[Resource Topic] 2019/1173: Immunization against Complete Subversion without Random Oracles

Welcome to the resource topic for 2019/1173

Title:
Immunization against Complete Subversion without Random Oracles

Authors: Giuseppe Ateniese, Danilo Francati, Bernardo Magri, Daniele Venturi

Abstract:

We seek constructions of general-purpose immunizers that take arbitrary cryptographic primitives, and transform them into ones that withstand a powerful “malicious but proud” adversary, who attempts to break security by possibly subverting the implementation of all algorithms (including the immunizer itself!), while trying not to be detected. This question is motivated by the recent evidence of cryptographic schemes being intentionally weakened, or designed together with hidden backdoors, e.g., with the scope of mass surveillance. Our main result is a subversion-secure immunizer in the plain model, that works for a fairly large class of deterministic primitives, i.e. cryptoschemes where a secret (but tamperable) random source is used to generate the keys and the public parameters, whereas all other algorithms are deterministic. The immunizer relies on an additional independent source of public randomness, which is used to sample a public seed. Assuming the public source is untamperable, and that the subversion of the algorithms is chosen independently of the seed, we can instantiate our immunizer from any one-way function. In case the subversion is allowed to depend on the seed, and the public source is still untamperable, we obtain an instantiation from collision-resistant hash functions. In the more challenging scenario where the public source is also tamperable, we additionally need to assume that the initial cryptographic primitive has sub-exponential security. Previous work in the area only obtained subversion-secure immunization for very restricted classes of primitives, often in weaker models of subversion and using random oracles.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/1173

See all topics related to this paper.

Feel free to post resources that are related to this paper below.

Example resources include: implementations, explanation materials, talks, slides, links to previous discussions on other websites.

For more information, see the rules for Resource Topics .