Cryptography grew to be much more than "the study of secret writing". Modern cryptography is concerned with establishing properties such as privacy, integrity and authenticity in protocols for secure communication and computation. This comes at a price: Cryptographic tools usually introduce an overhead, both in terms of communication complexity (that is, number and size of messages transmitted) and computational efficiency (that is, time and memory required). As in many settings communication between the parties involved is the bottleneck, this thesis is concerned with improving communication complexity in cryptographic protocols. One direction towards this goal is scalable cryptography: In many cryptographic schemes currently deployed, the security degrades linearly with the number of instances (e.g. encrypted messages) in the system. As this number can be huge in contexts like cloud computing, the parameters of the scheme have to be chosen considerably larger - and in particular depending on the expected number of instances in the system - to maintain security guarantees. We advance the state-of-the-art regarding scalable cryptography by constructing schemes where the security guarantees are independent of the number of instances. This allows to choose smaller parameters, even when the expected number of instances is immense. - We construct the first scalable encryption scheme with security against active adversaries which has both compact public keys and ciphertexts. In particular, we significantly reduce the size of the public key to only about 3% of the key-size of the previously most efficient scalable encryption scheme. (Gay,Hofheinz, and Kohl, CRYPTO, 2017) - We present a scalable structure-preserving signature scheme which improves both in terms of public-key and signature size compared to the previously best construction to about 40% and 56% of the sizes, respectively. (Gay, Hofheinz, Kohl, and Pan, EUROCRYPT, 2018) Another important area of cryptography is secure multi-party computation, where the goal is to jointly evaluate some function while keeping each party’s input private. In traditional approaches towards secure multi-party computation either the communication complexity scales linearly in the size of the function, or the computational efficiency is poor. To overcome this issue, Boyle, Gilboa, and Ishai (CRYPTO, 2016) introduced the notion of homomorphic secret sharing. Here, inputs are shared between parties such that each party does not learn anything about the input, and such that the parties can locally evaluate functions on the shares. Homomorphic secret sharing implies secure computation where the communication complexity only depends on the size of the inputs, which is typically much smaller than the size of the function. A different approach towards efficient secure computation is to split the protocol into an input-independent preprocessing phase, where long correlated strings are generated, and a very efficient online phase. One example for a useful correlation are authenticated Beaver triples, which allow to perform efficient multiplications in the online phase such that privacy of the inputs is preserved and parties deviating the protocol can be detected. The currently most efficient protocols implementing the preprocessing phase require communication linear in the number of triples to be generated. This results typically in high communication costs, as the online phase requires at least one authenticated Beaver triple per multiplication. We advance the state-of-the art regarding efficient protocols for secure computation with low communication complexity as follows. - We construct the first homomorphic secret sharing scheme for computing arbitrary functions in NC 1 (that is, functions that are computably by circuits with logarithmic depth) which supports message spaces of arbitrary size, has only negligible correctness error, and does not require expensive multiplication on ciphertexts. (Boyle, Kohl, and Scholl, EUROCRYPT, 2019) - We introduce the notion of a pseudorandom correlation generator for general correlations. Pseudorandom correlation generators allow to locally extend short correlated seeds into long pseudorandom correlated strings. We show that pseudorandom correlation generators can replace the preprocessing phase in many protocols, leading to a preprocessing phase with sublinear communication complexity. We show connections to homomorphic secret sharing schemes and give the first instantiation of pseudorandom correlation generators for authenticated Beaver triples at reasonable computational efficiency. (Boyle, Couteau, Gilboa, Ishai, Kohl, and Scholl, CRYPTO, 2019)
Cryptography grew to be much more than "the study of secret writing". Modern cryptography is concerned with establishing properties such as privacy, integrity and authenticity in protocols for secure communication and computation. This comes at a price: Cryptographic tools usually introduce an overhead, both in terms of communication complexity (that is, number and size of messages transmitted) and computational efficiency (that is, time and memory required). As in many settings communication between the parties involved is the bottleneck, this thesis is concerned with improving communication complexity in cryptographic protocols. One direction towards this goal is scalable cryptography: In many cryptographic schemes currently deployed, the security degrades linearly with the number of instances (e.g. encrypted messages) in the system. As this number can be huge in contexts like cloud computing, the parameters of the scheme have to be chosen considerably larger - and in particular depending on the expected number of instances in the system - to maintain security guarantees. We advance the state-of-the-art regarding scalable cryptography by constructing schemes where the security guarantees are independent of the number of instances. This allows to choose smaller parameters, even when the expected number of instances is immense. - We construct the first scalable encryption scheme with security against active adversaries which has both compact public keys and ciphertexts. In particular, we significantly reduce the size of the public key to only about 3% of the key-size of the previously most efficient scalable encryption scheme. (Gay,Hofheinz, and Kohl, CRYPTO, 2017) - We present a scalable structure-preserving signature scheme which improves both in terms of public-key and signature size compared to the previously best construction to about 40% and 56% of the sizes, respectively. (Gay, Hofheinz, Kohl, and Pan, EUROCRYPT, 2018) Another important area of cryptography is secure multi-party computation, where the goal is to jointly evaluate some function while keeping each party’s input private. In traditional approaches towards