International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We formally study “non-malleable functions” (NMFs), a general cryptographic primitive which simplifies and relaxes “non-malleable one-way/hash functions” (NMOWHFs) introduced by Boldyreva et al. (in: Advances in cryptology—ASIACRYPT 2009, pp 524–541, 2009) and refined by Baecher et al. (in: CT-RSA 2011, pp 268–283, 2011). NMFs focus on basic functions, rather than one-way/hash functions considered in the literature of NMOWHFs. We formalize a game-based definition for NMFs. Roughly, a function f is non-malleable if given an image $$y^* \leftarrow f(x^*)$$ y ∗ ← f ( x ∗ ) for a randomly chosen $$x^*$$ x ∗ , it is hard to output a value y together with a transformation $$\phi $$ ϕ from some prefixed transformation class such that y is an image of $$\phi (x^*)$$ ϕ ( x ∗ ) under f . Our non-malleable notion is strong in the sense that only trivial copy solution $$(\mathsf {id}, y^*)$$ ( id , y ∗ ) is forbidden, where $$\mathsf {id}$$ id is the identity transformation. We also consider the adaptive notion, which stipulates that non-malleability holds even when an inversion oracle is available. We investigate the relations between non-malleability and one-wayness in depth. In the non-adaptive setting, we show that non-malleability generally implies one-wayness for poly-to-one functions but not vice versa. In the adaptive setting, we show that for most algebra-induced transformation classes, adaptive non-malleability (ANM) is equivalent to adaptive one-wayness (AOW) for injective functions. These results establish theoretical connections between non-malleability and one-wayness for functions and extend to trapdoor functions as well, resolving the open problems left by Kiltz et al. (in: Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2010, pp 673–692, 2010). We also study the relations between standard OW/NM and hinting OW/NM, where the latter notions are typically more useful in practice. Toward efficient realizations of NMFs, we give a deterministic construction from adaptive trapdoor functions as well as a randomized construction from all-but-one lossy functions and one-time signature. This partially solves an open problem posed by Boldyreva et al. (in: Advances in cryptology—ASIACRYPT 2009, pp 524–541, 2009). Finally, we explore applications of NMFs in security against related-key attacks (RKA). We first show that, somewhat surprisingly, the implication AOW $$\Rightarrow $$ ⇒ ANM sheds light on addressing non-trivial copy attacks in RKA security. We then show that NMFs give rise to a generic construction of RKA-secure authenticated key derivation functions, which have proven to be very useful in achieving RKA security for numerous cryptographic primitives. Particularly, our construction simplifies and unifies the result due to Qin et al. (in: Public-key cryptography—PKC 2015, volume 9020 of LNCS. Springer, Berlin, pp 557–578, 2015).