International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Suppose a prover, in possession of a large body of valuable evidence, wants to quickly convince a verifier by presenting only a small portion of the evidence. We define an Approximate Lower Bound Argument, or ALBA, which allows the prover to do just that: to succinctly prove knowledge of a large number of elements satisfying a predicate (or, more generally, elements of a sufficient total weight when a predicate is generalized to a weight function). The argument is approximate because there is a small gap between what the prover actually knows and what the verifier is convinced the prover knows. This gap enables very efficient schemes. We present noninteractive constructions of ALBA in the random oracle and Uniform Random String models and show that our proof sizes are nearly optimal. We also show how our constructions can be made particularly communication-efficient when the evidence is distributed among multiple provers working together, which is of practical importance when ALBA is applied to a decentralized setting. We demonstrate two very different applications of ALBAs: for large-scale decentralized signatures and for achieving universal composability in general-purpose succinct proof systems (SNARKs).

Blockchains are gaining traction and acceptance, not just for cryptocurrencies, but increasingly as an architecture for distributed computing. In this work we seek solutions that allow a \emph{public} blockchain to act as a trusted long-term repository of secret information: Our goal is to deposit a secret with the blockchain, specify how it is to be used (e.g., the conditions under which it is released), and have the blockchain keep the secret and use it only in the specified manner (e.g., release only it once the conditions are met). This simple functionality enables many powerful applications, including signing statements on behalf of the blockchain, using it as the control plane for a storage system, performing decentralized program-obfuscation-as-a-service, and many more. Using proactive secret sharing techniques, we present a scalable solution for implementing this functionality on a public blockchain, in the presence of a mobile adversary controlling a small minority of the participants. The main challenge is that, on the one hand, scalability requires that we use small committees to represent the entire system, but, on the other hand, a mobile adversary may be able to corrupt the entire committee if it is small. For this reason, existing proactive secret sharing solutions are either non-scalable or insecure in our setting. We approach this challenge via "player replaceability", which ensures the committee is anonymous until after it performs its actions. Our main technical contribution is a system that allows sharing and re-sharing of secrets among the members of small dynamic committees, without knowing who they are until after they perform their actions and erase their secrets. Our solution handles a fully mobile adversary corrupting roughly 1/4 of the participants at any time, and is scalable in terms of both the number of parties and the number of time intervals.

Fuzzy extractors (Dodis et al., in Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2014, Springer, Berlin, 2014, pp 93–110) convert repeated noisy readings of a secret into the same uniformly distributed key. To eliminate noise, they require an initial enrollment phase that takes the first noisy reading of the secret and produces a nonsecret helper string to be used in subsequent readings. Reusable fuzzy extractors (Boyen, in Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on computer and communications security, CCS, ACM, New York, 2004, pp 82–91) remain secure even when this initial enrollment phase is repeated multiple times with noisy versions of the same secret, producing multiple helper strings (for example, when a single person’s biometric is enrolled with multiple unrelated organizations). We construct the first reusable fuzzy extractor that makes no assumptions about how multiple readings of the source are correlated. The extractor works for binary strings with Hamming noise; it achieves computational security under the existence of digital lockers (Canetti and Dakdouk, in Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2008, Springer, Berlin, 2008, pp 489–508). It is simple and tolerates near-linear error rates. Our reusable extractor is secure for source distributions of linear min-entropy rate. The construction is also secure for sources with much lower entropy rates—lower than those supported by prior (nonreusable) constructions—assuming that the distribution has some additional structure, namely, that random subsequences of the source have sufficient minentropy. Structure beyond entropy is necessary to support distributions with low entropy rates. We then explore further how different structural properties of a noisy source can be used to construct fuzzy extractors when the error rates are high, building a computationally secure and an information-theoretically secure construction for large-alphabet sources.

In many applications, it is important to verify that an RSA public key (N, e) specifies a permutation over the entire space $$\mathbb {Z}_N$$ , in order to prevent attacks due to adversarially-generated public keys. We design and implement a simple and efficient noninteractive zero-knowledge protocol (in the random oracle model) for this task. Applications concerned about adversarial key generation can just append our proof to the RSA public key without any other modifications to existing code or cryptographic libraries. Users need only perform a one-time verification of the proof to ensure that raising to the power e is a permutation of the integers modulo N. For typical parameter settings, the proof consists of nine integers modulo N; generating the proof and verifying it both require about nine modular exponentiations.We extend our results beyond RSA keys and also provide efficient noninteractive zero-knowledge proofs for other properties of N, which can be used to certify that N is suitable for the Paillier cryptosystem, is a product of two primes, or is a Blum integer. As compared to the recent work of Auerbach and Poettering (PKC 2018), who provide two-message protocols for similar languages, our protocols are more efficient and do not require interaction, which enables a broader class of applications.

We give a framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures (SAS) that unifies and simplifies prior work and leads to new results. The framework is based on ideal ciphers over large domains, which have recently been shown to be realizable in the random oracle model. The basic idea is to replace the random oracle in the full-domain-hash signature scheme with an ideal cipher. Each signer in sequence applies the ideal cipher, keyed by the message, to the output of the previous signer, and then inverts the trapdoor permutation on the result. We obtain different variants of the scheme by varying additional keying material in the ideal cipher and making different assumptions on the trapdoor permutation. In particular, we obtain the first scheme with lazy verification and signature size independent of the number of signers that does not rely on bilinear pairings.Since existing proofs that ideal ciphers over large domains can be realized in the random oracle model are lossy, our schemes do not currently permit practical instantiation parameters at a reasonable security level, and thus we view our contribution as mainly conceptual. However, we are optimistic tighter proofs will be found, at least in our specific application.