What a lovely hat

Group signature (GS) is a well-known cryptographic primitive providing anonymity and traceability. Several implication results have been given by mainly focusing on the several security levels of anonymity, e.g., fully anonymous GS implies public key encryption (PKE) and selfless anonymous GS can be constructed from one-way functions and non-interactive zero knowledge poofs, and so on. In this paper, we explore an winning condition of full traceability: an adversary is required to produce a...

We describe Crescent, a construction and implementation of privacy-preserving credentials. The system works by upgrading the privacy features of existing credentials, such as JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) and Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) and as such does not require a new party to issue credentials. By using zero-knowledge proofs of possession of these credentials, we can add privacy features such as selective disclosure and unlinkability, without help from credential issuers. The system has...

Anonymous digital credentials allow a user to prove possession of an attribute that has been asserted by an identity issuer without revealing any extra information about themselves. For example, a user who has received a digital passport credential can prove their “age is $>18$” without revealing any other attributes such as their name or date of birth. Despite inherent value for privacy-preserving authentication, anonymous credential schemes have been difficult to deploy at scale. ...

Ensuring transaction privacy in blockchain systems is essential to safeguard user data and financial activity from exposure on public ledgers. This paper conducts a systematization of knowledge (SoK) on privacy-preserving techniques in cryptocurrencies with native privacy features. We define and compare privacy notions such as confidentiality, k-anonymity, full anonymity, and sender-receiver unlinkability, and categorize the cryptographic techniques employed to achieve these guarantees. Our...

A group signatures allows a user to sign a message anonymously on behalf of a group and provides accountability by using an opening authority who can ``open'' a signature and reveal the signer's identity. Group signatures have been widely used in privacy-preserving applications including anonymous attestation and anonymous authentication. Fully dynamic group signatures allow new members to join the group and existing members to be revoked if needed. Symmetric-key based group signature...

Shuffle is a frequently used operation in secure multiparty computations, with various applications, including joint data analysis and anonymous communication systems. Most existing MPC shuffle protocols are constructed from MPC permutation protocols, which allows a party to securely apply its private permutation to an array of $m$ numbers shared among all $n$ parties. Following a ``permute-in-turn'' paradigm, these protocols result in $\Omega(n^2m)$ complexity in the semi-honest setting....

The eIDAS 2.0 regulation aims to develop interoperable digital identities for European citizens, and it has recently become law. One of its requirements is that credentials be unlinkable. Anonymous credentials (AC) allow holders to prove statements about their identity in a way that does not require to reveal their identity and does not enable linking different usages of the same credential. As a result, they are likely to become the technology that provides digital identity for...

In large-scale protests, a repressive government will often disable the Internet to thwart communication between protesters. Smartphone mesh networks, which route messages over short range, possibly ephemeral, radio connections between nearby phones, allow protesters to communicate without relying on centralized Internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, prior work on mesh networks does not efficiently support cryptographically secure group messaging (a crucial requirement for protests); prior...

We introduce the notion of non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs with certified deletion. Our notion enables the recipient of a quantum NIZK proof for a (quantumly hard) NP statement to delete the proof and collapse it into a classical deletion certificate. Once this certificate is successfully validated, we require the recipient of the proof to lose their ability to find accepting inputs to NIZK verification. We formally define this notion and build several candidate constructions...

The hardness of lattice problems offers one of the most promising security foundations for quantum-safe cryptography. Basic schemes for public key encryption and digital signatures are already close to standardization at NIST and several other standardization bodies, and the research frontier has moved on to building primitives with more advanced privacy features. At the core of many such primi- tives are zero-knowledge proofs. In recent years, zero-knowledge proofs for (and using)...

Quantum information allows us to build quantum money schemes, where a bank can issue banknotes in the form of authenticatable quantum states that cannot be cloned or counterfeited: a user in possession of k banknotes cannot produce k +1 banknotes. Similar to paper banknotes, in existing quantum money schemes, a banknote consists of an unclonable quantum state and a classical serial number, signed by bank. Thus, they lack one of the most fundamental properties cryptographers look for in a...

Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zkSNARK) is a powerful cryptographic primitive, in which a prover convinces a verifier that a given statement is true without leaking any additional information. However, existing zkSNARKs suffer from high computation overhead in the proof generation. This limits the applications of zkSNARKs, such as private payments, private smart contracts, and anonymous credentials. Private delegation has become a prominent way to accelerate...

Service discovery is essential in wireless communications. However, existing service discovery protocols provide no or very limited privacy protection for service providers and clients, and they often leak sensitive information (e.g., service type, client’s identity and mobility pattern), which leads to various network-based attacks (e.g., spoofing, man-in-the-middle, identification and tracking). In this paper, we propose a private service discovery protocol, called PriSrv, which allows a...

