189 results sorted by ID
Practical Blind Signatures in Pairing-Free Groups
Michael Klooß, Michael Reichle, Benedikt Wagner
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures have garnered significant attention in recent years, with several efficient constructions in the random oracle model relying on well-understood assumptions. However, this progress does not apply to pairing-free cyclic groups: fully secure constructions over cyclic groups rely on pairings, remain inefficient, or depend on the algebraic group model or strong interactive assumptions. To address this gap, Chairattana-Apirom, Tessaro, and Zhu (CTZ, Crypto 2024) proposed a new...
Improved Lattice Blind Signatures from Recycled Entropy
Corentin Jeudy, Olivier Sanders
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures represent a class of cryptographic primitives enabling privacy-preserving authentication with several applications such as e-cash or e-voting. It is still a very active area of research, in particular in the post-quantum setting where the history of blind signatures has been hectic. Although it started to shift very recently with the introduction of a few lattice-based constructions, all of the latter give up an important characteristic of blind signatures (size, efficiency,...
OPPID: Single Sign-On with Oblivious Pairwise Pseudonyms
Maximilian Kroschewski, Anja Lehmann, Cavit Özbay
Cryptographic protocols
Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to conveniently authenticate to many Relying Parties (RPs) through a central Identity Provider (IdP). SSO supports unlinkable authentication towards the RPs via pairwise pseudonyms, where the IdP assigns the user an RP-specific pseudonym. This feature has been rolled out prominently within Apple's SSO service. While establishing unlinkable identities provides privacy towards RPs, it actually emphasizes the main privacy problem of SSO: with every...
Shared-Custodial Password-Authenticated Deterministic Wallets
Poulami Das, Andreas Erwig, Sebastian Faust
Cryptographic protocols
Cryptographic wallets are an essential tool in Blockchain networks to ensure the secure storage and maintenance of an user's cryptographic keys. Broadly, wallets can be divided into three categories, namely custodial, non-custodial, and shared-custodial wallets. The first two are centralized solutions, i.e., the wallet is operated by a single entity, which inherently introduces a single point of failure. Shared-custodial wallets, on the other hand, are maintained by two independent parties,...
Unforgeability of Blind Schnorr in the Limited Concurrency Setting
Franklin Harding, Jiayu Xu
Public-key cryptography
A Blind Signature Scheme (BSS) is a cryptographic primitive that enables a user to obtain a digital signature on a message from a signer without revealing the message itself. The standard security notion against malicious users for a BSS is One-More Unforgeability (OMUF). One of the earliest and most well-studied blind signature schemes is the Schnorr BSS, although recent results show it does not satisfy OMUF. On the other hand, the Schnorr BSS does satisfy the weaker notion of sequential...
Multivariate Blind Signatures Revisited
Ward Beullens
Attacks and cryptanalysis
In 2017, Petzoldt, Szepieniec, and Mohamed proposed a blind signature scheme, based on multivariate cryptography. This construction has been expanded on by several other works. This short paper shows that their construction is susceptible to an efficient polynomial-time attack. The problem is that the authors implicitly assumed that for a random multivariate quadratic map $\mathcal{R}:\mathbb{F}_q^m \rightarrow \mathbb{F}_q^m$ and a collision-resistant hash function $H: \{0,1\}^* \rightarrow...
Interactive Threshold Mercurial Signatures and Applications
Masaya Nanri, Octavio Perez Kempner, Mehdi Tibouchi, Masayuki Abe
Public-key cryptography
Equivalence class signatures allow a controlled form of malleability based on equivalence classes defined over the message space. As a result, signatures can be publicly randomized and adapted to a new message representative in the same equivalence class. Notably, security requires that an adapted signature-message pair looks indistinguishable from a random signature-message pair in the space of valid signatures for the new message representative. Together with the decisional Diffie-Hellman...
Non-interactive Blind Signatures: Post-quantum and Stronger Security
Foteini Baldimtsi, Jiaqi Cheng, Rishab Goyal, Aayush Yadav
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures enable a receiver to obtain signatures on messages of its choice without revealing any message to the signer. Round-optimal blind signatures are designed as a two-round interactive protocol between a signer and receiver. Coincidentally, the choice of message is not important in many applications, and is routinely set as a random (unstructured) message by a receiver.
With the goal of designing more efficient blind signatures for such applications, Hanzlik (Eurocrypt '23)...
Revisiting the Security of Fiat-Shamir Signature Schemes under Superposition Attacks
Quan Yuan, Chao Sun, Tsuyoshi Takagi
Public-key cryptography
The Fiat-Shamir transformation is a widely employed technique in constructing signature schemes, known as Fiat-Shamir signature schemes (FS-SIG), derived from secure identification (ID) schemes. However, the existing security proof only takes into account classical signing queries and does not consider superposition attacks, where the signing oracle is quantum-accessible to the adversaries. Alagic et al. proposed a security model called blind unforgeability (BUF, Eurocrypt'20), regarded as a...
A trust-minimized e-cash for cryptocurrencies
Mario Yaksetig
Cryptographic protocols
We introduce a private cryptocurrency design based on the original e-cash protocol. Our proposal allows for private payments on existing blockchain systems. In our design, the issuance of the private cash is transparent and is associated with a blockchain transfer to provide stronger security.
A Concrete Analysis of Wagner's $k$-List Algorithm over $\mathbb{Z}_p$
Antoine Joux, Hunter Kippen, Julian Loss
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Since its introduction by Wagner (CRYPTO `02), the $k$-list algorithm has found significant utility in cryptanalysis. One important application thereof is in computing forgeries on several interactive signature schemes that implicitly rely on the hardness of the ROS problem formulated by Schnorr (ICICS `01). The current best attack strategy for these schemes relies the conjectured runtime of the $k$-list algorithm over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. The tightest known analysis of Wagner's algorithm over...
On Security Proofs of Existing Equivalence Class Signature Schemes
Balthazar Bauer, Georg Fuchsbauer
Public-key cryptography
Equivalence class signatures (EQS), introduced by Hanser and Slamanig (AC'14), sign vectors of elements from a bilinear group. Signatures can be ``adapted'', meaning that anyone can transform a signature on a vector to a (random) signature on any multiple of that vector. (Signatures thus authenticate equivalence classes.) A transformed signature/message pair is then indistinguishable from a random signature on a random message. EQS have been used to efficiently instantiate (delegatable)...
Practical Post-Quantum Signatures for Privacy
Sven Argo, Tim Güneysu, Corentin Jeudy, Georg Land, Adeline Roux-Langlois, Olivier Sanders
Public-key cryptography
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...
Lattice Based Signatures with Additional Functionalities
Swati Rawal, Sahadeo Padhye, Debiao He
Public-key cryptography
Digital signatures is a cryptographic protocol that can provide the added assurances of identity, status, proof of origin of an electronic document, and can acknowledge informed consent by the signer. Lattice based assumptions have seen a certain rush in recent years to fulfil the desire to expand the hardness assumption beyond factoring or discrete logarithm problem on which digital signatures can rely. In this article, we cover the recent progress made in digital signatures based on...
Pairing-Free Blind Signatures from Standard Assumptions in the ROM
Julia Kastner, Ky Nguyen, Michael Reichle
Public-key cryptography
Blind Signatures are a useful primitive for privacy preserving applications such as electronic payments, e-voting, anonymous credentials, and more.
However, existing practical blind signature schemes based on standard assumptions require either pairings or lattices. We present the first practical construction of a round-optimal blind signature in the random oracle model based on standard assumptions without resorting to pairings or lattices. In particular, our construction is secure under...
Pairing-Free Blind Signatures from CDH Assumptions
Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Stefano Tessaro, Chenzhi Zhu
Public-key cryptography
We present the first concurrently-secure blind signatures making black-box use of a pairing-free group for which unforgeability, in the random oracle model, can be proved {\em without} relying on the algebraic group model (AGM), thus resolving a long-standing open question. Prior pairing-free blind signatures without AGM proofs have only been proved secure for bounded concurrency, relied on computationally expensive non-black-box use of NIZKs, or had complexity growing with the number of...
Oblivious issuance of proofs
Michele Orrù, Stefano Tessaro, Greg Zaverucha, Chenzhi Zhu
Cryptographic protocols
We consider the problem of creating, or issuing, zero-knowledge proofs obliviously. In this setting, a prover interacts with a verifier to produce a proof, known only to the verifier. The resulting proof is transferable and can be verified non-interactively by anyone. Crucially, the actual proof cannot be linked back to the interaction that produced it.
This notion generalizes common approaches to designing blind signatures, which can be seen as the special case of proving "knowledge of a...
Breaking Parallel ROS: Implication for Isogeny and Lattice-based Blind Signatures
Shuichi Katsumata, Yi-Fu Lai, Michael Reichle
Public-key cryptography
Many of the three-round blind signatures based on identification protocols are only proven to be $\ell$-concurrently unforgeable for $\ell = \mathsf{polylog}(\lambda)$. It was only recently shown in a seminal work by Benhamouda et al. (EUROCRYPT'21) that this is not just a limitation of the proof technique. They proposed an elegant polynomial time attack against the $\ell$-concurrently unforgeability of the classical blind Schnorr protocol for $\ell = \mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$.
However,...
M&M'S: Mix and Match Attacks on Schnorr-type Blind Signatures with Repetition
Khue Do, Lucjan Hanzlik, Eugenio Paracucchi
Attacks and cryptanalysis
Blind signatures allow the issuing of signatures on messages chosen by the user so that they ensure $\mathit{blindness}$ of the message against the signer. Moreover, a malicious user cannot output $\ell+1$ signatures while only finishing $\ell$ signing sessions. This notion, called $\mathit{one}$-$\mathit{more}$ unforgeability, comes in two flavors supporting either $\mathit{sequential}$ or $\mathit{concurrent}$ sessions.
In this paper, we investigate the security of a class of blind...
Blind signatures from Zero knowledge in the Kummer variety
Paulo L. Barreto, Devin D. Reich, Marcos A. Simplicio Jr., Gustavo H. M. Zanon
Cryptographic protocols
We show how to apply the BZ methodology (Blind signatures from Zero knowledge) to obtain blind signatures in the Kummer varieties defined by Montgomery curves. We also describe specially-tailored arithmetic algorithms to facilitate their efficient implementation. The result can be proved secure under appropriate assumptions, appears to resist even the ROS attack (to which most elliptic-curve blind signature schemes succumb), and is arguably one of the most efficient among those proposals...
Practical Round-Optimal Blind Signatures in the ROM from Standard Assumptions
Shuichi Katsumata, Michael Reichle, Yusuke Sakai
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures serve as a foundational tool for privacy-preserving applications and have recently seen renewed interest due to new applications in blockchains and privacy-authentication tokens. With this, constructing practical round-optimal (i.e., signing consists of the minimum two rounds) blind signatures in the random oracle model (ROM) has been an active area of research, where several impossibility results indicate that either the ROM or a trusted setup is inherent.
In this work,...
Street Rep: A Privacy-Preserving Reputation Aggregation System
Christophe Hauser, Shirin Nilizadeh, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Ni Trieu, Srivatsan Ravi, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna
Applications
Over the last decade, online reputation has become a central aspect of our digital lives. Most online services and communities assign a reputation score to users, based on feedback from other users about various criteria such as how reliable, helpful, or knowledgeable a person is. While many online services compute reputation based on the same set of such criteria, users currently do not have the ability to use their reputation scores across services. As a result, users face trouble...
