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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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Short Signatures from the Weil Pairing

The purpose of this paper is to investigate fixed-point arithmetic in ring-based Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE) schemes. We provide three main contributions: firstly, we investigate the representation of fixed-point numbers. We analyse the two representations from Dowlin et al., representing a fixed-point number as a large integer (encoded as a scaled polynomial) versus a polynomial-based fractional representation. We show that these two are, in fact, isomorphic by presenting an explicit isomorphism between the two that enables us to map the parameters from one representation to another. Secondly, given a computation and a bound on the fixed-point numbers used as inputs and scalars within the computation, we achieve a way of producing lower bounds on the plaintext modulus p and the degree of the ring d needed to support complex homomorphic operations. Finally, as an application of these bounds, we investigate homomorphic image processing.

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Fixed-point arithmetic in SHE schemes

In this paper we discuss various aspects of cryptosystems based on hyperelliptic curves. In particular we cover the implementation of the group law on such curves and how to generate suitable curves for use in cryptography. This paper presents a practical comparison between the performance of elliptic curve based digital signature schemes and schemes based on hyperelliptic curves. We conclude that, at present, hyperelliptic curves offer no performance advantage over elliptic curves.

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On the performance of hyperelliptic cryptosystems

Power analysis attacks on elliptic curve based systems work by analysing the point multiplication algorithm. Recently Goubin observed that if an attacker can choose the point P to enter into the point multiplication algorithm then none of the standard three randomizations can fully defend against a DPA attack. In this paper we examine Goubin’s attack in more detail and completely discount its effectiveness when the attacker chooses a point of finite order, for the remaining cases we propose a defence based on using isogenies of small degree.

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An Analysis of Goubin’s Refined Power Analysis Attack

The development of multi-party computation was one of the early achievements of theoretical cryptography. Since that time a number of papers have been published which look at specific application scenarios (e-voting, e-auctions), different security guarantees (computational vs unconditional), different adversarial models (active vs passive, static vs adaptive), different communication models (secure channels, broadcast) and different set-up assumptions (CRS, trusted hardware etc). We examine an application scenario in the area of cloud computing which we call Secure Outsourced Computation. We show that this variant produces less of a restriction on the allowable adversary structures than full multi-party computation. We also show that if one provides the set of computation engines (or Cloud Computing providers) with a small piece of isolated trusted hardware one can outsource any computation in a manner which requires less security constraints on the underlying communication model and at greater computational/communication efficiency than full multi-party computation. In addition our protocol is highly efficient and thus of greater practicality than previous solutions, our required trusted hardware being particularly simple and with minimal trust requirements.

Nigel P. Smart

Papers

Fixed-point arithmetic in SHE schemes

On the performance of hyperelliptic cryptosystems

An Analysis of Goubin’s Refined Power Analysis Attack

Secure outsourced computation

Public key signatures in the multi-user setting