In this paper, we introduce zkMarket, a privacy-preserving fair trade system on the blockchain. zkMarket addresses the challenges of transaction privacy and computational efficiency. To ensure transaction privacy, zkMarket is built upon an anonymous transfer protocol. By combining encryption with zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARK), both the seller and the buyer are enabled to trade fairly. Furthermore, by encrypting the decryption key, we make the data...

We present a new compact and tightly secure (anonymous) identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme based on structured lattices. This is the first IBE scheme that is (asymptotically) as compact as the most practical NTRU-based schemes and tightly secure under the module learning with errors (MLWE) assumption, known as the standard lattice assumption, in the (quantum) random oracle model. In particular, our IBE scheme is the most compact lattice-based scheme (except for NTRU-based schemes). We...

In recent years, urban areas have experienced a rapid increase in vehicle numbers, while the availability of parking spaces has remained largely static, leading to a significant shortage of parking spots. This shortage creates considerable inconvenience for drivers and contributes to traffic congestion. A viable solution is the temporary use of private parking spaces by homeowners during their absence, providing a means to alleviate the parking problem and generate additional income for the...

Distributed point functions (DPF) are increasingly becoming a foundational tool with applications for application-specific and general secure computation. While two-party DPF constructions are readily available for those applications with satisfiable performance, the three-party ones are left behind in both security and efficiency. In this paper we close this gap and propose the first three-party DPF construction that matches the state-of-the-art two-party DPF on all metrics. Namely, it...

Zero-knowledge for set membership is a building block at the core of several privacy-aware applications, such as anonymous payments, credentials and whitelists. We propose a new efficient construction for the batching variant of the problem, where a user intends to show knowledge of several elements (a batch) in a set without any leakage on the elements. Our construction is transparent—it does not requires a trusted setup—and based on Curve Trees by Campanelli, Hall-Andersen and Kamp...

Blockchain-based auction markets offer stronger fairness and transparency compared to their centralized counterparts. Deposits and sealed bid formats are usually applied to enhance security and privacy. However, to our best knowledge, the formal treatment of deposit-enabled sealed-bid auctions remains lacking in the cryptographic literature. To address this gap, we first propose a decentralized anonymous deposited-bidding (DADB) scheme, providing formal syntax and security definitions....

Cryptography's most common use is secure communication---e.g. Alice can use encryption to hide the contents of the messages she sends to Bob (confidentiality) and can use signatures to assure Bob she sent these messages (authenticity). While one typically considers stateless security guarantees---for example a channel that Alice can use to send messages securely to Bob---one can also consider stateful ones---e.g. an interactive conversation between Alice, Bob and their friends where...

Keyed-verification anonymous credentials are widely recognized as among the most efficient tools for anonymous authentication. In this work, we revisit two prominent credential systems: the scheme by Chase et al. (CCS 2014), commonly referred to as CMZ or PS MAC, and the scheme by Barki et al. (SAC 2016), known as BBDT or BBS MAC. We show how to make CMZ statistically anonymous and BBDT compatible with the BBS RFC draft. We provide a comprehensive security analysis for strong(er) properties...

A mixnet developed by Hébant et al. (PKC '20) employs certified ciphertexts that carry homomorphic signatures from an authority, reducing the complexity of the shuffling proof, and thereby enabling efficient large-scale deployment. However, their privacy relies on trusting the authority, making it unsuitable for voting, the primary application of mixnets. Building on the prior work, we leverage recent advances in equivalence class signatures by replacing homomorphic signatures with newly...

Peer-to-peer communication systems can provide many functions, including anonymized routing of network traffic, massive parallel computing environments, and distributed storage. Anonymity refers to the state of being completely nameless, with no attached identifiers. Pseudonymity involves the use of a fictitious name that can be consistently linked to a particular user, though not necessarily to the real identity. Both provide a layer of privacy, shielding the user's true identity from...

The problem of reliable/secure all-to-all communication over low-degree networks has been essential for communication-local (CL) n-party MPC (i.e., MPC protocols where every party directly communicates only with a few, typically polylogarithmic in n, parties) and more recently for communication over ad hoc networks, which are used in blockchain protocols. However, a limited number of adaptively secure solutions exist, and they all make relatively strong assumptions on the ability of parties...

Mix networks (mixnets) enhance anonymity by routing client messages through multiple hops, intentionally delaying or reordering these messages to ensure unlinkability. However, this process increases end-to-end latency, potentially degrading the client experience. To address this issue, LARMix (NDSS, 2024) proposed a low-latency routing methodology specifically designed for stratified mixnet architectures. Our paper extends this concept to Free Routes mixnet designs, where, unlike stratified...

