International Association
for Cryptologic Research

The Peregrine signature scheme is one of the candidates in the ongoing Korean post-quantum cryptography competition. It is proposed as a high-speed variant of Falcon, which is a hash-and-sign signature scheme over NTRU lattices and one of the schemes selected by NIST for standardization. To this end, Peregrine replaces the lattice Gaussian sampler in the Falcon signing procedure with a new sampler based on the centered binomial distribution. While this modification offers significant advantages in terms of efficiency and implementation, it does not come with a provable guarantee that signatures do not leak information about the signing key. Unfortunately, lattice based signature schemes in the hash-and-sign paradigm that lack such a guarantee (such as GGH, NTRUSign or DRS) have generally proved insecure. In this paper, we show that Peregrine is no exception, by demonstrating a practical key recovery attack against it. We observe that the distribution of Peregrine signatures is a hidden transformation of some public distribution and still leaks information about the signing key. By adapting the parallelepiped-learning technique of Nguyen and Regev (Eurocrypt 2006), we show that the signing key can be recovered from a relatively small number of signatures. The learning technique alone yields an approximate version of the key, from which we can recover the exact key using a decoding technique due to Thomas Prest (PKC 2023). For the reference implementation (resp. the official specification version) of Peregrine-512, we fully recover the secret key with good probability in a few hours given around 25,000 (resp. 11 million) signature samples.

We revisit the Cramer, Damg{\aa}rd, Schoenmakers (CDS) approach for composing sigma protocols, and adapt it to a setting in which the underlying protocols have multiple rounds of interaction. The goal of CDS composition is to prove compound NP-relations by combining multiple ``atomic'' proof systems. Its key feature is that it interacts with the atomic proofs in a generic fashion, enabling simpler and more efficient implementation. Recent developments in multi-round protocols call for the adaptation of CDS composition beyond its original scope, which not only was restricted to three-move protocols but in fact fails in the multi-round case, as well as in the composition of so-called $k$-special sound proofs. We propose a new method for multi-round composition in the plain model, in a soundness preserving way and with an ``offline'' zero-knowledge simulation property. The need for handling arbitrary monotone access structures in $\mathsf{mNC}^1$, which is all Boolean function families represented by polynomial-size formulas over some fixed complete basis, leads us to identify a complexity theoretic problem of independent interest. Prior to our work, multi-round composition was either restricted to the random oracle model, or worked only for argument systems, and moreover required heavy ``online'' zero-knowledge simulation.

Mercurial signatures are an extension of equivalence class signatures that allow malleability for the public keys, messages, and signatures within the respective classes. Unfortunately, the most efficient construction to date suffers from a weak public key class-hiding property, where the original signer with the signing key can link the public keys in the same class. This is a severe limitation in their applications, where the signer is often considered untrustworthy of privacy. This paper presents two-party and multi-party interactive threshold mercurial signatures that overcome the above limitation by eliminating the single entity who knows the signing key. For the general case, we propose two constructions. The first follows the same interactive structure as the two-party case, avoiding complex distributed computations such as randomness generation, inversion, and multiplication, and even eliminates the need for private communication between parties. The second is based on a blueprint for general multi-party computation using verifiable secret sharing, but adopting optimizations. We show applications in anonymous credential systems that individually fit the two-party and multi-party constructions. In particular, in the two-party case, our approach provides stronger privacy by completely removing the trust in the authorities. We also discuss more applications, from blind signatures to multi-signatures and threshold ring signatures. Finally, to showcase the practicality of our approach, we implement our interactive constructions and compare them against related alternatives.

In structure-preserving cryptography, every building block shares the same bilinear groups. These groups must be generated for a specific, a priori fixed security level, and thus, it is vital that the security reduction in all involved building blocks is as tight as possible. In this work, we present the first generic construction of structure-preserving signature schemes whose reduction cost is independent of the number of signing queries. Its chosen-message security is almost tightly reduced to the chosen-plaintext security of a structure-preserving public-key encryption scheme and the security of Groth–Sahai proof system. Technically, we adapt the adaptive partitioning technique by Hofheinz (Eurocrypt 2017) to the setting of structure-preserving signature schemes. To achieve a structure-preserving scheme, our new variant of the adaptive partitioning technique relies only on generic group operations in the scheme itself. Interestingly, however, we will use non-generic operations during our security analysis. Instantiated over asymmetric bilinear groups, the security of our concrete scheme is reduced to the external Diffie–Hellman assumption with linear reduction cost in the security parameter, independently of the number of signing queries. The signatures in our schemes consist of a larger number of group elements than those in other non-tight schemes, but can be verified faster, assuming their security reduction loss is compensated by increasing the security parameter to the next standard level.

