International Association
for Cryptologic Research

There exists a mismatch between the theory and practice of cryptography in the presence of leakage. On the theoretical front, the bounded leakage model, where the adversary learns bounded-length but noiseless information about secret components, and the random probing model, where the adversary learns some internal values of a leaking implementation with some probability, are convenient abstractions to analyze the security of numerous designs. On the practical front, side-channel attacks produce long transcripts which are inherently noisy but provide information about all internal computations, and this noisiness is usually evaluated with closely related metrics like the mutual information or statistical distance. Ideally, we would like to claim that resilience to bounded leakage or random probing implies resilience to noisy leakage evaluated according to these metrics. However, prior work (Duc, Dziembowski and Faust, Eurocrypt 2014; Brian et al., Eurocrypt 2021) has shown that proving such reductions with useful parameters is challenging. In this work, we study noisy leakage models stemming from hockey-stick divergences, which generalize statistical distance and are also the basis of differential privacy. First, we show that resilience to bounded leakage and random probing implies resilience to our new noisy leakage model with improved parameters compared to models based on the statistical distance or mutual information. Second, we establish composition theorems for our model, showing that these connections extend to a setting where multiple leakages are obtained from a leaking implementation. We complement our theoretical results with a discussion of practical relevance, highlighting that (i) the reduction to bounded leakage applies to realistic leakage functions with noise levels that are decreased by several orders of magnitude compared to Brian et al., and (ii) the reduction to random probing usefully generalizes the seminal work of Duc, Dziembowski, and Faust, although it remains limited when the field size in which masking operates grows (i.e., hockey-stick divergences can better hide the field size dependency of the noise requirements, but do not annihilate it).

Two-source extractors are deterministic functions that, given two independent weak sources of randomness, output a (close to) uniformly random string of bits. Cheraghchi and Guruswami (TCC 2015) introduced two- source non-malleable extractors that combine the properties of randomness extraction with tamper resilience. Two-source non-malleable extractors have since then attracted a lot of attention, and have very quickly become fundamental objects in cryptosystems involving communication channels that cannot be fully trusted. Various applications of two-source non-malleable extractors include in particular non-malleable codes, non-malleable commitments, non-malleable secret sharing, network extraction, and privacy amplification with tamperable memory. The best known constructions of two-source non-malleable extractors are due to Chattopadhyay, Goyal, and Li (STOC 2016), Li (STOC 2017), and Li (CCC 2019). All of these constructions require both sources to have min-entropy at least 0.99n, where n is the bit-length of each source. In this work, we introduce collision-resistant randomness extractors. This allows us to design a compiler that, given a two-source non-malleable extractor, and a collision-resistant extractor, outputs a two-source non- malleable extractor that inherits the non-malleability property from the non-malleable extractor, and the entropy requirement from the collision-resistant extractor. Nested application of this compiler leads to a dramatic improvement of the state-of-the-art mentioned above. We obtain a construction of a two-source non-malleable extractor where one source is required to have min-entropy greater than 0.8n, and the other source is required to have only polylog(n) min-entropy. Moreover, the other parameters of our construction, i.e., the output length, and the error remain comparable to prior constructions.

We distill a simple information-theoretic model for randomness extraction motivated by the task of generating publicly verifiable randomness in blockchain settings and which is closely related to You-Only-Speak-Once (YOSO) protocols (CRYPTO 2021). With the goal of avoiding denial-of-service attacks, parties speak only once and in sequence by broadcasting a public value and forwarding secret values to future parties. Additionally, an unbounded adversary can corrupt any chosen subset of at most t parties. In contrast, existing YOSO protocols only handle random corruptions. As a notable example, considering worst-case corruptions allows us to reduce trust in the role assignment mechanism, which is assumed to be perfectly random in YOSO. We study the maximum corruption threshold t which allows for unconditional randomness extraction in our model: - With respect to feasibility, we give protocols for t corruptions and n=6t+1 or n=5t parties depending on whether the adversary learns secret values forwarded to corrupted parties immediately once they are sent or only once the corrupted party is executed, respectively. Both settings are motivated by practical implementations of secret value forwarding. To design such protocols, we go beyond the committee-based approach that is sufficient for random corruptions in YOSO but turns out to be sub-optimal for chosen corruptions. - To complement our protocols, we show that low-error randomness extraction is impossible with corruption threshold t and n\leq 4t parties in both settings above. This also provides a separation between chosen and random corruptions, since the latter allows for randomness extraction with close to n/2 random corruptions.