Blockchain-enabled digital currency systems have typically operated in isolation, lacking necessary mechanisms for seamless interconnection. Consequently, transferring assets across distinct currency systems remains a complex challenge, with existing schemes often falling short in ensuring security, privacy, and practicality. This paper proposes P2C2T -- a privacy-preserving cross-chain transfer scheme. It is the first scheme to address atomicity, unlinkability, indistinguishability,...

The Li et al.'s scheme [Computer Communications, 186 (2022), 110-120)] uses XOR operation to realize the private transmission of sensitive information, under the assumption that if only one parameter in the expression $ a= b\oplus c $ is known, an adversary cannot retrieve the other two. The assumption neglects that the operands $b$ and $c$ must be of the same bit-length, which leads to the exposure of a substring in the longer operand. The scheme wrongly treats timestamps as random...

This work introduces Cryptobazaar, a novel scalable, private, and decentralized sealed-bid auction protocol. In particular, our protocol protects the privacy of losing bidders by preserving the confidentiality of their bids while ensuring public verifiability of the outcome and relying only on a single untrusted auctioneer for coordination. At its core, Cryptobazaar combines an efficient distributed protocol to compute the logical-OR for a list of unary-encoded bids with various novel...

We propose the first constructions of anonymous tokens with decentralized issuance. Namely, we consider a dynamic set of signers/issuers; a user can obtain a token from any subset of the signers, which is publicly verifiable and unlinkable to the issuance process. To realize this new primitive we formalize the notion of Blind Multi-Signatures (BMS), which allow a user to interact with multiple signers to obtain a (compact) signature; even if all the signers collude they are unable to link a...

Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) empowers individuals and organizations with full control over their data. Decentralized identifiers (DIDs) are at its center, where a DID contains a collection of public keys associated with an entity, and further information to enable entities to engage via secure and private messaging across different platforms. A crucial stepping stone is DIDComm, a cryptographic communication layer that is in production with version 2. Due to its widespread and active...

Smart farming uses different vehicles to manage all the operations on the farm. These vehicles should be put to good use for secure data transmission. The Vangala et al.'s key agreement scheme [IEEE TIFS, 18 (2023), 904-9193] is designed for agricultural IoT networks. In this note, we show that the scheme fails to keep anonymity, instead pseudonymity. The scheme simply thinks that anonymity is equivalent to preventing the real identity from being recovered. But the true anonymity means...

Clinical trials are crucial in the development of new medical treatment methods. To ensure the correctness of clinical trial results, medical institutes need to collect and process large volumes of participant data, which has prompted research on privacy preservation and data reliability. However, existing solutions struggle to resolve the trade-off between them due to the trust gap between the physical and digital worlds, limiting their practicality. To tackle the issues above, we present...

Privacy preserving systems often need to allow anonymity while requiring accountability. For anonymous clients, depending on application, this may mean banning/revoking their accounts, docking their reputation, or updating their state in some complex access control scheme. Frequently, these operations happen asynchronously when some violation, e.g., a forum post, is found well after the offending action occurred. Malicious clients, naturally, wish to evade this asynchronous negative...

We show that the key agreement scheme [IEEE Trans. Serv. Comput. 16(4): 3000-3013, 2023] fails to keep user anonymity, not as claimed. The scheme simply acknowledges that user anonymity is equivalent to preventing user's identity from being recovered. But the true anonymity means that the adversary cannot attribute different sessions to target users. It relates to entity-distinguishable, not just identity-revealable. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to clarify the...

Anonymous Broadcast Channels (ABCs) allow a group of clients to announce messages without revealing the exact author. Modern ABCs operate in a client-server model, where anonymity depends on some threshold (e.g., 1 of 2) of servers being honest. ABCs are an important application in their own right, e.g., for activism and whistleblowing. Recent work on ABCs (Riposte, Blinder) has focused on minimizing the bandwidth cost to clients and servers when supporting large broadcast channels for such...

Delegatable anonymous credentials (DACs) enable a root issuer to delegate credential-issuing power, allowing a delegatee to take a delegator role. To preserve privacy, credential recipients and verifiers should not learn anything about intermediate issuers in the delegation chain. One particularly efficient approach to constructing DACs is due to Crites and Lysyanskaya (CT-RSA '19). In contrast to previous approaches, it is based on mercurial signatures (a type of equivalence-class...

We show that the Chunka-Banerjee-Goswami authentication and key agreement scheme [Wirel. Pers. Commun., 117, 1361-1385, 2021] fails to keep user anonymity, not as claimed. It only keeps pseudonymity. Anonymous actions are designed to be unlinkable to any entity, but pseudonymous actions can be traced back to a certain entity. We also find the scheme is insecure against offline dictionary attack.