CSI-Otter: Isogeny-based (Partially) Blind Signatures from the Class Group Action with a Twist
Shuichi Katsumata, Yi-Fu Lai, Jason T. LeGrow, Ling Qin
Public-key cryptography
In this paper, we construct the first provably-secure isogeny-based (partially) blind signature scheme.
While at a high level the scheme resembles the Schnorr blind signature, our work does not directly follow from that construction, since isogenies do not offer as rich an algebraic structure.
Specifically, our protocol does not fit into the "linear identification protocol" abstraction introduced by Hauck, Kiltz, and Loss (EUROCYRPT'19), which was used to generically construct...
Snowblind: A Threshold Blind Signature in Pairing-Free Groups
Elizabeth Crites, Chelsea Komlo, Mary Maller, Stefano Tessaro, Chenzhi Zhu
Public-key cryptography
Both threshold and blind signatures have, individually, received a considerable amount of attention. However little is known about their combination, i.e., a threshold signature which is also blind, in that no coalition of signers learns anything about the message being signed or the signature being produced. Several applications of blind signatures (e.g., anonymous tokens) would benefit from distributed signing as a means to increase trust in the service and hence reduce the risks of key...
RSA Blind Signatures with Public Metadata
Ghous Amjad, Kevin Yeo, Moti Yung
Cryptographic protocols
Anonymous tokens are digital signature schemes that enable an issuer to provider users with signatures without learning the input message or the resulting signature received by the user. These primitives allow applications to propagate trust while simultaneously protecting the identity of the user. Anonymous tokens have become a core component for improving the privacy of several real-world applications including ad measurements, authorization protocols, spam detection and VPNs.
In...
SoK: Privacy-Preserving Signatures
Alishah Chator, Matthew Green, Pratyush Ranjan Tiwari
Public-key cryptography
Modern security systems depend fundamentally on the ability of users to authenticate their communications to other parties in a network. Unfortunately, cryptographic authentication can substantially undermine the privacy of users. One possible solution to this problem is to use privacy-preserving cryptographic authentication. These protocols allow users to authenticate their communications without revealing their identity to the verifier. In the non-interactive setting, the most common...
More Efficient Post-Quantum Electronic Voting from NTRU
Patrick Hough, Caroline Sandsbråten, Tjerand Silde
Cryptographic protocols
In recent years, there has been much focus on developing core cryptographic primitives based on lattice assumptions, driven by the NIST cal for post-quantum key encapsulation and digital signature algorithms. However, more work must be conducted on efficient privacy-preserving protocols with post-quantum security.
Electronic voting is one such privacy-preserving protocol whose adoption is increasing across the democratic world. E-voting offers both a fast and convenient alternative to...
Concurrent Security of Anonymous Credentials Light, Revisited
Julia Kastner, Julian Loss, Omar Renawi
Public-key cryptography
We revisit the concurrent security guarantees of the well-known Anonymous Credentials Light (ACL) scheme (Baldimtsi and Lysyanskaya, CCS'13). This scheme was originally proven secure when executed sequentially, and its concurrent security was left as an open problem.
A later work of Benhamouda et al. (EUROCRYPT'21) gave an efficient attack on ACL when executed concurrently, seemingly resolving this question once and for all.
In this work, we point out a subtle flaw in the attack of...
Threshold BBS+ Signatures for Distributed Anonymous Credential Issuance
Jack Doerner, Yashvanth Kondi, Eysa Lee, abhi shelat, LaKyah Tyner
Cryptographic protocols
We propose a secure multiparty signing protocol for the BBS+ signature scheme; in other words, an anonymous credential scheme with threshold issuance. We prove that due to the structure of the BBS+ signature, simply verifying the signature produced by an otherwise semi-honest protocol is sufficient to achieve composable security against a malicious adversary. Consequently, our protocol is extremely simple and efficient: it involves a single request from the client (who requires a signature)...
A Framework for Practical Anonymous Credentials from Lattices
Jonathan Bootle, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Alessandro Sorniotti
Public-key cryptography
We present a framework for building practical anonymous credential schemes based on the hardness of lattice problems. The running time of the prover and verifier is independent of the number of users and linear in the number of attributes. The scheme is also compact in practice, with the proofs being as small as a few dozen kilobytes for arbitrarily large (say up to $2^{128}$) users with each user having several attributes. The security of our scheme is based on a new family of lattice...
On the Security of Blind Signatures in the Multi-Signer Setting
Samuel Bedassa Alemu, Julia Kastner
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures were originally introduced by Chaum (CRYPTO ’82) in the context of privacy-preserving electronic payment systems. Nowadays, the cryptographic primitive has also found applications in anonymous credentials and voting systems. However, many practical blind signature schemes have only been analysed in the game-based setting where a single signer is present. This is somewhat unsatisfactory as blind signatures are intended to be deployed in a setting with many signers. We address...
Post-Quantum Privacy Pass via Post-Quantum Anonymous Credentials
Guru-Vamsi Policharla, Bas Westerbaan, Armando Faz-Hernández, Christopher A Wood
Cryptographic protocols
It is known that one can generically construct a post-quantum anonymous credential scheme, supporting the showing of arbitrary predicates on its attributes using general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs secure against quantum adversaries [Fischlin, CRYPTO 2006].
Traditionally, such a generic instantiation is thought to come with impractical sizes and performance. We show that with careful choices and optimizations, such a scheme can perform surprisingly well.
In fact, it performs...
Non-Interactive Blind Signatures for Random Messages
Lucjan Hanzlik
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures allow a signer to issue signatures on messages chosen by the signature recipient. The main property is that the recipient's message is hidden from the signer. There are many applications, including Chaum's e-cash system and Privacy Pass, where no special distribution of the signed message is required, and the message can be random. Interestingly, existing notions do not consider this practical use case separately.
In this paper, we show that constraining the recipient's...
Anonymous Counting Tokens
Fabrice Benhamouda, Mariana Raykova, Karn Seth
Cryptographic protocols
We introduce a new primitive called anonymous counting tokens (ACTs) which allows clients to obtain blind signatures or MACs (aka tokens) on messages of their choice, while at the same time enabling issuers to enforce rate limits on the number of tokens that a client can obtain for each message. Our constructions enforce that each client will be able to obtain only one token per message and we show a generic transformation to support other rate limiting as well. We achieve this new property...
Do we need to change some things? Open questions posed by the upcoming post-quantum migration to existing standards and deployments
Panos Kampanakis, Tancrède Lepoint
Cryptographic protocols
Cryptographic algorithms are vital components ensuring the privacy and security of computer systems. They have constantly improved and evolved over the years following new developments, attacks, breaks, and lessons learned. A recent example is that of quantum-resistant cryptography, which has gained a lot of attention in the last decade and is leading to new algorithms being standardized today. These algorithms, however, present a real challenge: they come with strikingly different size and...
Lattice-Based Blind Signatures: Short, Efficient, and Round-Optimal
Ward Beullens, Vadim Lyubashevsky, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Gregor Seiler
Public-key cryptography
We give a construction of a 2-round blind signature scheme based on the hardness of standard lattice problems (Ring/Module-SIS/LWE and NTRU) with a signature size of 22 KB. The protocol is round-optimal and has a transcript size that can be as small as 60 KB. This blind signature is around $4$ times shorter than the most compact lattice-based scheme based on standard assumptions of del Pino and Katsumata (Crypto 2022) and around $2$ times shorter than the scheme of Agrawal et al. (CCS 2022)...
Blind signatures from Zero-knowledge arguments
Paulo L. Barreto, Gustavo H. M. Zanon
Cryptographic protocols
We propose a novel methodology to obtain $B$lind signatures that is fundamentally based on the idea of hiding part of the underlying plain signatures under a $Z$ero-knowledge argument of knowledge of the whole signature (hence the shorthand, $BZ$). Our proposal is necessarily non-black-box and stated in the random oracle model. We illustrate the technique by describing two instantiations: a classical setting based on the traditional discrete logarithm assumption, and a post-quantum setting...
An analysis of a scheme proposed for electronic voting systems
Nicu Neculache, Vlad-Andrei Petcu, Emil Simion
Cryptographic protocols
Voting mechanisms allow the expression of the elections by a democratic approach. Any voting scheme must ensure, preferably in an efficient way, a series of safety measures such as confidentiality, integrity and anonymity. Since the 1980s, the concept of electronic voting became more and more of interest, being an advantageous or even necessary alternative for the organization of secure elections. In this paper, we give an overview for the e-voting mechanisms together with the security...
On blindness of several ElGamal-type blind signatures
Alexandra Babueva, Liliya Akhmetzyanova, Evgeny Alekseev, Oleg Taraskin
Public-key cryptography
Blind signature schemes are the essential element of many complex information systems such as e-cash and e-voting systems. They should provide two security properties: unforgeability and blindness. The former one is standard for all signature schemes and ensures that a valid signature can be generated only during the interaction with the secret signing key holder. The latter one is more specific for this class of signature schemes and means that there is no way to link a (message, signature)...
BlindHub: Bitcoin-Compatible Privacy-Preserving Payment Channel Hubs Supporting Variable Amounts
Xianrui Qin, Shimin Pan, Arash Mirzaei, Zhimei Sui, Oğuzhan Ersoy, Amin Sakzad, Muhammed F. Esgin, Joseph K. Liu, Jiangshan Yu, Tsz Hon Yuen
Applications
Payment Channel Hub (PCH) is a promising solution to the scalability issue of first-generation blockchains or cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It supports off-chain payments between a sender and a receiver through an intermediary (called the tumbler). Relationship anonymity and value privacy are desirable features of privacy-preserving PCHs, which prevent the tumbler from identifying the sender and receiver pairs as well as the payment amounts. To our knowledge, all existing...
Concurrently Secure Blind Schnorr Signatures
Georg Fuchsbauer, Mathias Wolf
Public-key cryptography
Many applications of blind signatures, e.g. in blockchains, require compatibility of the resulting signatures with the existing system. This makes blind issuing of Schnorr signatures (now being standardized and supported by major cryptocurrencies) desirable. Concurrent security of the signing protocol is required to thwart denial-of-service attacks.
We present a concurrently secure blind-signing protocol for Schnorr signatures, using the standard primitives NIZK and PKE and assuming...
Sweep-UC: Swapping Coins Privately
Lucjan Hanzlik, Julian Loss, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan, Benedikt Wagner
Cryptographic protocols
Fair exchange (also referred to as atomic swap) is a fundamental operation in any cryptocurrency that allows users to atomically exchange coins.
While a large body of work has been devoted to this problem, most solutions lack on-chain privacy. Thus, coins retain a public transaction history which is known to degrade the fungibility of a currency. This has led to a flourishing line of related research on fair exchange with privacy guarantees. Existing protocols either rely on heavy scripting...
Rai-Choo! Evolving Blind Signatures to the Next Level
Lucjan Hanzlik, Julian Loss, Benedikt Wagner
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures are a fundamental tool for privacy-preserving applications.
Known constructions of concurrently secure blind signature schemes either are prohibitively inefficient or rely on non-standard assumptions, even in the random oracle model.
A recent line of work (ASIACRYPT `21, CRYPTO `22) initiated the study of concretely efficient schemes based on well-understood assumptions in the random oracle model.
However, these schemes still have several major drawbacks:
1) The signer...
The Abe-Okamoto Partially Blind Signature Scheme Revisited
Julia Kastner, Julian Loss, Jiayu Xu
Public-key cryptography
Partially blind signatures, an extension of ordinary blind signatures, are a primitive with wide applications in e-cash and electronic voting. One of the most efficient schemes to date is the one by Abe and Okamoto (CRYPTO 2000), whose underlying idea - the OR-proof technique - has served as the basis for several works.
