In recent years, lattice-based cryptography has been recognized for its many attractive properties, such as strong provable security guarantees and apparent resistance to quantum attacks, flexibility for realizing powerful tools like fully homomorphic encryption, and high asymptotic efficiency. Indeed, several works have demonstrated that for basic tasks like encryption and authentication, lattice-based primitives can have performance competitive with (or even surpassing) those based on classical mechanisms like RSA or Diffie-Hellman. However, there still has been relatively little work on developing lattice cryptography for deployment in real-world cryptosystems and protocols. In this work we take a step toward that goal, by giving efficient and practical lattice-based protocols for key transport, encryption, and authenticated key exchange that are suitable as “drop-in ” components for proposed Internet standards and other open protocols. The security of all our proposals is provably based (sometimes in the random-oracle model) on the well-studied “learning with errors over rings” problem, and hence on the conjectured worst-case hardness of problems on ideal lattices (against quantum algorithms). One of our main technical innovations (which may be of independent interest) is a simple, low-bandwidth reconciliation technique that allows two parties who “approximately agree ” on a secret value to reach exact agreement, a setting common to essentially all lattice-based encryption schemes. Our technique reduces the ciphertext length of prior (already compact) encryption schemes nearly twofold, at essentially no cost. 1
In recent years, lattice-based cryptography has been recognized for its many attractive properties, such as strong provable security guarantees and apparent resistance to quantum attacks, flexibility for realizing powerful tools like fully homomorphic encryption, and high asymptotic efficiency. Indeed, several works have demonstrated that for basic tasks like encryption and authentication, lattice-based primitives can have performance competitive with (or even surpassing) those based on classical mechanisms like RSA or Diffie-Hellman. However, there still has been relatively little work on developing lattice cryptography for deployment in real-world cryptosystems and protocols. In this work we take a step toward that goal, by giving efficient and practical lattice-based protocols for key transport, encryption, and authenticated key exchange that are suitable as “drop-in ” components for proposed Internet standards and other open protocols. The security of all our proposals is provably based (sometimes in the random-oracle model) on the well-studied “learning with errors over rings” problem, and hence on the conjectured worst-case hardness of problems on ideal lattices (against quantum algorithms). One of our main technical innovations (which may be of independent interest) is a simple, low-bandwidth reconciliation technique that allows two parties who “approximately agree ” on a secret value to reach exact agreement, a setting common to essentially all lattice-based encryption schemes. Our technique reduces the ciphertext length of prior (already compact) encryption schemes nearly twofold, at essentially no cost. 1
The invention of public-key cryptography (PKC) by Diffie and Hellman in 1976 is one of two milestones marking the beginning of modern cryptography. The security of a PKC system requires that it should be infeasible to compute the private key from a given public key, which in turn is typically guaranteed by the difficulty in solving some cryptographic-friendly mathematical problems. Among those problems, the integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems play pivotal roles in the development of public-key cryptography. In particular, the assumption that there is no polynomial time (classical) algorithm that solves the above two problems constitutes the basis for the security of almost all currently used public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA and ElGamal. However, Shor [1] found an efficient quantum solving algorithm for the integer factorization and discrete logarithm problems in 1994, which would destroy the security basis for most real deployed PKC systems if large-scale quantum computers become available. The rapid development of quantum technology in recent years suggests that we are getting closer to the quantum crisis of current PKC systems. As a response to the quantum crisis, the research community has made many efforts to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) that are believed to resist quantum computer attacks. Lattice-based cryptography is one of the main directions in this area, and has become the most promising PQC candidate for standardization. The research of lattice-based cryptography dates back to the seminal work of Ajtai [2], which first based the security of cryptographic primitives on the difficulty of solving some lattice problems such as the approximate shortest vector problem and the closest vector problem. After more than two decades of development, lattice-based cryptography has gained substantial progress. In theory, we have witnessed the construction of many powerful cryptographic primitives that were not known before. In practice, the public key size of lattice-based cryptosystems has been significantly reduced from several gigabytes to a few