For many pairing-based cryptographic protocols such as Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) schemes, the arithmetic on the first pairing subgroup $\mathbb{G}_1$ is more fundamental. Such operations heavily depend on the sizes of prime fields. At the 192-bit security level, Gasnier and Guillevic presented a curve named GG22D7-457 with CM-discriminant $D = 7$ and embedding degree $k = 22$. Compared to other well-known pairing-friendly curves at the same security level, the curve GG22D7-457 has...

We show that the authentication protocol [IEEE Internet Things J., 2023, 10(1), 867-876] is not correctly specified, because the server cannot complete its computations. To revise, the embedded device needs to compute an extra point multiplication over the underlying elliptic curve. We also find the protocol cannot provide anonymity, not as claimed. It can only provide pseudonymity.

We construct two efficient post-quantum ring signatures with anonymity against full key exposure from isogenies, addressing limitations of existing isogeny-based ring signatures. First, we present an efficient concrete distinguisher for the SQIsign simulator when the signing key is provided using one transcript. This shows that turning SQIsign into an efficient full anonymous ring signature requires some new ideas. Second, we propose a variant of SQIsign that is resistant to the...

This report presents the security protocols and general trust architecture of the SMARTEDGE swarm computing platform. Part 1 describes the coordination protocols for use in a swarm production environment, e.g. a smart factory, and Part 2 deals with crowd-sensing scenarios characteristic of traffic-control swarms.

In crowdsourcing systems, requesters publish tasks, and interested workers provide answers to get rewards. Worker anonymity motivates participation since it protects their privacy. Anonymity with unlinkability is an enhanced version of anonymity because it makes it impossible to ``link'' workers across the tasks they participate in. Another core feature of crowdsourcing systems is worker quality which expresses a worker's trustworthiness and quantifies their historical performance. In this...

We show that the authentication key agreement scheme [IEEE Trans. Smart Grid, 2023, 14(5), 3816-3827] is flawed due to its inconsistent computations. We also show that the scheme fails to keep anonymity, not as claimed.

Strike-lists are a common technique for rollback and replay prevention in protocols that require that clients remain anonymous or that their current position in a state machine remain confidential. Strike-lists are heavily used in anonymous credentials, e-cash schemes, and trusted execution environments, and are widely deployed on the web in the form of Privacy Pass (PoPETS '18) and Google Private State Tokens. In such protocols, clients submit pseudorandom tokens associated with each...

Waku is a privacy-preserving, generalized, and decentralized messaging protocol suite. Waku uses GossipSub for message routing and Rate Limiting Nullifiers (RLN) for spam protection. GossipSub ensures fast and reliable peer-to-peer message delivery in a permissionless environment, while RLN enforces a common publishing rate limit using zero-knowledge proofs. This paper presents a practical evaluation of message propagation latency in Waku. First, we estimate latencies analytically,...

Ensuring the authenticity and credibility of daily media on internet is an ongoing problem. Meanwhile, genuinely captured images often require refinements before publication. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) offer a solution by verifying edited image without disclosing the original source. However, ZKPs typically come with high costs, particularly in terms of prover complexity and proof size. This paper presents VIMz, a framework for efficiently proving the authenticity of high-resolution images...

We analyse a two password-authenticated key exchange protocols, a variant of CPace and a protocol related to the well-known SRP protocol. Our security results are tight. The first result gives us some information about trade-offs for design choices in CPace. The second result provides information about the security of SRP. Our analysis is done in a new game-based security definition for password-authenticated key exchange. Our definition accomodates arbitrary password sampling...

Zero-knowledge shuffle arguments are a useful tool for constructing mix-nets which enable anonymous communication. We propose a new shuffle argument using a novel technique that probabilistically checks that each weighted set of input elements corresponds to some weighted set of output elements, with weights from the same set as the input element weights. We achieve this using standard discrete log assumptions and the shortest integer solution (SIS) assumption. Our shuffle argument has...

PeaceFounder is a centralised E2E verifiable e-voting system that leverages pseudonym braiding and history trees. The immutability of the bulletin board is maintained replication-free by voter’s client devices with locally stored consistency-proof chains. Meanwhile, pseudonym braiding done via an exponentiation mix before the vote allows anonymisation to be transactional with a single braider at a time. In contrast to existing E2E verifiable e-voting systems, it is much easier to deploy as...

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) systems empower users to (anonymously) establish and verify their identity when accessing both digital and real-world resources, emerging as a promising privacy-preserving solution for user-centric identity management. Recent work by Maram et al. proposes the privacy-preserving Sybil-resistant decentralized SSI system CanDID (IEEE S&P 2021). While this is an important step, notable shortcomings undermine its efficacy. The two most significant among them being...

Range proofs serve as a protocol for the prover to prove to the verifier that a committed number resides within a specified range, such as $[0,2^n)$, without disclosing the actual value. These proofs find extensive application in various domains, including anonymous cryptocurrencies, electronic voting, and auctions. However, the efficiency of many existing schemes diminishes significantly when confronted with batch proofs encompassing multiple elements. The pivotal challenge arises...