We point out several subtle flaws in the original proof of security, and provide a new detailed and rigorous proof, achieving similar bounds as the original work. We...
A Survey on Exotic Signatures for Post-Quantum Blockchain: Challenges & Research Directions
Maxime Buser, Rafael Dowsley, Muhammed F. Esgin, Clémentine Gritti, Shabnam Kasra Kermanshahi, Veronika Kuchta, Jason T. LeGrow, Joseph K. Liu, Raphael C.-W. Phan, Amin Sakzad, Ron Steinfeld, Jiangshan Yu
Public-key cryptography
Blockchain technology provides efficient and secure solutions to various online activities by utilizing a wide range of cryptographic tools. In this paper, we survey the existing literature on post-quantum secure digital signatures that possess exotic advanced features and which are crucial cryptographic tools used in the blockchain ecosystem for (i) account management, (ii) consensus efficiency, (iii) empowering scriptless blockchain, and (iv) privacy. The exotic signatures that we...
On the (im)possibility of ElGamal blind signatures
Liliya Akhmetzyanova, Evgeny Alekseev, Alexandra Babueva, Stanislav Smyshlyaev
Public-key cryptography
In the current paper we investigate the possibility of designing secure blind signature scheme based on ElGamal signature equation. We define the generalized construction and analyze its security. We consider two types of schemes with the proposed construction, that cover all existing schemes. For schemes of the first type we provide generic ROS-style attack that violates unforgeability in the parallel setting. For schemes of the second type we prove that they do not provide either...
Foundations of Coin Mixing Services
Noemi Glaeser, Matteo Maffei, Giulio Malavolta, Pedro Moreno-Sanchez, Erkan Tairi, Sri AravindaKrishnan Thyagarajan
Applications
Coin mixing services allow users to mix their cryptocurrency coins and thus enable unlinkable payments in a way that prevents tracking of honest users' coins by both the service provider and the users themselves. The easy bootstrapping of new users and backwards compatibility with cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) with limited support for scripts are attractive features of this architecture, which has recently gained considerable attention in both academia and industry.
A recent work...
2022/910
Last updated: 2022-07-21
Round Optimal Blind Signatures: Short Signatures with Post-Quantum Blindness
Shweta Agrawal, Jung Hee Cheon, Hyeongmin Choe, Damien Stehlé, Anshu Yadav
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures are a fascinating primitive which allow a user to obtain signatures from a signer, while hiding the message. Tremendously useful, these have been studied extensively for decades. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, all concretely practical blind signatures rely on non-standard assumptions and/or achieve sub-optimal round complexity.
In this work, we provide an efficient, round-optimal (two-round) blind signature scheme from the hardness of the discrete log (DL) problem...
Security Analysis of RSA-BSSA
Anna Lysyanskaya
Cryptographic protocols
In a blind signature scheme, a user can obtain a digital signature on a message of her choice without revealing anything about the message or the resulting signature to the signer. Blind signature schemes have recently found applications for privacy-preserving web browsing and ad ecosystems, and as such, are ripe for standardization. In this paper, we show that the recent proposed standard of Denis, Jacobs and Wood [18, 17] constitutes a strongly one-more-unforgeable blind signature scheme...
A New Framework For More Efficient Round-Optimal Lattice-Based (Partially) Blind Signature via Trapdoor Sampling
Rafael del Pino, Shuichi Katsumata
Cryptographic protocols
Blind signatures, proposed by Chaum (CRYPTO'82), are interactive protocols between a signer and a user, where a user can obtain a signature without revealing the message to be signed. Recently, Hauck et al. (EUROCRYPT'20) observed that all efficient lattice-based blind signatures following the blueprint of the original blind signature by Rükert (ASIACRYPT'10) have a flawed security proof. This puts us in a situation where all known lattice-based blind signatures have at least two of the...
Blind accumulators for e-voting
Sergey Agievich
Public-key cryptography
We present a novel cryptographic primitive, blind accumulator, aimed at constructing e-voting systems. Blind accumulators collect private keys of eligible voters in a decentralized manner not getting information about the keys. Once the accumulation is complete, a voter processes the resulting accumulator deriving a public key that refers to the private key previously added by this voter. Public keys are derived deterministically and can therefore stand as fixed voter pseudonyms. The voter...
Short Pairing-Free Blind Signatures with Exponential Security
Stefano Tessaro, Chenzhi Zhu
Public-key cryptography
This paper proposes the first practical pairing-free three-move blind signature schemes that (1) are concurrently secure, (2) produce short signatures (i.e., three or four group elements/scalars), and (3) are provably secure either in the generic group model (GGM) or the algebraic group model (AGM) under the (plain or one-more) discrete logarithm assumption (beyond additionally assuming random oracles). We also propose a partially blind version of one of our schemes.
Our schemes do not rely...
Security Analysis of Coconut, an Attribute-Based Credential Scheme with Threshold Issuance
Alfredo Rial, Ania M. Piotrowska
Cryptographic protocols
Coconut [NDSS 2019] is an attribute-based credential scheme with threshold issuance. We analyze its security properties. To this end, we define an ideal functionality for attribute-based access control with threshold issuance. We describe a construction that realizes our functionality. Our construction follows Coconut with a few changes. In particular, it modifies the protocols for blind issuance of credentials and for credential show so that user privacy holds against computationally...
PI-Cut-Choo and Friends: Compact Blind Signatures via Parallel Instance Cut-and-Choose and More
Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Lucjan Hanzlik, Julian Loss, Anna Lysyanskaya, Benedikt Wagner
Blind signature schemes are one of the best-studied tools for privacy-preserving authentication. Unfortunately, known constructions of provably secure blind signatures either rely on non-standard hardness assumptions, or require parameters that grow linearly with the number of concurrently issued signatures, or involve prohibitively inefficient general techniques such as general secure two-party computation.
Recently, Katz, Loss and Rosenberg (ASIACRYPT'21) gave a technique that, for the...
Efficient Lattice-Based Blind Signatures via Gaussian One-Time Signatures
Vadim Lyubashevsky, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen, Maxime Plancon
Public-key cryptography
Lattice-based blind signature schemes have been receiving some recent attention lately. Earlier efficient 3-round schemes (Asiacrypt 2010, Financial Cryptography 2020) were recently shown to have mistakes in their proofs, and fixing them turned out to be extremely inefficient and limited the number of signatures that a signer could send to less than a dozen (Crypto 2020). In this work we propose a round-optimal, 2-round lattice-based blind signature scheme which produces signatures of length...
Publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata bit
Fabrice Benhamouda, Tancrède Lepoint, Michele Orrù, Mariana Raykova
Public-key cryptography
We present a new construction for publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata. This primitive enables an issuer to generate an anonymous authentication token for a user while embedding a single private metadata bit.
The token can be publicly verified, while the value of the private metadata is only accessible to the party holding the secret issuing key and remains hidden to any other party, even to the user. The security properties of this primitive also...
Merged with 2022/007
Rutchathon Chairattana-Apirom, Anna Lysyanskaya
Public-key cryptography
Blind signature schemes are one of the best and best-studied tools for privacy-preserving authentication. It has a blind signing protocol in which a signer learns nothing about the message being signed or the resulting signature; thus such a signature can serve as an anonymous authentication token. Thus, constructing efficient blind signatures secure under realistic cryptographic assumptions is an important goal.
A recent paper by Benhamouda, Lepoint, Loss, Orr\`u, and Raykova (Eurocrypt...
A Note on the Post-Quantum Security of (Ring) Signatures
Rohit Chatterjee, Kai-Min Chung, Xiao Liang, Giulio Malavolta
This work revisits the security of classical signatures and ring signatures in a quantum world. For (ordinary) signatures, we focus on the arguably preferable security notion of blind-unforgeability recently proposed by Alagic et al. (Eurocrypt'20). We present two short signature schemes achieving this notion: one is in the quantum random oracle model, assuming quantum hardness of SIS; and the other is in the plain model, assuming quantum hardness of LWE with super-polynomial modulus. Prior...
Practical, Round-Optimal Lattice-Based Blind Signatures
Shweta Agrawal, Elena Kirshanova, Damien Stehle, Anshu Yadav
Public-key cryptography
Blind signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive with numerous practical applications. While there exist many practical blind signatures from number-theoretic assumptions, the situation is far less satisfactory from post-quantum assumptions. In this work, we provide the first overall practical, lattice-based blind signature, supporting an unbounded number of signature queries and additionally enjoying optimal round complexity. We provide a detailed estimate of parameters achieved...
One-more Unforgeability of Blind ECDSA
Xianrui Qin, Cailing Cai, Tsz Hon Yuen
Public-key cryptography
In this paper, we give the first formal security analysis on the one-more unforgeability of blind ECDSA.
We start with giving a general attack on blind ECDSA, which is similar to the ROS attack on the blind Schnorr signature. We formulate the ECDSA-ROS problem to capture this attack.
Next, we give a generic construction of blind ECDSA based on an additive homomorphic encryption and a corresponding zero-knowledge proof. Our concrete instantiation is about 40 times more bandwidth efficient...
BlindOR: An Efficient Lattice-Based Blind Signature Scheme from OR-Proofs
Nabil Alkeilani Alkadri, Patrick Harasser, Christian Janson
Cryptographic protocols
An OR-proof is a protocol that enables a user to prove the possession of a witness for one of two (or more) statements, without revealing which one. Abe and Okamoto (CRYPTO 2000) used this technique to build a partially blind signature scheme whose security is based on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. Inspired by their approach, we present BlindOR, an efficient blind signature scheme from OR-proofs based on lattices over modules. Using OR-proofs allows us to reduce the...
2021/1357
Last updated: 2022-12-12
Two-Round Concurrently Secure Two-Party Computation
Behzad Abdolmaleki, Giulio Malavolta, Ahmadreza Rahimi
Cryptographic protocols
In this paper, we study the round complexity of concurrently secure computation protocols in the plain model, without random oracles or assuming the presence of a trusted setup. In the plain model, it is well known that concurrently secure two-party computation with polynomial simulation is impossible to achieve in two rounds. For this reason, we focus on the well-studied notion of security with super-polynomial simulation (SPS). Our main result is the first construction of two-round SPS...
Post-Quantum Key-Blinding for Authentication in Anonymity Networks
Edward Eaton, Douglas Stebila, Roy Stracovsky
Public-key cryptography
Anonymity networks, such as the Tor network, are highly decentralized and make heavy use of ephemeral identities. Both of these characteristics run in direct opposition to a traditional public key infrastructure, so entity authentication in an anonymity network can be a challenge. One system that Tor relies on is key-blinded signatures, which allow public keys to be transformed so that authentication is still possible, but the identity public key is masked. This is used in Tor during onion...
The One-More Discrete Logarithm Assumption in the Generic Group Model
Balthazar Bauer, Georg Fuchsbauer, Antoine Plouviez
Foundations
The one more-discrete logarithm assumption (OMDL) underlies the security analysis of identification protocols, blind signature and multi-signature schemes, such as blind Schnorr signatures and the recent MuSig2 multi-signatures. As these schemes produce standard Schnorr signatures, they are compatible with existing systems, e.g. in the context of blockchains. OMDL is moreover assumed for many results on the impossibility of certain security reductions.
Despite its wide use, surprisingly,...
