Quantum Subversives

Zhichao Yang, Rongmao Chen, Chao Li +2 more

Abstract Subversion of cryptography has received wide attentions especially after the Snowden Revelations in 2013. Most of the currently proposed subversion attacks essentially rely on the freedom of randomness choosing in the cryptographic protocol to hide backdoors embedded in the cryptosystems. Despite the fact that significant progresses in this line of research have been made, most of them mainly considered the classical setting, while the research gap regarding subversion attacks against post-quantum cryptography remains tremendous. Inspired by this observation, we investigate a subversion attack against existing protocol that is proved post-quantum secure. Particularly, we show an efficient way to undetectably subvert the well-known lattice-based encryption scheme proposed by Regev (STOC 2005). Our subversion enables the subverted algorithm to stealthily leak arbitrary messages to the outsider who knows the backdoor. Through theoretical analysis and experimental observations, we demonstrate that the subversion attack against the LWE encryption scheme is feasible and practical.

Tim Beardsley

Joel Davis

Kévin Duverger, Pierre-Alain Fouque, Charlie Jacomme +2 more

Subversion-resilient Authenticated key-exchange (AKE) aims to achieve the guarantees of secure AKE even in the presence of an adversary that has tampered with parts of the protocol's implementation. One way to achieve subversion-resilient AKE is the use of Reverse Firewalls (RFs), an untrusted third-party that can restore security. Recent work[17] highlights the challenges of designing RFs for practical secure channel-establishment.

Burong Kang, Zhengan Huang, Lei Zhang

In public-key encryption (PKE), ciphertexts received by a receiver may be possibly correlated and the security of a PKE relies on honestly generated system parameters. Security against selective opening attacks (SOA) for PKE guarantees that even when an attacker has broken into a subset of honestly generated ciphertexts and opened them (i.e., seeing plaintexts and random bits), the unopened ciphertexts remain secure. While security against parameter subversion attacks (PSA) for PKE requires that even when the public system parameters are maliciously generated, a PKE scheme should be secure. In this paper, we initiate the study of PKE secure against both SOA and PSA. To capture SOA and PSA simultaneously, we formulate a new security notion called indistinguishability under selective opening attacks and parameter subversion attacks (IND-SO-PSA). Further, we define the lossy trapdoor function and all-but-many lossy trapdoor function in the presence of PSA (LTF-PSA and ABM-LTF-PSA correspondingly) and propose an instantiation with the efficiently-embeddable group (EG). Applying these new primitives, we construct a PKE scheme that is proven to be IND-SO-PSA secure.

Yakir Aharonov, Daniel Rohrlich