International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Unclonable cryptography utilizes the principles of quantum mechanics to addresses cryptographic tasks that are impossible classically. We introduce a novel unclonable primitive in the context of secret sharing, called unclonable secret sharing (USS). In a USS scheme, there are shareholders, each holding a share of a classical secret represented as a quantum state. They can recover the secret once all parties (or at least parties) come together with their shares. Importantly, it should be infeasible to copy their own shares and send the copies to two non-communicating parties, enabling both of them to recover the secret. Our work initiates a formal investigation into the realm of unclonable secret sharing, shedding light on its implications, constructions, and inherent limitations. ** Connections: We explore the connections between USS and other quantum cryptographic primitives such as unclonable encryption and position verification, showing the difficulties to achieve USS in different scenarios. **Limited Entanglement: In the case where the adversarial shareholders do not share any entanglement or limited entanglement, we demonstrate information-theoretic constructions for USS. **Large Entanglement: If we allow the adversarial shareholders to have unbounded entanglement resources (and unbounded computation), we prove that unclonable secret sharing is impossible. On the other hand, in the quantum random oracle model where the adversary can only make a bounded polynomial number of queries, we show a construction secure even with unbounded entanglement. Furthermore, even when these adversaries possess only a polynomial amount of entanglement resources, we establish that any unclonable secret sharing scheme with a reconstruction function implementable using Cliffords and logarithmically many T-gates is also unattainable.

Software watermarking allows for embedding a mark into a piece of code, such that any attempt to remove the mark will render the code useless. Provably secure watermarking schemes currently seems limited to programs computing various cryptographic operations, such as evaluating pseudorandom functions (PRFs), signing messages, or decrypting ciphertexts (the latter often going by the name ``traitor tracing''). Moreover, each of these watermarking schemes has an ad-hoc construction of its own. We observe, however, that many cryptographic objects are used as building blocks in larger protocols. We ask: just as we can compose building blocks to obtain larger protocols, can we compose watermarking schemes for the building blocks to obtain watermarking schemes for the larger protocols? We give an affirmative answer to this question, by precisely formulating a set of requirements that allow for composing watermarking schemes. We use our formulation to derive a number of applications.

This work provides both negative and positive results for publicly verifiable quantum money. ** In the first part, we give a general theorem, showing that a certain natural class of quantum money schemes from lattices cannot be secure. We use this theorem to break the recent quantum money proposal of Khesin, Lu, and Shor. ** In the second part, we propose a framework for building quantum money and quantum lightning we call invariant money which abstracts and formalizes some ideas of quantum money from knots by Farhi et al.(ITCS'12) and its precedent work by Lutomirski et al.(ICS'10). In addition to formalizing this framework, we provide concrete hard computational problems loosely inspired by classical knowledge-of-exponent assumptions, whose hardness would imply the security of *quantum lightning*, a strengthening of quantum money where not even the bank can duplicate banknotes. ** We discuss potential instantiations of our framework, including an oracle construction using cryptographic group actions and instantiations from rerandomizable functional encryption, isogenies over elliptic curves, and knots.

Copy-protection is the task of encoding a program into a quantum state to prevent illegal duplications. A line of recent works studied copy-protection schemes under "1 -> 2 attacks": the adversary receiving one program copy can not produce two valid copies. However, under most circumstances, vendors need to sell more than one copy of a program and still ensure that no duplicates can be generated. In this work, we initiate the study of collusion-resistant copy-protection in the plain model. Our results are twofold: * For the first time, we show that all major watermarkable functionalities can be copy-protected (including unclonable decryption, digital signatures, and PRFs). Among these, copy-protection of digital signature schemes is not known before. The feasibility of copy-protecting all watermarkable functionalities is an open question raised by Aaronson et al. (CRYPTO' 21) * We make all the above schemes k bounded collusion-resistant for any polynomial k, giving the first bounded collusion-resistant copy-protection for various functionalities in the plain model.