A Fast and Simple Partially Oblivious PRF, with Applications
Nirvan Tyagi, Sofı́a Celi, Thomas Ristenpart, Nick Sullivan, Stefano Tessaro, Christopher A. Wood
Cryptographic protocols
We build the first construction of a partially oblivious pseudorandom function (POPRF) that does not rely on bilinear pairings. Our construction can be viewed as combining elements of the 2HashDH OPRF of Jarecki, Kiayias, and Krawczyk with the Dodis-Yampolskiy PRF. We analyze our POPRF’s security in the random oracle model via reduction to a new one-more gap strong Diffie-Hellman inversion assumption. The most significant technical challenge is establishing confidence in the new assumption,...
Boosting the Security of Blind Signature Schemes
Jonathan Katz, Julian Loss, Michael Rosenberg
Public-key cryptography
Existing blind signature schemes that are secure for polynomially many concurrent executions of the signing protocol are either inefficient or rely on non-standard assumptions (even in the random-oracle model). We show the first efficient blind signature schemes achieving this level of security based on the RSA, factoring, or discrete logarithm assumptions (in the random-oracle model). Our core technique involves an extension and generalization of a transform due to Pointcheval (Eurocrypt...
A Trustless GQ Multi-Signature Scheme with Identifiable Abort
Handong Cui, Tsz Hon Yuen
Cryptographic protocols
Guillou-Quisquater (GQ) signature is an efficient RSA-based digital signature scheme amongst the most famous Fiat-Shamir follow-ons owing to its good simplicity. However, there exist two bottlenecks for GQ hindering its application in industry or academia: the RSA trapdoor $n=pq$ in the key generation phase and its high bandwidth caused by the storage-consuming representation of RSA group elements (3072 bits per one element in 128-bit security).
In this paper, we first formalize the...
2021/381
Last updated: 2021-12-02
Towards Practical and Round-Optimal Lattice-Based Threshold and Blind Signatures
Shweta Agrawal, Damien Stehle, Anshu Yadav
Cryptographic protocols
Threshold and blind signature schemes have found numerous applications in cryptocurrencies, e-cash, e-voting and other privacy-preserving technologies. In this work, we make advances in bringing lattice-based constructions for these primitives closer to practice.
1. Threshold Signatures. For round optimal threshold signatures, we improve the only known construction by Boneh et al. [CRYPTO'18] as follows:
a. Efficiency. We reduce the amount of noise flooding from $2^{\Omega(\lambda)}$ down...
Round-Optimal Blind Signatures in the Plain Model from Classical and Quantum Standard Assumptions
Shuichi Katsumata, Ryo Nishimaki, Shota Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa
Foundations
Blind signatures, introduced by Chaum (Crypto’82), allows a user to obtain a signature on a message without
revealing the message itself to the signer. Thus far, all existing constructions of round-optimal blind signatures are
known to require one of the following: a trusted setup, an interactive assumption, or complexity leveraging. This
state-of-the-affair is somewhat justified by the few known impossibility results on constructions of round-optimal blind
signatures in the plain model...
WabiSabi: Centrally Coordinated CoinJoins with Variable Amounts
Ádám Ficsór, Yuval Kogman, Lucas Ontivero, István András Seres
Cryptographic protocols
Bitcoin transfers value on a public ledger of transactions anyone can verify. Coin ownership is defined in terms of public keys. Despite potential use for private transfers, research has shown that users’ activity can often be traced in practice. Businesses have been built on dragnet surveillance of Bitcoin users because of this lack of strong privacy, which harms its fungibility, a basic property of functional money.
Although the public nature of this design lacks strong guarantees for...
2021/161
Last updated: 2021-07-26
Generic Adaptor Signature
Xianrui Qin, Handong Cui, Tsz Hon Yuen
Cryptographic protocols
Adaptor signature is becoming an increasingly important tool in solving the scalability and interoperability issues of blockchain applications. It has many useful properties, such as reducing the on-chain communication cost, increasing the fungibility of transactions, and circumventing the limitation of the blockchain's scripting language.
In this paper, we propose the first generic construction of adaptor signatures from {\sf Type-T} canonical identification, which includes...
Binary Tree Based Forward Secure Signature Scheme in the Random Oracle Model
Mariusz Jurkiewicz
Public-key cryptography
In this paper we construct and consider a signature scheme with evolving secret key, where there is used Type 3 pairing. The idea is based on some properties of binary trees, with a number of leaves being the same as a number of time periods in the scheme. This lets us to gain such conditions, that allows to prove the forward-security of the considered scheme in the random oracle model. The proof is conducted by reducing the security of the scheme to the difficulty of solving a certain...
Ovid: Message-based Automatic Contact Tracing
Leonie Reichert, Samuel Brack, Björn Scheuermann
Applications
The Covid-19 pandemic created various new challenges for our societies.
Quickly discovering new infections using automated contact tracing without endangering privacy of the general public is one of these.
Most discussions concerning architectures for contact tracing applications revolved around centralized against decentralized approaches.
In contrast, the system proposed in this work builds on the idea of message-based contact tracing to inform users of their risk.
Our main contribution is...
On Pairing-Free Blind Signature Schemes in the Algebraic Group Model
Julia Kastner, Julian Loss, Jiayu Xu
Public-key cryptography
Studying the security and efficiency of blind signatures is an important goal for privacy sensitive applications. In particular, for large-scale settings (e.g., cryptocurrency tumblers), it is important for schemes to scale well with the number of users in the system. Unfortunately, all practical schemes either 1) rely on (very strong) number theoretic hardness assumptions and/or computationally expensive pairing operations over bilinear groups, or 2) support only a polylogarithmic number of...
On the (in)security of ROS
Fabrice Benhamouda, Tancrède Lepoint, Julian Loss, Michele Orrù, Mariana Raykova
Cryptographic protocols
We present an algorithm solving the ROS (Random inhomogeneities in a Overdetermined Solvable system of linear equations) problem in polynomial time for l > log p dimensions. Our algorithm can be combined with Wagner’s attack, and leads to a sub-exponential solution for any dimension l with best complexity known so far.
When concurrent executions are allowed, our algorithm leads to practical attacks against unforgeability of blind signature schemes such as Schnorr and Okamoto--Schnorr blind...
Lattice-Based Blind Signatures, Revisited
Eduard Hauck, Eike Kiltz, Julian Loss, Ngoc Khanh Nguyen
Public-key cryptography
We observe that all previously known lattice-based blind signature schemes
contain subtle flaws in their security proofs (e.g., Rückert, ASIACRYPT '08) or can be attacked (e.g., BLAZE by Alkadri et al., FC '20).
Motivated by this, we revisit the problem of constructing blind signatures from standard lattice assumptions.
We propose a new three-round lattice-based blind signature scheme whose security can be proved, in the random oracle model, from the standard SIS assumption. Our starting...
Efficient Signatures on Randomizable Ciphertexts
Balthazar Bauer, Georg Fuchsbauer
Public-key cryptography
Randomizable encryption lets anyone randomize a ciphertext so it is distributed like a fresh encryption of the same plaintext. Signatures on randomizable ciphertexts (SoRC), introduced by Blazy et al. (PKC'11), let one adapt a signature on a ciphertext to a randomization of the latter. Since signatures can only be adapted to ciphertexts that encrypt the same message as the signed ciphertext, signatures obliviously authenticate plaintexts. SoRC have been used as a building block in...
CAUDHT: Decentralized Contact Tracing Using a DHT and Blind Signatures
Samuel Brack, Leonie Reichert, Björn Scheuermann
Applications
Contact tracing is a promising approach to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Various systems have been proposed to
automatise the process. Many designs rely heavily on a centralised server or reveal significant amounts of private data to health authorities. We propose CAUDHT, a decentralized peer-to-peer system for contact tracing. The central health authority can focus on providing and operating tests for the disease while contact tracing is done by the system’s users themselves. We use a...
Lattice-based (Partially) Blind Signature without Restart
Samuel Bouaziz-Ermann, Sébastien Canard, Gautier Eberhart, Guillaume Kaim, Adeline Roux-Langlois, Jacques Traoré
Public-key cryptography
We present in this paper a blind signature and its partially blind variant based on lattices assumptions. Blind signature is a cornerstone in privacy-oriented cryptography and we propose the first lattice based scheme without restart. Compare to related work, the key idea of our construction is to provide a trapdoor to the signer in order to let him perform some gaussian pre-sampling during the signature generation process, preventing this way to restart from scratch the whole protocol. We...
On Lattice-Based Interactive Protocols: An Approach with Less or No Aborts
Nabil Alkeilani Alkadri, Rachid El Bansarkhani, Johannes Buchmann
Public-key cryptography
A canonical identification (CID) scheme is a 3-move protocol consisting of a commitment, challenge, and response. It constitutes the core design of many cryptographic constructions such as zero-knowledge proof systems and various types of signature schemes. Unlike number-theoretic constructions, CID in the lattice setting usually forces provers to abort and repeat the whole authentication process once the distribution of the computed response does not follow a target distribution independent...
Supersingular Isogeny-Based Designated Verifier Blind Signature
Rajeev Anand Sahu, Agnese Gini, Ankan Pal
Public-key cryptography
Recently, Srinath and Chandrasekaran have proposed an undeniable blind signature scheme (UBSS) from supersingular isogeny to provide signer’s control in a quantum-resistant blind signature. However, certain weaknesses of undeniable signature have already been observed and have been overcome by formalizing the designated verifier signature (DVS). In this paper, we explore the possibility of generic construction of a DVS from hard homogeneous spaces. Further, following this...
Leakage-Resilient Lattice-Based Partially Blind Signatures
D. Papachristoudis, D. Hristu-Varsakelis, F. Baldimtsi, G. Stephanides
Cryptographic protocols
Blind signature schemes (BSS) play a pivotal role in privacy-oriented cryptography. However, with blind signature schemes, the signed message remains unintelligible to the signer, giving them no guarantee that the blinded message he signed actually contained valid information. Partially-blind signature schemes (PBSS) were introduced to address precisely this problem. In this paper we present the first leakage-resilient, lattice-based partially-blind signature scheme in the literature. Our...
Are These Pairing Elements Correct? Automated Verification and Applications
Susan Hohenberger, Satyanarayana Vusirikala
Applications
Using a set of pairing product equations (PPEs) to verify the correctness of an untrusted set of pairing elements with respect to another set of trusted elements has numerous cryptographic applications. These include the design of basic and structure-preserving signature schemes, building oblivious transfer schemes from “blind” IBE, finding new verifiable random functions and keeping the IBE/ABE authority “accountable” to the user.
A natural question to ask is: are all trusted-untrusted...
Identity-Based Encryption with Security against the KGC: A Formal Model and Its Instantiations
Keita Emura, Shuichi Katsumata, Yohei Watanabe
Public-key cryptography
The key escrow problem is one of the main barriers to the widespread real-world use of identity-based encryption (IBE). Specifically, a key generation center (KGC), which generates secret keys for a given identity, has the power to decrypt all ciphertexts. At PKC 2009, Chow defined a notion of security against the KGC, that relies on assuming that it cannot discover the underlying identities behind ciphertexts. However, this is not a realistic assumption since, in practice, the KGC manages...
Black-Box Wallets: Fast Anonymous Two-Way Payments for Constrained Devices
Max Hoffmann, Michael Klooß, Markus Raiber, Andy Rupp
Cryptographic protocols
Black-box accumulation (BBA) is a building block which enables a privacy-preserving implementation of point collection and redemption, a functionality required in a variety of user-centric applications including loyalty programs, incentive systems, and mobile payments.
