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Improved security proofs in lattice-based cryptography: using the Rényi divergence rather than the statistical distance.

Shi Bai, Adeline Roux-Langlois, Tancrède Lepoint, Damien Stehlé, Ron Steinfeld

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

The Rényi divergence is a measure of closeness of two probabilitydistributions. We show that it can often be used as an alternativeto the statistical distance in security proofs for lattice-based cryptography.Using the Rényi divergence is particularly suited for security proofsof primitives in which the attacker is required to solve a search problem(e.g., forging a signature).We show that it may also be used in the case ofdistinguishing problems (e.g., semantic security of encryption schemes),when they enjoy a public sampleability property. The techniques lead tosecurity proofs for schemes with smaller parameters, and sometimes tosimpler security proofs than the existing ones.

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Improved Security Proofs in Lattice-Based Cryptography: Using the Rényi Divergence Rather than the Statistical Distance

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Threshold encryption schemes provide a common tool to secure a public-key encryption scheme against single point of failure attacks. Despite the success of lattices in building fully-homomorphic and presumably quantum-resistant encryption schemes, the task of thresholdizing those schemes remains challenging. The major bottleneck in the standard approach is the use of statistical noise flooding, leading to a significant efficiency loss and the need of stronger hardness assumptions. Recent works have replaced the heavy statistical noise flooding by a lighter one using the Rényi divergence. The new Rényi noise flooding both improves the efficiency and allows to use weaker hardness assumptions. However, arguing semantic security of lattice-based threshold schemes in the presence of Rényi noise flooding showed to be challenging. Chowdhury et al. (IACR ePrint'22) argued in the fully-homomorphic case that the Rényi divergence directly applies for semantic security by making use of an existing framework called public sampleability. In this work, we argue that their public sampleability framework was neither sufficient nor correctly used. To address both issues, we strengthen the framework and thoroughly apply it to prove semantic security of generic lattice-based threshold encryption constructions. We distinguish between the plain public-key and the fully-homomorphic settings, as different security notions are achieved. As a byproduct, this shows that the proof detour via one-way security made by Boudgoust and Scholl (Asiacrypt'23) was superfluous, now leading to tighter proofs in the standard model.

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Estimating the Security of Lattice-based Cryptosystems.

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Encryption and signature schemes based on worst-case lattice problems are promising candidates for the post-quantum era, where classic number-theoretic assumptions are rendered false. Although there have been many important results and breakthroughs in lattice cryptography, the questions of how to systematically evaluate their security in practice and how to choose secure parameters are still open. This is mainly due to the fact that most security proofs are essentially asymptotic statements. In addition, the hardness of the underlying complexity assumption is controlled by several interdependent parameters rather than just a simple bit length as in many classic schemes. With our work, we close this gap by providing a framework that (1) distills a hardness estimate out of a given parameter set and (2) relates the complexity of practical lattice-based attacks to symmetric “bit security” for the first time. Our approach takes various security levels, or attacker types, into account. Moreover, we use it to predict long-term security in a similar fashion as the results that are collected on www.keylength.com. In contrast to the experiments by Gama and Nguyen (Eurocrypt 2008), our estimates are based on precisely the family of lattices that is relevant in modern lattice-based cryptography. Our framework can be applied in two ways: Firstly, to assess the hardness of the (few) proposed parameter sets so far and secondly, to propose secure parameters in the first place. Our methodology is applicable to essentially all lattice-based schemes that are based on the learning with errors problem (LWE) or the small integer solution problem (SIS) and it allows us to compare efficiency and security across different schemes and even across different types of cryptographic primitives.