Secret-sharing is one of the most fundamental primitives in cryptography, and has found several applications. All known constructions of secret sharing (with the exception of those with a pathological choice of parameters) require access to uniform randomness. However, in practice it is extremely challenging to generate a source of uniform randomness. This has led to a large body of research devoted to designing randomized algorithms and cryptographic primitives from imperfect sources of randomness. Motivated by this, Bosley and Dodis (TCC 2007) asked whether it is even possible to construct a $2$-out-of-$2$ secret sharing scheme without access to uniform randomness. In this work, we make significant progress towards answering this question. Namely, we resolve this question for secret sharing schemes with important additional properties: $1$-bit leakage-resilience and non-malleability. We prove that, for not too small secrets, it is impossible to construct any $2$-out-of-$2$ leakage-resilient or non-malleable secret sharing scheme without access to uniform randomness. Given that the problem of whether $2$-out-of-$2$ secret sharing requires uniform randomness has been open for more than a decade, it is reasonable to consider intermediate problems towards resolving the open question. In a spirit similar to NP-completeness, we also study how the existence of a $t$-out-of-$n$ secret sharing without access to uniform randomness is related to the existence of a $t'$-out-of-$n'$ secret sharing without access to uniform randomness for a different choice of the parameters $t,n,t',n'$.

We show that noisy leakage can be simulated in the information-theoretic setting using a single query of bounded leakage, up to a small statistical simulation error and a slight loss in the leakage parameter. The latter holds true in particular for one of the most used noisy-leakage models, where the noisiness is measured using the conditional average min-entropy (Naor and Segev, CRYPTO'09 and SICOMP'12). Our reductions between noisy and bounded leakage are achieved in two steps. First, we put forward a new leakage model (dubbed the dense leakage model) and prove that dense leakage can be simulated in the information-theoretic setting using a single query of bounded leakage, up to small statistical distance. Second, we show that the most common noisy-leakage models fall within the class of dense leakage, with good parameters. We also provide a complete picture of the relationships between different noisy-leakage models, and prove lower bounds showing that our reductions are nearly optimal. Our result finds applications to leakage-resilient cryptography, where we are often able to lift security in the presence of bounded leakage to security in the presence of noisy leakage, both in the information-theoretic and in the computational setting. Additionally, we show how to use lower bounds in communication complexity to prove that bounded-collusion protocols (Kumar, Meka, and Sahai, FOCS'19) for certain functions do not only require long transcripts, but also necessarily need to reveal enough information about the inputs.

For more than 30 years, cryptographers have been looking for public sources of uniform randomness in order to use them as a set-up to run appealing cryptographic protocols without relying on trusted third parties. Unfortunately, nowadays it is fair to assess that assuming the existence of physical phenomena producing public uniform randomness is far from reality.  It is known that uniform randomness cannot be extracted from a single weak source. A well-studied way to overcome this is to consider several independent weak sources. However, this means we must trust the various sampling processes of weak randomness from physical processes. Motivated by the above state of affairs, this work considers a set-up where players can access multiple {\em potential} sources of weak randomness, several of which may be jointly corrupted by a computationally unbounded adversary. We introduce {\em SHELA} (Somewhere Honest Entropic Look Ahead) sources to model this situation. We show that there is no hope of extracting uniform randomness from a {\em SHELA} source. Instead, we focus on the task of {\em Somewhere-Extraction} (i.e., outputting several candidate strings, some of which are uniformly distributed -- yet we do not know which). We give explicit constructions of {\em Somewhere-Extractors} for {\em SHELA} sources with good parameters. Then, we present applications of the above somewhere-extractor where the public uniform randomness can be replaced by the output of such extraction from corruptible sources, greatly outperforming trivial solutions. The output of somewhere-extraction is also useful in other settings, such as a suitable source of random coins for many randomized algorithms. In another front, we comprehensively study the problem of {\em Somewhere-Extraction} from a {\em weak} source, resulting in a series of bounds. Our bounds highlight the fact that, in most regimes of parameters (including those relevant for applications), {\em SHELA} sources significantly outperform {\em weak} sources of comparable parameters both when it comes to the process of {\em Somewhere-Extraction}, or in the task of amplification of success probability in randomized algorithms. Moreover, the low quality of somewhere-extraction from weak sources excludes its use in various efficient applications.

