Previously known functional encryption (FE) schemes for general circuits relied on indistin-guishability obfuscation, which in turn either relies on an exponential number of assumptions (basically, one per circuit), or a polynomial set of assumptions, but with an exponential loss in the security reduction. Additionally these schemes are proved in an unrealistic selective security model, where the adversary is forced to specify its target before seeing the public parameters. For these constructions, full security can be obtained but at the cost of an exponential loss in the security reduction. In this work, we overcome the above limitations and realize a fully secure functional en-cryption scheme without using indistinguishability obfuscation. Specifically the security of our scheme relies only on the polynomial hardness of simple assumptions on multilinear maps. 1
Previously known functional encryption (FE) schemes for general circuits relied on indistin-guishability obfuscation, which in turn either relies on an exponential number of assumptions (basically, one per circuit), or a polynomial set of assumptions, but with an exponential loss in the security reduction. Additionally these schemes are proved in an unrealistic selective security model, where the adversary is forced to specify its target before seeing the public parameters. For these constructions, full security can be obtained but at the cost of an exponential loss in the security reduction. In this work, we overcome the above limitations and realize a fully secure functional en-cryption scheme without using indistinguishability obfuscation. Specifically the security of our scheme relies only on the polynomial hardness of simple assumptions on multilinear maps. 1
The arrival of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) has transformed the cryptographic land-scape by enabling several security goals that were previously beyond our reach. Consequently, one of the pressing goals currently is to construct iO from well-studied standard cryptographic assumptions. In this work, we make progress in this direction by presenting a reduction from iO to a natural form of public-key functional encryption (FE). Specifically, we construct iO for general functions from any single-key FE scheme for NC1 that achieves selective, indistinguishability security against sub-exponential time adversaries. Further, the FE scheme should be compact, namely, the running time of the encryption algorithm must only be a polynomial in the security parameter and the input message length (and not in the function description size or its output length). We achieve this result by developing a novel arity amplification technique to transform FE for single-ary functions into FE for multi-ary functions (aka multi-input FE). Instantiating our approach with known, non-compact FE schemes, we obtain the first constructions of multi-input FE for constant-ary functions based on standard assumptions. Finally, as a result of independent interest, we construct a compact FE scheme from ran-domized encodings for Turing machines and learning with errors assumption.
We construct a general-purpose multi-input functional encryption scheme in the private-key setting. Namely, we construct a scheme where a functional key corresponding to a function f enables a user holding encryptions of x1; : : : ; xt to compute f(x1; : : : ; xt) but nothing else. This is achieved starting from any general-purpose private-key single-input scheme (without any additional assumptions), and is proven to be adaptively secure for any constant number of inputs t. Moreover, it can be extended to a super-constant number of inputs assuming that the underlying single-input scheme is sub-exponentially secure. Instantiating our construction with existing single-input schemes, we obtain multi-input schemes that are based on a variety of assumptions (such as indistinguishability obfuscation, multilinear maps, learning with errors, and even one-way functions), offering various trade-offs between security and efficiency. Previous and concurrent constructions of multi-input functional encryption schemes either rely on stronger assumptions and provided weaker security guarantees (Goldwasser et al. [EU-ROCRYPT '14], and Ananth and Jain [CRYPTO '15]), or relied on multilinear maps and could
We present a construction of a private-key functional encryption scheme for any family of randomized functionalities based on any such scheme for deterministic functionalities that is sufficiently expressive. Instantiating our construction with existing schemes for deterministic functionalities, we obtain schemes for any family of randomized functionalities based on a variety of assumptions (including the LWE assumption, simple assumptions on multilinear maps, and even the existence of any one-way function) offering various trade-offs between security and efficiency. Previously, Goyal, Jain, Koppula and Sahai [Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2013] constructed a public-key functional encryption scheme for any family of randomized functionalities based on indistinguishability obfuscation. One of the key insights underlying our work is that, in the private-key setting, a sufficiently expressive functional encryption scheme may be appropriately utilized for implementing proof techniques that were so far implemented based on obfuscation assumptions (such as the punctured programming technique of Sahai and Waters [STOC 2014]). We view this as a contribution of independent interest that may be found useful in other settings as well.