We introduce ${zkVoting}$, a coercion-resistant e-voting system that utilizes a fake keys approach based on a novel nullifiable commitment scheme. This scheme allows voters to receive both real and fake commitment keys from a registrar. Each ballot includes this commitment, but only the tallier can efficiently discern the fake ballots, simplifying the tally process to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ and ensuring coercion resistance. ${zkVoting}$ also preserves voter anonymity by ensuring each ballot...

The realm of digital health is experiencing a global surge, with mobile applications extending their reach into various facets of daily life. From tracking daily eating habits and vital functions to monitoring sleep patterns and even the menstrual cycle, these apps have become ubiquitous in their pursuit of comprehensive health insights. Many of these apps collect sensitive data and promise users to protect their privacy - often through pseudonymization. We analyze the real anonymity that...

Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) provides fine-grained access control to encrypted data and finds applications in various domains. The practicality of ABE schemes hinges on the balance between security and efficiency. The state-of-the-art adaptive secure ABE scheme, proven to be adaptively secure under standard assumptions (FAME, CCS'17), is less efficient compared to the fastest one (FABEO, CCS'22) which is only proven secure under the Generic Group Model (GGM). These traditional ABE...

Ring signatures are one of the crucial cryptographic primitives used in the design of privacy-preserving systems. Such a signature scheme allows a signer to anonymously sign a message on behalf of a spontaneously formed group. It not only ensures the authenticity of the message but also conceals the true signer within the group. An important extension of ring signatures is linkable ring signatures, which prevent a signer from signing twice without being detected (under some constraints)....

This paper presents a new architecture for metadata-private messaging that counters scalability challenges by offloading most computations to the clients. At the core of our design is a distributed private information retrieval (PIR) protocol, where the responder delegates its work to alleviate PIR's computational bottleneck and catches misbehaving delegates by efficiently verifying their results. We introduce DPIR, a messaging system that uses distributed PIR to let a server storing...

t-out-of-n threshold ring signature (TRS) is a type of anonymous signature designed for t signers to jointly sign a message while hiding their identities among n parties that include themselves. However, can TRS address those needs if one of the signers wants to revoke his signature or, additively, sign separately later? Can non-signers be revoked without compromising anonymity? Previous research has only discussed opposing situations. The present study introduces a novel property for...

Key blinding produces pseudonymous digital identities by rerandomizing public keys of a digital signature scheme. It is used in anonymous networks to provide the seemingly contradictory goals of anonymity and authentication. Current key blinding schemes are based on the discrete log assumption. Eaton, Stebila and Stracovsky (LATINCRYPT 2021) proposed the first key blinding schemes from lattice assumptions. However, the large public keys and lack of QROM security means they are not ready to...

We revisit the problem of private information retrieval (PIR) in the shuffle model, where queries can be made anonymously by multiple clients. We present the first single-server PIR protocol in this model that has sublinear per-client communication and information-theoretic security. Moreover, following one-time preprocessing on the server side, our protocol only requires sublinear per-client computation. Concretely, for every $\gamma>0$, the protocol has $O(n^{\gamma})$ communication and...

Decentralized payments have evolved from using pseudonymous identifiers to much more elaborate mechanisms to ensure privacy. They can shield the amounts in payments and achieve untraceability, e.g., decoy-based untraceable payments use decoys to obfuscate the actual asset sender or asset receiver. There are two types of decoy-based payments: full decoy set payments that use all other available users as decoys, e.g., Zerocoin, Zerocash, and ZCash, and user-defined decoy set payments where...

Ring signatures, a cryptographic primitive introduced by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (ASIACRYPT 2001), offer signer anonymity within dynamically formed user groups. Recent advancements have focused on lattice-based constructions to improve efficiency, particularly for large signing rings. However, current state-of-the-art solutions suffer from significant overhead, especially for smaller rings. In this work, we present a novel NTRU-based ring signature scheme, Gandalf, tailored towards...

In onion routing, a message travels through the network via a series of intermediaries, wrapped in layers of encryption to make it difficult to trace. Onion routing is an attractive approach to realizing anonymous channels because it is simple and fault tolerant. Onion routing protocols provably achieving anonymity in realistic adversary models are known for the synchronous model of communication so far. In this paper, we give the first onion routing protocol that achieves anonymity in...

The shuffle model has recently emerged as a popular setting for differential privacy, where clients can communicate with a central server using anonymous channels or an intermediate message shuffler. This model was also explored in the context of cryptographic tasks such as secure aggregation and private information retrieval (PIR). However, this study was almost entirely restricted to the stringent notion of information-theoretic security. In this work, we study computationally secure...

