Zhenfeng Zhang

Bio: Zhenfeng Zhang is an academic researcher from Chinese Academy of Sciences. The author has contributed to research in topics: Encryption & Public-key cryptography. The author has an hindex of 25, co-authored 121 publications receiving 2667 citations. Previous affiliations of Zhenfeng Zhang include Henan University & University of Sydney.

Certificateless public-key signature : Security model and efficient construction

Abstract: Certificateless public-key cryptosystem is a new and attractive paradigm, which avoids the inherent key escrow property in identity-based public-key cryptosystems, and does not need expensive certificates as in the public key infrastructure. A strong security model for certificateless public key encryption was established by Al-Riyami and Paterson in 2003. In this paper, we first present a security model for certificateless public-key signature schemes, and then propose an efficient construction based on bilinear pairings. The security of the proposed scheme can be proved to be equivalent to the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model with a tight reduction.

Certificateless public-key signature: security model and efficient construction

Abstract: “Certificateless public-key cryptosystem” is a new and attractive paradigm, which avoids the inherent key escrow property in identity-based public-key cryptosystems, and does not need expensive certificates as in the public key infrastructure. A strong security model for certificateless public key encryption was established by Al-Riyami and Paterson in 2003. In this paper, we first present a security model for certificateless public-key signature schemes, and then propose an efficient construction based on bilinear pairings. The security of the proposed scheme can be proved to be equivalent to the computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model with a tight reduction.

Key replacement attack against a generic construction of certificateless signature

Abstract: Certificateless cryptography involves a Key Generation Center (KGC) which issues a partial key to a user and the user also independently generates an additional public/secret key pair in such a way that the KGC who knows only the partial key but not the additional secret key is not able to do any cryptographic operation on behalf of the user; and a third party who replaces the public/secret key pair but does not know the partial key cannot do any cryptographic operation as the user either. We call this attack launched by the third party as the key replacement attack. In ACISP 2004, Yum and Lee proposed a generic construction of digital signature schemes under the framework of certificateless cryptography. In this paper, we show that their generic construction is insecure against key replacement attack. In particular, we show that the security requirements of their generic building blocks are insufficient to support some security claim stated in their paper. We then propose a modification of their scheme and show its security in a new and simplified security model. We show that our simplified definition and adversarial model not only capture all the distinct features of certificateless signature but are also more versatile when compared with all the comparable ones. We believe that the model itself is of independent interest.

Key replacement attack against a generic construction of certificateless signature

Abstract: Certificateless cryptography involves a Key Generation Center (KGC) which issues a partial key to a user and the user also independently generates an additional public/secret key pair in such a way that the KGC who knows only the partial key but not the additional secret key is not able to do any cryptographic operation on behalf of the user; and a third party who replaces the public/secret key pair but does not know the partial key cannot do any cryptographic operation as the user either. We call this attack launched by the third party as the key replacement attack. In ACISP 2004, Yum and Lee proposed a generic construction of digital signature schemes under the framework of certificateless cryptography. In this paper, we show that their generic construction is insecure against key replacement attack. In particular, we show that the security requirements of their generic building blocks are insufficient to support some security claim stated in their paper. We then propose a modification of their scheme and show its security in a new and simplified security model. We show that our simplified definition and adversarial model not only capture all the distinct features of certificateless signature but are also more versatile when compared with all the comparable ones. We believe that the model itself is of independent interest.

Efficient ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption with constant-size ciphertext and constant computation-cost

Abstract: Attribute-based encryption provides good solutions to the problem of anonymous access control by specifying access policies among private keys or ciphertexts over encrypted data. In ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), each user is associated with a set of attributes, and data is encrypted with access structures on attributes. A user is able to decrypt a ciphertext if and only if his attributes satisfy the ciphertext access structure. CP-ABE is very appealing since the ciphertext and data access policies are integrated together in a natural and effective way. Most current CP-ABE schemes incur large ciphertext size and computation costs in the encryption and decryption operations which depend at least linearly on the number of attributes involved in the access policy. In this paper, we present two new CP-ABE schemes, which have both constant-size ciphertext and constant computation costs for a nonmonotone AND gate access policy, under chosen plaintext and chosen ciphertext attacks. The security of first scheme can be proven CPA-secure in standard model under the decision n-BDHE assumption. And the security of second scheme can be proven CCA-secure in standard model under the decision n-BDHE assumption and the existence of collision-resistant hash functions. Our scheme can also be extended to the decentralizing multi-authority setting.