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One essential quest in cryptography is the search for hard instances of a given computational problem that is known to be hard in the worst-case. In lattice cryptography we are in the unique situation that we have found a way of picking random instances which are at least as hard as well-studied lattice problems in the worst-case. At the same time, no attack running in subexponential time is known to break these problems, even for an adversary using quantum computers. Virtually all public-key schemes in use today are subject to such attacks, and the development of quantum computers is actively pursued, so it is prudent to investigate lattice-based alternatives. There are two fundamental open problems in lattice cryptography today and this thesis contributes to solving them. First, there exists a widely used efficiency improvement that allows for trapdoors whose asymptotic keysize and evaluation time are both quasilinear in the dimension of an associated lattice. This is accomplished by restricting oneself to lattices with special structure, so-called ideal lattices. This entails the use of newer security assumptions, but these have not been analyzed thoroughly so far. We start this work by comparing the class of ideal lattice problems with its general counterpart in terms of size. Affirming folklore, we find the number of restricted instances among all instances to be asymptotically negligible for those classes of lattices suggested for practical use. The second open problem is that while the connection to worst-case problems is well understood, the practical hardness of the related average-case problems is not. Specifically, there have been parameters suggested for practical usage, where current lattice basis reduction algorithms can solve these worst-case problems, but the related average-case problems, which these are reduced to and which represent the basis of practical security of the cryptosystems, are completely infeasible. In most cases, this lack of understanding has lead either to a very conservative choice of parameters, or none at all. This in turn makes it impossible for the resulting lattice schemes to compete with their counterparts based on other paradigms. We further the understanding of this practical security and at the same time improve the efficiency of several common related cryptographic schemes. Among other things, we find that for the SWIFFT compression function, solving certain problems closely related to finding collisions is easier than previously thought and we suggest efficient replacement parameters. We propose a novel zero-knowledge identification scheme that, to our knowledge, beats all competing post-quantum schemes, even those based on other paradigms. Possibly most important, we help to tighten the efficiency gap between lattice encryption schemes that are provably secure and the acclaimed ad-hoc encryption scheme NTRU. This is done by unifying many recent developments into a new provably secure design and providing a comprehensive analysis of practical security, which together results in a great leap of efficiency.

