In public-key encryption, a long-term private key can be an easy target for hacking and deserves extra protection. One way to enhance its security is to share the long-term private key among multiple (say n) distributed servers; any threshold number (t, t ≤ n) of these servers are needed to collectively use the shared private key without reconstructing it. As a result, an attacker who has compromised less than t servers will still not be able to reconstruct the shared private key. In this thesis, we studied threshold decryption schemes for lattice-based public-key en- cryption, which is one of the most promising post-quantum public-key encryption schemes. We developed threshold decryption schemes for Stinson’s, the standard NTRU, and NTRU with Ring Learning with Errors (R-LWE) cryptosystems. Prototype implementations were developed for validating the functionality of these threshold decryption schemes. Our de- signs achieve heuristic security, and its security is supported by mechanisms similar to that of R-LWE.
In public-key encryption, a long-term private key can be an easy target for hacking and deserves extra protection. One way to enhance its security is to share the long-term private key among multiple (say n) distributed servers; any threshold number (t, t ≤ n) of these servers are needed to collectively use the shared private key without reconstructing it. As a result, an attacker who has compromised less than t servers will still not be able to reconstruct the shared private key. In this thesis, we studied threshold decryption schemes for lattice-based public-key en- cryption, which is one of the most promising post-quantum public-key encryption schemes. We developed threshold decryption schemes for Stinson’s, the standard NTRU, and NTRU with Ring Learning with Errors (R-LWE) cryptosystems. Prototype implementations were developed for validating the functionality of these threshold decryption schemes. Our de- signs achieve heuristic security, and its security is supported by mechanisms similar to that of R-LWE.
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.
Ever since the appearance of quantum computers, prime factoring and discrete logarithm-based cryptography have been questioned, giving birth to the so-called post-quantum cryptography. The most prominent field in post-quantum cryptography is lattice-based cryptography, protocols that are proved to be as difficult to break as certain hard lattice problems like Learning with Errors (LWE) or Ring Learning with Errors (R-LWE). Furthermore, the application of cryptographic techniques to different areas, like electronic voting, has also nourished a great interest in distributed cryptography. In this work, we will give two original threshold protocols based in the lattice problem R-LWE: one for key generation and one for decryption. We will prove them both correct and secure under the assumption of hardness of some well-known lattice problems. Finally, we will give a rough implementation of the protocols in C to give some tentative results about their viability, in particular our model generates keys in the order of 103 ms and decrypts and encrypts in the order of 102 ms.
In this paper, we propose a threshold increasing algorithm for a (t; n) latticebased Threshold Multi-Stage Secret Sharing (TMSSS) scheme. To realize the changeability feature, we use the zero addition protocol to construct a new (t0; n) TMSSS scheme. Therefore, the new scheme enjoys the signi cant feature of threshold changeability along with the inherited features of being multi-stage, multi-use, and veri able derived fromour previously proposed lattice-based TMSSS scheme. Furthermore, we use the improved TMSSS scheme to propose a threshold decryption algorithm for the Learning With Error (LWE) based public key encryption scheme based on the study of Lindner and Peikert. For threshold decryption, each authorized subset of participants decrypts the ciphertext partially and sends the result to the combiner. The combiner can decrypt the ciphertext using the partial decryptions. The security of both schemes is based on hardness of lattice problems, i.e. LWE and Inhomogeneous Small Integer Solution (ISIS) problems, which are believed to resist against the quantum algorithms. The proposed schemes are eficient, especially on the participants' side, making them suitable for the applications in which the participants have limited processing capacities.
Threshold public key encryption is a cryptographic primitive where a secret key of an organization is distributed among special members called decryption servers (insiders) and a certain threshold number of insiders must cooperate to decrypt any ciphertext. Threshold public key encryption with an additional randomized algorithm Tsplit is called resplittable threshold public key encryption (RTPKE). Cryptographic primitive RTPKE was introduced by Hanaoka et al. [Generic construction of chosen ciphertext secure proxy re-encryption, in CT-RSA, San Francisco, CA, USA, LNCS, O. Dunkelman, ed., Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 2012, pp. 349–364] in a generic construction of chosen ciphertext attack secure proxy re-encryption scheme. In MIST 2013 conference Singh et al. [Lattice based efficient threshold public key encryption scheme, J. Wirel. Mob. Netw. Ubiquitous Comput. Dependable Appl. (JoWUA) 4(4) (2013), pp. 93–107] presented lattice-based RTPKE scheme based on Regev's LWE [On lattices, learning with errors, random linear codes, and cryptography, in STOC, Baltimore, MD, USA, H.N. Gabow and R. Fagin, eds., ACM, University of Wales, Cardiff, 2005, pp. 84–93] assumption. In this paper, we propose lattice-based RTPKE scheme in the identity-based setting.
The standard public-key cryptosystems used today relies mathematical problems that require a lot of computing force to solve, so much that, with the right parameters, they are computationally unsolvable. But there are quantum algorithms that are able to solve these problems in much shorter time. These quantum algorithms have been known for many years, but have only been a problem in theory because of the lack of quantum computers. But with recent development in the building of quantum computers, the cryptographic world is looking for quantum-resistant replacements for today’s standard public-key cryptosystems. Public-key cryptosystems based on lattices are possible replacements. This thesis presents several possible candidates for new standard public-key cryptosystems, mainly NTRU and ring-LWE-based systems. The latticebased cryptosystems are shown to be very fast and have strong, provable security against quantum computers, but are a lot more complicated than RSA and Diffie-Hellman.
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.