International Association
for Cryptologic Research

Non-malleable zero-knowledge (NMZK), originally introduced in the seminal work of Dolev, Dwork, and Naor (STOC 91), is a fundamental concept for modeling the security of proof systems against man-in-the-middle attacks. After 30 years of active research, Kim, Liang, and Pandey (CRYPTO 2022) presented the first efficient constant-round NMZK argument system based solely on symmetric-key cryptography. Their construction relies on a non-black-box use of the involved cryptographic primitives and on multiple executions of Ligero (CCS 2017) that affect both the round complexity and the computational efficiency of their protocol. Their work left open the natural important challenge of achieving NMZK using the underlying primitives only in a black-box fashion (regardless of the number of rounds and actual efficiency). In this paper, we solve the aforementioned open problem by presenting the first NMZK argument system based on the black-box use of cryptographic primitives. Our work is optimal in the use of primitives since we only need one-way functions, and asymptotically optimal in the number of rounds since we only require a constant number of rounds. Our argument system is non-malleable with respect to the strong ``simulation-extractability'' flavor of non-malleability. Furthermore, we also show that our construction can be efficiently instantiated in Minicrypt, significantly improving upon the work of Kim et al., both in terms of round complexity and computational efficiency.

In this paper we consider two-round secure computation protocols which use different communication channels in different rounds: namely, protocols where broadcast is available in neither round, both rounds, only the first round, or only the second round. The prior works of Cohen, Garay and Zikas (Eurocrypt 2020) and Damgård, Magri, Ravi, Siniscalchi and Yakoubov (Crypto 2021) give tight characterizations of which security guarantees are achievable for various thresholds in each communication structure. In this work, we introduce a new security notion, namely, selective identifiable abort, which guarantees that every honest party either obtains the output, or aborts identifying one corrupt party (where honest parties may potentially identify different corrupted parties). We investigate what broadcast patterns in two-round MPC allow achieving this guarantee across various settings (such as with or without PKI, with or without an honest majority). Further, we determine what is possible in the honest majority setting without a PKI, closing a question left open by Damgård et al. We show that without a PKI, having an honest majority does not make it possible to achieve stronger security guarantees compared to the dishonest majority setting. However, if two-thirds of the parties are guaranteed to be honest, identifiable abort is additionally achievable using broadcast only in the second round. We use fundamentally different techniques from the previous works to avoid relying on private communication in the first round when a PKI is not available, since assuming such private channels without the availability of public encryption keys is unrealistic. We also show that, somewhat surprisingly, the availability of private channels in the first round does not enable stronger security guarantees unless the corruption threshold is one.

In this work we study the problem of minimizing the round complexity for securely evaluating multiparty functionalities while making black-box use of polynomial time assumptions. In Eurocrypt 2016, Garg et al. showed that assuming all parties have access to a broadcast channel, then at least four rounds of communication are required to securely realize non-trivial functionalities in the plain model. A sequence of results follow-up the result of Garg et al. matching this lower bound under a variety of assumptions. Unfortunately, none of these works make black-box use of the underlying cryptographic primitives. In Crypto 2021, Ishai, Khurana, Sahai, and Srinivasan came closer to matching the four-round lower bound, obtaining a five-round protocol that makes black-box use of oblivious transfer and PKE with pseudorandom public keys. In this work, we show how to realize any input-less functionality (e.g., coin-tossing, generation of key-pairs, and so on) in four rounds while making black-box use of two-round oblivious transfer. As an additional result, we construct the first four-round MPC protocol for generic functionalities that makes black-box use of the underlying primitives, achieving security against non-aborting adversaries. Our protocols are based on a new primitive called list two-party computation. This primitive offers relaxed security compared to the standard notion of secure two-party computation. Despite this relaxation, we argue that this tool suffices for our applications. List two-party computation is of independent interest, as we argue it can also be used for the generation of setups, like oblivious transfer correlated randomness, in three rounds. Prior to our work, generating such a setup required at least four rounds of interactions or a trusted third party.

