LabEx PERSYVAL-Lab

There has been a recent interest in proposing quantum protocols whose security relies on weaker computational assumptions than their classical counterparts. Importantly to our work, it has been recently shown that public-key encryption (PKE) from one-way functions (OWF) is possible if we consider quantum public keys. Notice that we do not expect classical PKE from OWF given the impossibility results of Impagliazzo and Rudich (STOC'89). However, the distribution of quantum public keys is a challenging task. Therefore, the main question that motivates our work is if quantum PKE from OWF is possible if we have classical public keys. Such protocols are impossible if ciphertexts are also classical, given the impossibility result of Austrin et al. (CRYPTO'22) of quantum enhanced key-agreement (KA) with classical communication. In this paper, we focus on black-box separation for PKE with classical public key and quantum ciphertext from OWF under the polynomial compatibility conjecture, first introduced in Austrin et al.. More precisely, we show the separation when the decryption algorithm of the PKE does not query the OWF. We prove our result by extending the techniques of Austrin et al. and we show an attack for KA in an extended classical communication model where the last message in the protocol can be a quantum state.

Networks are essential for analyzing complex systems. However, their growing size necessitates backbone extraction techniques aimed at reducing their size while retaining critical features. In practice, selecting, implementing, and evaluating the most suitable backbone extraction method may be challenging. This paper introduces netbone, a Python package designed for assessing the performance of backbone extraction techniques in weighted networks. Its comparison framework is the standout feature of netbone. Indeed, the tool incorporates state-of-the-art backbone extraction techniques. Furthermore, it provides a comprehensive suite of evaluation metrics allowing users to evaluate different backbones techniques. We illustrate the flexibility and effectiveness of netbone through the US air transportation network analysis. We compare the performance of different backbone extraction techniques using the evaluation metrics. We also show how users can integrate a new backbone extraction method into the comparison framework. netbone is publicly available as an open-source tool, ensuring its accessibility to researchers and practitioners. Promoting standardized evaluation practices contributes to the advancement of backbone extraction techniques and fosters reproducibility and comparability in research efforts. We anticipate that netbone will serve as a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners enabling them to make informed decisions when selecting backbone extraction techniques to gain insights into the structural and functional properties of complex systems.

The subset cover problem for $k \geq 1$ hash functions, which can be seen as an extension of the collision problem, was introduced in 2002 by Reyzin and Reyzin to analyse the security of their hash-function based signature scheme HORS. The security of many hash-based signature schemes relies on this problem or a variant of this problem (e.g. HORS, SPHINCS, SPHINCS+, $\dots$). Recently, Yuan, Tibouchi and Abe (2022) introduced a variant to the subset cover problem, called restricted subset cover, and proposed a quantum algorithm for this problem. In this work, we prove that any quantum algorithm needs to make $\Omega\left((k+1)^{-\frac{2^{k}}{2^{k+1}-1}}\cdot N^{\frac{2^{k}-1}{2^{k+1}-1}}\right)$ queries to the underlying hash functions with codomain size $N$ to solve the restricted subset cover problem, which essentially matches the query complexity of the algorithm proposed by Yuan, Tibouchi and Abe. We also analyze the security of the general $(r,k)$-subset cover problem, which is the underlying problem that implies the unforgeability of HORS under a $r$-chosen message attack (for $r \geq 1$). We prove that a generic quantum algorithm needs to make $\Omega\left(N^{k/5}\right)$ queries to the underlying hash functions to find a $(1,k)$-subset cover. We also propose a quantum algorithm that finds a $(r,k)$-subset cover making $O\left(N^{k/(2+2r)}\right)$ queries to the $k$ hash functions.

This document describes our exact Cluster Editing solver, PaSTEC, which got the third place in the 2021 PACE Challenge.

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices have grown in popularity over the past few years. The RSA public-key cryptographic primitive is time consuming for resource-constrained IoT. Recently, Zhang et al. proposed a two-party outsourcing protocol between a client and a server for RSA decryption in IoT. It relies on the Chinese remainder theorem as proposed by Quisquater and Couvreur in 1982 and is very efficient. We show that their protocol does not achieve the claimed security guarantees: 1) the (secret) decryption exponent, the plaintext, and the factorization of the RSA modulus are revealed to a passive adversary and 2) a malicious server can make the client accept an (invalid) value of its choice as the result of the delegated computation.

The processing of data and signals provided by sensors aims at extracting relevant features which can be used to assess and diagnose the health state of the monitored targets. Nevertheless, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) present a number of shortcomings that have an impact on the quality of the gathered data at the sink level, leading to imprecise diagnostics of the observed targets. To improve data accuracy, two main critical and related issues, namely the energy consumption and coverage quality, need to be considered. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm based on a theory of domination in graphs, and we study its impact on diagnostics by using six machine learning algorithms. First, we give the correctness proofs and next we assess its behaviour through simulations. Obtained results show that the proposed algorithm exhibits good performances despite its lower complexity.

Cryptographic operations are performed everywhere, from standard laptop to smart cards. Some devices computational resources can be very limited and it is natural to delegate costly operations to another device capable of carrying out cryptographic algorithms. In this setting, it is obviously important to ensure the limited device that the computation is carried out correctly and that the powerful device does not learn anything about what is actually computing (including the secret inputs and outputs). We briefly review the recent advances on secure outsourcing of group exponentiation (in groups of known prime order as well as in groups of unknown order) and pairing computation.