Quantum copy protection uses the unclonability of quantum states to construct quantum software that provably cannot be pirated. Copy protection would be immensely useful, but unfortunately little is known about how to achieve it in general. In this work, we make progress on this goal, by giving the following results: * We show how to copy protect any program that cannot be learned from its input-output behavior, relative to a classical oracle. This improves on Aaronson (CCC 2009), which achieves the same relative to a quantum oracle. By instantiating the oracle with post-quantum candidate obfuscation schemes, we obtain a heuristic construction of copy protection. * We show, roughly, that any program which can be watermarked can be copy detected, a weaker version of copy protection that does not prevent copying, but guarantees that any copying can be detected. Our scheme relies on the security of the assumed watermarking, plus the assumed existence of public key quantum money. Our construction is general, applicable to many recent watermarking schemes.

In 2012, Aaronson and Christiano introduced the idea of hidden subspace states to build public-key quantum money [STOC '12]. Since then, this idea has been applied to realize several other cryptographic primitives which enjoy some form of unclonability. In this work, we propose a generalization of hidden subspace states to hidden coset states. We study different unclonable properties of coset states and several applications: * We show that, assuming indistinguishability obfuscation (iO), hidden coset states possess a certain direct product hardness property, which immediately implies a tokenized signature scheme in the plain model. Previously, a tokenized signature scheme was known only relative to an oracle, from a work of Ben-David and Sattath [QCrypt '17]. * Combining a tokenized signature scheme with extractable witness encryption, we give a construction of an unclonable decryption scheme in the plain model. The latter primitive was recently proposed by Georgiou and Zhandry [ePrint '20], who gave a construction relative to a classical oracle. * We conjecture that coset states satisfy a certain natural monogamy-of-entanglement property. Assuming this conjecture is true, we remove the requirement for extractable witness encryption in our unclonable decryption construction. As potential evidence in support of the conjecture, we prove a weaker version of this monogamy property, which we believe will still be of independent interest. * Finally, we give the first construction of a copy-protection scheme for pseudorandom functions (PRFs) in the plain model. Our scheme is secure either assuming iO and extractable witness encryption, or iO, LWE and the conjectured monogamy property mentioned above. This is the first example of a copy-protection scheme with provable security in the plain model for a class of functions that is not evasive.

One of the primary research challenges in Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is constructing and proving cryptosystems that are adaptively secure. To date the main paradigm for achieving adaptive security in ABE is dual system encryption. However, almost all such solutions in bilinear groups rely on (variants of) either the subgroup decision problem over composite order groups or the decision linear assumption. Both of these assumptions are decisional rather than search assumptions and the target of the assumption is a source or bilinear group element. This is in contrast to earlier selectively secure ABE systems which can be proven secure from either the decisional or search Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. In this work we make progress on closing this gap by giving a new ABE construction for the subset functionality and prove security under the Search Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption. We first provide a framework for proving adaptive security in Attribute-Based Encryption systems. We introduce a concept of ABE with deletable attributes where any party can take a ciphertext encrypted under the attribute string x in {0, 1}^n and modify it into a ciphertext encrypted under any string x' in {0, 1, bot}^n where x' is derived by replacing any bits of x with bot symbols (i.e. ``deleting" attributes of x). The semantics of the system are that any private key for a circuit C can be used to decrypt a ciphertext associated with x' if none of the input bits read by circuit C are bot symbols and C(x') = 1. We show a pathway for combining ABE with deletable attributes with constrained pseudorandom functions to obtain adaptively secure ABE building upon the recent work of [Tsabary19]. Our new ABE system will be adaptively secure and be a ciphertext-policy ABE that supports the same functionality as the underlying constrained PRF as long as the PRF is ``deletion conforming". Here we also provide a simple constrained PRF construction that gives subset functionality. Our approach enables us to access a broader array of Attribute-Based Encryption schemes support deletion of attributes. For example, we show that both the [GPSW06] and [Boyen13] ABE schemes can trivially handle a deletion operation. And, by using a hardcore bit variant of GPSW scheme we obtain an adaptively secure ABE scheme under the Search Bilinear Diffie-Hellman assumption in addition to pseudo random functions in NC1. This gives the first adaptively secure ABE from a search assumption as all prior work relied on decision assumptions over source group elements.