Covert Security with Public Verifiability: Faster, Leaner, and Simpler

We introduce the notion of covert security with public verifiability, building on the covert security model introduced by Aumann and Lindell (TCC 2007). Protocols that satisfy covert security guarantee that the honest parties involved in the protocol will notice any cheating attempt with some constant probability e. The idea behind the model is that the fear of being caught cheating will be enough of a deterrent to prevent any cheating attempt. However, in the basic covert security model, the honest parties are not able to persuade any third party (say, a judge) that a cheating occurred. We propose (and formally define) an extension of the model where, when an honest party detects cheating, it also receives a certificate that can be published and used to persuade other parties, without revealing any information about the honest party's input. In addition, malicious parties cannot create fake certificates in the attempt of framing innocents. Finally, we construct a secure two-party computation protocol for any functionality f that satisfies our definition, and our protocol is almost as efficient as the one of Aumann and Lindell. We believe that the fear of a public humiliation or even legal consequences vastly exceeds the deterrent given by standard covert security. Therefore, even a small value of the deterrent factor e will suffice in discouraging any cheating attempt.

Multiparty computation protocols (MPC) are said to be secure against covert adversaries if the honest parties are guaranteed to detect any misbehavior by the malicious parties with a constant probability. Protocols that, upon detecting a cheating attempt, additionally allow the honest parties to compute certificates, which enable third parties to be convinced of the malicious behavior of the accused parties, are called publicly verifiable. In this work, we make several contributions to the domain of MPC with security against covert adversaries. We identify a subtle flaw in a protocol of Goyal, Mohassel, and Smith (Eurocrypt 2008), meaning that their protocol does not allow to identify a cheating party, and show how to fix their original construction to obtain security against covert adversaries. We present generic compilers that transform arbitrary passively secure preprocessing protocols, i.e. protocols where the parties have no private inputs, into protocols that are secure against covert adversaries and publicly verifiable. Using our compiler, we construct the first efficient variants of the BMR and the SPDZ protocols that are secure and publicly verifiable against a covert adversary that corrupts all but one party, and also construct variants with covert security and identifiable abort. We observe that an existing impossibility result by Ishai, Ostrovsky, and Seyalioglu (TCC 2012) can be used to show that there exist certain functionalities that cannot be realized by parties, that have oracle-access to broadcast and arbitrary two-party functionalities, with information-theoretic security against a covert adversary.

The security notion of covert security introduced by Aumann and Lindell (TCC’07) allows the adversary to successfully cheat and break security with a fixed probability $$1-\epsilon $$ , while with probability $$\epsilon $$ , honest parties detect the cheating attempt. Asharov and Orlandi (ASIACRYPT’12) extend covert security to enable parties to create publicly verifiable evidence about misbehavior that can be transferred to any third party. This notion is called publicly verifiable covert security (PVC) and has been investigated by multiple works. While these two notions work well in settings with known identities in which parties care about their reputation, they fall short in Internet-like settings where there are only digital identities that can provide some form of anonymity. In this work, we propose the notion of financially backed covert security (FBC), which ensures that the adversary is financially punished if cheating is detected. Next, we present three transformations that turn PVC protocols into FBC protocols. Our protocols provide highly efficient judging, thereby enabling practical judge implementations via smart contracts deployed on a blockchain. In particular, the judge only needs to non-interactively validate a single protocol message while previous PVC protocols required the judge to emulate the whole protocol. Furthermore, by allowing an interactive punishment procedure, we can reduce the amount of validation to a single program instruction, e.g., a gate in a circuit. An interactive punishment, additionally, enables us to create financially backed covert secure protocols without any form of common public transcript, a property that has not been achieved by prior PVC protocols.

Secure Multi-party Computation (MPC) with small population and honest majority has drawn focus specifically due to customization in techniques and resulting efficiency that the constructions can offer. In this work, we investigate a wide range of security notions in the five-party setting, tolerating two active corruptions. Being constant-round, our protocols are best suited for real-time, high latency networks such as the Internet. In a minimal setting of pairwise-private channels, we present efficient instantiations with unanimous abort (where either all honest parties obtain the output or none of them do) and fairness (where the adversary obtains its output only if all honest parties also receive it). With the presence of an additional broadcast channel (known to be necessary), we present a construction with guaranteed output delivery (where any adversarial behaviour cannot prevent the honest parties from receiving the output). The broadcast communication is minimal and independent of circuit size. In terms of performance (communication and run time), our protocols incur minimal overhead over the best known protocol of Chandran et al. (ACM CCS 2016) that achieves the least security of selective abort. Further, our protocols for fairness and unanimous abort can be extended to n-parties with at most √n corruptions, similar to Chandran et al. Going beyond the most popular honest-majority setting of three parties with one corruption, our results demonstrate feasibility of attaining stronger security notions for more than one active corruption at an expense not too far from the least desired security of selective abort.

