Abstract. A receiver-anonymous channel allows a sender to send a message to a receiver without an adversary learning for whom the message is intended. Wireless broadcast channels naturally provide receiver anonymity, as does multi-casting one message to a receiver population containing the intended receiver. While anonymity and confidentiality appear to be orthogonal properties, making anonymous communication confidential is more involved than one might expect, since the ciphertext might reveal which public key has been used to encrypt. To address this problem, public-key cryptosystems with enhanced security properties have been proposed. We investigate constructions as well as limitations for preserving receiver anonymity when using public-key encryption (PKE). We use the constructive cryptography approach by Maurer and Renner and interpret cryptographic schemes as constructions of a certain ideal resource (e.g. a confidential anonymous channel) from given real resources (e.g. a broadcast channel). We define appropriate anonymous communication resources and show that a very natural resource can be constructed by using a PKE scheme which fulfills three properties that appear in cryptographic literature (IND-CCA, key-privacy, weak robustness). We also show that a desirable stronger variant, preventing the adversary from selective “trial-deliveries ” of messages, is unfortunately unachievable by any PKE scheme, no matter how strong. The constructive approach makes the guarantees achieved by applying a cryptographic scheme explicit in the constructed (ideal) resource; this specifies the exact requirements for the applicability of a cryptographic scheme in a given context. It also allows to decide which of the existing security properties of such a cryptographic scheme are adequate for the considered scenario, and which are too weak or too strong. Here, we show that weak robustness is necessary but that so-called strong robustness is unnecessarily strong in that it does not construct a (natural) stronger resource.
Abstract. A receiver-anonymous channel allows a sender to send a message to a receiver without an adversary learning for whom the message is intended. Wireless broadcast channels naturally provide receiver anonymity, as does multi-casting one message to a receiver population containing the intended receiver. While anonymity and confidentiality appear to be orthogonal properties, making anonymous communication confidential is more involved than one might expect, since the ciphertext might reveal which public key has been used to encrypt. To address this problem, public-key cryptosystems with enhanced security properties have been proposed. We investigate constructions as well as limitations for preserving receiver anonymity when using public-key encryption (PKE). We use the constructive cryptography approach by Maurer and Renner and interpret cryptographic schemes as constructions of a certain ideal resource (e.g. a confidential anonymous channel) from given real resources (e.g. a broadcast channel). We define appropriate anonymous communication resources and show that a very natural resource can be constructed by using a PKE scheme which fulfills three properties that appear in cryptographic literature (IND-CCA, key-privacy, weak robustness). We also show that a desirable stronger variant, preventing the adversary from selective “trial-deliveries ” of messages, is unfortunately unachievable by any PKE scheme, no matter how strong. The constructive approach makes the guarantees achieved by applying a cryptographic scheme explicit in the constructed (ideal) resource; this specifies the exact requirements for the applicability of a cryptographic scheme in a given context. It also allows to decide which of the existing security properties of such a cryptographic scheme are adequate for the considered scenario, and which are too weak or too strong. Here, we show that weak robustness is necessary but that so-called strong robustness is unnecessarily strong in that it does not construct a (natural) stronger resource.
In a multi-receiver encryption system, a sender chooses a set of authorized receivers and sends them a message securely and efficiently, as the message is well encrypted and only one ciphertext corresponding to the message is generated no matter how many receivers the sender has chosen. It can be applied to video conferencing systems, pay-per-view channels, remote education, and so forth. Due to privacy considerations, an authorized receiver may not expect that his identity is revealed. In 2010, anonymous multi-receiver identity-based (ID-based) encryption was first discussed, and furthermore, many works on the topic have been presented so far. Unfortunately, we find that all of those schemes fail to prove the chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA) security in either confidentiality or anonymity. In this manuscript, we propose the first anonymous multi-receiver ID-based authenticated encryption scheme with CCA security in both confidentiality and anonymity. In the proposed scheme, the identity of the sender of a ciphertext can be authenticated by the receivers after a successful decryption. In addition, the proposed scheme also is the first CCA-secure one against insider attacks. Moreover, only one pairing computation is required in decryption.
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
Public-key encryption (PKE) is an extremely useful cryptographic primitive, seeing constant use when browsing the internet. A PKE scheme is a simple way for users to communicate securely without exchanging any secret keys beforehand. However, PKE by itself only enables one-to-one communication. For example, in the simple setting of group messaging, where a user wishes to send a message to many other users simultaneously, vanilla PKE can become quite inefficient. In the decades following the introduction of PKE, numerous “advanced PKE” primitives were introduced. These include broadcast encryption, attributed-based encryption, functional encryption, threshold encryption, and many more. Such primitives typically achieve their additional functionality by assuming the existence of a central user who provides keys for the other users. Since this trust assumption is quite strong, there has been a recent line of work investigating the removal of such a trust assumption while still retaining the advanced functionality. Currently, these so-called trustless advanced PKE schemes can be constructed from pairing-based assumptions or strong tools like indistinguishability obfuscation and witness encryption. Notably, none of these schemes enjoy security from a reasonable post-quantum assumption. In this work, we make progress on filling this gap by constructing the first trustless advanced PKE schemes from simple lattice assumptions.
Abstract. Adaptively-secure encryption schemes ensure secrecy even in the presence of an adversary who can corrupt parties in an adaptive manner based on public keys, ciphertexts, and secret data of alreadycorrupted parties. Ideally, an adaptively-secure encryption scheme should, like standard public-key encryption, allow arbitrarily-many parties to use a single encryption key to securely encrypt arbitrarily-many messages to a given receiver who maintains only a single short decryption key. However, it is known that these requirements are impossible to achieve: no non-interactive encryption scheme that supports encryption of an unbounded number of messages and uses a single, unchanging decryption key can be adaptively secure. Impossibility holds even if secure data erasure is possible. We show that this limitation can be overcome by updating the decryption key over time and making some mild assumptions about the frequency of communication between parties. Using this approach, we construct adaptively-secure, completely non-interactive encryption schemes supporting secure encryption of arbitrarily-many messages from arbitrarilymany senders. Our schemes additionally provide forward security and security against chosen-ciphertext attacks. 1
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