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) allows a (host) device with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to prove that it has a certified configuration of hardware and software whilst preserving the privacy of the device. All deployed DAA schemes are based on classical security assumptions. Despite a long line of works proposing post-quantum designs, the vast majority give only theoretical schemes and where concrete parameters are computed, their efficiency is far from practical. Our first...

Ring signatures allow members of a group (called "ring") to sign a message anonymously within the group, which is chosen ad hoc at the time of signing (the members do not need to have interacted before). In this paper, we propose a physical version of ring signatures. Our signature is based on one-out-of-many signatures, a method used in many real cryptographic ring signatures. It consists of boxes containing coins locked with padlocks that can only be opened by a particular group member. To...

Non-transferability (NT) is a security notion which ensures that credentials are only used by their intended owners. Despite its importance, it has not been formally treated in the context of anonymous tokens (AT) which are lightweight anonymous credentials. In this work, we consider a client who "buys" access tokens which are forbidden to be transferred although anonymously redeemed. We extensively study the trade-offs between privacy (obtained through anonymity) and security in AT through...

We present a framework for privacy-preserving streaming algorithms which combine the memory-efficiency of streaming algorithms with strong privacy guarantees. These algorithms enable some number of servers to compute aggregate statistics efficiently on large quantities of user data without learning the user's inputs. While there exists limited prior work that fits within our model, our work is the first to formally define a general framework, interpret existing methods within this general...

This paper's purpose is to give a new method of analyzing Beale Cipher 1 and Cipher 3 and to show that there is no key which will decipher them into sentences. Previous research has largely used statistical methods to either decipher them or prove they have no solution. Some of these methods show that there is a high probability, but not certainty that they are unsolvable. Both ciphers remain unsolved. The methods used in this paper are not statistical ones based on thousands...

With additively homomorphic encryption (AHE), one can compute, from input ciphertexts $\mathsf{Enc}(x_1),\ldots,\mathsf{Enc}(x_n)$, and additional inputs $y_1,\ldots,y_k$, a ciphertext $c_\textit{f}=\mathsf{Enc}(f(x_1,\ldots,x_n,y_1,\ldots, y_k))$ for any polynomial $f$ in which each monomial has total degree at most $1$ in the $x$-variables (but can be arbitrary in the $y$-variables). For AHE that satisfies a set of natural requirements, we give a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof...

Cryptographic accumulators, introduced in 1993 by Benaloh and De Mare, represent a set with a concise value and offer proofs of (non-)membership. Accumulators have evolved, becoming essential in anonymous credentials, e-cash, and blockchain applications. Various properties like dynamic and universal emerged for specific needs, leading to multiple accumulator definitions. In 2015, Derler, Hanser, and Slamanig proposed a unified model, but new properties, including zero-knowledge security,...

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) was designed for the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and versions using RSA and elliptic curve cryptography have been included in the TPM specifications and in ISO/IEC standards. These standardised DAA schemes have their security based on the factoring or discrete logarithm problems and are therefore insecure against quantum attackers. Research into quantum-resistant DAA has resulted in several lattice-based schemes. Now in this paper, we propose the first...

Group signatures and their variants have been widely used in privacy-sensitive scenarios such as anonymous authentication and attestation. In this paper, we present a new post-quantum group signature scheme from symmetric primitives. Using only symmetric primitives makes the scheme less prone to unknown attacks than basing the design on newly proposed hard problems whose security is less well-understood. However, symmetric primitives do not have rich algebraic properties, and this makes it...

We show the authentication mechanism [Ad Hoc Networks, 2023, 103003] fails to keep user anonymity, not as claimed.

Existing oblivious systems offer robust security by concealing memory access patterns, but they encounter significant scalability and performance challenges. Recent efforts to enhance the practicality of these systems involve embedding oblivious computation, e.g., oblivious sorting and shuffling, within Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). For instance, oblivious sort has been heavily utilized: in Oblix (S&P'18), when oblivious indexes are created and accessed; in Snoopy's high-throughput...

Mercurial signatures are an extension of equivalence class signatures that allow malleability for the public keys, messages, and signatures within the respective classes. Unfortunately, the most efficient construction to date suffers from a weak public key class-hiding property, where the original signer with the signing key can link the public keys in the same class. This is a severe limitation in their applications, where the signer is often considered untrustworthy of privacy. This...

Delegatable Anonymous Credentials (DAC) are an enhanced Anonymous Credentials (AC) system that allows credential owners to use credentials anonymously, as well as anonymously delegate them to other users. In this work, we introduce a new concept called Delegatable Attribute-based Anonymous Credentials with Chainable Revocation (DAAC-CR), which extends the functionality of DAC by allowing 1) fine-grained attribute delegation, 2) issuers to restrict the delegation capabilities of the delegated...