Most of this book has considered two-party and multiparty computation with security with (unfair) abort. This security notion allows the adversary to force the honest parties to abort even depending on the outputs of corrupted parties. (Note, however, that the adversary is not allowed to bias the output of honest parties in any other manner.) This relaxation of security is necessary if one wishes to tolerate arbitrarily many corruptions. A further relaxation considers computational security, where the adversary is assumed to be computationally bounded, e.g., probabilistic polynomial time. In this setting, any circuit can be securely realized even when arbitrarily many parties are corrupted, as long as one is willing to sacrifice fairness and robustness.

Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) aims at detecting the association between diseases and Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs) with statistical techniques and has great potential for disease diagnosis. To obtain high-quality results, GWAS requires large-scale genomic data containing individuals’ privacy information. Thus, how to improve the efficiency of GWAS while protecting the privacy of genomic data becomes a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient GWAS scheme. By using secure three-party computation, we present a series of protocols, i.e., Secure Quality Control, Secure Principle Component Analysis, Secure Cochran-Armitage trend test, and Secure Logistic Regression, to cover the most significant procedures of secure GWAS. In these protocols, a new comparison protocol is designed to reduce communication and improve efficiency. Furthermore, by extending the above comparison protocol to be maliciously secure and utilizing other technologies, e.g., consistency check, we extend the whole GWAS scheme to malicious security with rationally additional overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that our protocols achieve about 33% performance improvement than the state-of-art secure GWAS scheme using two-party computation in terms of runtime and communication in the semi-honest setting. The cost of our scheme in the malicious setting is around 1.5X than that in the semi-honest setting.

We investigate the definition of statistical security (i.e., security against unbounded adversaries) in the framework of reactive simulatability. This framework allows to formulate and analyze multi-party protocols modularly by providing a composition theorem for protocols. However, we show that the notion of statistical security, as defined by Backes, Pfitzmann and Waidner for the reactive simulatability framework, does not allow for secure composition of protocols. This in particular invalidates the proof of the composition theorem.We give evidence that the reason for the non-composability of statistical security is no artifact of the framework itself, but of the particular formulation of statistical security. Therefore, we give a modified notion of statistical security in the reactive simulatability framework. We prove that this notion allows for secure composition of protocols.As to the best of our knowledge, no formal definition of statistical security has been fixed for Canetti’s universal composability framework, we believe that our observations and results can also help to avoid potential pitfalls there.KeywordsReactive simulatabilityuniversal composabilitystatistical securityprotocol composition

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Cryptographers' Track at the RSA Conference 2011, CT-RSA 2011, held in San Francisco, CA, USA, in February 2011. The 24 revised full papers presented together with 1 invited lecture were carefully reviewed and selected from 79 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on secure two-party computation, cryptographic primitives, side channel attacks, authenticated key agreement, proofs of security, block ciphers, security notions, public-key encryption, crypto tools and parameters, and digital signatures.

Characterization of Security Notions for Probabilistic Private-Key Encryption

” Food securitization” refers to the process by which food supplies are linked to larger security issues or broader notions of human security. While this study is built on the surge of food policy studies that acknowledge the importance of discourse, rhetoric, and labeling in shaping the notion of security there is no empirical research that explicitly examine how securitization process of food policy takes place, why, when and the implications of this. The aim of the study was to examine the contextual events that triggered the securitization of food policy: the actors who used food security rhetoric, and the institutional measures they suggested for solving food insecurity. By taking a discursive approach, the study quantitatively examined how and why food was securitized during debates on Israeli food policy took place during two time periods: 1948–1950, the years of the implementation of the austerity laws; and 2008–2017, the years of global recession, and the rise of obesity. The study found that the notion of food security was strategically used to define a variety of food-related issues. Each definition of food security was triggered by a variety of events and social contexts such as war, increases in the cost of living, the rise in obesity rates, and global warming. These frames, used throughout the debates, then influenced the actor’s choice of solutions. The study shows that most Israeli actors reacted to food security frames using institutional welfare measures.

