We propose simple and efficient CCA-secure public-key encryption schemes (i.e., schemes secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks) based on any identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme. Our constructions have ramifications of both theoretical and practical interest. First, our schemes give a new paradigm for achieving CCA-security; this paradigm avoids “proofs of well-formedness ” that have been shown to underlie previous constructions. Second, instantiating our construction using known IBE constructions we obtain CCA-secure encryption schemes whose performance is competitive with the most efficient CCA-secure schemes to date. Our techniques extend naturally to give an efficient method for securing IBE schemes (even hierarchical ones) against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks. Coupled with previous work, this gives the first efficient constructions of CCA-secure IBE schemes.

Abstract. This paper addresses the problem of designing practical protocols for proving properties about encrypted data. To this end, it presents a variant of the new public key encryption of Cramer and Shoup based on Paillier’s decision composite residuosity assumption, along with efficient protocols for verifiable encryption and decryption of discrete logarithms (and more generally, of representations with respect to multiple bases). This is the first verifiable encryption system that provides chosen ciphertext security and avoids inefficient cut-and-choose proofs. The presented protocols have numerous applications, including key escrow, optimistic fair exchange, publicly verifiable secret and signature sharing, universally composable commitments, group signatures, and confirmer signatures. 1

Recently, Canetti, Halevi, and Katz showed a general method for constructing CCA-secure encryption schemes from identity-based encryption schemes in the standard model. We improve the efficiency of their construction, and show two specific instantiations of our resulting scheme which offer the most efficient encryption (and, in one case, key generation) of any CCA-secure encryption scheme to date.

Computer users are asked to generate, keep secret, and recall an increasing number of passwords for uses including host accounts, email servers, e-commerce sites, and online financial services. Unfortunately, the password entropy that users can comfortably memorize seems insu#cient to store unique, secure passwords for all these accounts, and it is likely to remain constant as the number of passwords (and the adversary's computational power) increases into the future. In this paper, we propose a technique that uses a strengthened cryptographic hash function to compute secure passwords for arbitrarily many accounts while requiring the user to memorize only a single short password. This mechanism functions entirely on the client; no server-side changes are needed. Unlike previous approaches, our design is both highly resistant to brute force attacks and nearly stateless, allowing users to retrieve their passwords from any location so long as they can execute our program and remember a short secret. This combination of security and convenience will, we believe, entice users to adopt our scheme. We discuss the construction of our algorithm in detail, compare its strengths and weaknesses to those of related approaches, and present Password Multiplier, an implementation in the form of an extension to the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Password-based authenticated key exchange (PAKE) are protocols which are designed to be secure even when the secret key used for authentication is a human-memorable password. In this paper, we consider PAKE protocols in the three-party scenario, in which the users trying to establish a common secret do not share a password between themselves but only with a trusted server. Towards our goal, we recall some of the existing security notions for PAKE protocols and introduce new ones that are more suitable to the case of generic constructions of three-party protocols. We then present a natural generic construction of a three-party PAKE protocol from any two-party PAKE protocol and prove its security. To the best of our knowledge, the new protocol is the first provably-secure PAKE protocol in the three-party setting.

We show two efficient techniques enabling the use of biometric data to achieve mutual authentication or authenticated key exchange over a completely insecure (i.e., adversarially controlled) channel. In addition to achieving stronger security guarantees than the work of Boyen, we improve upon his solution in a number of other respects: we tolerate a broader class of errors and, in one case, improve upon the parameters of his solution and give a proof of security in the standard model. 1 Using Biometric Data for Secure Authentication Biometric data, as a potential source of high-entropy, secret information, havebeen suggested as a way to enable strong, cryptographically-secure authentication of human users without requiring them to remember or store traditionalcryptographic keys. Before such data can be used in existing cryptographic protocols, however, two issues must be addressed: first, biometric data are not uni-formly distributed and hence do not offer provable security guarantees if used

We propose and realize a definition of security for password-based key exchange within the framework of universal composability (UC), thus providing security guarantees under arbitrary composition with other protocols. In addition, our definition captures some aspects of the problem that were not adequately addressed by most prior notions. For instance, our definition does not assume any underlying probability distribution on passwords, nor does it assume independence between passwords chosen by different parties. We also formulate a definition of password-based secure channels, and show how to realize such channels given any passwordbased key exchange protocol. The password-based key exchange protocol shown here is in the common reference string model and relies on standard number-theoretic assumptions. The components of our protocol can be instantiated to give a relatively efficient solution which is conceivably usable in practice. We also show that it is impossible to satisfy our definition in the “plain ” model (e.g., without

Abstract In wireless ad-hoc broadcast networks the pairing problem consists of establishing a (long-term) connection between two specific physical nodes in the network that do not yet know each other. We focus on the ephemeral version of this problem. Ephemeral pairings occur, for example, when electronic business cards are exchanged between two people that meet, or when one pays at a check-out using a wireless wallet. This problem can, in more abstract terms, be phrased as an ephemeral key exchange problem: given a low bandwidth authentic (or private) communication channel between two nodes, and a high bandwidth broadcast channel, can we establish a high-entropy shared secret session key between the two nodes without relying on any a priori shared secret information. Apart from introducing this new problem, we present several ephemeral key exchange protocols, both for the case of authentic channels as well as for the case of private channels.

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Abstract. Password-based key exchange schemes are designed to provide entities communicating over a public network, and sharing a (short) password only, with a session key (e.g, the key is used for data integrity and/or confidentiality). The focus of the present paper is on the analysis of very efficient schemes that have been proposed to the IEEE P1363 Standard working group on password-based authenticated key-exchange methods, but for which actual security was an open problem. We analyze the AuthA key exchange scheme and give a complete proof of its security. Our analysis shows that the AuthA protocol and its multiple modes of operation are provably secure under the computational Diffie-Hellman intractability assumption, in both the random-oracle and the ideal-cipher models. 1