International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We study several strengthening of classical circular security assumptions which were recently introduced in four new lattice-based constructions of indistinguishability obfuscation: Brakerski-D\"ottling-Garg-Malavolta (Eurocrypt 2020), Gay-Pass (STOC 2021), Brakerski-D\"ottling-Garg-Malavolta (Eprint 2020) and Wee-Wichs (Eprint 2020). We provide explicit counterexamples to the {\em $2$-circular shielded randomness leakage} assumption w.r.t.\ the Gentry-Sahai-Waters fully homomorphic encryption scheme proposed by Gay-Pass, and the {\em homomorphic pseudorandom LWE samples} conjecture proposed by Wee-Wichs. Our work suggests a separation between classical circular security of the kind underlying un-levelled fully-homomorphic encryption from the strengthened versions underlying recent iO constructions, showing that they are not (yet) on the same footing. Our counterexamples exploit the flexibility to choose specific implementations of circuits, which is explicitly allowed in the Gay-Pass assumption and unspecified in the Wee-Wichs assumption. Their indistinguishabilty obfuscation schemes are still unbroken. Our work shows that the assumptions, at least, need refinement. In particular, generic leakage-resilient circular security assumptions are delicate, and their security is sensitive to the specific structure of the leakages involved.

We develop attacks on the security of variants of pseudo-random generators computed by quadratic polynomials. In particular we give a general condition for breaking the one-way property of mappings where every output is a quadratic polynomial (over the reals) of the input. As a corollary, we break the degree-2 candidates for security assumptions recently proposed for constructing indistinguishability obfuscation by Ananth, Jain and Sahai (ePrint 2018) and Agrawal (ePrint 2018). We present conjectures that would imply our attacks extend to a wider variety of instances, and in particular offer experimental evidence that they break assumption of Lin-Matt (ePrint 2018).Our algorithms use semidefinite programming, and in particular, results on low-rank recovery (Recht, Fazel, Parrilo 2007) and matrix completion (Gross 2009).