PORs: Proofs of Retrievability for Large Files

Abstract: In this paper, we define and explore proofs of retrievability (PORs). A POR scheme enables an archive or back-up service (prover) to produce a concise proof that a user (verifier) can retrieve a target file F, that is, that the archive retains and reliably transmits file data sufficient for the user to recover F in its entirety.A POR may be viewed as a kind of cryptographic proof of knowledge (POK), but one specially designed to handle a large file (or bitstring) F. We explore POR protocols here in which the communication costs, number of memory accesses for the prover, and storage requirements of the user (verifier) are small parameters essentially independent of the length of F. In addition to proposing new, practical POR constructions, we explore implementation considerations and optimizations that bear on previously explored, related schemes.In a POR, unlike a POK, neither the prover nor the verifier need actually have knowledge of F. PORs give rise to a new and unusual security definition whose formulation is another contribution of our work.We view PORs as an important tool for semi-trusted online archives. Existing cryptographic techniques help users ensure the privacy and integrity of files they retrieve. It is also natural, however, for users to want to verify that archives do not delete or modify files prior to retrieval. The goal of a POR is to accomplish these checks without users having to download the files themselves. A POR can also provide quality-of-service guarantees, i.e., show that a file is retrievable within a certain time bound.

The Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3

Abstract: This document specifies version 1.3 of the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol. TLS allows client/server applications to communicate over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery. This document updates RFCs 4492, 5705, and 6066 and it obsoletes RFCs 5077, 5246, and 6961. This document also specifies new requirements for TLS 1.2 implementations.

On the Size of Pairing-Based Non-interactive Arguments

Abstract: Non-interactive arguments enable a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is true. Recently there has been a lot of progress both in theory and practice on constructing highly efficient non-interactive arguments with small size and low verification complexity, so-called succinct non-interactive arguments SNARGs and succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge SNARKs. Many constructions of SNARGs rely on pairing-based cryptography. In these constructions a proof consists of a number of group elements and the verification consists of checking a number of pairing product equations. The question we address in this article is how efficient pairing-based SNARGs can be. Our first contribution is a pairing-based preprocessing SNARK for arithmetic circuit satisfiability, which is an NP-complete language. In our SNARK we work with asymmetric pairings for higher efficiency, a proof is only 3 group elements, and verification consists of checking a single pairing product equations using 3 pairings ini¾?total. Our SNARK is zero-knowledge and does not reveal anything about the witness the prover uses to make the proof. As our second contribution we answer an open question of Bitansky, Chiesa, Ishai, Ostrovsky and Paneth TCC 2013 by showing that linear interactive proofs cannot have a linear decision procedure. It follows from this that SNARGs where the prover and verifier use generic asymmetric bilinear group operations cannot consist of a single group element. This gives the first lower bound for pairing-based SNARGs. It remains an intriguing open problem whether this lower bound can be extended to rule out 2 group element SNARGs, which would prove optimality of our 3 element construction.

Traitor Tracing with constant transmission rate

Abstract: An important open problem in the area of Traitor Tracing is designing a scheme with constant expansion of the size of keys (users' keys and the encryption key) and of the size of ciphertexts with respect to the size of the plaintext. This problem is known from the introduction of Traitor Tracing by Chor, Fiat and Naor. We refer to such schemes as traitor tracing with constant transmission rate. Here we present a general methodology and two protocol constructions that result in the first two public-key traitor tracing schemes with constant transmission rate in settings where plaintexts can be calibrated to be sufficiently large. Our starting point is the notion of copyrighted function which was presented by Naccache, Shamir and Stern. We first solve the open problem of discrete-log-based and public-key-based copyrighted function. Then, we observe the simple yet crucial relation between (public-key) copyrighted encryption and (public-key) traitor tracing, which we exploit by introducing a generic design paradigm for designing constant transmission rate traitor tracing schemes based on copyrighted encryption functions. Our first scheme achieves the same expansion efficiency as regular ElGamal encryption. The second scheme introduces only a slightly larger (constant) overhead, however, it additionally achieves efficient black-box traitor tracing (against any pirate construction).