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

This paper examines multi-party computation protocols in the presence of two major constraints commonly encountered in deployed systems. Firstly, we consider the situation where the parties are connected not by direct point-to-point connections, but by a star-like topology with a few central post-office style relays. Secondly, we consider MPC protocols with a strong honest majority (t n/2) in which we have stragglers (some parties are progressing slower than others). We model stragglers by allowing the adversary to delay messages to and from some parties for a given length of time. We first prove that having only a single honest relay is enough to ensure consensus of the messages sent within a protocol; then, we show that special care must be taken to describe multiplication protocols in the case of relays and stragglers; finally, we present an efficient honest-majority MPC protocol which can be run ontop of the relays and which provides active-security with abort in the case of a strong honest majority, even when run with stragglers. We back up our protocol presentation with both experimental evaluations and simulations of the effect of the relays and delays on our protocol.

MPC With Delayed Parties Over Star-Like Networks

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Topical Collection on Computing on Encrypted Data

The Fiat-Shamir (FS) transform is a popular tool to produce particularly efficient digital signature schemes out of identification protocols. It is known that the resulting signature scheme is secure (in the random oracle model) if and only if the identification protocol is secure against passive impersonators. A similar results holds for constructing ID-based signature schemes out of ID-based identification protocols. The transformation had also been applied to identification protocols with additional privacy properties. So, via the FS transform, ad-hoc group identification schemes yield ring signatures and identity escrow schemes yield group signature schemes. Unfortunately, results akin to those above are not known to hold for these latter settings and the security of the resulting schemes needs to be proved from scratch, or worse, it is often simply assumed. Therefore, the security of the schemes obtained this way does not clearly follow from that of the base identification protocol and needs to be proved from scratch. Even worse, some papers seem to simply assume that the transformation works without proof. In this paper we provide the missing foundations for the use of the FS transform in these more complex settings. We start with defining a formal security model for identity escrow schemes (a concept proposed earlier but never rigorously formalized). Our main result constists of necessary and sufficient conditions for an identity escrow scheme to yield (via the FS transform) a secure group signature schemes. In addition, we discuss several variants of this result that account for the constructions of group signatures that fulfill weaker notions of security. In addition, using the similarity between group and ring signature schemes we give analogous results for the latter primitive.

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The Fiat-Shamir Transform for Group and Ring Signature Schemes.

Computational puzzles are mildly difficult computational problems that require resources (processor cycles, memory, or both) to solve. Puzzles have found a variety of uses in security. In this paper we are concerned with client puzzles: a type of puzzle used as a defense against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Before engaging in a resource consuming protocol with a client, a server demands that the client solves a freshly generated client puzzle. Despite their widespread use, the lack of formal models for security of client puzzles prevents a full analysis of proposed puzzles and, more importantly, prevents rigorous proofs for the effectiveness of puzzles as a DoS defense. The main contribution of this paper is a formal model for the security of client puzzles as a stepping stone towards solving the above problems. We clarify the interface that client puzzles should offer and give two security notions for puzzles. Both functionality and security are inspired by, and tailored to, the use of puzzles as a defense against DoS attacks. The first notion – puzzle unforgeability – requires that an adversary is unable to produce valid looking puzzles on its own. The second notion – puzzle-difficulty – requires that an adversary spends at least an appropriate amount of resources solving puzzles. Our definitions fill an important gap: breaking either of the two properties immediately leads to successful DoS attacks. We illustrate this point with an attack against a previously proposed puzzle construction. We show that a subtle flaw renders the construction forgeable and we explain how to exploit this flaw to mount a DoS attack on certain protocols that use this puzzle. We also provide a generic construction of a client puzzle. Our construction uses a pseudorandom function family to provide unforgeability and a one way function for the difficulty. We prove our generic construction meets our definitions of unforgeability and difficulty for client puzzles. Finally, we discuss and analyze (in the random oracle model) a practical instantiation of our construction based on hash functions.

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Nigel P. Smart

Papers

MPC With Delayed Parties Over Star-Like Networks

Topical Collection on Computing on Encrypted Data

The Fiat-Shamir Transform for Group and Ring Signature Schemes.

Security Notions and Generic Constructions for Client Puzzles.