The lattice reduction attack on (EC)DSA (and other Schnorr-like signature schemes) with partially known nonces, originally due to Howgrave-Graham and Smart, has been at the core of many concrete cryptanalytic works, side-channel based or otherwise, in the past 20 years. The attack itself has seen limited development, however: improved analyses have been carried out, and the use of stronger lattice reduction algorithms has pushed the range of practically vulnerable parameters further, but the lattice construction based on the signatures and known nonce bits remain the same.In this paper, we propose a new idea to improve the attack based on the same data in exchange for additional computation: carry out an exhaustive search on some bits of the secret key. This turns the problem from a single bounded distance decoding (BDD) instance in a certain lattice to multiple BDD instances in a fixed lattice of larger volume but with the same bound (making the BDD problem substantially easier). Furthermore, the fact that the lattice is fixed lets us use batch/preprocessing variants of BDD solvers that are far more efficient than repeated lattice reductions on non-preprocessed lattices of the same size. As a result, our analysis suggests that our technique is competitive or outperforms the state of the art for parameter ranges corresponding to the limit of what is achievable using lattice attacks so far (around 2-bit leakage on 160-bit groups, or 3-bit leakage on 256-bit groups).We also show that variants of this idea can also be applied to bits of the nonces (leading to a similar improvement) or to filtering signature data (leading to a data-time trade-off for the lattice attack). Finally, we use our technique to obtain an improved exploitation of the TPM–FAIL dataset similar to what was achieved in the Minerva attack.

Cramer, Damgård, and Schoenmakers (CDS) built a proof system to demonstrate the possession of subsets of witnesses for a given collection of statements that belong to a prescribed access structure P by composing so-called sigma-protocols for each atomic statement. Their verifier complexity is linear in the size of the monotone span program representation of P. We propose an alternative method for combining sigma-protocols into a single non-interactive system for a compound statement in the random oracle model. In contrast to CDS, our verifier complexity is linear in the size of the acyclicity program representation of P, a complete model of monotone computation introduced in this work. We show that the acyclicity program size of a predicate is never larger than its de Morgan formula size and it is polynomially incomparable to its monotone span program size. We additionally present an extension of our proof system, with verifier complexity linear in the monotone circuit size of P, in the common reference string model. Finally, considering the types of statement that naturally reduce to acyclicity programming, we discuss several applications of our new methods to protecting privacy in cryptocurrency and social networks.

Highly efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (NIZK) are often constructed for limited languages and it is not known how to extend them to cover wider classes of languages in general. In this work we initiate a study on black-box language extensions for conjunctive and disjunctive relations, that is, building a NIZK system for $${mathcal L}diamond hat{{mathcal L}}$$ (with $$diamond in {wedge , vee }$$ ) based on NIZK systems for languages $${mathcal L}$$ and $$hat{{mathcal L}}$$ . While the conjunctive extension of NIZKs is straightforward by simply executing the given NIZKs in parallel, it is not known how disjunctive extensions could be achieved in a black-box manner. Besides, observe that the simple conjunctive extension does not work in the case of simulation-sound NIZKs (SS-NIZKs), as pointed out by Sahai (Sahai, FOCS 1999). Our main contribution is an impossibility result that negates the existence of the above extensions and implies other non-trivial separations among NIZKs, SS-NIZKs, and labelled SS-NIZKs. Motivated by the difficulty of such transformations, we additionally present an efficient construction of signature schemes based on unbounded simulation-sound NIZKs (USS-NIZKs) for any language without language extensions.

Proofs of partial knowledge demonstrate the possession of certain subsets of witnesses for a given collection of statements x_1,\dots,x_n. Cramer, Damg{\aa}rd, and Schoenmakers (CDS), built proofs of partial knowledge, given "atomic" protocols for individual statements x_i, by having the prover randomly secret share the verifier's challenge and using the shares as challenges for the atomic protocols. This simple and highly-influential transformation has been used in numerous applications, ranging from anonymous credentials to ring signatures. We consider what happens if, instead of using the shares directly as challenges, the prover first hashes them. We show that this elementary enhancement can result in significant benefits: - the proof contains a {\em single} atomic transcript per statement x_i, - it suffices that the atomic protocols are k-special sound for k \geq 2, - when compiled using the Fiat-Shamir heuristic, the protocol retains its soundness in the {\em non-programmable} random oracle model. None of the above features is satisfied by the CDS transformation.

Quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (QA-NIZK) systems and structure-preserving signature (SPS) schemes are two powerful tools for constructing practical pairing-based cryptographic schemes. Their efficiency directly affects the efficiency of the derived advanced protocols.We construct more efficient QA-NIZK and SPS schemes with tight security reductions. Our QA-NIZK scheme is the first one that achieves both tight simulation soundness and constant proof size (in terms of number of group elements) at the same time, while the recent scheme from Abe et al. (ASIACRYPT 2018) achieved tight security with proof size linearly depending on the size of the language and the witness. Assuming the hardness of the Symmetric eXternal Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) problem, our scheme contains only 14 elements in the proof and remains independent of the size of the language and the witness. Moreover, our scheme has tighter simulation soundness than the previous schemes.Technically, we refine and extend a partitioning technique from a recent SPS scheme (Gay et al., EUROCRYPT 2018). Furthermore, we improve the efficiency of the tightly secure SPS schemes by using a relaxation of NIZK proof system for OR languages, called designated-prover NIZK system. Under the SXDH assumption, our SPS scheme contains 11 group elements in the signature, which is shortest among the tight schemes and is the same as an early non-tight scheme (Abe et al., ASIACRYPT 2012). Compared to the shortest known non-tight scheme (Jutla and Roy, PKC 2017), our scheme achieves tight security at the cost of 5 additional elements.All the schemes in this paper are proven secure based on the Matrix Diffie-Hellman assumptions (Escala et al., CRYPTO 2013). These are a class of assumptions which include the well-known SXDH and DLIN assumptions and provide clean algebraic insights to our constructions. To the best of our knowledge, our schemes achieve the best efficiency among schemes with the same functionality and security properties. This naturally leads to improvement of the efficiency of cryptosystems based on simulation-sound QA-NIZK and SPS.