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows for evaluating arbitrary functions over encrypted data. In Multi-party FHE applications, different parties encrypt their secret data and submit ciphertexts to a server, which, according to the application logic, performs homomorphic operations on them. For example, in a secret voting application, the tally is computed by summing up the ciphertexts encoding the votes. Valid encrypted votes are of the form $E(0)$ and $E(1)$. A malicious voter could...

Anonymous identity-based encryption (AIBE) is an extension of identity-based encryption (IBE) that enhances the privacy of a ciphertext by providing ciphertext anonymity. In this paper, we introduce the concept of revocable IBE with anonymous revocation (RIBE-AR), which is capable of issuing an update key and hiding the revoked set of the update key that efficiently revokes private keys of AIBE. We first define the security models of RIBE-AR and propose an efficient RIBE-AR scheme in...

To resist the regimes of ubiquitous surveillance imposed upon us in every facet of modern life, we need technological tools that subvert surveillance systems. Unfortunately, while cryptographic tools frequently demonstrate how we can construct systems that safeguard user privacy, there is limited motivation for corporate entities engaged in surveillance to adopt these tools, as they often clash with profit incentives. This paper demonstrates how, in one particular aspect of everyday life --...

Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) is a cryptographic protocol that enables users with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) to authenticate without revealing their identity. Thus, DAA emerged as a good privacy-enhancing solution. Current standards have security based on factorization and discrete logarithm problem making them vulnerable to quantum computer attacks. Recently, a number of lattice-based DAA has been propose in the literature to start transition to quantum-resistant cryptography. In...

Banks publish daily a list of available securities/assets (axe list) to selected clients to help them effectively locate Long (buy) or Short (sell) trades at reduced financing rates. This reduces costs for the bank, as the list aggregates the bank's internal firm inventory per asset for all clients of long as well as short trades. However, this is somewhat problematic: (1) the bank's inventory is revealed; (2) trades of clients who contribute to the aggregated list, particularly those deemed...

Lattice-based cryptography has emerged as a promising new candidate to build cryptographic primitives. It offers resilience against quantum attacks, enables fully homomorphic encryption, and relies on robust theoretical foundations. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) are an essential primitive for various privacy-preserving applications. For example, anonymous credentials, group signatures, and verifiable oblivious pseudorandom functions all require ZKPs. Currently, the majority of ZKP systems are...

Private messaging platforms provide strong protection against platform eavesdropping, but malicious users can use privacy as cover for spreading abuse and misinformation. In an attempt to identify the sources of misinformation on private platforms, researchers have proposed mechanisms to trace back the source of a user-reported message (CCS '19,'21). Unfortunately, the threat model considered by initial proposals allowed a single user to compromise the privacy of another user whose...

A function secret sharing (FSS) (Boyle et al., Eurocrypt 2015) is a cryptographic primitive that enables additive secret sharing of functions from a given function family $\mathcal{F}$. FSS supports a wide range of cryptographic applications, including private information retrieval (PIR), anonymous messaging systems, private set intersection and more. Formally, given positive integers $r \geq 2$ and $t < r$, and a class $\mathcal{F}$ of functions $f: [n] \to \mathbb{G}$ for an Abelian group...

Introducing Small Cell Networks (SCN) has significantly improved wireless link quality, spectrum efficiency and network capacity, which has been viewed as one of the key technologies in the fifth-generation (5G) mobile network. However, this technology increases the frequency of handover (HO) procedures caused by the dense deployment of cells in the network with reduced cell coverage, bringing new security and privacy issues. The current 5G-AKA and HO protocols are vulnerable to security...

Zero-knowledge range proofs (ZKRPs) allow a prover to convince a verifier that a secret value lies in a given interval. ZKRPs have numerous applications: from anonymous credentials and auctions, to confidential transactions in cryptocurrencies. At the same time, a plethora of ZKRP constructions exist in the literature, each with its own trade-offs. In this work, we systematize the knowledge around ZKRPs. We create a classification of existing constructions based on the underlying building...

Linkable ring signatures are an important cryptographic primitive for anonymized applications, such as e-voting, e-cash and confidential transactions. To eliminate backdoor and overhead in a trusted setup, transparent setup in the discrete logarithm or pairing settings has received considerable attention in practice. Recent advances have improved the proof sizes and verification efficiency of linkable ring signatures with a transparent setup to achieve logarithmic bounds. Omniring (CCS '19)...

We introduce a new cryptographic primitive, called Sybil-Resilient Anonymous (SyRA) signatures, which enable users to generate, on demand, unlinkable pseudonyms tied to any given context, and issue signatures on behalf of these pseudonyms. Concretely, given a personhood relation, an issuer (who may be a distributed entity) enables users to prove their personhood and extract an associated long-term key, which can then be used to issue signatures for any given context and message....