Recent breakthroughs in cryptography have positioned indistinguishability obfuscation as a “central hub” for almost all known cryptographic tasks, and as an extremely powerful building block for new cryptographic tasks resolving long-standing and foundational open problems. However, constructions based on indistinguishability obfuscation almost always rely on non-black-box techniques, and thus the extent to which it can be used as a building block has been completely unexplored so far. We present a framework for proving meaningful negative results on the power of indistinguishability obfuscation. By considering indistinguishability obfuscation for oracle-aided circuits, we capture the common techniques that have been used so far in constructions based on indistinguishability obfuscation. These include, in particular, non-black-box techniques such as the punctured programming approach of Sahai and Waters [A. Sahai and B. Waters, How to use indistinguishability obfuscation: Deniable encryption, and more, in Proceedings of the 46th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, ACM, New York, 2014, pp. 475--484] and its variants, as well as subexponential security assumptions. Within our framework we prove the first negative results on the power of indistinguishability obfuscation and of the tightly related notion of functional encryption. Our results are as follows: (1) There is no fully black-box construction of a collision-resistant function family from an indistinguishability obfuscator for oracle-aided circuits. (2) There is no fully black-box construction of a key-agreement protocol with perfect completeness from a private-key functional encryption scheme for oracle-aided circuits. Specifically, we prove that any such potential constructions must suffer from an exponential security loss, and thus our results cannot be circumvented using subexponential security assumptions. Our framework captures constructions that may rely on a wide variety of primitives in a non-black-box manner (e.g., obfuscating or generating a functional key for a function that uses the evaluation circuit of a puncturable pseudorandom function), and we only assume that the underlying indistinguishability obfuscator or functional encryption scheme itself is used in a black-box manner.
In a functional encryption (FE) scheme, the owner of the secret key can generate restricted decryption keys that allow users to learn specific functions of the encrypted messages and nothing else. In many known constructions of FE schemes, such a notion of security is guaranteed only for messages that are fixed ahead of time (i.e., before the adversary even interacts with the system). This is called selective security, which is too restrictive for many realistic applications. Achieving adaptive security (also called full security), where security is guaranteed even for messages that are adaptively chosen at any point in time, seems significantly more challenging. The handful of known fully-secure schemes are based on specifically tailored techniques that rely on strong assumptions (such as obfuscation assumptions or multilinear maps assumptions). In this paper we show that any sufficiently expressive selectively-secure FE scheme can be transformed into a fully secure one without introducing any additional assumptions. We present a direct black-box transformation, making novel use of hybrid encryption, a classical technique that was originally introduced for improving the efficiency of encryption schemes, combined with a new technique we call the Trojan Method. This method allows to embed a secret execution thread in the functional keys of the underlying
In a functional encryption (FE) scheme, a user that holds a ciphertext and a function-key can learn the result of applying the function to the plaintext message. Security requires that the user does not learn anything beyond the function evaluation. We extend this notion to the quantum setting by providing definitions and a construction for a quantum functional encryption (QFE) scheme which allows for the evaluation of polynomially-sized circuits on arbitrary quantum messages. Our construction is built upon quantum garbled circuits [BY20]. We also investigate the relationship of QFE to the seemingly unrelated notion of unclonable encryption (UE) and find that any QFE scheme universally achieves the property of unclonable functional encryption (UFE). In particular we assume the existence of an unclonable encryption scheme with quantum decryption keys which was recently constructed by [AKY24]. Our UFE guarantees that two parties cannot simultaneously recover the correct function outputs using two independently sampled function secret keys. As an application we give the first construction for public-key UE with variable decryption keys. Lastly, we establish a connection between quantum indistinguishability obfuscation (qiO) and quantum functional encryption (QFE); showing that any multi-input indistinguishability-secure quantum functional encryption scheme unconditionally implies the existence of qiO.