There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

We propose a fully functional identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme. The scheme has chosen ciphertext security in the random oracle model assuming a variant of the computational Diffie--Hellman problem. Our system is based on bilinear maps between groups. The Weil pairing on elliptic curves is an example of such a map. We give precise definitions for secure IBE schemes and give several applications for such systems.

/pdf/identity-based-encryption-from-the-weil-pairing-1x4254f2zc.pdf

Identity-Based Encryption from the Weil Pairing

In several distributed systems a user should only be able to access data if a user posses a certain set of credentials or attributes. Currently, the only method for enforcing such policies is to employ a trusted server to store the data and mediate access control. However, if any server storing the data is compromised, then the confidentiality of the data will be compromised. In this paper we present a system for realizing complex access control on encrypted data that we call ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption. By using our techniques encrypted data can be kept confidential even if the storage server is untrusted; moreover, our methods are secure against collusion attacks. Previous attribute-based encryption systems used attributes to describe the encrypted data and built policies into user's keys; while in our system attributes are used to describe a user's credentials, and a party encrypting data determines a policy for who can decrypt. Thus, our methods are conceptually closer to traditional access control methods such as role-based access control (RBAC). In addition, we provide an implementation of our system and give performance measurements.

/pdf/ciphertext-policy-attribute-based-encryption-q09jxdyx4n.pdf

Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption

As more sensitive data is shared and stored by third-party sites on the Internet, there will be a need to encrypt data stored at these sites. One drawback of encrypting data, is that it can be selectively shared only at a coarse-grained level (i.e., giving another party your private key). We develop a new cryptosystem for fine-grained sharing of encrypted data that we call Key-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (KP-ABE). In our cryptosystem, ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes and private keys are associated with access structures that control which ciphertexts a user is able to decrypt. We demonstrate the applicability of our construction to sharing of audit-log information and broadcast encryption. Our construction supports delegation of private keys which subsumesHierarchical Identity-Based Encryption (HIBE).

/pdf/attribute-based-encryption-for-fine-grained-access-control-3fjqefx4um.pdf

Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data

We introduce a short signature scheme based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman assumption on certain elliptic and hyperelliptic curves. The signature length is half the size of a DSA signature for a similar level of security. Our short signature scheme is designed for systems where signatures are typed in by a human or signatures are sent over a low-bandwidth channel.

/pdf/short-signatures-from-the-weil-pairing-5ajupg0cpi.pdf

Short Signatures from the Weil Pairing

Recently, there has been huge progress in the field of concretely efficient secure computation, even while providing security in the presence of malicious adversaries. This is especially the case in the two-party setting, where constant-round protocols exist that remain fast even over slow networks. However, in the multi-party setting, all concretely efficient fully-secure protocols, such as SPDZ, require many rounds of communication.

/pdf/efficient-constant-round-multi-party-computation-combining-2rpmil7cui.pdf

Efficient Constant Round Multi-party Computation Combining BMR and SPDZ

Methods from provable security, developed over the last twenty years, have been recently extensively used to support emerging standards. However, the fact that proofs also need time to be validated through public discussion was somehow overlooked. This became clear when Shoup found that there was a gap in the widely believed security proof of OAEP against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks. We give more examples, showing that provable security is more subtle than it at first appears. Our examples are in the area of signature schemes: one is related to the security proof of ESIGN and the other two to the security proof of ECDSA. We found that the ESIGN proof does not hold in the usual model of security, but in a more restricted one. Concerning ECDSA, both examples are based on the concept of duplication: one shows how to manufacture ECDSA keys that allow for two distinct messages with identical signatures, a duplicate signature; the other shows that from any message-signature pair, one can derive a second signature of the same message, the malleability. The security proof provided by Brown [7] does not account for our first example while it surprisingly rules out malleability, thus offering a proof of a property, non-malleability, that the actual scheme does not possess.

Flaws in applying proof methodologies to signature schemes

This paper is motivated by the observation that existing security models for direct anonymous attestation (DAA) have problems to the extent that insecure protocols may be deemed secure when analysed under these models. This is particularly disturbing as DAA is one of the few complex cryptographic protocols resulting from recent theoretical advances actually deployed in real life. Moreover, standardization bodies are currently looking into designing the next generation of such protocols. Our first contribution is to identify issues in existing models for DAA and explain how these errors allow for proving security of insecure protocols. These issues are exhibited in all deployed and proposed DAA protocols (although they can often be easily fixed). Our second contribution is a new security model for a class of "pre-DAA scheme", that is, DAA schemes where the computation on the user side takes place entirely on the trusted platform. Our model captures more accurately than any previous model the security properties demanded from DAA by the trusted computing group (TCG), the group that maintains the DAA standard. Extending the model from pre-DAA to full DAA is only a matter of refining the trust models on the parties involved. Finally, we present a generic construction of a DAA protocol from new building blocks tailored for anonymous attestation. Some of them are new variations on established ideas and may be of independent interest. We give instantiations for these building blocks that yield a DAA scheme more efficient than the one currently deployed, and as efficient as the one about to be standardized by the TCG which has no valid security proof.

/pdf/anonymous-attestation-with-user-controlled-linkability-57naw1btfn.pdf

Anonymous attestation with user-controlled linkability

Advances in Cryptology - Asiacrypt 2008

The security of BGV-style homomorphic encryption schemes over polynomial rings relies on rings of very large dimension. This large dimension is needed because of the large modulus-to-noise ratio in the key-switching matrices that are used for the top few levels of the evaluated circuit. However, larger noise (and hence smaller modulus-to-noise ratio) is used in lower levels of the circuit, so from a security standpoint it is permissible to switch to lower-dimension rings, thus speeding up the homomorphic operations for the lower levels of the circuit. However, implementing such ring-switching is nontrivial, since these schemes rely on the ring algebraic structure for their homomorphic properties.

A basic ring-switching operation was used by Brakerski, Gentry and Vaikuntanathan, over polynomial rings of the form $\mathbb{Z}[X]/(X^{2^n}+1)$, in the context of bootstrapping. In this work we generalize and extend this technique to work over any cyclotomic ring and show how it can be used not only for bootstrapping but also during the computation itself (in conjunction with the "packed ciphertext" techniques of Gentry, Halevi and Smart).

Nigel P. Smart

Papers

Efficient Constant Round Multi-party Computation Combining BMR and SPDZ

Flaws in applying proof methodologies to signature schemes

Anonymous attestation with user-controlled linkability

Advances in Cryptology - Asiacrypt 2008

Ring switching in BGV-Style homomorphic encryption