kilobytes. For current applications and standardization, key exchanges, public-key encryptions (PKEs) and signatures are the most desired lattice-based cryptosystems, where the first two are often used to ensure information secrecy, while the last provides information authentication. Note that public-key encryptions are equivalent to two-round key exchanges, also known as the key encapsulation mechanism (KEM). In the following, we focus on lattice-based PKEs/KEMs. The design principle of lattice-based PKEs/KEMs follows two approaches: a trapdoor one-way function and an approximate commutative one-way function. In the first approach, a trapdoor one-way function f and its trapdoor f−1 are generated as the public key and private key. A plaintext m is encrypted as c = f(m), and the ciphertext is decrypted as m = f−1(c). The NTRU scheme and its variants follow such an approach. In the second approach, an approximate commutative function fs and a random input a are generated, the public key is (a, b = fs(a)) and the private key is s. A plaintext m is encrypted as c1 = gr(a), c2 = gr(b) + E(m), where r is a random element, g is an approximate commutative one-way function and E is the encoding of an error-correction code. The ciphertext (c1, c2) is decrypted as m = D(c2 − fs(c1)), where D is the decoding of an error-correction code. The correctness of decryption is guaranteed by the approximate commutative property (gr(b) = gr(fs(a)) ≈ fs(gr(a)) = fs(c1)) and the error-correction code. Learning with errors (LWE) problem-based PKE/KEM schemes and their variants follow such an approach. The standardization of PQC has received substantial support from national funding agencies, such as the European Union projects PQCrypto and SAFEcrypto. The USA National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) started the post-quantum standardization project in 2012, organized a worldwide ‘competition’ in 2016 and plans to deliver draft standards before 2024. After two rounds of evaluation, seven schemes were accepted as the round-three candidates on 22 July 2020, of which five are lattice-based schemes. In 2017, the International organization for standardization started a study project of post-quantum cryptography named SD8. Most LWE-based PKE schemes such as Kyber and LAC follow the Lindner-Peikert framework [3] up to the choices of ring structure, noise distribution and parameters. As the size of noise in lattice-based PKEs/EKMs is typically larger than the lower bits of the ciphertext, many schemes often artificially drop a few lower bits to optimize the practical performance without significantly increasing the final decryption noise. Kyber [4] is one of the most promising PKE/KEM candidates in the NIST PQC standardization, whose security is provably based on the difficulty of so-called module LWE (MLWE) problems. The use of MLWE allowed Kyber to obtain additional flexibility and security advantages, while keeping the same efficiency as those based on the ring-LWE problems. The strategy of dropping some lower bits is used to compress both the public-key and ciphertext sizes. For a targeted 128-bit quantum security, the public-key and ciphertext sizes of Kyber is around a single kilobyte. LAC [5] uses several techniques to reduce the modulus as small as possible: it uses a byte-level modulus, embeds powerful error-correcting codes to maximize the noise-modulus rate, provides a different style of modulus to avoid potential attacks for special polynomial ring structures and optimizes the polynomial multiplication algorithm of the bit-level secret and noise. Based on these techniques, LAC reduces the public key to 544–1056 bytes and the ciphertext to 664–1464 bytes. Meanwhile, it achieves similar computational performance compared with NTT technique schemes. By observing the asymmetries in lattice-based cryptosystems, Zhang and Yu et al. [6] proposed asymmetric MLWE and asymmetric MSIS problems, which yield further size-optimized KEMs and signature schemes to those from standard counterparts. Compared to the seven NIST round-three candidates at Category III security, their KEM scheme has parameters (public key + ciphertext size) smaller than Classic McEliece, CRYSTALS-Kyber, NTRU and Saber; their signature scheme has parameters (public key + signature size) smaller than CRYSTALS-Dilithium and Rainbow, but slightly larger than FALCON, where CRYSTALS-Kyber, NTRU, Saber, CRYSTALS-Dilithium and FALCON are lattice-based schemes. One important application of lattice-based PKEs/KEMs is to build authenticated key exchange (AKE), which could provide additional authentication to the established session key. There are several generic ways to construct AKE from lattice-based PKEs/KEMs. In the PKE setting, Xue and Lu et al. [7] proposed a more compact KEM-based framework via a new primitive named ‘2-key KEM’, which shares some item between different ciphertexts. In the only password setting, Zhang and Yu [8] presented a two-round PAKE framework from the splittable-PKEs that can be instantiated from lattices. The only known AKE that does not rely on lattice-based PKEs/KEMs was given in Ref. [9], which has two-round messages and provides implicit authentication. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (6197239 to X.L.; 62022018 and 61932019 to J.Z.) and the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFB0804105 to J.Z.). Conflict of interest statement. None declared.