secure multi-party computation either the communication complexity scales linearly in the size of the function, or the computational efficiency is poor. To overcome this issue, Boyle, Gilboa, and Ishai (CRYPTO, 2016) introduced the notion of homomorphic secret sharing. Here, inputs are shared between parties such that each party does not learn anything about the input, and such that the parties can locally evaluate functions on the shares. Homomorphic secret sharing implies secure computation where the communication complexity only depends on the size of the inputs, which is typically much smaller than the size of the function. A different approach towards efficient secure computation is to split the protocol into an input-independent preprocessing phase, where long correlated strings are generated, and a very efficient online phase. One example for a useful correlation are authenticated Beaver triples, which allow to perform efficient multiplications in the online phase such that privacy of the inputs is preserved and parties deviating the protocol can be detected. The currently most efficient protocols implementing the preprocessing phase require communication linear in the number of triples to be generated. This results typically in high communication costs, as the online phase requires at least one authenticated Beaver triple per multiplication. We advance the state-of-the art regarding efficient protocols for secure computation with low communication complexity as follows. - We construct the first homomorphic secret sharing scheme for computing arbitrary functions in NC 1 (that is, functions that are computably by circuits with logarithmic depth) which supports message spaces of arbitrary size, has only negligible correctness error, and does not require expensive multiplication on ciphertexts. (Boyle, Kohl, and Scholl, EUROCRYPT, 2019) - We introduce the notion of a pseudorandom correlation generator for general correlations. Pseudorandom correlation generators allow to locally extend short correlated seeds into long pseudorandom correlated strings. We show that pseudorandom correlation generators can replace the preprocessing phase in many protocols, leading to a preprocessing phase with sublinear communication complexity. We show connections to homomorphic secret sharing schemes and give the first instantiation of pseudorandom correlation generators for authenticated Beaver triples at reasonable computational efficiency. (Boyle, Couteau, Gilboa, Ishai, Kohl, and Scholl, CRYPTO, 2019)
Nowadays, computation becomes more advanced, and may require more than one parties to participate.Some examples include e-voting system and privacy-preserving data analytics.One of the main concerns here is privacy.Inputs of these systems must be kept secret.To address this concern, we can construct the systems by using secure multi-party protocols, where several parties with their secret inputs perform joint computations in oblivious ways.Many aspects of the protocols can be further improved towards the usage in reallife applications, considering operational requirements and trade-offs.These operational requirements include efficiency, functionality, security, scalability, and verifiability.This thesis consists of three parts; each part focuses on specific improvements.In the first part, we focus on improving security and efficiency.We consider a homomorphic secret sharing scheme, where a secret input from each party is divided into several shares, each share is sent to different computing server, and the servers can perform some computation locally to get shares of the result.It is obvious that homomorphic secret sharing schemes can be used as secure multi-party protocols with small communication.We found that the existing homomorphic secret sharing scheme with public key of Lai et al. (Asiacrypt 2018) is 1-secure, which means if more than one computing servers try to collude, the security of the system will be compromised.They also proposed a t-secure scheme, but it requires solving NP-hard problem.To improve their security level, we use the idea from the secret sharing scheme of Ito et al.Our scheme also supports any number of computing servers without solving NP-hard problem.Using hyper-graph representation of non-access structures, we prove the maximum polynomial degree that our scheme can support.In addition, we prove correctness and security of the scheme, and propose some possible further improvements.In the second part, we focus on improving scalability and efficiency.Most of the secret sharing schemes, including homomorphic secret sharing, require the number of parties to be fixed in advance.This causes an inconvenience if we want to add more parties later in order to change the security setting or improve availability of the system.One existing variant of secret sharing, called evolving secret sharing, allows any number of parties to join the system at any time.However, it is inefficient to perform computation on this kind of secret sharing.To address this problem, we propose the definition of evolving homomorphic secret sharing, which combines evolving and homomorphic properties together.The scheme iii then supports unbounded number of parties, and allows local computation on shares.In addition to the definition, we propose two concrete schemes.The first scheme realizes evolving disjunctive hierarchical access structure supporting multiplication.The second scheme realizes evolving partially disjunctive hierarchical access structure supporting lowdegree polynomial computation.In the third part, we focus on improving functionality, verifiability, and efficiency.We consider the problem of oblivious deterministic finite automata (DFA) evaluation protocol.In this problem, one party holds a secret string, and the other party holds a secret pattern.The goal of this protocol is to output whether the string matches with the pattern of not without revealing both secret inputs.Most of the existing protocols use several communication rounds and require public key primitives, which can be inefficient.As our contribution, we propose an oblivious conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS) scheme for DFA.It is the first CDS scheme that has a functionality of DFA evaluation.We then use the proposed oblivious CDS scheme as a building block to construct an oblivious DFA evaluation protocol, using a multi-client verifiable computation framework.As a result, our protocol is constant-round, verifiable, and does not require any public key primitives.We also propose a standard CDS scheme for DFA as an independent interest.This thesis is expected to be a step of secure multi-party protocols and secret sharing schemes enhancements towards real-life applications.High level ideas for more improvements are also suggested as future prospects.
