Public-key encryption allows anyone to encrypt messages that only the intended recipient can decrypt. It is an essential component of most network security protocols; however, the algorithms in widespread use are inherently vulnerable to attacks by quantum computers, should they become a practical reality. This thesis looks at public-key encryption from computationally hard problems based on high-dimensional lattices, believed to resist classical and quantum attacks. On those foundations, it proposes three post-quantum public-key encryption schemes, respectively featuring richer access control, tighter reductionist security proofs, and stronger confidentiality in the presence of external leakage.
Public-key encryption allows anyone to encrypt messages that only the intended recipient can decrypt. It is an essential component of most network security protocols; however, the algorithms in widespread use are inherently vulnerable to attacks by quantum computers, should they become a practical reality. This thesis looks at public-key encryption from computationally hard problems based on high-dimensional lattices, believed to resist classical and quantum attacks. On those foundations, it proposes three post-quantum public-key encryption schemes, respectively featuring richer access control, tighter reductionist security proofs, and stronger confidentiality in the presence of external leakage.
The security of conventional public-key cryptography schemes is based on mathematical problems which are considered to be infeasible to solve by classical computers in a reasonable amount of time. However, the rise of quantum computers might break this security in the future. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) aims to achieve secure schemes which are resistant against attacks assisted by quantum computers. Public-key cryptography refers to asymmetric cryptography in which encryption is done with a public key and decryption is done with a private key. Characteristic properties of public-key cryptography include the possibility to derive the private key from public information by solving some presumably hard problem. The hardness of the problem constitutes the basis for the system's security. In the post-quantum era, the security must be based on problems that are too hard to solve even for quantum computers. In this thesis, we will study lattice-based cryptography which is believed to serve as a good candidate for secure post-quantum public-key cryptography. Our main attention is in the problem of learning with errors, which is in the base of some lattice-based schemes and is linked to the hard problem of finding short vectors in a lattice.
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.
Public-key cryptography is an indispensable component used in almost all of our present-day digital infrastructure. However, most if not all of it is predominantly built upon hardness guarantees of number theoretic problems that can be broken by large-scale quantum computers in the future. Sensing the imminent threat from continued advances in quantum computing, NIST has recently initiated a global-level standardization process for quantum resistant public-key cryptographic primitives such as public-key encryption, digital signatures, and key encapsulation mechanisms. While the process received proposals from various categories of post-quantum cryptography, lattice-based cryptography features most prominently among all the submissions. Lattice-based cryptography offers a very attractive alternative to traditional public-key cryptography mainly due to the variety of lattice-based schemes offering varying flavors of security and efficiency guarantees. In this article, we survey the evolution of lattice-based key-sharing schemes (public-key encryption and key encapsulation schemes) and cover various aspects ranging from theoretical security guarantees, general algorithmic frameworks, practical implementation aspects, and physical attack security, with special focus on lattice-based key-sharing schemes competing in the NIST’s standardization process.
Public-key cryptography is an indispensable component used in almost all of our present-day digital infrastructure. However, most if not all of it is predominantly built upon hardness guarantees of number theoretic problems that can be broken by large-scale quantum computers in the future. Sensing the imminent threat from continued advances in quantum computing, NIST has recently initiated a global-level standardization process for quantum resistant public-key cryptographic primitives such as public-key encryption, digital signatures, and key encapsulation mechanisms. While the process received proposals from various categories of post-quantum cryptography, lattice-based cryptography features most prominently among all the submissions. Lattice-based cryptography offers a very attractive alternative to traditional public-key cryptography mainly due to the variety of lattice-based schemes offering varying flavors of security and efficiency guarantees. In this article, we survey the evolution of lattice-based key-sharing schemes (public-key encryption and key encapsulation schemes) and cover various aspects ranging from theoretical security guarantees, general algorithmic frameworks, practical implementation aspects, and physical attack security, with special focus on lattice-based key-sharing schemes competing in the NIST’s standardization process.
