiring ⌈log(t)⌉+6 rounds in total. We design a new consistency check, similar in spirit to that of Doerner et al., but suitable for an arbitrary number of participants, and we optimize the underlying two-party multiplication protocol on which our scheme is based, reducing its concrete communication and computation costs. We implement our scheme and evaluate it among groups of up to 256 of co-located and geographically-distributed parties, and among small groups of embedded devices. We find that in the LAN setting, our scheme outperforms all prior works by orders of magnitude, and that it is efficient enough for use even on smartphones or hardware tokens. In the WAN setting we find that, despite its logarithmic round count, our protocol outperforms the best constant-round protocols in realistic scenarios. 18. eprint.iacr.org Eyal Ronen, Robert Gillham, Daniel Genkin, Adi Shamir, David Wong, and Yuval Yarom At CRYPTO’98, Bleichenbacher published his seminal paper which described a padding oracle attack against RSA implementations that follow the PKCS #1 v1.5 standard. Over the last twenty years researchers and implementors had spent a huge amount of effort in developing and deploying numerous mitigation techniques which were supposed to plug all the possible sources of Bleichenbacher-like leakages. However, as we show in this paper most implementations are still vulnerable to several novel types of attack based on leakage from various microarchitectural side channels: Out of nine popular implementations of TLS that we tested, we were able to break the security of seven implementations with practical proof-of-concept attacks. We demonstrate the feasibility of using those Cache-like ATacks (CATs) to perform a downgrade attack against any TLS connection to a vulnerable server, using a BEAST-like Man in the Browser attack. The main difficulty we face is how to perform the thousands of oracle queries required before the browser’s imposed timeout (which is 30 seconds for almost all browsers, with the exception of Firefox which can be tricked into extending this period). The attack seems to be inherently sequential (due to its use of adaptive chosen ciphertext queries), but we describe a new way to parallelize Bleichenbacher-like padding attacks by exploiting any available number of TLS servers that share the same public key certificate. With this improvement, we could demonstrate the feasibility of a downgrade attack which could recover all the 2048 bits of the RSA plaintext (including the premaster secret value, which suffices to establish a secure connection) from five available TLS servers in under 30 seconds. This sequential-to-parallel transformation of such attacks can be of independent interest, speeding up and facilitating other side channel attacks on RSA implementations. 19. files.sri.inf.ethz.ch Samuel Steffen, Benjamin Bichsel, Mario Gersbach, Noa Melchior, Petar Tsankov and Martin Vechev Privacy concerns of smart contracts are a major roadblock preventing their wider adoption. A promising approach to protect private data is hiding it with cryptographic primitives and then enforcing correctness of state updates by Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge (NIZK) proofs. Unfortunately, NIZK statements are less expressive than smart contracts, forcing developers to keep some functionality in the contract. This results in scattered logic, split across contract code and NIZK statements, with unclear privacy guarantees. To address these problems, we present the zkay language, which introduces privacy types defining owners of private values. zkay contracts are statically type checked to (i) ensure they are realizable using NIZK proofs and (ii) prevent unintended information leaks. Moreover, the logic of zkay contracts is easy to follow by just ignoring privacy types. To enforce zkay contracts, we automatically transform them into contracts equivalent in terms of privacy and functionality, yet executable on public blockchains. We evaluated our approach on a proof-of-concept implementation generating Solidity contracts and implemented 10 interesting example contracts in zkay. Our results indicate that zkay is practical: On-chain cost for executing the transformed contracts is around 1M gas per transaction (~0.50US$) and off-chain cost is moderate.

20. eprint.iacr.org
Johannes Blömer, Jan Bobolz, Denis Diemert and Fabian Eidens

In this paper, we introduce updatable anonymous credential systems (UACS) and use them to construct a new privacy-preserving incentive system. In a UACS, a user holding a credential certifying some attributes can interact with the corresponding issuer to update his attributes. During this, the issuer knows which update function is run, but does not learn the user’s previous attributes. Hence the update process preserves anonymity of the user. One example for a class of update functions are additive updates of integer attributes, where the issuer increments an unknown integer attribute value v by some known value k. This kind of update is motivated by an application of UACS to incentive systems. Users in an incentive system can anonymously accumulate points, e.g. in a shop at checkout, and spend them later, e.g. for a discount.