In this thesis we focus on various aspects of secure message transmission protocols. Such protocols achieve the secure transmission of a message from a sender to a receiver - where the term “secure” encapsulates the notion of privacy and reliability of message transmission. These two parties are connected using an underlying network in which a static computationally unlimited active adversary able to corrupt up to t network nodes is assumed to be present. Such protocols are important to study as they are used extensively in various cryptographic protocols and are of interest to other research areas such as ad-hoc networks, military networks amongst others. Optimal bounds for the number of phases (communication from sender to receiver or vice versa), connectivity requirements (number of node disjoint network paths connecting sender and receiver - denoted by n), communication complexity (complexity of the number of field elements sent - where F is the finite field used and jFj = q) and transmission complexity (proportion of communication complexity to complexity of secrets transmitted) for secure message transmission protocols have been proven in previous work. In the one-phase model it has been shown that n 3t+1 node disjoint paths are required to achieve perfect communication. In the two phase model only n 2t + 1 node disjoint paths are necessary. This connectivity is also the required bound for almost perfectly secure one-phase protocols - protocols which achieve perfect privacy but with a negligible probability may fail to achieve reliability. In such cases the receiver accepts a different message to that transmitted by the sender or does not accept any message. The main focus of recent research in secure message transmission protocols has been to present new protocols which achieve optimal transmission complexity. This has been achieved through the transmission of multiple messages. If a protocol has a communication complexity of O(n3) field elements, to achieve optimal transmission complexity O(n2) secrets will have to be communicated. This has somewhat ignored the simplification and improvement of protocols which securely transmit a single secret. Such improvements include constructing more efficient protocols with regards to communication complexity, computational complexity and the number of field elements sent throughout the whole protocol. In the thesis we first consider one-phase almost perfectly secure message transmission and present two new protocols which improve on previous work. We present a polynomial time protocol of O(n2) communication complexity which at the time of writing this thesis, is computationally more efficient than any other protocol of similar communication complexity for the almost perfectly secure transmission of a single message. Even though our first almost perfectly secure transmission protocol is of polynomial time, it is important to study other protocols also and improve previous work presented by other researchers. This is the idea behind the second one-phase almost perfectly secure message transmission protocol we present which requires an exponential complexity of field operations but lower (O(n)) communication complexity. This protocol also improves on previous protocols of similar communication complexity, requiring in the order of O(log q) less computation to complete - where q denotes the size of the finite field used. Even though this protocol is of exponential time, for small values of n (e.g. when t = 1, t = 2 or t = 3) it may be beneficial to use this protocol for almost perfectly secure communication as opposed to using the polynomial time protocol. This is because less field elements need to be transmitted over the whole network which connects a sender and a receiver. Furthermore, an optimal almost perfectly secure transmission protocol will be one with O(n) communication complexity and with polynomial computational complexity. We hope that in the future, other researchers will be inspired by our proposed protocol, improve on our work and ideally achieve these optimal results. We also consider multi-phase protocols. By combining various cryptographic schemes, we present a new two-phase perfectly secure single message transmission protocol. At the time of writing this thesis, the protocol is the most efficient protocol when considering communication complexity. Our protocol has a communication complexity of O(n2) compared to O(n3) of previous work thus improving on the communication complexity by an order of O(n) for the perfectly secure message transmission of a single message. This protocol is then extended to a three phase protocol where a multi-recipient broadcast end channel network setting is considered. As opposed to point to point networks where a path from a sender reaches a single receiver, this network model is new in the field of message transmission protocols. In this model each path from a sender reaches multiple receivers, with all receivers receiving the same information from their common network communication channel. We show how the use of this protocol upon such a network can lead to great savings in the transmission and computation carried out by a single sender. We also discuss the importance and relevance of such a multi-recipient setting to practical applications. The first protocols in the field of perfectly secure message transmission with a human receiver are also presented. This is a topic proposed by my