Intervention 2: Problems of Generic Transformation

Backdooring cryptographic algorithms is an indisputable taboo in the cryptographic literature for a good reason: however noble the intentions, backdoors might fall in the wrong hands, in which case security is completely compromised. Nonetheless, more and more legislative pressure is being produced to enforce the use of such backdoors. In this work we introduce the concept of disposable cryptographic backdoors which can be used only once and become useless after that. These exotic primitives are impossible in the classical digital world without stateful and secure trusted hardware support, but, as we show, are feasible assuming quantum computation and access to classical stateless hardware tokens. Concretely, we construct a disposable (single-use) version of message authentication codes, and use them to derive a black-box construction of stateful hardware tokens in the above setting with quantum computation and classical stateless hardware tokens. This can be viewed as a generic transformation from stateful to stateless tokens and enables, among other things, one-time programs and memories. This is to our knowledge the first provably secure construction of such primitives from stateless tokens. As an application of disposable cryptographic backdoors we use our constructed primitive above to propose a middle-ground solution to the recent legislative push to backdoor cryptography: the conflict between Apple and FBI. We show that it is possible for Apple to create a one-time backdoor which unlocks any single device, and not even Apple can use it to unlock more than one, i.e., the backdoor becomes useless after it is used. We further describe how to use our ideas to derive a version of CCA-secure public key encryption, which is accompanied with a disposable (i.e., single-use, as in the above scenario) backdoor.

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Generic Transformation to Strongly Unforgeable Signatures

Applied Cryptography and Network Security - Lecture Notes in Computer Science ◽

10.1007/978-3-540-72738-5_1 ◽

2007 ◽

pp. 1-17 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

Qiong Huang ◽

Duncan S. Wong ◽

Yiming Zhao

Keyword(s):

Generic Transformation

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Practical CCA-Secure Functional Encryptions for Deterministic Functions

Security and Communication Networks ◽

10.1155/2020/8823788 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 2020 ◽

pp. 1-14

Author(s):

Huige Wang ◽

Kefei Chen ◽

Tianyu Pan ◽

Yunlei Zhao

Keyword(s):

Affirmative Answer ◽

Inner Product ◽

Secret Key ◽

Functional Encryption ◽

Fine Grained ◽

Indistinguishability Obfuscation ◽

Simulation Based ◽

Multilinear Maps ◽

Hard Problems ◽

Generic Transformation

Functional encryption (FE) can implement fine-grained control to encrypted plaintext via permitting users to compute only some specified functions on the encrypted plaintext using private keys with respect to those functions. Recently, many FEs were put forward; nonetheless, most of them cannot resist chosen-ciphertext attacks (CCAs), especially for those in the secret-key settings. This changed with the work, i.e., a generic transformation of public-key functional encryption (PK-FE) from chosen-plaintext (CPA) to chosen-ciphertext (CCA), where the underlying schemes are required to have some special properties such as restricted delegation or verifiability features. However, examples for such underlying schemes with these features have not been found so far. Later, a CCA-secure functional encryption from projective hash functions was proposed, but their scheme only applies to inner product functions. To construct such a scheme, some nontrivial techniques will be needed. Our key contribution in this work is to propose CCA-secure functional encryptions in the PKE and SK environment, respectively. In the existing generic transformation from (adaptively) simulation-based CPA- (SIM-CPA-) secure ones for deterministic functions to (adaptively) simulation-based CCA- (SIM-CCA-) secure ones for randomized functions, whether the schemes were directly applied to CCA settings for deterministic functions is not implied. We give an affirmative answer and derive a SIM-CCA-secure scheme for deterministic functions by making some modifications on it. Again, based on this derived scheme, we also propose an (adaptively) indistinguishable CCA- (IND-CCA-) secure SK-FE for deterministic functions. The final results show that our scheme can be instantiated under both nonstandard assumptions (e.g., hard problems on multilinear maps and indistinguishability obfuscation (IO)) and under standard assumptions (e.g., DDH, RSA, LWE, and LPN).

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