Secret sharing enables a dealer to split a secret into a set of shares, in such a way that certain authorized subsets of share holders can reconstruct the secret, whereas all unauthorized subsets cannot. Non-malleable secret sharing (Goyal and Kumar, STOC 2018) additionally requires that, even if the shares have been tampered with, the reconstructed secret is either the original or a completely unrelated one. In this work, we construct non-malleable secret sharing tolerating $p$-time {\em joint-tampering} attacks in the plain model (in the computational setting), where the latter means that, for any $p>0$ fixed {\em a priori}, the attacker can tamper with the same target secret sharing up to $p$ times. In particular, assuming one-to-one one-way functions, we obtain: - A secret sharing scheme for threshold access structures which tolerates joint $p$-time tampering with subsets of the shares of maximal size ({\em i.e.}, matching the privacy threshold of the scheme). This holds in a model where the attacker commits to a partition of the shares into non-overlapping subsets, and keeps tampering jointly with the shares within such a partition (so-called {\em selective partitioning}). - A secret sharing scheme for general access structures which tolerates joint $p$-time tampering with subsets of the shares of size $O(\sqrt{\log n})$, where $n$ is the number of parties. This holds in a stronger model where the attacker is allowed to adaptively change the partition within each tampering query, under the restriction that once a subset of the shares has been tampered with jointly, that subset is always either tampered jointly or not modified by other tampering queries (so-called {\em semi-adaptive partitioning}). At the heart of our result for selective partitioning lies a new technique showing that every one-time {\em statistically} non-malleable secret sharing against joint tampering is in fact {\em leakage-resilient} non-malleable ({\em i.e.},\ the attacker can leak jointly from the shares prior to tampering). We believe this may be of independent interest, and in fact we show it implies lower bounds on the share size and randomness complexity of statistically non-malleable secret sharing against {\em independent} tampering.

Non-malleable codes (NMCs), introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs [20], provide a useful message integrity guarantee in situations where traditional error-correction (and even error-detection) is impossible; for example, when the attacker can completely overwrite the encoded message. NMCs have emerged as a fundamental object at the intersection of coding theory and cryptography. In particular, progress in the study of non-malleable codes and the related notion of non-malleable extractors has led to new insights and progress on even more fundamental problems like the construction of multi-source randomness extractors. A large body of the recent work has focused on various constructions of non-malleable codes in the split-state model. Many variants of NMCs have been introduced in the literature, e.g., strong NMCs, super strong NMCs and continuous NMCs. The most general, and hence also the most useful notion among these is that of continuous non-malleable codes, that allows for continuous tampering by the adversary. We present the first efficient information-theoretically secure continuously non-malleable code in the constant split-state model. We believe that our main technical result could be of independent interest and some of the ideas could in future be used to make progress on other related questions.

In this work we present a collection of compilers that take secret sharing schemes for an arbitrary access structure as input and produce either leakage-resilient or non-malleable secret sharing schemes for the same access structure. A leakage-resilient secret sharing scheme hides the secret from an adversary, who has access to an unqualified set of shares, even if the adversary additionally obtains some size-bounded leakage from all other secret shares. A non-malleable secret sharing scheme guarantees that a secret that is reconstructed from a set of tampered shares is either equal to the original secret or completely unrelated. To the best of our knowledge we present the first generic compiler for leakage-resilient secret sharing for general access structures. In the case of non-malleable secret sharing, we strengthen previous definitions, provide separations between them, and construct a non-malleable secret sharing scheme for general access structures that fulfills the strongest definition with respect to independent share tampering functions. More precisely, our scheme is secure against concurrent tampering: The adversary is allowed to (non-adaptively) tamper the shares multiple times, and in each tampering attempt can freely choose the qualified set of shares to be used by the reconstruction algorithm to reconstruct the tampered secret. This is a strong analogue of the multiple-tampering setting for split-state non-malleable codes and extractors.We show how to use leakage-resilient and non-malleable secret sharing schemes to construct leakage-resilient and non-malleable threshold signatures. Classical threshold signatures allow to distribute the secret key of a signature scheme among a set of parties, such that certain qualified subsets can sign messages. We construct threshold signature schemes that remain secure even if an adversary leaks from or tampers with all secret shares.

Non-Malleable Codes (NMC) were introduced by Dziembowski, Pietrzak and Wichs in ICS 2010 as a relaxation of error correcting codes and error detecting codes. Faust, Mukherjee, Nielsen, and Venturi in TCC 2014 introduced an even stronger notion of non-malleable codes called continuous non-malleable codes where security is achieved against continuous tampering of a single codeword without re-encoding.We construct information theoretically secure CNMC resilient to bit permutations and overwrites, this is the first Continuous NMC constructed outside of the split-state model.In this work we also study relations between the CNMC and parallel CCA commitments. We show that the CNMC can be used to bootstrap a Self-destruct parallel CCA bit commitment to a Self-destruct parallel CCA string commitment, where Self-destruct parallel CCA is a weak form of parallel CCA security. Then we can get rid of the Self-destruct limitation obtaining a parallel CCA commitment, requiring only one-way functions.