•Jan 1, 2011•0 citations
The Rényi divergence is a measure of closeness of two probabilitydistributions. We show that it can often be used as an alternativeto the statistical distance in security proofs for lattice-based cryptography.Using the Rényi divergence is particularly suited for security proofsof primitives in which the attacker is required to solve a search problem(e.g., forging a signature).We show that it may also be used in the case ofdistinguishing problems (e.g., semantic security of encryption schemes),when they enjoy a public sampleability property. The techniques lead tosecurity proofs for schemes with smaller parameters, and sometimes tosimpler security proofs than the existing ones.
Threshold encryption schemes provide a common tool to secure a public-key encryption scheme against single point of failure attacks. Despite the success of lattices in building fully-homomorphic and presumably quantum-resistant encryption schemes, the task of thresholdizing those schemes remains challenging. The major bottleneck in the standard approach is the use of statistical noise flooding, leading to a significant efficiency loss and the need of stronger hardness assumptions. Recent works have replaced the heavy statistical noise flooding by a lighter one using the Rényi divergence. The new Rényi noise flooding both improves the efficiency and allows to use weaker hardness assumptions. However, arguing semantic security of lattice-based threshold schemes in the presence of Rényi noise flooding showed to be challenging. Chowdhury et al. (IACR ePrint'22) argued in the fully-homomorphic case that the Rényi divergence directly applies for semantic security by making use of an existing framework called public sampleability. In this work, we argue that their public sampleability framework was neither sufficient nor correctly used. To address both issues, we strengthen the framework and thoroughly apply it to prove semantic security of generic lattice-based threshold encryption constructions. We distinguish between the plain public-key and the fully-homomorphic settings, as different security notions are achieved. As a byproduct, this shows that the proof detour via one-way security made by Boudgoust and Scholl (Asiacrypt'23) was superfluous, now leading to tighter proofs in the standard model.
Lattice-based cryptography is a branch of cryptography exploiting the presumed hardness of some well-known problems on lattices. Its main advantages are its simplicity, efficiency, and apparent security against quantum computers. The principle of the security proofs in lattice-based cryptography is to show that attacking a given scheme is at least as hard as solving a particular problem, as the Learning with Errors problem (LWE) or the Small Integer Solution problem (SIS). Then, by showing that those two problems are at least as hard to solve than a hard problem on lattices, presumed polynomial time intractable, we conclude that the constructed scheme is secure.In this thesis, we improve the foundation of the security proofs and build new cryptographic schemes. We study the hardness of the SIS and LWE problems, and of some of their variants on integer rings of cyclotomic fields and on modules on those rings. We show that there is a classical hardness proof for the LWE problem (Regev's prior reduction was quantum), and that the module variants of SIS and LWE are also hard to solve. We also give two new lattice-based group signature schemes, with security based on SIS and LWE. One is the first lattice-based group signature with logarithmic signature size in the number of users. And the other construction allows another functionality, verifier-local revocation. Finally, we improve the size of some parameters in the work on cryptographic multilinear maps of Garg, Gentry and Halevi in 2013.
Encryption and signature schemes based on worst-case lattice problems are promising candidates for the post-quantum era, where classic number-theoretic assumptions are rendered false. Although there have been many important results and breakthroughs in lattice cryptography, the questions of how to systematically evaluate their security in practice and how to choose secure parameters are still open. This is mainly due to the fact that most security proofs are essentially asymptotic statements. In addition, the hardness of the underlying complexity assumption is controlled by several interdependent parameters rather than just a simple bit length as in many classic schemes. With our work, we close this gap by providing a framework that (1) distills a hardness estimate out of a given parameter set and (2) relates the complexity of practical lattice-based attacks to symmetric “bit security” for the first time. Our approach takes various security levels, or attacker types, into account. Moreover, we use it to predict long-term security in a similar fashion as the results that are collected on www.keylength.com. In contrast to the experiments by Gama and Nguyen (Eurocrypt 2008), our estimates are based on precisely the family of lattices that is relevant in modern lattice-based cryptography. Our framework can be applied in two ways: Firstly, to assess the hardness of the (few) proposed parameter sets so far and secondly, to propose secure parameters in the first place. Our methodology is applicable to essentially all lattice-based schemes that are based on the learning with errors problem (LWE) or the small integer solution problem (SIS) and it allows us to compare efficiency and security across different schemes and even across different types of cryptographic primitives.
One essential quest in cryptography is the search for hard instances of a given computational problem that is known to be hard in the worst-case. In lattice cryptography we are in the unique situation that we have found a way of picking random instances which are at least as hard as well-studied lattice problems in the worst-case. At the same time, no attack running in subexponential time is known to break these problems, even for an adversary using quantum computers. Virtually all public-key schemes in use today are subject to such attacks, and the development of quantum computers is actively pursued, so it is prudent to investigate lattice-based alternatives. There are two fundamental open problems in lattice cryptography today and this thesis contributes to solving them. First, there exists a widely used efficiency improvement that allows for trapdoors whose asymptotic keysize and evaluation time are both quasilinear in the dimension of an associated lattice. This is accomplished by restricting oneself to lattices with special structure, so-called ideal lattices. This entails the use of newer security assumptions, but these have not been analyzed thoroughly so far. We start this work by comparing the class of ideal lattice problems with its general counterpart in terms of size. Affirming folklore, we find the number of restricted instances among all instances to be asymptotically negligible for those classes of lattices suggested for practical use. The second open problem is that while the connection to worst-case problems is well understood, the practical hardness of the related average-case problems is not. Specifically, there have been parameters suggested for practical usage, where current lattice basis reduction algorithms can solve these worst-case problems, but the related average-case problems, which these are reduced to and which represent the basis of practical security of the cryptosystems, are completely infeasible. In most cases, this lack of understanding has lead either to a very conservative choice of parameters, or none at all. This in turn makes it impossible for the resulting lattice schemes to compete with their counterparts based on other paradigms. We further the understanding of this practical security and at the same time improve the efficiency of several common related cryptographic schemes. Among other things, we find that for the SWIFFT compression function, solving certain problems closely related to finding collisions is easier than previously thought and we suggest efficient replacement parameters. We propose a novel zero-knowledge identification scheme that, to our knowledge, beats all competing post-quantum schemes, even those based on other paradigms. Possibly most important, we help to tighten the efficiency gap between lattice encryption schemes that are provably secure and the acclaimed ad-hoc encryption scheme NTRU. This is done by unifying many recent developments into a new provably secure design and providing a comprehensive analysis of practical security, which together results in a great leap of efficiency.