Alongside the growth of technology is the increasing demand for security of data and communication channels. As attacking power grows, devices become smaller and data expands, the security needs to be stronger yet less resource-consuming than ever before. Public key cryptography (PKC) is used in the majority of today's communications systems. The security of public-key cryptographic schemes, such as RSA and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), is based on underlying mathematical problems such as factoring large integers or solving the discrete log problem. However, the discovery of Shor's Algorithm in 1994 insinuates that these schemes will be insecure when a full-scale quantum computer is developed, as these problems will be solvable in polynomial time. Therefore attention has moved towards post-quantum, or quantum-safe, cryptography (QSC). In 2016, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the beginning of their efforts to migrate to QSC, a standardisation process which has involved the cryptographic community worldwide. There are five main types of QSC being considered for standardisation; lattice-based, code-based, multivariate-based, hash-based and isogeny-based. Lattice-based cryptography (LBC) offers a promising alternative to today's classical approaches. Hard problems based on lattices are believed to be unsolvable, even by a quantum-computer, in a feasible amount of time. In 1995, Ajtai showed that the average case complexity of these problems is at least as hard as solving the problems in the worst case. Furthermore, lattice-based schemes are the only remaining contender in the NIST process to provide the important primitives of encryption, key encapsulation and digital signature schemes (DSSs). A well-recognised open problem surrounding quantum-safe cryptography is its increase in bandwidth and computational complexity in comparison to existing cryptography. However, in comparison to other quantum-safe schemes, LBC has been shown to be relatively efficient. In this thesis, novel software designs of lattice-based schemes are presented and shown to be competitive with existing PKC. Additionally, physical attacks are considered and countermeasures are incorporated into the designs. DSSs are required for authentication, integrity and non-repudiation of data. This thesis provides an evaluation of three leading signature schemes, BLISS-B, Dilithium and \textsc{Falcon}, which vary in terms of their key features, such as the sampling processes used, and the structure of the lattices. Physical attacks on the three schemes are considered and the effect on performance of appropriate attack countermeasures is evaluated. A novel fault attack on the NIST candidate \textsc{Falcon} is also proposed. A further advantage of LBC is the ability to support cryptographic primitives with extended capabilities to facilitate certificate management and compute on encrypted data. The complexity of today's technology advances mean applications require more sophisticated primitives, which contrastingly are required to run on even smaller platforms. This thesis presents novel quantum-safe advanced cryptographic schemes, specifically lattice-based identity-based encryption (IBE) and hierarchical identity-based encryption (HIBE). IBE removes the need for certificate management, as a user's public key depends on their public identity. IBE is currently used in vital applications such as emergency services communication and so the development of a high-performance quantum-safe alternative is imperative. This thesis also introduces the first scalable HIBE scheme based on lattices. The first HIBE scheme based on structured lattices, Latte, was proposed by the National Centre for Cyber Security (NCSC) in 2017. However, the public key and ciphertext sizes increased with each delegation and hence it was not feasible to scale the algorithm. Skinny Latte, proposed in this thesis, remedies this issue by fixing the dimension of the lattice, thereby making public key and ciphertext sizes constant. This research also shows that it is practical for real-world deployment. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that lattice-based cryptography is practical for real-world applications. It considers both theoretical and physical attacks, and presents novel designs of advanced quantum-safe cryptographic primitives, which have only yet been realised by lattices.
The advent of large-scale quantum computers poses an existential threat to the security of current public-key cryptosystems, such as RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), which rely on the computational intractability of integer factorization and discrete logarithms. This paper explores lattice-based cryptography as a promising candidate for post-quantum security. We delve into the mathematical foundations of lattices, specifically focusing on hard problems like the Shortest Vector Problem (SVP), Closest Vector Problem (CVP), Small Integer Solution (SIS), and Learning With Errors (LWE) problems, which are believed to remain intractable even for quantum computers. We provide a comprehensive review of prominent lattice-based constructions, including NTRU, Kyber, and Dilithium, highlighting their security proofs, efficiency considerations, and suitability for various cryptographic primitives such as public-key encryption, key-exchange mechanisms, and digital signatures. Furthermore, we discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with their deployment, including parameter selection, resistance to side-channel attacks, and integration into existing cryptographic infrastructures. By examining the theoretical underpinnings and practical implications, this work aims to solidify understanding of lattice-based methods as a robust and essential component of the cryptographic landscape in the quantum era, moving beyond the traditional RSA frontier.