By definition, BBA+ schemes (Hartung et al. CCS '17) offer strong privacy and security guarantees,
such as unlinkability of transactions and correctness of the balance flows of all (even malicious) users.
Unfortunately, the...
Security models for everlasting privacy
Panagiotis Grontas, Aris Pagourtzis, Alexandros Zacharakis
Applications
We propose security models for everlasting privacy, a property that protects the content of the votes cast in electronic elections
against future and powerful adversaries. Initially everlasting privacy was treated synonymously with information theoretic privacy and did not take advantage of the information available to the adversary and his behavior during or after the election. More recent works provided variations of the concept, limiting the view of the future adversary to publicly...
BLAZE: Practical Lattice-Based Blind Signatures for Privacy-Preserving Applications
Nabil Alkeilani Alkadri, Rachid El Bansarkhani, Johannes Buchmann
Cryptographic protocols
Blind signatures constitute basic cryptographic ingredients for privacy-preserving applications such as anonymous credentials, e-voting, and Bitcoin. Despite the great variety of cryptographic applications blind signatures also found their way in real-world scenarios. Due to the expected progress in cryptanalysis using quantum computers, it remains an important research question to find practical and secure alternatives to current systems based on the hardness of classical security...
Blind Schnorr Signatures and Signed ElGamal Encryption in the Algebraic Group Model
Georg Fuchsbauer, Antoine Plouviez, Yannick Seurin
Public-key cryptography
The Schnorr blind signing protocol allows blind issuing of Schnorr signatures, one of the most widely used signatures. Despite its practical relevance, its security analysis is unsatisfactory. The only known security proof is rather informal and in the combination of the generic group model (GGM) and the random oracle model (ROM) assuming that the ``ROS problem'' is hard. The situation is similar for (Schnorr-)signed ElGamal encryption, a simple CCA2-secure variant of ElGamal.
We analyze...
A publicly verifiable quantum blind signature scheme without entanglement based on asymmetric cryptography
Yalin Chen, Jue-Sam Chou, Liang-Chun Wang, Yu-Yuan Chou
Cryptographic protocols
In recent years, several cryptographic scholars have proposed quantum blind signature schemes. However, their methods require the signatories and the inspectors to share common keys in advance, which makes them not only complicated in concept, but also suffering deniable problem. Moreover, due to the fact that not everyone can verify the blind signature, it needs to have a designated verifier. In view of Laurent, et al.’s argument that other than the assumption of the pre-image being...
Linearly-Homomorphic Signatures and Scalable Mix-Nets
Chloé Hébant, Duong Hieu Phan, David Pointcheval
Cryptographic protocols
Anonymity is a primary ingredient for our digital life. Several tools have been designed to address it such as, for authentication, blind signatures, group signatures or anonymous credentials and, for confidentiality, randomizable encryption or mix-nets. When it comes to complex electronic voting schemes, random shuffling of ciphertexts with mix-nets is the only known tool. However, it requires huge and complex zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the actual permutation of the initial...
TMPS: Ticket-Mediated Password Strengthening
John Kelsey, Dana Dachman-Soled, Sweta Mishra, Meltem Sonmez Turan
Cryptographic protocols
We introduce the notion of Ticket-Mediated Password Strengthening (TMPS), a technique for allowing users to derive keys from passwords while imposing a strict limit on the number of guesses of their password any attacker can make, and strongly protecting the users' privacy. We describe the security requirements of TMPS, and then a set of efficient and practical protocols to implement a TMPS scheme, requiring only hash functions, CCA2-secure encryption, and blind signatures. We provide...
A Modular Treatment of Blind Signatures from Identification Schemes
Eduard Hauck, Eike Kiltz, Julian Loss
Public-key cryptography
We propose a modular security treatment of blind signatures derived from linear identification schemes in the random oracle model. To this end, we present a general framework that captures several well known schemes from the literature and allows to prove their security.
Our modular security reduction introduces a new security notion for identification schemes called One-More-Man In the Middle Security which we show equivalent to the classical One-More-Unforgeability notion for blind...
Minicrypt Primitives with Algebraic Structure and Applications
Navid Alamati, Hart Montgomery, Sikhar Patranabis, Arnab Roy
Foundations
Algebraic structure lies at the heart of much of Cryptomania as we know it. An interesting question is the following: instead of building (Cryptomania) primitives from concrete assumptions, can we build them from simple Minicrypt primitives endowed with additional algebraic structure? In this work, we affirmatively answer this question by adding algebraic structure to the following Minicrypt primitives:
• One-Way Function (OWF)
• Weak Unpredictable Function (wUF)
• Weak Pseudorandom...
Quantum-secure message authentication via blind-unforgeability
Gorjan Alagic, Christian Majenz, Alexander Russell, Fang Song
Foundations
Formulating and designing authentication of classical messages in
the presence of adversaries with quantum query access has been a
longstanding challenge, as the familiar classical notions of
unforgeability do not directly translate into meaningful notions in
the quantum setting. A particular difficulty is how to fairly
capture the notion of "predicting an unqueried value" when the
adversary can query in quantum superposition.
We propose a natural definition of...
Improved (Almost) Tightly-Secure Simulation-Sound QA-NIZK with Applications
Masayuki Abe, Charanjit S. Jutla, Miyako Ohkubo, Arnab Roy
We construct the first (almost) tightly-secure unbounded-simulation-sound quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (USS-QA-NIZK) for linear-subspace languages with compact (number of group elements independent of the security parameter) common reference string (CRS) and compact proofs under standard assumptions in bilinear-pairings groups. Specifically, our construction has $ O(\log Q) $ reduction to the SXDH, DLIN and matrix-DDH assumptions, where $ Q $ is the number of...
A New Blind ECDSA Scheme for Bitcoin Transaction Anonymity
Xun Yi, Kwok-Yan Lam, Dieter Gollmann
In this paper, we consider a scenario where a bitcoin liquidity provider sells bitcoins to clients. When a client pays for a bitcoin online, the provider is able to link the client's payment information to the bitcoin sold to that client. To address the clients' privacy concern, it is desirable for the provider to perform the bitcoin transaction with blind signatures. However, existing blind signature schemes are incompatible with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) which...
Formal Analysis of Vote Privacy using Computationally Complete Symbolic Attacker
Gergei Bana, Rohit Chadha, Ajay Kumar Eeralla
Cryptographic protocols
We analyze the FOO electronic voting protocol in the provable secu- rity model using the technique of Computationally Complete Symbolic Attacker (CCSA). The protocol uses commitments, blind signatures and anonymous chan- nels to achieve vote privacy. Unlike the Dolev-Yao analyses of the protocol, we assume neither perfect cryptography nor existence of perfectly anonymous chan- nels. Our analysis reveals new attacks on vote privacy, including an attack that arises due to the inadequacy of the...
Multi-Theorem Preprocessing NIZKs from Lattices
Sam Kim, David J. Wu
Cryptographic protocols
Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs are fundamental to modern cryptography. Numerous NIZK constructions are known in both the random oracle and the common reference string (CRS) models. In the CRS model, there exist constructions from several classes of cryptographic assumptions such as trapdoor permutations, pairings, and indistinguishability obfuscation. Notably absent from this list, however, are constructions from standard lattice assumptions. While there has been partial...
Towards everlasting privacy and efficient coercion resistance in remote electronic voting
Panagiotis Grontas, Aris Pagourtzis, Alexandros Zacharakis, Bingsheng Zhang
Cryptographic protocols
In this work, we propose a first version of an e-voting scheme that achieves end-to-end verifiability, everlasting privacy and efficient coercion resistance in the JCJ setting. Everlasting privacy is achieved assuming an anonymous channel, without resorting to dedicated channels between the election authorities to exchange private data. In addition, the proposed scheme achieves coercion resistance under standard JCJ assumptions. As a core building block of our scheme, we also propose a new...
Improved (Almost) Tightly-Secure Structure-Preserving Signatures
Charanjit S. Jutla, Miyako Ohkubo, Arnab Roy
Structure Preserving Signatures (SPS) allow the signatures and the messages signed to be further encrypted while retaining the ability to be proven valid under zero-knowledge. In particular, SPS are tailored to have structure suitable for Groth-Sahai NIZK proofs. More precisely, the messages, signatures, and verification keys are required to be elements of groups that support efficient bilinear-pairings (bilinear groups), and the signature verification consists of just evaluating one or more...
Blind signatures have garnered significant attention in recent years, with several efficient constructions in the random oracle model relying on well-understood assumptions. However, this progress does not apply to pairing-free cyclic groups: fully secure constructions over cyclic groups rely on pairings, remain inefficient, or depend on the algebraic group model or strong interactive assumptions. To address this gap, Chairattana-Apirom, Tessaro, and Zhu (CTZ, Crypto 2024) proposed a new...
Blind signatures represent a class of cryptographic primitives enabling privacy-preserving authentication with several applications such as e-cash or e-voting. It is still a very active area of research, in particular in the post-quantum setting where the history of blind signatures has been hectic. Although it started to shift very recently with the introduction of a few lattice-based constructions, all of the latter give up an important characteristic of blind signatures (size, efficiency,...
Single Sign-On (SSO) allows users to conveniently authenticate to many Relying Parties (RPs) through a central Identity Provider (IdP). SSO supports unlinkable authentication towards the RPs via pairwise pseudonyms, where the IdP assigns the user an RP-specific pseudonym. This feature has been rolled out prominently within Apple's SSO service. While establishing unlinkable identities provides privacy towards RPs, it actually emphasizes the main privacy problem of SSO: with every...
Cryptographic wallets are an essential tool in Blockchain networks to ensure the secure storage and maintenance of an user's cryptographic keys. Broadly, wallets can be divided into three categories, namely custodial, non-custodial, and shared-custodial wallets. The first two are centralized solutions, i.e., the wallet is operated by a single entity, which inherently introduces a single point of failure. Shared-custodial wallets, on the other hand, are maintained by two independent parties,...
A Blind Signature Scheme (BSS) is a cryptographic primitive that enables a user to obtain a digital signature on a message from a signer without revealing the message itself. The standard security notion against malicious users for a BSS is One-More Unforgeability (OMUF). One of the earliest and most well-studied blind signature schemes is the Schnorr BSS, although recent results show it does not satisfy OMUF. On the other hand, the Schnorr BSS does satisfy the weaker notion of sequential...
In 2017, Petzoldt, Szepieniec, and Mohamed proposed a blind signature scheme, based on multivariate cryptography. This construction has been expanded on by several other works. This short paper shows that their construction is susceptible to an efficient polynomial-time attack. The problem is that the authors implicitly assumed that for a random multivariate quadratic map $\mathcal{R}:\mathbb{F}_q^m \rightarrow \mathbb{F}_q^m$ and a collision-resistant hash function $H: \{0,1\}^* \rightarrow...
Equivalence class signatures allow a controlled form of malleability based on equivalence classes defined over the message space. As a result, signatures can be publicly randomized and adapted to a new message representative in the same equivalence class. Notably, security requires that an adapted signature-message pair looks indistinguishable from a random signature-message pair in the space of valid signatures for the new message representative. Together with the decisional Diffie-Hellman...
Blind signatures enable a receiver to obtain signatures on messages of its choice without revealing any message to the signer. Round-optimal blind signatures are designed as a two-round interactive protocol between a signer and receiver. Coincidentally, the choice of message is not important in many applications, and is routinely set as a random (unstructured) message by a receiver. With the goal of designing more efficient blind signatures for such applications, Hanzlik (Eurocrypt '23)...