The prior works of Cohen, Garay and Zikas (Eurocrypt 2020), Damgård, Magri, Ravi, Siniscalchi and Yakoubov (Crypto 2021) and Damgård, Ravi, Siniscalchi and Yakoubov (Eurocrypt 2023) study 2-round Multi-Party Computation (where some form of set-up is required). Motivated by the fact that broadcast is an expensive resource, they focus on so-called broadcast optimal MPC, i.e., they give tight characterizations of which security guarantees are achievable, if broadcast is available in the first round, the second round, both rounds, or not at all. This work considers the natural question of characterizing broadcast optimal MPC in the plain model where no set-up is assumed. We focus on 4-round protocols, since 4 is known to be the minimal number of rounds required to securely realize any functionality with black-box simulation. We give a complete characterization of which security guarantees, (namely selective abort, selective identifiable abort, unanimous abort and identifiable abort) are feasible or not, depending on the exact selection of rounds in which broadcast is available.

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) protocols that are resilient to a dishonest majority allow the adversary to get the output of the computation while, at the same time, forcing the honest parties to abort. Aumann and Lindell introduced the enhanced notion of security with identifiable abort, which still allows the adversary to trigger an abort but, at the same time, it enables the honest parties to agree on the identity of the party that led to the abort. More recently, in Eurocrypt 2016, Garg et al. showed that, assuming access to a simultaneous message exchange channel for all the parties, at least four rounds of communication are required to securely realize non-trivial functionalities in the plain model. Following Garg et al., a sequence of works has matched this lower bound, but none of them achieved security with identifiable abort. In this work, we close this gap and show that four rounds of communication are also sufficient to securely realize any functionality with identifiable abort using standard and generic polynomial-time assumptions. To achieve this result we introduce the new notion of bounded-rewind secure MPC that guarantees security even against an adversary that performs a mild form of reset attacks. We show how to instantiate this primitive starting from any MPC protocol and by assuming trapdoor-permutations. The notion of bounded-rewind secure MPC allows for easier parallel composition of MPC protocols with other (interactive) cryptographic primitives. Therefore, we believe that this primitive can be useful in other contexts in which it is crucial to combine multiple primitives with MPC protocols while keeping the round complexity of the final protocol low.

We construct the first four-round non-malleable commitment scheme based solely on the black-box use of one-to-one one-way functions. Prior to our work, all non-malleable commitment schemes based on black-box use of polynomial-time cryptographic primitives require more than 16 rounds of interaction. A key tool for our construction is a proof system that satisfies a new definition of security that we call non-malleable zero-knowledge with respect to commitments. In a nutshell, such a proof system can be safely run in parallel with any (potentially interactive) commitment scheme. We provide an instantiation of this tool using the MPC-in-the-Head approach in combination with BMR. The resulting protocol makes black-box use of one-to-one one-way functions.

Publicly Verifiable Zero-Knowledge proofs are known to exist only from setup assumptions such as a trusted common reference string or a random oracle. Unfortunately, the former requires a trusted party while the latter does not exist. Blockchains are distributed systems that already exist and provide certain security properties (under some honest majority assumption), hence, a natural recent research direction has been to use a blockchain as an alternative setup assumption. In TCC 2017 Goyal and Goyal proposed a construction of a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge (pvZK) proof system for some proof-of-stake blockchains. The zero-knowledge property of their construction however relies on some additional and not fully specified assumptions about the current and future behavior of honest blockchain players. In this paper, we provide several contributions. First, we show that when using a blockchain to design a provably secure protocol, it is dangerous to rely on demanding additional requirements on behaviors of the blockchain players. We do so by showing an ``attack of the clones'' whereby a malicious verifier can use a smart contract to slyly (not through bribing) clone capabilities of honest stakeholders and use those to invalidate the zero-knowledge property of the proof system by Goyal and Goyal. Second, we propose a new publicly verifiable zero-knowledge proof system that relies on non-interactive commitments and on an assumption on the min-entropy of some blocks appearing on the blockchain. Third, motivated by the fact that blockchains are a recent innovation and their resilience, in the long run, is still controversial, we introduce the concept of collapsing blockchain, and we prove that the zero-knowledge property of our scheme holds even if the blockchain eventually becomes insecure and all blockchain players eventually become dishonest.