In structure-preserving signatures, public keys, messages, and signatures are all collections of source group elements of some bilinear groups. In this paper, we introduce fully structure-preserving signature schemes, with the additional requirement that even secret keys are group elements. This strong property allows efficient non-interactive proofs of knowledge of the secret key, which is useful in designing cryptographic protocols under simulation-based security where online extraction of the secret key is needed. We present efficient constructions under simple standard assumptions and pursue even more efficient constructions with the extra property of randomizability based on the generic bilinear group model. An essential building block for our efficient standard model construction is a shrinking structure-preserving trapdoor commitment scheme, which is by itself an important primitive and of independent interest as it appears to contradict a known impossibility result that structure-preserving commitments cannot be shrinking. We argue that a relaxed binding property lets us circumvent the impossibility while still retaining the usefulness of the primitive in important applications as mentioned above.

In structure-preserving cryptography over bilinear groups, cryptographic schemes are restricted to exchange group elements only, and their correctness must be verifiable only by evaluating pairing product equations. Several primitives, such as structure-preserving signatures, commitments, and encryption schemes, have been proposed. Although deterministic primitives, such as verifiable pseudorandom functions or verifiable unpredictable functions, play an important role in the construction of cryptographic protocols, no structure-preserving realizations of them are known. This is not coincident: In this paper, we show that it is impossible to construct algebraic structure-preserving deterministic primitives that provide provability, uniqueness, and unpredictability. This includes verifiable random functions, unique signatures, and verifiable unpredictable functions as special cases. The restriction of structure-preserving primitives to be algebraic is natural, otherwise it would not be known how to verify correctness only by evaluating pairing product equations. We further extend our negative result to pseudorandom functions and deterministic public key encryption as well as non-strictly structure-preserving primitives, where target group elements are also allowed in their ranges and public keys.

In this paper, we optimize Bleichenbacher’s statistical attack technique against (EC)DSA and other Schnorr-like signature schemes with biased or partially exposed nonces. Previous approaches to Bleichenbacher’s attack suffered from very large memory consumption during the so-called “range reduction” phase. Using a carefully analyzed and highly parallelizable approach to this range reduction based on the Schroeppel–Shamir algorithm for knapsacks, we manage to overcome the memory barrier of previous work while maintaining a practical level of efficiency in terms of time complexity.As a separate contribution, we present new fault attacks against the qDSA signature scheme of Renes and Smith (ASIACRYPT 2017) when instantiated over the Curve25519 Montgomery curve, and we validate some of them on the AVR microcontroller implementation of qDSA using actual fault experiments on the ChipWhisperer-Lite evaluation board. These fault attacks enable an adversary to generate signatures with 2 or 3 bits of the nonces known.Combining our two contributions, we are able to achieve a full secret key recovery on qDSA by applying our version of Bleichenbacher’s attack to these faulty signatures. Using a hybrid parallelization model relying on both shared and distributed memory, we achieve a very efficient implementation of our highly scalable range reduction algorithm. This allows us to complete Bleichenbacher’s attack in the 252-bit prime order subgroup of Curve25519 within a reasonable time frame and using relatively modest computational resources both for 3-bit nonce exposure and for the much harder case of 2-bit nonce exposure. Both of these computations, and particularly the latter, set new records in the implementation of Bleichenbacher’s attack.

We construct the first (almost) tightly-secure unbounded-simulation-sound quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (USS-QA-NIZK) for linear-subspace languages with compact (number of group elements independent of the security parameter) common reference string (CRS) and compact proofs under standard assumptions in bilinear-pairings groups. In particular, under the SXDH assumption, the USS-QA-NIZK proof size is only seventeen group elements with a factor $$O(\log {Q})$$ loss in security reduction to SXDH. The USS-QA-NIZK primitive has many applications, including structure-preserving signatures (SPS), CCA2-secure publicly-verifiable public-key encryption (PKE), which in turn have applications to CCA-anonymous group signatures, blind signatures and unbounded simulation-sound Groth-Sahai NIZK proofs. We show that the almost tight security of our USS-QA-NIZK translates into constructions of all of the above applications with (almost) tight-security to standard assumptions such as SXDH and, more generally, $$\mathcal{D}_k$$-MDDH. Thus, we get the first publicly-verifiable (almost) tightly-secure multi-user/multi-challenge CCA2-secure PKE with practical efficiency under standard bilinear assumptions. Our (almost) tight SPS construction is also improved in the signature size over previously known constructions.