The Fiat-Shamir transformation is a widely employed technique in constructing signature schemes, known as Fiat-Shamir signature schemes (FS-SIG), derived from secure identification (ID) schemes. However, the existing security proof only takes into account classical signing queries and does not consider superposition attacks, where the signing oracle is quantum-accessible to the adversaries. Alagic et al. proposed a security model called blind unforgeability (BUF, Eurocrypt'20), regarded as a...
We introduce a private cryptocurrency design based on the original e-cash protocol. Our proposal allows for private payments on existing blockchain systems. In our design, the issuance of the private cash is transparent and is associated with a blockchain transfer to provide stronger security.
Since its introduction by Wagner (CRYPTO `02), the $k$-list algorithm has found significant utility in cryptanalysis. One important application thereof is in computing forgeries on several interactive signature schemes that implicitly rely on the hardness of the ROS problem formulated by Schnorr (ICICS `01). The current best attack strategy for these schemes relies the conjectured runtime of the $k$-list algorithm over $\mathbb{Z}_p$. The tightest known analysis of Wagner's algorithm over...
Equivalence class signatures (EQS), introduced by Hanser and Slamanig (AC'14), sign vectors of elements from a bilinear group. Signatures can be ``adapted'', meaning that anyone can transform a signature on a vector to a (random) signature on any multiple of that vector. (Signatures thus authenticate equivalence classes.) A transformed signature/message pair is then indistinguishable from a random signature on a random message. EQS have been used to efficiently instantiate (delegatable)...
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...
Digital signatures is a cryptographic protocol that can provide the added assurances of identity, status, proof of origin of an electronic document, and can acknowledge informed consent by the signer. Lattice based assumptions have seen a certain rush in recent years to fulfil the desire to expand the hardness assumption beyond factoring or discrete logarithm problem on which digital signatures can rely. In this article, we cover the recent progress made in digital signatures based on...
Blind Signatures are a useful primitive for privacy preserving applications such as electronic payments, e-voting, anonymous credentials, and more. However, existing practical blind signature schemes based on standard assumptions require either pairings or lattices. We present the first practical construction of a round-optimal blind signature in the random oracle model based on standard assumptions without resorting to pairings or lattices. In particular, our construction is secure under...
We present the first concurrently-secure blind signatures making black-box use of a pairing-free group for which unforgeability, in the random oracle model, can be proved {\em without} relying on the algebraic group model (AGM), thus resolving a long-standing open question. Prior pairing-free blind signatures without AGM proofs have only been proved secure for bounded concurrency, relied on computationally expensive non-black-box use of NIZKs, or had complexity growing with the number of...
We consider the problem of creating, or issuing, zero-knowledge proofs obliviously. In this setting, a prover interacts with a verifier to produce a proof, known only to the verifier. The resulting proof is transferable and can be verified non-interactively by anyone. Crucially, the actual proof cannot be linked back to the interaction that produced it. This notion generalizes common approaches to designing blind signatures, which can be seen as the special case of proving "knowledge of a...
Many of the three-round blind signatures based on identification protocols are only proven to be $\ell$-concurrently unforgeable for $\ell = \mathsf{polylog}(\lambda)$. It was only recently shown in a seminal work by Benhamouda et al. (EUROCRYPT'21) that this is not just a limitation of the proof technique. They proposed an elegant polynomial time attack against the $\ell$-concurrently unforgeability of the classical blind Schnorr protocol for $\ell = \mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$. However,...
Blind signatures allow the issuing of signatures on messages chosen by the user so that they ensure $\mathit{blindness}$ of the message against the signer. Moreover, a malicious user cannot output $\ell+1$ signatures while only finishing $\ell$ signing sessions. This notion, called $\mathit{one}$-$\mathit{more}$ unforgeability, comes in two flavors supporting either $\mathit{sequential}$ or $\mathit{concurrent}$ sessions. In this paper, we investigate the security of a class of blind...
We show how to apply the BZ methodology (Blind signatures from Zero knowledge) to obtain blind signatures in the Kummer varieties defined by Montgomery curves. We also describe specially-tailored arithmetic algorithms to facilitate their efficient implementation. The result can be proved secure under appropriate assumptions, appears to resist even the ROS attack (to which most elliptic-curve blind signature schemes succumb), and is arguably one of the most efficient among those proposals...
Blind signatures serve as a foundational tool for privacy-preserving applications and have recently seen renewed interest due to new applications in blockchains and privacy-authentication tokens. With this, constructing practical round-optimal (i.e., signing consists of the minimum two rounds) blind signatures in the random oracle model (ROM) has been an active area of research, where several impossibility results indicate that either the ROM or a trusted setup is inherent. In this work,...
Over the last decade, online reputation has become a central aspect of our digital lives. Most online services and communities assign a reputation score to users, based on feedback from other users about various criteria such as how reliable, helpful, or knowledgeable a person is. While many online services compute reputation based on the same set of such criteria, users currently do not have the ability to use their reputation scores across services. As a result, users face trouble...
In this paper, we construct the first provably-secure isogeny-based (partially) blind signature scheme. While at a high level the scheme resembles the Schnorr blind signature, our work does not directly follow from that construction, since isogenies do not offer as rich an algebraic structure. Specifically, our protocol does not fit into the "linear identification protocol" abstraction introduced by Hauck, Kiltz, and Loss (EUROCYRPT'19), which was used to generically construct...
Both threshold and blind signatures have, individually, received a considerable amount of attention. However little is known about their combination, i.e., a threshold signature which is also blind, in that no coalition of signers learns anything about the message being signed or the signature being produced. Several applications of blind signatures (e.g., anonymous tokens) would benefit from distributed signing as a means to increase trust in the service and hence reduce the risks of key...
Anonymous tokens are digital signature schemes that enable an issuer to provider users with signatures without learning the input message or the resulting signature received by the user. These primitives allow applications to propagate trust while simultaneously protecting the identity of the user. Anonymous tokens have become a core component for improving the privacy of several real-world applications including ad measurements, authorization protocols, spam detection and VPNs. In...
Modern security systems depend fundamentally on the ability of users to authenticate their communications to other parties in a network. Unfortunately, cryptographic authentication can substantially undermine the privacy of users. One possible solution to this problem is to use privacy-preserving cryptographic authentication. These protocols allow users to authenticate their communications without revealing their identity to the verifier. In the non-interactive setting, the most common...
In recent years, there has been much focus on developing core cryptographic primitives based on lattice assumptions, driven by the NIST cal for post-quantum key encapsulation and digital signature algorithms. However, more work must be conducted on efficient privacy-preserving protocols with post-quantum security. Electronic voting is one such privacy-preserving protocol whose adoption is increasing across the democratic world. E-voting offers both a fast and convenient alternative to...
We revisit the concurrent security guarantees of the well-known Anonymous Credentials Light (ACL) scheme (Baldimtsi and Lysyanskaya, CCS'13). This scheme was originally proven secure when executed sequentially, and its concurrent security was left as an open problem. A later work of Benhamouda et al. (EUROCRYPT'21) gave an efficient attack on ACL when executed concurrently, seemingly resolving this question once and for all. In this work, we point out a subtle flaw in the attack of...
We propose a secure multiparty signing protocol for the BBS+ signature scheme; in other words, an anonymous credential scheme with threshold issuance. We prove that due to the structure of the BBS+ signature, simply verifying the signature produced by an otherwise semi-honest protocol is sufficient to achieve composable security against a malicious adversary. Consequently, our protocol is extremely simple and efficient: it involves a single request from the client (who requires a signature)...
We present a framework for building practical anonymous credential schemes based on the hardness of lattice problems. The running time of the prover and verifier is independent of the number of users and linear in the number of attributes. The scheme is also compact in practice, with the proofs being as small as a few dozen kilobytes for arbitrarily large (say up to $2^{128}$) users with each user having several attributes. The security of our scheme is based on a new family of lattice...
Blind signatures were originally introduced by Chaum (CRYPTO ’82) in the context of privacy-preserving electronic payment systems. Nowadays, the cryptographic primitive has also found applications in anonymous credentials and voting systems. However, many practical blind signature schemes have only been analysed in the game-based setting where a single signer is present. This is somewhat unsatisfactory as blind signatures are intended to be deployed in a setting with many signers. We address...
It is known that one can generically construct a post-quantum anonymous credential scheme, supporting the showing of arbitrary predicates on its attributes using general-purpose zero-knowledge proofs secure against quantum adversaries [Fischlin, CRYPTO 2006]. Traditionally, such a generic instantiation is thought to come with impractical sizes and performance. We show that with careful choices and optimizations, such a scheme can perform surprisingly well. In fact, it performs...
Blind signatures allow a signer to issue signatures on messages chosen by the signature recipient. The main property is that the recipient's message is hidden from the signer. There are many applications, including Chaum's e-cash system and Privacy Pass, where no special distribution of the signed message is required, and the message can be random. Interestingly, existing notions do not consider this practical use case separately. In this paper, we show that constraining the recipient's...
We introduce a new primitive called anonymous counting tokens (ACTs) which allows clients to obtain blind signatures or MACs (aka tokens) on messages of their choice, while at the same time enabling issuers to enforce rate limits on the number of tokens that a client can obtain for each message. Our constructions enforce that each client will be able to obtain only one token per message and we show a generic transformation to support other rate limiting as well. We achieve this new property...
Cryptographic algorithms are vital components ensuring the privacy and security of computer systems. They have constantly improved and evolved over the years following new developments, attacks, breaks, and lessons learned. A recent example is that of quantum-resistant cryptography, which has gained a lot of attention in the last decade and is leading to new algorithms being standardized today. These algorithms, however, present a real challenge: they come with strikingly different size and...
We give a construction of a 2-round blind signature scheme based on the hardness of standard lattice problems (Ring/Module-SIS/LWE and NTRU) with a signature size of 22 KB. The protocol is round-optimal and has a transcript size that can be as small as 60 KB. This blind signature is around $4$ times shorter than the most compact lattice-based scheme based on standard assumptions of del Pino and Katsumata (Crypto 2022) and around $2$ times shorter than the scheme of Agrawal et al. (CCS 2022)...
We propose a novel methodology to obtain $B$lind signatures that is fundamentally based on the idea of hiding part of the underlying plain signatures under a $Z$ero-knowledge argument of knowledge of the whole signature (hence the shorthand, $BZ$). Our proposal is necessarily non-black-box and stated in the random oracle model. We illustrate the technique by describing two instantiations: a classical setting based on the traditional discrete logarithm assumption, and a post-quantum setting...
Voting mechanisms allow the expression of the elections by a democratic approach. Any voting scheme must ensure, preferably in an efficient way, a series of safety measures such as confidentiality, integrity and anonymity. Since the 1980s, the concept of electronic voting became more and more of interest, being an advantageous or even necessary alternative for the organization of secure elections. In this paper, we give an overview for the e-voting mechanisms together with the security...
Blind signature schemes are the essential element of many complex information systems such as e-cash and e-voting systems. They should provide two security properties: unforgeability and blindness. The former one is standard for all signature schemes and ensures that a valid signature can be generated only during the interaction with the secret signing key holder. The latter one is more specific for this class of signature schemes and means that there is no way to link a (message, signature)...
Payment Channel Hub (PCH) is a promising solution to the scalability issue of first-generation blockchains or cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. It supports off-chain payments between a sender and a receiver through an intermediary (called the tumbler). Relationship anonymity and value privacy are desirable features of privacy-preserving PCHs, which prevent the tumbler from identifying the sender and receiver pairs as well as the payment amounts. To our knowledge, all existing...