In this work, we provide a compiler that transforms a single-input functional encryption scheme for the class of polynomially bounded circuits into a multi-client functional encryption (MCFE) scheme for the class of separable functions. An $n$-input function $f$ is called separable if it can be described as a list of polynomially bounded circuits $f^1,..., f^n$ s.t. $f(x_1,..., x_n)= f^1(x_1)+ ... + f^n(x_n)$ for all $x_1,..., x_n$. Our compiler extends the works of Brakerski et al. [Eurocrypt 2016] and of Komargodski et al. [Eurocrypt 2017] in which a generic compiler is proposed to obtain multi-input functional encryption (MIFE) from single-input functional encryption. Our construction achieves the stronger notion of MCFE but for the less generic class of separable functions. Prior to our work, a long line of results has been proposed in the setting of MCFE for the inner-product functionality, which is a special case of a separable function. We also propose a modified version of the notion of decentralized MCFE introduced by Chotard et al. [Asiacrypt 2018] that we call outsourceable mulit-client functional encryption (OMCFE). Intuitively, the notion of OMCFE makes it possible to distribute the load of the decryption procedure among at most $n$ different entities, which will return decryption shares that can be combined (e.g., additively) thus obtaining the output of the computation. This notion is especially useful in the case of a very resource consuming decryption procedure, while the combine algorithm is non-time consuming. We also show how to extend the presented MCFE protocol to obtain an OMCFE scheme for the same functionality class.

This paper closes the question of the possibility of two-round MPC protocols achieving different security guarantees with and without the availability of broadcast in any given round. Cohen et al. (Eurocrypt 2020) study this question in the dishonest majority setting; we complete the picture by studying the honest majority setting. In the honest majority setting, given broadcast in both rounds, it is known that the strongest guarantee — guaranteed output delivery — is achievable (Gordon et al. Crypto 2015). We show that, given broadcast in the first round only, guaranteed output delivery is still achievable. Given broadcast in the second round only, we give a new construction that achieves identifiable abort, and we show that fairness — and thus guaranteed output delivery — are not achievable in this setting. Finally, if only peer-to-peer channels are available, we show that the weakest guarantee — selective abort — is the only one achievable for corruption thresholds t > 1 and for t = 1 and n = 3. On the other hand, it is already known that selective abort can be achieved in these cases. In the remaining cases, i.e., t = 1 and n > 3, it is known (from the work of Ishai et al. at Crypto 2010, and Ishai et al. at Crypto 2015) that guaranteed output delivery (and thus all weaker guarantees) are possible.

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.

A proof system is publicly verifiable, if anyone, by looking at the transcript of the proof, can be convinced that the corresponding theorem is true. Public verifiability is important in many applications since it allows to compute a proof only once while convincing an unlimited number of verifiers.Popular interactive proof systems (e.g., $$\varSigma $$-protocols) protect the witness through various properties (e.g., witness indistinguishability (WI) and zero knowledge (ZK)) but typically they are not publicly verifiable since such proofs are convincing only for those verifiers who contributed to the transcripts of the proofs. The only known proof systems that are publicly verifiable rely on a non-interactive (NI) prover, through trust assumptions (e.g., NIZK in the CRS model), heuristic assumptions (e.g., NIZK in the random oracle model), specific number-theoretic assumptions on bilinear groups or relying on obfuscation assumptions (obtaining NIWI with no setups).In this work we construct publicly verifiable witness-indistinguishable proof systems from any $$\varSigma $$-protocol, based only on the existence of a very generic blockchain. The novelty of our approach is in enforcing a non-interactive verification (thus guaranteeing public verifiability) while allowing the prover to be interactive and talk to the blockchain (this allows us to circumvent the need of strong assumptions and setups). This opens interesting directions for the design of cryptographic protocols leveraging on blockchain technology.

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.