The notion of non-malleable cryptography, an extension of semantically secure cryptography, is defined. Informally, in the context of encryption the additional requirement is that given the ciphertext it is impossible to generate a different ciphertext so that the respective plaintexts are related. The same concept makes sense in the contexts of string commitment and zero-knowledge proofs of possession of knowledge. Non-malleable schemes for each of these three problems are presented. The schemes do not assume a trusted center; a user need not know anything about the number or identity of other system users. Our cryptosystem is the first proven to be secure against a strong type of chosen ciphertext attack proposed by Rackoff and Simon, in which the attacker knows the ciphertext she wishes to break and can query the decryption oracle on any ciphertext other than the target.

We present a single-database computationally private information retrieval scheme with polylogarithmic communication complexity. Our construction is based on a new, but reasonable intractability assumption, which we call the Φ-Hiding Assumption (ΦHA): essentially the difficulty of deciding whether a small prime> 2 divides ϕ(m), where m is a composite integer of unknown factorization. Our result also implies the existence of two-round CS proof systems under a concrete complexity assumption. Keywords: Integer factorization, Euler’s function, Φ-hiding assumption, private information retrieval, computationally sound proofs.

We establish the following, quite unexpected, result: replication of data for the computational Private Information Retrieval problem is not necessary. More specifically, based on the quadratic residuosity assumption, we present a single database, computationally-private information-retrieval scheme with O(n ffl ) communication complexity for any ffl ? 0.

A two party protocol in which party A uses one of several secret witnesses to an NP assertion is witness indistinguishable if party B cannot tell which witness A is actually using. The protocol is witness hiding

Concurrent executions of a zero-knowledge protocol by a single prover (with one or more verifiers) may leak information and may not be zero-knowledge in toto. In this paper, we study the problem of maintaining zero-knowledge We introduce the notion of an (; ) timing constraint: for any two processors P1 and P2 , if P1 measures elapsed time on its local clock and P2 measures elapsed time on its local clock, and P2 starts after P1 does, then P2 will finish after P1 does. We show that if the adversary is constrained by an (; ) assumption then there exist four-round almost concurrent zero-knowledge interactive proofs and perfect concurrent zero-knowledge arguments for every language in NP . We also address the more specific problem of Deniable Authentication, for which we propose several particularly efficient solutions. Deniable Authentication is of independent interest, even in the sequential case; our concurrent solutions yield sequential solutions without recourse to timing, i.e., in the standard model.

Constant-round zero-knowledge proof systems for every language in NP are presented, assuming the existence of a collection of claw-free functions. In particular, it follows that such proof systems exist assuming the intractability of either the Discrete Logarithm Problem or the Factoring Problem for Blum Integers.

We show how to securely realize any two-party and multi-party functionality in a universally composable way, regardless of the number of corrupted participants. That is, we consider an asynchronous multi-party network with open communication and an adversary that can adaptively corrupt as many parties as it wishes. In this setting, our protocols allow any subset of the parties (with pairs of parties being a special case) to securely realize any desired functionality of their local inputs, and be guaranteed that security is preserved regardless of the activity in the rest of the network. This implies that security is preserved under concurrent composition of an unbounded number of protocol executions, it implies non-malleability with respect to arbitrary protocols, and more. Our constructions are in the common reference string model and rely on standard intractability assumptions.

Abstract not found

The random oracle model is a very convenient setting for designing cryptographic protocols. In this idealized model all parties have access to a common, public random function, called a random oracle. Protocols in this model are often very simple and efficient; also the analysis is often clearer. However, we do not have a general mechanism for transforming protocols that are secure in the random oracle model into protocols that are secure in real life. In fact, we do not even know how to meaningfully specify the properties required from such a mechanism. Instead, it is a common practice to simply replace - often without mathematical justification - the random oracle with a `cryptographic hash function' (e.g., MD5 or SHA). Consequently, the resulting protocols have no meaningful proofs of security. We propose a research program aimed at rectifying this situation by means of identifying, and subsequently realizing, the useful properties of random oracles. As a first step, we introduce a new primitive that realizes a specific aspect of random oracles. This primitive, called oracle hashing, is a hash function that, like random oracles, `hides all partial information on its input'. A salient property of oracle hashing is that it is probabilistic: different applications to the same input result in different hash values. Still, we maintain the ability to verify whether a given hash value was generated from a given input. We describe constructions of oracle hashing, as well as applications where oracle hashing successfully replaces random oracles.

This paper puts forward a new notion of a proof based on computational complexity and explores its implications for computation at large. Computationally sound proofs provide, in a novel and meaningful framework, answers to old and new questions in complexity theory. In particular, given a random oracle or a new complexity assumption, they enable us to 1. prove that verifying is easier than deciding for all theorems; 2. provide a quite effective way to prove membership in computationally hard languages (such as Co-NP-complete ones); and 3. show that every computation possesses a short certificate vouching its correctness. Finally, if a special type of computationally sound proof exists, we show that Blum’s notion of program checking can be meaningfully broadened so as to prove that NP-complete languages are checkable.