Lattice-based cryptography is the use of conjectured hard problems on point lattices in ℝn as the foundation for secure cryptographic systems. Attractive features of lattice cryptography include apparent resistance to quantum attacks (in contrast with most number-theoretic cryptography), high asymptotic efficiency and parallelism, security under worst-case intractability assumptions, and solutions to long-standing open problems in cryptography. This work surveys most of the major developments in lattice cryptography over the past ten years. The main focus is on the foundational short integer solution (SIS) and learning with errors (LWE) problems (and their more efficient ring-based variants), their provable hardness assuming the worst-case intractability of standard lattice problems, and their many cryptographic applications.
Lattice-based cryptography is the use of conjectured hard problems on point lattices in Rn as the foundation for secure cryptographic systems. Attractive features of lattice cryptography include apparent resistance to quantum attacks (in contrast with most number-theoretic cryptography), high asymptotic efficiency and parallelism, security under worst-case intractability assumptions, and solutions to long-standing open problems in cryptography. This monograph surveys most of the major developments in lattice cryptography over the past ten years. The main focus is on the foundational short integer solution (SIS) and learning with errors (LWE) problems (and their more efficient ring-based variants), their provable hardness assuming the worst-case intractability of standard lattice problems, and their many cryptographic applications.
Classical cryptography has been around for a long time in the documented human history, but most classical ciphers were broken and even solved by hand. Shannon introduced the notion of perfect secrecy that formally defines confidentiality in the information-theoretic sense, which is only possible in the restricted scenarios where the message is no longer than the encryption key. The invention of public-key cryptography (the Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol in 1976 and the RSA crypto-system in 1977) marks the birth of modern cryptography, allowing parties to exchange messages securely without sharing any secrets in advance. Furthermore, it provides computational security based on the conjectured hardness of mathematical problems such as factorization and the discrete logarithm. Public-key cryptography has found numerous applications in the Internet, financial and banking industry, and blockchains, and it plays a crucial role in protecting information security and asset safety. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, Shor proposed efficient quantum algorithms that solve number-theoretic problems, including factorization and discrete logarithms in polynomial time. Once a quantum computer of a particular scale becomes a reality, it will cause a devastating blow to the existing public-key infrastructure. To deal with such a ‘quantum crisis’, academia and industry are looking into the design, analysis and standardization of cryptographic algorithms that can resist quantum computers referred to as post-quantum cryptography (PQC). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been soliciting proposals for the post-quantum public-key algorithms since 2016. More recently, the Chinese Association for Cryptologic Research (CACR) held a competition on designing cryptographic algorithms whose public-key cryptography track focused on post-quantum cryptographic algorithms. Lattice-based cryptography is considered by most to be the mainstream technical route of post-quantum cryptography, which is reflected in the number of proposals (and their percentage of the total) received in the NIST PQC process. To reflect the status quo of post-quantum cryptography, we invite leading experts in this area to contribute three technical perspectives that aim to help readers understand the algorithms, the underlying basic techniques and different technical routes to achieve quantum resistance. The first perspective, presented by Lu and Zhang, introduces public-key cryptographic algorithms whose quantum security is reducible from the conjectured quantum hardness of lattice problems. In particular, they mainly focus on public-key encryption (PKE) and the key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), which are essential building blocks for securing the confidentiality of communication without pre-shared secrets. Both