Attribute-based cryptography allows fine-grained control on the use of the private key. In particular, attribute-based signature (ABS) specifies the capabilities of the signer, which can only sign messages associated to a policy that is authorized by his set of attributes. Furthermore, we can expect signature to not leak any information about the identity of the signer. ABS is a useful tool for identity-preserving authentication process which requires granular access-control, and can...

Driven by the NIST's post-quantum standardization efforts and the selection of Kyber as a lattice-based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM), several Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) protocols have been recently proposed that leverage a KEM to create an efficient, easy-to-implement and secure PAKE. In two recent works, Beguinet et al. (ACNS 2023) and Pan and Zeng (ASIACRYPT 2023) proposed generic compilers that transform KEM into PAKE, relying on an Ideal Cipher (IC) defined over a...

Decentralized Anonymous Credential (DAC) systems are increasingly relevant, especially when enhancing revocation mechanisms in the face of complex traceability challenges. This paper introduces IDEA-DAC, a paradigm shift from the conventional revoke-and-reissue methods, promoting direct and Integrity-Driven Editing (IDE) for Accountable DACs, which results in better integrity accountability, traceability, and system simplicity. We further incorporate an Edit-bound Conformity Check that...

Randomized Partial Checking (RPC} was proposed by Jakobsson, Juels, and Rivest and attracted attention as an efficient method of verifying the correctness of the mixing process in numerous applied scenarios. In fact, RPC is a building block for many electronic voting schemes, including Prêt à Voter, Civitas, Scantegrity II as well as voting-systems used in real-world elections (e.g., in Australia). Mixing is also used in anonymous transfers of cryptocurrencies. It turned out, however,...

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) provides effective charging services, allows bidirectional energy communication between the power grid and electric vehicle (EV), and reduces environmental pollution and energy crises. Recently, Sungjin Yu et al. proposed a PUF-based, robust, and anonymous authentication and key establishment scheme for V2G networks. In this paper, we show that the proposed protocol does not provide user anonymity and is vulnerable to tracing attack. We also found their scheme is...

In recent years, decentralized computing has gained popularity in various domains such as decentralized learning, financial services and the Industrial Internet of Things. As identity privacy becomes increasingly important in the era of big data, safeguarding user identity privacy while ensuring the security of decentralized computing systems has become a critical challenge. To address this issue, we propose ADC (Anonymous Decentralized Computing) to achieve anonymity in decentralized...

Additive randomized encodings (ARE), introduced by Halevi, Ishai, Kushilevitz, and Rabin (CRYPTO 2023), reduce the computation of a k-party function $f (x_1, . . . , x_k )$ to locally computing encodings $\hat{x}_i$ of each input xi and then adding them together over some Abelian group into an output encoding $\hat{y} = ∑ \hat{x}_i$, which reveals nothing but the result. In robust ARE (RARE) the sum of any subset of $\hat{x}_i$, reveals only the residual function obtained by restricting the...

We study blockchain-based provably anonymous payment systems between light clients. Such clients interact with the blockchain through full nodes, who can see what the light clients read and write. The goal of our work is to enable light clients to perform anonymous payments, while maintaining privacy even against the full nodes through which they interact with the blockchain. We formalize the problem in the universal composability model and present a provably secure solution to it. In...

Anonymous message delivery, as in privacy-preserving blockchain and private messaging applications, needs to protect recipient metadata: eavesdroppers should not be able to link messages to their recipients. This raises the question: how can untrusted servers assist in delivering the pertinent messages to each recipient, without learning which messages are addressed to whom? Recent work constructed Oblivious Message Retrieval (OMR) protocols that outsource the message detection and...

Equivalence class signatures (EQS; Asiacrypt '14), sign vectors of elements from a bilinear group. Anyone can transform a signature on a vector to a signature on any multiple of that vector; signatures thus authenticate equivalence classes. A transformed signature/message pair is indistinguishable from a random signature on a random message. EQS have been used to efficiently instantiate (delegatable) anonymous credentials, (round-optimal) blind signatures, ring and group signatures,...

Almost all practical cryptographic protocols are based on computational or ad-hoc assumptions. Assessing the strengths of these assumptions is therefore a key factor in evaluating the risks of the systems using them. As a service to (and by) cryptographic researchers and practitioners, we developed Delphi, an online questionnaire to document researchers' opinions and beliefs about the strengths of the most important assumptions. All responses received will be made accessible on our website,...

The transition to post-quantum cryptography has been an enormous challenge and effort for cryptographers over the last decade, with impressive results such as the future NIST standards. However, the latter has so far only considered central cryptographic mechanisms (signatures or KEM) and not more advanced ones, e.g., targeting privacy-preserving applications. Of particular interest is the family of solutions called blind signatures, group signatures and anonymous credentials, for which...