supervisor Professor Yvo Desmedt for which I constructed solutions. In such protocols, one of the communicating parties is considered to be a human who does not have access to a computational device. Because of this, solutions for such protocols need to be computationally efficient and computationally simple so that they can be executed by the human party. Experiments with human participants were carried out to assess how easily and accurately human parties used the proposed protocols. The experimental results are presented and these identify how well human participants used the protocols. In addition to the security of messages, we also consider how one can achieve anonymity of message transmission protocols. For such protocols, considering a single-receiver multi-sender scenario, the presence of a t-threshold bounded adversary and the transmission of multiple secrets (as many as the number of sender), once the protocols ends one should not be able to identify the sender of a received message. Considering a passive and active adversary new protocols are presented which achieve the secure and anonymous transmission of messages in the information-theoretic security model. Our proposed solutions can also be applied (with minor alterations) to the dual problem when a single-sender multi-recipient communication setting is considered. The contributions of the thesis are primarily theoretical - thus no implementation of the proposed protocols was carried out. Despite this, we reflect on practical aspects of secure message transmission protocols. We review the feasibility of implementing secure message transmission protocols in general upon various networks - focusing on the Internet which can be considered as the most important communication network at this time. We also describe in theory how concepts of secure message transmission protocols could possibly be used in practical implementations for secure communication on various existing communication networks. Open problems that remain unsolved in the research area of the proposed protocols are also discussed and we hope that these inspire research and future solutions for the design (and implementation) of better and more efficient secure message transmission protocols.
Secure multi-party computation is a conceptual framework in which distrusting parties engage in a protocol to securely perform a computational task. Depending on the precise model of security, different sets of tasks admit secure protocols. We take a complexity-theoretic approach to studying the inherent difficulty of securely realizing tasks in various standard security models. * We give the first alternate characterization of secure realizability in the framework of universally composable (UC) security. This is the first characterization in any model to consider completely arbitrary computational tasks and completely arbitrary communication channels. * The most long-standing class of computational tasks studied are those in which two parties evaluate a deterministic function. For these tasks, we give the first complete, combinatorial characterizations of secure realizability in the passive, standalone, and universally composable security models, against computationally unbounded adversaries. * Say that a task G has ``as much cryptographic complexity'' as another task F if there is a secure protocol for F that uses access to a secure implementation of G. We show that there is an infinite hierarchy of tasks with strictly increasing cryptographic complexities, with respect to computationally unbounded security. We also show that there exist tasks whose cryptographic complexities are incomparable. * In contrast, we show that under a standard cryptographic assumption, there exist only two distinct levels of cryptographic complexity with respect to polynomial-time security. Every task either has a trivial protocol using plain communication channels, or is complete (i.e., given access to a secure implementation of this task, there are secure protocols for all other tasks). This is the first result to derive a characterization of completeness for a class of arbitrary interactive tasks. In light of these characterizations, the only tasks which are securely realizable in the demanding framework of universal composition are those related to secure communication. Indeed, the framework has been used to define the security of encryption schemes, which has allowed for modular design and analysis of protocols. We consider a similar approach for homomorphic encryption schemes. A homomorphic scheme is one in which anyone can obtain an encryption of f(m_1, ..., m_n), given only the encryptions of unknown messages m_1, ..., m_n, for a specific set of functions f. * We give a construction of a homomorphic encryption scheme in which the allowed homomorphic operation is as full-featured as possible --- namely, one can derive a correctly-distributed encryption of f(m) given an encryption of unknown message m, for some functions f --- yet it is computationally infeasible to generate a ciphertext that is related to other ciphertexts in any other way. Our contributions involve developing new appropriate security definitions as well as new constructions. * We show that schemes with such powerful security guarantees can be used to build conceptually simple, efficient, UC-secure protocols for verifiable computations on encrypted data. We show protocols for two tasks related to aggregating encrypted data.
Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is one of the most important primitives in cryptography. Several directions to construct and improve MPC protocols have been studied over the past decades. The majority of existing MPC protocols rely on assumptions such as every party communicates with every other party or every party needs to know every other party and the computation algorithm well in advance. Such assumptions can be difficult to achieve in modern large scale networks. This thesis explores two distinct lines of work leading to new practical models in response to these scenarios.First, we examine communication locality, the total number of other parties that each party communicates with in the protocol, as a new measure for an MPC protocol. Although progress has been made, the question of achieving low communication locality and round complexity at the same time for adaptive adversaries corrupting t l n/2 parties remains open. We show that by assuming a public-key infrastructure (PKI) and a symmetric-key infrastructure (SKI) the above question can be answered affirmatively, under standard assumptions. In particular, we describe a protocol with polylogarithmic communication locality and round complexity which tolerates up to t l n/2 adaptive corruptions. Our results are based on a new model of hidden random graphs obtained from the SKI, and using them to emulate a complete network in polylogarithmic rounds and polylogarithmic locality.We then examine multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (MFHE) schemes, which allow computation on data encrypted under different public keys chosen independently of each other. One of the main problems left in MFHE has been on how to deal with malicious users without trusted setup assumptions. We show how this can be done through circuit privacy, which guarantees that even if both ciphertexts and public keys are not well-formed, no information is revealed regarding the computation, other than what follows from the output on some well-formed inputs. Generalizing the result for circuit-private FHE, we provide a framework for adding circuit privacy to existing MFHE schemes.Finally, we incorporate the circuit privacy in a variant of server-assisted MPC, called on-the-fly MPC, where a server or a “cloud” performs an arbitrary dynamically chosen computation on a subset of data uploaded by multiple clients and encrypted under different keys on-the-fly. Circuit privacy allows the server to keep the algorithm used in the computation private even from a malicious adversary corrupting any number of clients. In particular, we construct a three-round on-the-fly MPC protocol with circuit privacy against malicious clients without the trusted setup.
In this work, we develop a methodology for determining the communication required to implement various two-party functionalities noninteractively. In the particular setting on which we focus, the protocols are based upon somewhat homomorphic encryption, and furthermore, they treat the homomorphic properties as a black box. In this setting, we develop lower bounds which give a smooth trade-off between the communication complexity and the “expressiveness” of the cryptosystem---the latter being measured in terms of the depth of the arithmetic circuits that can be evaluated on ciphertext. Given the current state of the art in homomorphic encryption, this trade-off may also be viewed as one between communication and computation, since at present, more expressive cryptosystems are markedly less efficient. We then apply this methodology to place lower bounds on a number of cryptographic protocols including private information retrieval writing and private keyword search. Our work provides a useful “litmus test” of feasibility for use by other cryptographic researchers attempting to develop new protocols that use somewhat homomorphic encryption in a black-box way and require certain levels of communication efficiency. We also answer an open question from the thesis of Doerte K. Rappe [Homomorphic Cryptosystems and Their Applications, Universität Dortmund, Germany, 2006] regarding the construction of fully homomorphic encryption from group homomorphic encryption.
Since Gentry's breakthrough construction of fully homomorphic encryption from lattice-based assumptions (STOC 2009), homomorphic cryptography has attracted a lot of attention. In short, homomorphic cryptography schemes allow performing computation on encrypted data without knowing anything about the underlying plaintext. This branch of cryptography has become increasingly useful in building new protocols and schemes with intriguing security and functionality features. In this thesis, we continue to study the applications of homomorphic cryptography and the lattice-based techniques underlying them in realizing new and enhanced cryptographic primitives. We obtain the following results: -We construct the first noninteractive zero knowledge argument (and proof) system for all of NP from standard lattice assumptions. Noninteractive zero knowledge argument systems have found many applications in enhancing the functionality as well as the security of cryptographic schemes and protocols. Constructing noninteractive zero knowledge arguments from lattice assumption has been a long standing open question. We finally close this problem. -We consider multi-key fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes. Traditional fully homomorphic encryption schemes allow computation on plaintext encrypted under a single key. The notion of multi-key fully homomorphic encryption allows homomorphic computation on data encrypted under different keys. We construct multi-key FHE schemes which are naturally dynamic: ciphertexts under new keys can join even during the homomorphic computation. -Finally, we focus on constrained pseudorandom functions (C-PRFs), which are pseudorandom functions (PRFs) with additional functional capabilities. We propose a new approach for building C-PRFs from lattices, and also significantly enhance the underlying lattice parameters.