(Sender-)Deniable encryption provides a very strong privacy guarantee: a sender who is coerced by an attacker into “opening” their ciphertext after-the-fact is able to generate “fake” local random choices that are consistent with any plaintext of their choice. The only known fully-efficient constructions of public-key deniable encryption rely on indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) (which currently can only be based on sub-exponential hardness assumptions).
(Sender-)Deniable encryption provides a very strong privacy guarantee: a sender who is coerced by an attacker into “opening” their ciphertext after-the-fact is able to generate “fake” local random choices that are consistent with any plaintext of their choice. The only known fully-efficient constructions of public-key deniable encryption rely on indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) (which currently can only be based on sub-exponential hardness assumptions).
Abstract. The primitive of deniable encryption was first introduced by Canetti et al. (CRYPTO, 1997). Deniable encryption is a regular public key encryption scheme with the added feature that after running the protocol honestly and transmitting a message m, both Sender and Receiver may produce random coins showing that the transmitted ciphertext was an encryption of any message m ′ in the message space. Deniable encryption is a key tool for constructing incoercible protocols, since it allows a party to send one message and later provide apparent evidence to a coercer that a different message was sent. In addition, deniable encryption may be used to obtain adaptively-secure multiparty computation (MPC) protocols and is secure under selective-opening attacks. Different flavors such as sender-deniable and receiver-deniable encryption, where only the Sender or Receiver can produce fake random coins, have been considered. Recently, several open questions regarding the feasibility of deniable encryption have been resolved (c.f. (O’Neill et al., CRYPTO, 2011), (Bendlin et al., ASIACRYPT, 2011)). A fundamental remaining open question is whether it is possible to construct sender-deniable Encryption Schemes with super-polynomial security, where an adversary has negligible advantage in distinguishing real and fake openings. The primitive of simulatable public key encryption (PKE), introduced by Damg˚ard and Nielsen (CRYPTO, 2000), is a public key encryption scheme with additional properties that allow oblivious sampling of public keys and
To ensure resistance to attacks with coercion to disclose a secret key by an active adversary, the protocol of deniable encryption includes a procedure for mutual authentication of the sender and receiver of a message with their long-term public keys, which is combined with a hidden exchange of single-use public keys used to generate a single-use shared key, on which the secret message is encrypted. Longterm public keys are used to generate a shared secret key, on which a fake message is encrypted. The produced intermediate ciphertexts are converted into a single ciphertext, which is computationally indistinguishable from the ciphertext obtained by probabilistic encryption of a fake message. This approach allows us to build an encryption protocol that is resistant to bi-sided attacks with coercion, since the disclosure of users' private keys gives access only to the fake message and cannot be used to prove the possibility of alternative decryption of the ciphertext transmitted over a public communication channel. The authentication of the single-use public keys is also used to implement protocols for secure encryption using short shared keys.
Abstract. A deniable cryptosystem allows a sender and a receiver to communicate over an insecure channel in such a way that the communication is still secure even if the adversary can threaten the parties into revealing their internal states after the execution of the protocol. This is done by allowing the parties to change their internal state to make it look like a given ciphertext decrypts to a message di erent from what it really decrypts to. Deniable encryption was in this way introduced to allow to deny a message exchange and hence combat coercion. Depending on which parties can be coerced, the security level, the avor and the number of rounds of the cryptosystem, it is possible to de ne a number of notions of deniable encryption. In this paper we prove that there does not exist any non-interactive receiver-deniable cryptosystem with better than polynomial security. This also shows that it is impossible to construct a non-interactive bi-deniable public-key encryption scheme with better than polynomial security. Speci cally, we give an explicit bound relating the security of the scheme to how e cient the scheme is in terms of key size. Our impossibility result establishes a lower bound on the security. As a nal contribution we give constructions of deniable public-key encryption schemes which establishes upper bounds on the security in terms of key length. There is a gap between our lower and upper bounds, which leaves the interesting open problem of nding the tight bounds. 1
Encryption of data is fundamental to secure communication in the modern world. Beyond encryption of data lies obfuscation, i.e., encryption of functionality. It is well-known that the most powerful means of obfuscating classical programs, so-called ``black-box obfuscation',' is provably impossible [Barak et al '12]. However, several recent results have yielded candidate schemes that satisfy a definition weaker than black-box, and yet still have numerous applications. In this work, we initialize the rigorous study of obfuscating programs via quantum-mechanical means. We define notions of quantum obfuscation which encompass several natural variants. The input to the obfuscator can describe classical or quantum functionality, and the output can be a circuit description or a quantum state. The obfuscator can also satisfy one of a number of obfuscation conditions: black-box, information-theoretic black-box, indistinguishability, and best possible; the last two conditions come in three variants: perfect, statistical, and computational. We discuss many applications, including CPA-secure quantum encryption, quantum fully-homomorphic encryption, and public-key quantum money. We then prove several impossibility results, extending a number of foundational papers on classical obfuscation to the quantum setting. We prove that quantum black-box obfuscation is impossible in a setting where adversaries can possess more than one output of the obfuscator. In particular, generic transformation of quantum circuits into black-box-obfuscated quantum circuits is impossible. We also show that statistical indistinguishability obfuscation is impossible, up to an unlikely complexity-theoretic collapse. Our proofs involve a new tool: chosen-ciphertext-secure encryption of quantum data, which was recently shown to be possible assuming quantum-secure one-way functions exist [Alagic et al '16].
Deniable encryption is an intriguing scheme against the problem of information leakage caused by adversary coercion. Previously proposed deniable schemes cannot resist the attack of quantum computers and there are few implementations of these schemes. Aiming at this problem, a deniable encryption scheme based on learning with errors (LWE) and related implementations were proposed. The scheme can resist the quantum attack, and also can deny the plaintext to any fake plaintext, so that the sender can resist the adversary’s coercive attack. Firstly, by using the indistinguishability of the LWE problem, a subset with low density named “translucent set” was constructed in a uniform space. The “translucent set” was used to construct the ciphertexts of bits 0 and 1, which enabled one-way deniability of a single bit and reduced the error rate. Then, a plaintext coding method was proposed to realize two-way deniability of a single bit so that the sender could deny the original plaintext to any fake plaintext. The theoretical analyses were given to show the deniability, security (IND–CPA), correctness, complexity and ciphertext expansion rate of the scheme. Finally, the scheme was implemented by C++, and experiments had been done for the error rate, ciphertext expansion rate, encryption and decryption efficiency. The experimental results showed that the error rate and ciphertext expansion rate were consistent with the theoretical results. Compared with other deniable schemes based on the quadratic residual problem, the proposed scheme has obvious advantages in anti-quantum attack, efficiency and ciphertext expansion rate. Specifically, the encryption efficiency is improved by 70%, and the ciphertext expansion rate is reduced to 1/3 of above schemes.