Many applications of blind signatures, e.g. in blockchains, require compatibility of the resulting signatures with the existing system. This makes blind issuing of Schnorr signatures (now being standardized and supported by major cryptocurrencies) desirable. Concurrent security of the signing protocol is required to thwart denial-of-service attacks. We present a concurrently secure blind-signing protocol for Schnorr signatures, using the standard primitives NIZK and PKE and assuming...
Fair exchange (also referred to as atomic swap) is a fundamental operation in any cryptocurrency that allows users to atomically exchange coins. While a large body of work has been devoted to this problem, most solutions lack on-chain privacy. Thus, coins retain a public transaction history which is known to degrade the fungibility of a currency. This has led to a flourishing line of related research on fair exchange with privacy guarantees. Existing protocols either rely on heavy scripting...
Blind signatures are a fundamental tool for privacy-preserving applications. Known constructions of concurrently secure blind signature schemes either are prohibitively inefficient or rely on non-standard assumptions, even in the random oracle model. A recent line of work (ASIACRYPT `21, CRYPTO `22) initiated the study of concretely efficient schemes based on well-understood assumptions in the random oracle model. However, these schemes still have several major drawbacks: 1) The signer...
Partially blind signatures, an extension of ordinary blind signatures, are a primitive with wide applications in e-cash and electronic voting. One of the most efficient schemes to date is the one by Abe and Okamoto (CRYPTO 2000), whose underlying idea - the OR-proof technique - has served as the basis for several works. We point out several subtle flaws in the original proof of security, and provide a new detailed and rigorous proof, achieving similar bounds as the original work. We...
Blockchain technology provides efficient and secure solutions to various online activities by utilizing a wide range of cryptographic tools. In this paper, we survey the existing literature on post-quantum secure digital signatures that possess exotic advanced features and which are crucial cryptographic tools used in the blockchain ecosystem for (i) account management, (ii) consensus efficiency, (iii) empowering scriptless blockchain, and (iv) privacy. The exotic signatures that we...
In the current paper we investigate the possibility of designing secure blind signature scheme based on ElGamal signature equation. We define the generalized construction and analyze its security. We consider two types of schemes with the proposed construction, that cover all existing schemes. For schemes of the first type we provide generic ROS-style attack that violates unforgeability in the parallel setting. For schemes of the second type we prove that they do not provide either...
Coin mixing services allow users to mix their cryptocurrency coins and thus enable unlinkable payments in a way that prevents tracking of honest users' coins by both the service provider and the users themselves. The easy bootstrapping of new users and backwards compatibility with cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin) with limited support for scripts are attractive features of this architecture, which has recently gained considerable attention in both academia and industry. A recent work...
Blind signatures are a fascinating primitive which allow a user to obtain signatures from a signer, while hiding the message. Tremendously useful, these have been studied extensively for decades. Yet, to the best of our knowledge, all concretely practical blind signatures rely on non-standard assumptions and/or achieve sub-optimal round complexity. In this work, we provide an efficient, round-optimal (two-round) blind signature scheme from the hardness of the discrete log (DL) problem...
In a blind signature scheme, a user can obtain a digital signature on a message of her choice without revealing anything about the message or the resulting signature to the signer. Blind signature schemes have recently found applications for privacy-preserving web browsing and ad ecosystems, and as such, are ripe for standardization. In this paper, we show that the recent proposed standard of Denis, Jacobs and Wood [18, 17] constitutes a strongly one-more-unforgeable blind signature scheme...
Blind signatures, proposed by Chaum (CRYPTO'82), are interactive protocols between a signer and a user, where a user can obtain a signature without revealing the message to be signed. Recently, Hauck et al. (EUROCRYPT'20) observed that all efficient lattice-based blind signatures following the blueprint of the original blind signature by Rükert (ASIACRYPT'10) have a flawed security proof. This puts us in a situation where all known lattice-based blind signatures have at least two of the...
We present a novel cryptographic primitive, blind accumulator, aimed at constructing e-voting systems. Blind accumulators collect private keys of eligible voters in a decentralized manner not getting information about the keys. Once the accumulation is complete, a voter processes the resulting accumulator deriving a public key that refers to the private key previously added by this voter. Public keys are derived deterministically and can therefore stand as fixed voter pseudonyms. The voter...
This paper proposes the first practical pairing-free three-move blind signature schemes that (1) are concurrently secure, (2) produce short signatures (i.e., three or four group elements/scalars), and (3) are provably secure either in the generic group model (GGM) or the algebraic group model (AGM) under the (plain or one-more) discrete logarithm assumption (beyond additionally assuming random oracles). We also propose a partially blind version of one of our schemes. Our schemes do not rely...
Coconut [NDSS 2019] is an attribute-based credential scheme with threshold issuance. We analyze its security properties. To this end, we define an ideal functionality for attribute-based access control with threshold issuance. We describe a construction that realizes our functionality. Our construction follows Coconut with a few changes. In particular, it modifies the protocols for blind issuance of credentials and for credential show so that user privacy holds against computationally...
Blind signature schemes are one of the best-studied tools for privacy-preserving authentication. Unfortunately, known constructions of provably secure blind signatures either rely on non-standard hardness assumptions, or require parameters that grow linearly with the number of concurrently issued signatures, or involve prohibitively inefficient general techniques such as general secure two-party computation. Recently, Katz, Loss and Rosenberg (ASIACRYPT'21) gave a technique that, for the...
Lattice-based blind signature schemes have been receiving some recent attention lately. Earlier efficient 3-round schemes (Asiacrypt 2010, Financial Cryptography 2020) were recently shown to have mistakes in their proofs, and fixing them turned out to be extremely inefficient and limited the number of signatures that a signer could send to less than a dozen (Crypto 2020). In this work we propose a round-optimal, 2-round lattice-based blind signature scheme which produces signatures of length...
We present a new construction for publicly verifiable anonymous tokens with private metadata. This primitive enables an issuer to generate an anonymous authentication token for a user while embedding a single private metadata bit. The token can be publicly verified, while the value of the private metadata is only accessible to the party holding the secret issuing key and remains hidden to any other party, even to the user. The security properties of this primitive also...
Blind signature schemes are one of the best and best-studied tools for privacy-preserving authentication. It has a blind signing protocol in which a signer learns nothing about the message being signed or the resulting signature; thus such a signature can serve as an anonymous authentication token. Thus, constructing efficient blind signatures secure under realistic cryptographic assumptions is an important goal. A recent paper by Benhamouda, Lepoint, Loss, Orr\`u, and Raykova (Eurocrypt...
This work revisits the security of classical signatures and ring signatures in a quantum world. For (ordinary) signatures, we focus on the arguably preferable security notion of blind-unforgeability recently proposed by Alagic et al. (Eurocrypt'20). We present two short signature schemes achieving this notion: one is in the quantum random oracle model, assuming quantum hardness of SIS; and the other is in the plain model, assuming quantum hardness of LWE with super-polynomial modulus. Prior...
Blind signatures are a fundamental cryptographic primitive with numerous practical applications. While there exist many practical blind signatures from number-theoretic assumptions, the situation is far less satisfactory from post-quantum assumptions. In this work, we provide the first overall practical, lattice-based blind signature, supporting an unbounded number of signature queries and additionally enjoying optimal round complexity. We provide a detailed estimate of parameters achieved...
In this paper, we give the first formal security analysis on the one-more unforgeability of blind ECDSA. We start with giving a general attack on blind ECDSA, which is similar to the ROS attack on the blind Schnorr signature. We formulate the ECDSA-ROS problem to capture this attack. Next, we give a generic construction of blind ECDSA based on an additive homomorphic encryption and a corresponding zero-knowledge proof. Our concrete instantiation is about 40 times more bandwidth efficient...
An OR-proof is a protocol that enables a user to prove the possession of a witness for one of two (or more) statements, without revealing which one. Abe and Okamoto (CRYPTO 2000) used this technique to build a partially blind signature scheme whose security is based on the hardness of the discrete logarithm problem. Inspired by their approach, we present BlindOR, an efficient blind signature scheme from OR-proofs based on lattices over modules. Using OR-proofs allows us to reduce the...
In this paper, we study the round complexity of concurrently secure computation protocols in the plain model, without random oracles or assuming the presence of a trusted setup. In the plain model, it is well known that concurrently secure two-party computation with polynomial simulation is impossible to achieve in two rounds. For this reason, we focus on the well-studied notion of security with super-polynomial simulation (SPS). Our main result is the first construction of two-round SPS...
Anonymity networks, such as the Tor network, are highly decentralized and make heavy use of ephemeral identities. Both of these characteristics run in direct opposition to a traditional public key infrastructure, so entity authentication in an anonymity network can be a challenge. One system that Tor relies on is key-blinded signatures, which allow public keys to be transformed so that authentication is still possible, but the identity public key is masked. This is used in Tor during onion...
The one more-discrete logarithm assumption (OMDL) underlies the security analysis of identification protocols, blind signature and multi-signature schemes, such as blind Schnorr signatures and the recent MuSig2 multi-signatures. As these schemes produce standard Schnorr signatures, they are compatible with existing systems, e.g. in the context of blockchains. OMDL is moreover assumed for many results on the impossibility of certain security reductions. Despite its wide use, surprisingly,...
We build the first construction of a partially oblivious pseudorandom function (POPRF) that does not rely on bilinear pairings. Our construction can be viewed as combining elements of the 2HashDH OPRF of Jarecki, Kiayias, and Krawczyk with the Dodis-Yampolskiy PRF. We analyze our POPRF’s security in the random oracle model via reduction to a new one-more gap strong Diffie-Hellman inversion assumption. The most significant technical challenge is establishing confidence in the new assumption,...
Existing blind signature schemes that are secure for polynomially many concurrent executions of the signing protocol are either inefficient or rely on non-standard assumptions (even in the random-oracle model). We show the first efficient blind signature schemes achieving this level of security based on the RSA, factoring, or discrete logarithm assumptions (in the random-oracle model). Our core technique involves an extension and generalization of a transform due to Pointcheval (Eurocrypt...
Guillou-Quisquater (GQ) signature is an efficient RSA-based digital signature scheme amongst the most famous Fiat-Shamir follow-ons owing to its good simplicity. However, there exist two bottlenecks for GQ hindering its application in industry or academia: the RSA trapdoor $n=pq$ in the key generation phase and its high bandwidth caused by the storage-consuming representation of RSA group elements (3072 bits per one element in 128-bit security). In this paper, we first formalize the...
Threshold and blind signature schemes have found numerous applications in cryptocurrencies, e-cash, e-voting and other privacy-preserving technologies. In this work, we make advances in bringing lattice-based constructions for these primitives closer to practice. 1. Threshold Signatures. For round optimal threshold signatures, we improve the only known construction by Boneh et al. [CRYPTO'18] as follows: a. Efficiency. We reduce the amount of noise flooding from $2^{\Omega(\lambda)}$ down...
Blind signatures, introduced by Chaum (Crypto’82), allows a user to obtain a signature on a message without revealing the message itself to the signer. Thus far, all existing constructions of round-optimal blind signatures are known to require one of the following: a trusted setup, an interactive assumption, or complexity leveraging. This state-of-the-affair is somewhat justified by the few known impossibility results on constructions of round-optimal blind signatures in the plain model...
