International Association
for Cryptologic Research

A software watermarking scheme can embed a message into a program without significantly changing its functionality. Moreover, any attempt to remove the embedded message in a marked program will substantially change the functionality of the program. Prior constructions of watermarking schemes focus on watermarking cryptographic functions, such as pseudorandom function (PRF), public key encryption, etc. A natural security requirement for watermarking schemes is collusion resistance, where the adversary’s goal is to remove the embedded messages given multiple marked versions of the same program. Currently, this strong security guarantee has been achieved by watermarking schemes for public key cryptographic primitives from standard assumptions (Goyal et al., CRYPTO 2019) and by watermarking schemes for PRFs from indistinguishability obfuscation (Yang et al., ASIACRYPT 2019). However, no collusion resistant watermarking scheme for PRF from standard assumption is known. In this work, we solve this problem by presenting a generic construction that upgrades a watermarkable PRF without collusion resistance to a collusion resistant one. One appealing feature of our construction is that it can preserve the security properties of the original scheme. For example, if the original scheme has security with extraction queries, the new scheme is also secure with extraction queries. Besides, the new scheme can achieve unforgeability even if the original scheme does not provide this security property. Instantiating our construction with existing watermarking schemes for PRF, we obtain collusion resistant watermarkable PRFs from standard assumptions, offering various security properties.

Public key encryption (PKE) schemes are usually deployed in an open system with numerous users. In practice, it is common that some users are corrupted. A PKE scheme is said to be receiver selective opening (RSO) secure if it can still protect messages transmitted to uncorrupted receivers after the adversary corrupts some receivers and learns their secret keys. This is usually defined by requiring the existence of a simulator that can simulate the view of the adversary given only the opened messages. Existing works construct RSO secure PKE schemes in a single-challenge setting, where the adversary can only obtain one challenge ciphertext for each public key. However, in practice, it is preferable to have a PKE scheme with RSO security in the multi-challenge setting, where public keys can be used to encrypt multiple messages. In this work, we explore the possibility for achieving PKE schemes with receiver selective opening security in the multi-challenge setting. Our contributions are threefold. First, we demonstrate that PKE schemes with RSO security in the single-challenge setting are not necessarily RSO secure in the multi-challenge setting. Then, we show that it is impossible to achieve RSO security for PKE schemes if the number of challenge ciphertexts under each public key is a priori unbounded. In particular, we prove that no PKE scheme can be RSO secure in the $k$-challenge setting (i.e., the adversary can obtain $k$ challenge ciphertexts for each public key) if its secret key contains less than $k$ bits. On the positive side, we give a concrete construction of PKE scheme with RSO security in the $k$-challenge setting, where the ratio of the secret key length to $k$ approaches the lower bound 1.

We provide new zero-knowledge argument of knowledge systems that work directly for a wide class of language, namely, ones involving the satisfiability of matrix-vector relations and integer relations commonly found in constructions of lattice-based cryptography. Prior to this work, practical arguments for lattice-based relations either have a constant soundness error $$(2/3)$$, or consider a weaker form of soundness, namely, extraction only guarantees that the prover is in possession of a witness that “approximates” the actual witness. Our systems do not suffer from these limitations.The core of our new argument systems is an efficient zero-knowledge argument of knowledge of a solution to a system of linear equations, where variables of this solution satisfy a set of quadratic constraints. This argument enjoys standard soundness, a small soundness error $$(1/poly)$$, and a complexity linear in the size of the solution. Using our core argument system, we construct highly efficient argument systems for a variety of statements relevant to lattices, including linear equations with short solutions and matrix-vector relations with hidden matrices.Based on our argument systems, we present several new constructions of common privacy-preserving primitives in the standard lattice setting, including a group signature, a ring signature, an electronic cash system, and a range proof protocol. Our new constructions are one to three orders of magnitude more efficient than the state of the art (in standard lattice). This illustrates the efficiency and expressiveness of our argument system.

A cryptographic watermarking scheme embeds a message into a program while preserving its functionality. Recently, a number of watermarking schemes have been proposed, which are proven secure in the sense that given one marked program, any attempt to remove the embedded message will substantially change its functionality.In this paper, we formally initiate the study of collusion attacks for watermarking schemes, where the attacker’s goal is to remove the embedded messages given multiple copies of the same program, each with a different embedded message. This is motivated by practical scenarios, where a program may be marked multiple times with different messages.The results of this work are twofold. First, we examine existing cryptographic watermarking schemes and observe that all of them are vulnerable to collusion attacks. Second, we construct collusion resistant watermarking schemes for various cryptographic functionalities (e.g., pseudorandom function evaluation, decryption, etc.). To achieve our second result, we present a new primitive called puncturable functional encryption scheme, which may be of independent interest.