types of crypto-systems are solicited by the NIST PQC standardization and the CACR algorithm design competition. This perspective gives a comprehensive survey on practical lattice-based PKEs/KEMs, and their best-known quantum and classical attacks. Another important post-quantum crypto-system is digital signature, which ensures that three goals of information security are met other than confidentiality, namely, integrity, authentication and non-repudiation. The second perspective is on lattice-based signature by Lyubashevsky. In this perspective, he surveys different techniques in building lattice-based post-quantum crypto-systems, discusses the challenges in overcoming performance issues and gives us state-of-the-art digital signature schemes. In addition to ensuring the ‘static’ security of information in storage and transmission, advanced cryptographic algorithms and protocols can guarantee information security during the computation process (possibly among multiple parties), referred to as privacy-preserving computation. Cryptographic techniques involved in privacy-preserving computation include secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof and fully homomorphic encryption. There is a pressing need to migrate them to the post-quantum era. The third perspective, by Yu and Xie, presents practical instantiations of these algorithms and discusses possible ways to migrate them to their quantum-resistant counterparts. To summarize, post-quantum cryptography has received widespread attention and made significant progress in recent years. Some post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, such as the lattice-based candidate, also have other advantages (e.g., computational efficiency and full homomorphism) over their classical counterparts. Lattice-based cryptography is an emerging field with high theoretical value and wide application, and we encourage young researchers to enter and explore this new and exciting field.
In [21], Peikert presents an efficient and provably secure set of lower level primitives for practical post-quantum cryptography. These primitives also give the first lattice-based scheme to provide perfect forward secrecy, and thus represent a major advancement in providing the same sort of security guarantees that are now expected for modern internet traffic protection. However, the presentation in [21] might prove a bit daunting for the slightly less mathematical reader. Here we provide what we hope will be a clear and selfcontained exposition of how the algorithm can be implemented, along with sample code and some initial analysis for potential parameter sizes. We focus on the simpler case, as chosen by Bos et al in [1], of cyclotomic rings whose degree is a power of two. We describe the necessary arithmetic setup and choices regarding error sampling, and give a possibly cleaner mechanism for reconciliation of the shared secrets. Then we present Peikert’s Diffie-Hellman-like key exchange algorithms along with security, correctness and implementation analysis. We demonstrate parameter choices that outperform [1] by a factor of up to 13 for equivalent security.
Today, lattice-based cryptography is a thriving scientific field. Its swift expansion is due, among others, to the attractiveness of fully homomorphic encryption and cryptographic multilinear maps. Lattice-based cryptography has also been recognized for its thrilling properties: a security that can be reduced to worst-case instances of problems over lattices, a quasi-optimal asymptotic efficiency and an alleged resistance to quantum computers. However, its practical use in real-world products leaves a lot to be desired. This thesis accomplishes a step towards this goal by narrowing the gap between theoretical research and practical implementation of recent public key cryptosystems. In this thesis, we design and implement a lattice-based digital signature, two fully homomorphic encryption schemes and cryptographic multilinear maps. Our highly efficient signature scheme, BLISS, opened the way to implementing lattice-based cryptography on constrained devices and remains as of today a promising primitive for post-quantum cryptography. Our fully homomorphic encryption schemes enjoy competitive homomorphic evaluations of nontrivial circuits. Finally, we describe the first implementation of cryptographic multilinear maps. Based on our implementation, a non interactive key exchange between more than three parties has been realized for the first time, and amounts to a few seconds per party.