Bitcoin transfers value on a public ledger of transactions anyone can verify. Coin ownership is defined in terms of public keys. Despite potential use for private transfers, research has shown that users’ activity can often be traced in practice. Businesses have been built on dragnet surveillance of Bitcoin users because of this lack of strong privacy, which harms its fungibility, a basic property of functional money. Although the public nature of this design lacks strong guarantees for...
Adaptor signature is becoming an increasingly important tool in solving the scalability and interoperability issues of blockchain applications. It has many useful properties, such as reducing the on-chain communication cost, increasing the fungibility of transactions, and circumventing the limitation of the blockchain's scripting language. In this paper, we propose the first generic construction of adaptor signatures from {\sf Type-T} canonical identification, which includes...
In this paper we construct and consider a signature scheme with evolving secret key, where there is used Type 3 pairing. The idea is based on some properties of binary trees, with a number of leaves being the same as a number of time periods in the scheme. This lets us to gain such conditions, that allows to prove the forward-security of the considered scheme in the random oracle model. The proof is conducted by reducing the security of the scheme to the difficulty of solving a certain...
The Covid-19 pandemic created various new challenges for our societies. Quickly discovering new infections using automated contact tracing without endangering privacy of the general public is one of these. Most discussions concerning architectures for contact tracing applications revolved around centralized against decentralized approaches. In contrast, the system proposed in this work builds on the idea of message-based contact tracing to inform users of their risk. Our main contribution is...
Studying the security and efficiency of blind signatures is an important goal for privacy sensitive applications. In particular, for large-scale settings (e.g., cryptocurrency tumblers), it is important for schemes to scale well with the number of users in the system. Unfortunately, all practical schemes either 1) rely on (very strong) number theoretic hardness assumptions and/or computationally expensive pairing operations over bilinear groups, or 2) support only a polylogarithmic number of...
We present an algorithm solving the ROS (Random inhomogeneities in a Overdetermined Solvable system of linear equations) problem in polynomial time for l > log p dimensions. Our algorithm can be combined with Wagner’s attack, and leads to a sub-exponential solution for any dimension l with best complexity known so far. When concurrent executions are allowed, our algorithm leads to practical attacks against unforgeability of blind signature schemes such as Schnorr and Okamoto--Schnorr blind...
We observe that all previously known lattice-based blind signature schemes contain subtle flaws in their security proofs (e.g., Rückert, ASIACRYPT '08) or can be attacked (e.g., BLAZE by Alkadri et al., FC '20). Motivated by this, we revisit the problem of constructing blind signatures from standard lattice assumptions. We propose a new three-round lattice-based blind signature scheme whose security can be proved, in the random oracle model, from the standard SIS assumption. Our starting...
Randomizable encryption lets anyone randomize a ciphertext so it is distributed like a fresh encryption of the same plaintext. Signatures on randomizable ciphertexts (SoRC), introduced by Blazy et al. (PKC'11), let one adapt a signature on a ciphertext to a randomization of the latter. Since signatures can only be adapted to ciphertexts that encrypt the same message as the signed ciphertext, signatures obliviously authenticate plaintexts. SoRC have been used as a building block in...
Contact tracing is a promising approach to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Various systems have been proposed to automatise the process. Many designs rely heavily on a centralised server or reveal significant amounts of private data to health authorities. We propose CAUDHT, a decentralized peer-to-peer system for contact tracing. The central health authority can focus on providing and operating tests for the disease while contact tracing is done by the system’s users themselves. We use a...
We present in this paper a blind signature and its partially blind variant based on lattices assumptions. Blind signature is a cornerstone in privacy-oriented cryptography and we propose the first lattice based scheme without restart. Compare to related work, the key idea of our construction is to provide a trapdoor to the signer in order to let him perform some gaussian pre-sampling during the signature generation process, preventing this way to restart from scratch the whole protocol. We...
A canonical identification (CID) scheme is a 3-move protocol consisting of a commitment, challenge, and response. It constitutes the core design of many cryptographic constructions such as zero-knowledge proof systems and various types of signature schemes. Unlike number-theoretic constructions, CID in the lattice setting usually forces provers to abort and repeat the whole authentication process once the distribution of the computed response does not follow a target distribution independent...
Recently, Srinath and Chandrasekaran have proposed an undeniable blind signature scheme (UBSS) from supersingular isogeny to provide signer’s control in a quantum-resistant blind signature. However, certain weaknesses of undeniable signature have already been observed and have been overcome by formalizing the designated verifier signature (DVS). In this paper, we explore the possibility of generic construction of a DVS from hard homogeneous spaces. Further, following this...
Blind signature schemes (BSS) play a pivotal role in privacy-oriented cryptography. However, with blind signature schemes, the signed message remains unintelligible to the signer, giving them no guarantee that the blinded message he signed actually contained valid information. Partially-blind signature schemes (PBSS) were introduced to address precisely this problem. In this paper we present the first leakage-resilient, lattice-based partially-blind signature scheme in the literature. Our...
Using a set of pairing product equations (PPEs) to verify the correctness of an untrusted set of pairing elements with respect to another set of trusted elements has numerous cryptographic applications. These include the design of basic and structure-preserving signature schemes, building oblivious transfer schemes from “blind” IBE, finding new verifiable random functions and keeping the IBE/ABE authority “accountable” to the user. A natural question to ask is: are all trusted-untrusted...
The key escrow problem is one of the main barriers to the widespread real-world use of identity-based encryption (IBE). Specifically, a key generation center (KGC), which generates secret keys for a given identity, has the power to decrypt all ciphertexts. At PKC 2009, Chow defined a notion of security against the KGC, that relies on assuming that it cannot discover the underlying identities behind ciphertexts. However, this is not a realistic assumption since, in practice, the KGC manages...
Black-box accumulation (BBA) is a building block which enables a privacy-preserving implementation of point collection and redemption, a functionality required in a variety of user-centric applications including loyalty programs, incentive systems, and mobile payments. By definition, BBA+ schemes (Hartung et al. CCS '17) offer strong privacy and security guarantees, such as unlinkability of transactions and correctness of the balance flows of all (even malicious) users. Unfortunately, the...
We propose security models for everlasting privacy, a property that protects the content of the votes cast in electronic elections against future and powerful adversaries. Initially everlasting privacy was treated synonymously with information theoretic privacy and did not take advantage of the information available to the adversary and his behavior during or after the election. More recent works provided variations of the concept, limiting the view of the future adversary to publicly...
Blind signatures constitute basic cryptographic ingredients for privacy-preserving applications such as anonymous credentials, e-voting, and Bitcoin. Despite the great variety of cryptographic applications blind signatures also found their way in real-world scenarios. Due to the expected progress in cryptanalysis using quantum computers, it remains an important research question to find practical and secure alternatives to current systems based on the hardness of classical security...
The Schnorr blind signing protocol allows blind issuing of Schnorr signatures, one of the most widely used signatures. Despite its practical relevance, its security analysis is unsatisfactory. The only known security proof is rather informal and in the combination of the generic group model (GGM) and the random oracle model (ROM) assuming that the ``ROS problem'' is hard. The situation is similar for (Schnorr-)signed ElGamal encryption, a simple CCA2-secure variant of ElGamal. We analyze...
In recent years, several cryptographic scholars have proposed quantum blind signature schemes. However, their methods require the signatories and the inspectors to share common keys in advance, which makes them not only complicated in concept, but also suffering deniable problem. Moreover, due to the fact that not everyone can verify the blind signature, it needs to have a designated verifier. In view of Laurent, et al.’s argument that other than the assumption of the pre-image being...
Anonymity is a primary ingredient for our digital life. Several tools have been designed to address it such as, for authentication, blind signatures, group signatures or anonymous credentials and, for confidentiality, randomizable encryption or mix-nets. When it comes to complex electronic voting schemes, random shuffling of ciphertexts with mix-nets is the only known tool. However, it requires huge and complex zero-knowledge proofs to guarantee the actual permutation of the initial...
We introduce the notion of Ticket-Mediated Password Strengthening (TMPS), a technique for allowing users to derive keys from passwords while imposing a strict limit on the number of guesses of their password any attacker can make, and strongly protecting the users' privacy. We describe the security requirements of TMPS, and then a set of efficient and practical protocols to implement a TMPS scheme, requiring only hash functions, CCA2-secure encryption, and blind signatures. We provide...
We propose a modular security treatment of blind signatures derived from linear identification schemes in the random oracle model. To this end, we present a general framework that captures several well known schemes from the literature and allows to prove their security. Our modular security reduction introduces a new security notion for identification schemes called One-More-Man In the Middle Security which we show equivalent to the classical One-More-Unforgeability notion for blind...
Algebraic structure lies at the heart of much of Cryptomania as we know it. An interesting question is the following: instead of building (Cryptomania) primitives from concrete assumptions, can we build them from simple Minicrypt primitives endowed with additional algebraic structure? In this work, we affirmatively answer this question by adding algebraic structure to the following Minicrypt primitives: • One-Way Function (OWF) • Weak Unpredictable Function (wUF) • Weak Pseudorandom...
Formulating and designing authentication of classical messages in the presence of adversaries with quantum query access has been a longstanding challenge, as the familiar classical notions of unforgeability do not directly translate into meaningful notions in the quantum setting. A particular difficulty is how to fairly capture the notion of "predicting an unqueried value" when the adversary can query in quantum superposition. We propose a natural definition of...
We construct the first (almost) tightly-secure unbounded-simulation-sound quasi-adaptive non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments (USS-QA-NIZK) for linear-subspace languages with compact (number of group elements independent of the security parameter) common reference string (CRS) and compact proofs under standard assumptions in bilinear-pairings groups. Specifically, our construction has $ O(\log Q) $ reduction to the SXDH, DLIN and matrix-DDH assumptions, where $ Q $ is the number of...
In this paper, we consider a scenario where a bitcoin liquidity provider sells bitcoins to clients. When a client pays for a bitcoin online, the provider is able to link the client's payment information to the bitcoin sold to that client. To address the clients' privacy concern, it is desirable for the provider to perform the bitcoin transaction with blind signatures. However, existing blind signature schemes are incompatible with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) which...
We analyze the FOO electronic voting protocol in the provable secu- rity model using the technique of Computationally Complete Symbolic Attacker (CCSA). The protocol uses commitments, blind signatures and anonymous chan- nels to achieve vote privacy. Unlike the Dolev-Yao analyses of the protocol, we assume neither perfect cryptography nor existence of perfectly anonymous chan- nels. Our analysis reveals new attacks on vote privacy, including an attack that arises due to the inadequacy of the...
Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs are fundamental to modern cryptography. Numerous NIZK constructions are known in both the random oracle and the common reference string (CRS) models. In the CRS model, there exist constructions from several classes of cryptographic assumptions such as trapdoor permutations, pairings, and indistinguishability obfuscation. Notably absent from this list, however, are constructions from standard lattice assumptions. While there has been partial...
In this work, we propose a first version of an e-voting scheme that achieves end-to-end verifiability, everlasting privacy and efficient coercion resistance in the JCJ setting. Everlasting privacy is achieved assuming an anonymous channel, without resorting to dedicated channels between the election authorities to exchange private data. In addition, the proposed scheme achieves coercion resistance under standard JCJ assumptions. As a core building block of our scheme, we also propose a new...
Structure Preserving Signatures (SPS) allow the signatures and the messages signed to be further encrypted while retaining the ability to be proven valid under zero-knowledge. In particular, SPS are tailored to have structure suitable for Groth-Sahai NIZK proofs. More precisely, the messages, signatures, and verification keys are required to be elements of groups that support efficient bilinear-pairings (bilinear groups), and the signature verification consists of just evaluating one or more...