21. eprint.iacr.org
Jun Furukawa and Yehuda Lindell

Secure multiparty computation (MPC) enables a set of parties to securely carry out a joint computation of their private inputs without revealing anything but the output. Protocols for semi-honest adversaries guarantee security as long as the corrupted parties run the specified protocol and ensure that nothing is leaked in the transcript. In contrast, protocols for malicious adversaries guarantee security in the presence of arbitrary adversaries who can run any attack strategy. Security for malicious adversaries is typically what is needed in practice (and is always preferred), but comes at a significant cost.

In this paper, we present the first protocol for a two-thirds honest majority that achieves security in the presence of malicious adversaries at essentially the exact same cost as the best known protocols for semi-honest adversaries. Our construction is not a general transformation and thus it is possible that better semi-honest protocols will be constructed which do not support our transformation. Nevertheless, for the current state-of-the-art for many parties (based on Shamir sharing), our protocol invokes the best semi-honest multiplication protocol exactly once per multiplication gate (plus some additional local computation that is negligible to the overall cost). Concretely, the best version of our protocol requires each party to send on average of just 2$\frac{2}{3}$ elements per multiplication gate (when the number of multiplication gates is at least the number of parties). This is four times faster than the previous-best protocol of Barak et al. (ACM CCS 2018) for small fields, and twice as fast as the previous-best protocol of Chida et al. (CRYPTO 2018) for large fields.

22. eprint.iacr.org
Phi Hung Le, Samuel Ranellucci and S. Dov Gordon

We construct new protocols for two parties to securely compute on the items in their intersection. Our protocols make use of an untrusted third party that has no input. The use of this party allows us to construct highly efficient protocols that are secure against a single malicious corruption.

23. eprint.iacr.org
Alin Tomescu, Vivek Bhupatiraju, Dimitrios Papadopoulos, Charalampos Papamanthou, Nikos Triandopoulos and Srinivas Devadas

Transparency logs allow users to audit a potentially malicious service, paving the way towards a more accountable Internet. For example, Certificate Transparency (CT) enables domain owners to audit Certificate Authorities (CAs) and detect impersonation attacks. Yet, to achieve their full potential, transparency logs must be bandwidth-efficient when queried by users. Specifically, everyone should be able to efficiently look up log entries by their key and efficiently verify that the log remains append-only. Unfortunately, without additional trust assumptions, current transparency logs cannot provide both small-sized lookup proofs and small-sized append-only proofs. In fact, one of the proofs always requires bandwidth linear in the size of the log, making it expensive for everyone to query the log. In this paper, we address this gap with a new primitive called an append-only authenticated dictionary (AAD). Our construction is the first to achieve (poly)logarithmic size for both proof types and helps reduce bandwidth consumption in transparency logs. This comes at the cost of increased append times and high memory usage, both of which remain to be improved to make practical deployment possible.

24. eprint.iacr.org
Nirvan Tyagi, Ian Miers and Thomas Ristenpart

Messaging systems are used to spread misinformation and other malicious content, often with dire consequences. End-to-end encryption improves privacy but hinders content-based moderation and, in particular, obfuscates the original source of malicious content. We introduce the idea of message traceback, a new cryptographic approach that enables platforms to simultaneously provide end-to-end encryption while also being able to track down the source of malicious content reported by users. We formalize functionality and security goals for message traceback, and detail two constructions that allow revealing a chain of forwarded messages (path traceback) or the entire forwarding tree (tree traceback). We implement and evaluate prototypes of our traceback schemes to highlight their practicality, and provide a discussion of deployment considerations.

25. sphincs.org
Daniel J. Bernstein, Andreas Hülsing, Stefan Kölbl, Ruben Niederhagen, Joost Rijneveld and Peter Schwabe

We introduce SPHINCS+, a stateless hash-based signature framework. SPHINCS+ has significant advantages over the state of the art in terms of speed, signature size, and security, and is among the nine remaining signature schemes in the second round of the NIST PQC standardization project. One of our main contributions in this context is a new few-time signature scheme that we call FORS. Our second main contribution is the introduction of tweakable hash functions and a demonstration how they allow for a unified security analysis of hash-based signature schemes. We give a security reduction for SPHINCS+ using this abstraction and derive secure parameters in accordance with the resulting bound. Finally, we present speed results for our optimized implementation of SPHINCS+ and compare to SPHINCS-256, Gravity-SPHINCS, and Picnic.