Pseudorandom generators are fundamental to many theoretical and applied aspects of computing. We show howto construct a pseudorandom generator from any oneway function. Since it is easy to construct a one-way function from a pseudorandom generator, this result shows that there is a pseudorandom generator iff there is a one-way function.

Abstract. This paper investigates a novel computational problem, namely the Composite Residuosity Class Problem, and its applications to public-key cryptography. We propose a new trapdoor mechanism and derive from this technique three encryption schemes: a trapdoor permutation and two homomorphic probabilistic encryption schemes computationally comparable to RSA. Our cryptosystems, based on usual modular arithmetics, are provably secure under appropriate assumptions in the standard model. 1

We combine well-known techniques from the areas of errorcorrecting codes and cryptography to achieve a new type of cryptographic primitive that we refer to as a fuzzy commitment scheme. Like a conventional cryptographic commitment scheme, our fuzzy commitment scheme is both concealing and binding: it is infeasible for an attacker to learn the committed value, and also for the committer to decommit a value in more than one way. In a conventional scheme, a commitment must be opened using a unique witness, which acts, essentially, as a decryption key. By contrast, our scheme is fuzzy in the sense that it accepts a witness that is close to the original encrypting witness in a suitable metric, but not necessarily identical. This characteristic of our fuzzy commitment scheme makes it useful for applications such as biometric authentication systems, in which data is subject to random noise. Because the scheme is tolerant of error, it is capable of protecting biometric data just as conventional cryptographic techniques, like hash functions, are used to protect alphanumeric passwords. This addresses a major outstanding problem in the theory of biometric authentication. We prove the security characteristics of our fuzzy commitment scheme relative to the properties of an underlying cryptographic hash function.

Abstract. We describe a simple and novel cryptographic construction that we refer to as a fuzzy vault. A player Alice may place a secret value κ in a fuzzy vault and “lock ” it using a set A of elements from some public universe U. If Bob tries to “unlock ” the vault using a set B of similar length, he obtains κ only if B is close to A, i.e., only if A and B overlap substantially. In constrast to previous constructions of this flavor, ours possesses the useful feature of order invariance, meaning that the ordering of A and B is immaterial to the functioning of the vault. As we show, our scheme enjoys provable security against a computationally unbounded attacker.

We present a new proposal for a trapdoor one-way function, from whichwe derive public-key encryption and digital signatures. The security of the new construction is based on the conjectured computational difficulty of lattice-reduction problems, providing a possible alternative to existing public-key encryption algorithms and digital signatures such as RSA and DSS.

Abstract. One interesting and important challenge for the cryptologic community is that of providing secure authentication and identification for unassisted humans. There are a range of protocols for secure identification which require various forms of trusted hardware or software, aimed at protecting privacy and financial assets. But how do we verify our identity, securely, when we don’t have or don’t trust our smart card, palmtop, or laptop? In this paper, we provide definitions of what we believe to be reasonable goals for secure human identification. We demonstrate that existing solutions do not meet these reasonable definitions. Finally, we provide solutions which demonstrate the feasibility of the security conditions attached to our definitions, but which are impractical for use by humans. 1

Abstract. Seven years after the optimal asymmetric encryption padding (OAEP) which makes chosen-ciphertext secure encryption scheme from any trapdoor one-way permutation (but whose unique application is RSA), this paper presents REACT, a new conversion which applies to any weakly secure cryptosystem, in the random oracle model: it is optimal from both the computational and the security points of view. Indeed, the overload is negligible, since it just consists of two more hashings for both encryption and decryption, and the reduction is very tight. Furthermore, advantages of REACT beyond OAEP are numerous: 1. it is more general since it applies to any partially trapdoor one-way function (a.k.a. weakly secure public-key encryption scheme) and therefore provides security relative to RSA but also to the Diffie-Hellman problem or the factorization; 2. it is possible to integrate symmetric encryption (block and stream ciphers) to reach very high speed rates; 3. it provides a key distribution with session key encryption, whose overall scheme achieves chosen-ciphertext security even with weakly secure symmetric scheme. Therefore, REACT could become a new alternative to OAEP, and even reach security relative to factorization, while allowing symmetric integration.

: An algorithm for finding small-weight words in large linear codes is developed. It is in particular able to decode random [512,256,57]-linear codes in 9 hours on a DEC alpha computer. We determine with it the minimum distance of some binary BCH codes of length 511, which were not known. Key-words: error-correcting codes, decoding algorithm, minimum weight, random linear codes, BCH codes. (R'esum'e : tsvp) submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Also with ' Ecole Nationale Sup'erieure de Techniques Avanc'ees, laboratoire LEI, 32 boulevard Victor, F-75015 Paris. Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Ecole Normale Sup'erieure, 45 rue d'Ulm, 75230 Paris Cedex 05 Unite de recherche INRIA Rocquencourt Domaine de Voluceau, Rocquencourt, BP 105, 78153 LE CHESNAY Cedex (France) Telephone : (33 1) 39 63 55 11 -- Telecopie : (33 1) 39 63 53 Un nouvel algorithme pour trouver des mots de poids minimum dans un code lin'eaire : application aux codes BCH primitifs au sens strict de l...

Lattices are regular arrangements of points in n-dimensional space, whose study appeared in the 19th century in both number theory and crystallography. Since the appearance of the celebrated LenstraLenstra -Lov'asz lattice basis reduction algorithm twenty years ago, lattices have had surprising applications in cryptology. Until recently, the applications of lattices to cryptology were only negative, as lattices were used to break various cryptographic schemes. Paradoxically, several positive cryptographic applications of lattices have emerged in the past five years: there now exist public-key cryptosystems based on the hardness of lattice problems, and lattices play a crucial role in a few security proofs.

Error-correcting codes and related combinatorial constructs play an important role in several recent (and old) results in computational complexity theory. In this paper we survey results on locally-testable and locally-decodable error-correcting codes, and their applications to complexity theory and to cryptography.