Suppose that a receiver R wishes to publish an encryption of her secret input x so that every sender S, holding an input y, can reveal f(x, y) to R by sending her a single message. This should be done while simultaneously protecting the secrecy of y against a corrupted R and preventing a corrupted S from having an unfair influence on the output of R beyond what is allowed by f. When the parties are semi-honest, practical solutions can be based on Yao's garbled circuit technique. However, for the general problem when the parties, or even S alone, may be malicious, all known polynomial-time solutions are highly inefficient. This is due in part to the fact that known solutions make a non-black-box use of cryptographic primitives, e.g., for providing non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of statements involving cryptographic computations on secrets. Motivated by the above question, we consider the problem of secure two-party computation in a model that allows only parallel calls to an ideal oblivious transfer (OT) oracle with no additional interaction. We obtain the following results. - Feasibility. We present the first general protocols in this model which only make a black-box use of a pseudorandom generator (PRG). All previous OT-based protocols either make a non-black-box use of cryptographic primitives or require multiple rounds of interaction. - Efficiency. We also consider the question of minimizing the asymptotic number of PRG calls made by such protocols. We show that polylog(κ) calls are sufficient for each gate in a (large) boolean circuit computing f, where κ is a statistical security parameter guaranteeing at most 2-κ simulation error of a malicious sender. Furthermore, the number of PRG calls per gate can be made constant by settling for a relaxed notion of security which allows a malicious S to arbitrarily correlate the event that R detects cheating with the input of R. This improves over the state of the art also for interactive constant-round black-box protocols, which required Ω(κ) PRG calls per gate, even with similar relaxations of the notion of security. Combining the above results with 2-message (parallel) OT protocols in the CRS model, we get the first solutions to the initial motivating question which only make a black-box use of standard cryptographic primitives.

Three-party password authenticated key exchange (3PAKE) allows two clients, each sharing a password with a trusted server, to establish a session key with the help of the server. It is a quite practical mechanism for establishing secure channels in large communication network. However, most current 3PAKE protocols are analyzed in security models that don’t adequately address protocol composition problem. In this paper, a direct definition of security for 3PAKE within the universal composability framework is proposed, which captures the basic security requirements of the problem and is proven to be stronger than the commonly used security notions. To further justify our formulation of 3PAKE, we prove that a slight variant of a generic 3PAKE protocol by Wang and Hu securely realizes the new security definition.

We formalize the standard application of identity-based encryption IBE, namely non-interactive secure communication, as realizing an ideal system which we call delivery controlled channel DCC. This system allows users to be registered by a central authority for an identity and to send messages securely to other users only known by their identity. Quite surprisingly, we show that existing security definitions for IBE are not sufficient to realize DCC. In fact, it is impossible to do so in the standard model. We show, however, how to adjust any IBE scheme that satisfies the standard security definition IND-ID-CPA to achieve this goal in the random oracle model. We also show that the impossibility result can be avoided in the standard model by considering a weaker ideal system that requires all users to be registered in an initial phase before any messages are sent. To achieve this, a weaker security notion, which we introduce and call IND-ID1-CPA, is actually sufficient. This justifies our new security definition and might open the door for more efficient schemes. We further investigate which ideal systems can be realized with schemes satisfying the standard notion and variants of selective security. As a contribution of independent interest, we show how to model features of an ideal system that are potentially available to dishonest parties but not guaranteed, and which such features arise when using IBE.

Adaptive security is a strong security notion that captures additional security threats that are not addressed by static corruptions. For instance, it captures real-world scenarios where “hackers” actively break into computers, possibly while they are executing secure protocols. Studying this setting is interesting from both theoretical and practical points of view. A primary building block in designing adaptively secure protocols is a non-committing encryption (NCE) that implements secure communication channels in the presence of adaptive corruptions. Current constructions require a number of public key operations that grows linearly with the length of the message. Furthermore, general two-party protocols require a number of NCE calls that is linear in the circuit size.In this paper we study the two-party setting in which at most one of the parties is adaptively corrupted, which we believe is the right security notion in the two-party setting. We study the feasibility of (1) NCE with constant number of public key operations for large message spaces (2) Oblivious transfer with constant number of public key operations for large input spaces of the sender, and (3) constant round secure computation protocols with a number of NCE calls, and an overall number of public key operations, that are independent of the circuit size. Our study demonstrates that such primitives indeed exist in the presence of single corruptions, while this is not known for fully adaptive security.KeywordsAdaptively Secure ComputationNon-Committing EncryptionOblivious Transfer

Health issues occasionally intersect security issues. Health security has been viewed as an essential part of human security. Policymakers and health professionals, however, do not share a common definition of health security. This article aims to characterize the notions of health security in order to clarify what constitutes the nexus of health and security. The concept of health security has evolved over time so that it encompasses many entities. Analyzing the health reports of four multilateral organizations (the United Nations, World Health Organization, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, and the European Union) produced eight categories of most significant relevance to contemporary health security, allowing comparison of the definitions. The four categories are: emerging diseases; global infectious disease; deliberate release of chemical and biological materials; violence, conflict, and humanitarian emergencies. Two other categories of common concern are natural disasters and environmental change, as well as chemical and radioactive accidents. The final two categories, food insecurity and poverty, are discussed less frequently. Nevertheless, food security is emerging as an increasingly important issue in public health. Health security is the first line of defence against health emergencies. As globalization brings more complexities, dealing with the increased scale and extent of health security will require greater international effort and political support.