Recently, Gentry and Lee (GL) proposed a fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme optimized for matrix arithmetic. In this paper, we propose an efficient bootstrapping technique for the GL scheme. Our core idea leverages the linearity of the slot–coefficient transformations, namely CtS and StC: we formulate these operations as ciphertext–plaintext matrix multiplications, which are natively supported by the GL scheme. As a result, the proposed method reduces the number of key-switching operations per step to a small constant. To enable this, we first generalize the GL scheme to matrices of non-power-of-two dimensions by introducing a generalized definition of the trace over commutative rings and proving that it commutes with decryption. Our bootstrapping adopts the CKKS paradigm: ModRaise, CtS, EvalMod, and StC. Typically, CtS/StC and EvalMod dominate runtime and depth, respectively; our optimization shifts the bottleneck to EvalMod for both. A proof-of-concept implementation shows that linear transformations account for 20.1 2.62× faster than the well-optimized library (Lattigo).

We propose an efficient fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) scheme tailored for matrix arithmetic based on the Ring-Learning with Errors problem. The proposed scheme naturally supports matrix multiplication, addition, and Hadamard multiplication for batched matrices of various sizes over both complex numbers and integers. Encrypted matrix multiplication is reduced to four matrix multiplications of ciphertext elements, without the need for expensive operations such as slot-to-coefficient conversion or ring switching. In addition, the scheme efficiently supports matrix transformations, including general and conjugate transpositions, as well as matrix rotations: inter-matrix rotations across batched matrices and intra-matrix rotations within rows and columns. By eliminating the need for expensive operations such as repeated slot rotations and conversion between slot- and coefficient-encoding, the proposed construction achieves significant performance improvements. In our construction, encrypted multiplications of n× n matrices under slot encoding are decomposed into two parts: (1) matrix multiplication—four n× n matrix multiplications of ciphertext coefficients, and (2) key switching—with a total cost approximately 2–4 times that of Hadamard multiplication. We implemented the proposed scheme and utilized the FLINT library for the matrix multiplication component. Experimental results demonstrate that the HE-specific overhead—namely, key switching—is comparable to the plaintext matrix-multiplication cost. This indicates that our construction substantially reduces auxiliary overheads and achieves strong overall efficiency.

We present a new construction of two-party, threshold ECDSA, building on a 2017 scheme of Lindell and improving his scheme in several ways. ECDSA signing is notoriously hard to distribute securely, due to non-linearities in the signing function. Lindell's scheme uses Paillier encryption to encrypt one party's key share and handle these non-linearities homomorphically, while elegantly avoiding any expensive zero knowledge proofs over the Paillier group during the signing process. However, the scheme pushes that complexity into key generation. Moreover, avoiding ZK proofs about Paillier ciphertexts during signing comes with a steep price - namely, the scheme requires a "global abort" when a malformed ciphertext is detected, after which an entirely new key must be generated. We overcome all of these issues with a proactive Refresh procedure. Since the Paillier decryption key is part of the secret that must be proactively refreshed, our first improvement is to radically accelerate key generation by replacing one of Lindell's ZK proofs which requires 80 Paillier ciphertexts for statistical security 2(-40) - with a much faster "weak" proof that requires only 2 Paillier ciphertexts, and which proves a weaker statement about a Paillier ciphertext that we show is sufficient in the context of our scheme. Secondly, our more efficient key generation procedure also makes frequent proactive Refreshes practical. Finally, we show that adding noise to one party's key share suffices to avoid the need to reset the public verification key when certain bad behavior is detected. Instead, we prove that our Refresh procedure, performed after each detection, suffices for addressing the attack, allowing the system to continue functioning without disruption to applications that rely on the verification key. Our scheme is also very efficient, competitive with the best constructions that do not provide proactive security, and state-of-the-art among the few results that do. Our optimizations to ECDSA key generation speed up runtime and improve bandwidth over Lindell's key generation by factors of 7 and 13, respectively. Our Key Generation protocol requires 20% less bandwidth than existing constructions, completes in only 3 protocol messages, and executes much faster than all but OT-based key generation. For ECDSA signing, our extra Refresh protocol does add a 10X latency and 5X bandwidth overhead compared to Lindell. However, this still fits in 150 ms runtime and about 5.4 KB of messages when run in our AWS cluster benchmark.

If the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word "encryption" is the Enigma machine, you might think that encryption is complicated and mathematically uninteresting. In fact, many modern encryption systems are quite simple from a mathematical point of view, especially encryption systems that are homomorphic. In these systems, the starting point is a homomorphism that respects some binary operation(s), such as $+$ or $\times$. Depicting this homomorphism with a rectangular commutative diagram, the objects on the top level of the diagram are called ciphertexts, and the objects on the bottom level are called messages or plaintexts. The downward arrows in the diagram are the homomorphism, which we call decryption. The rightward arrows are the operation(s). Decryption commutes with the operations. To the commutative diagram we add one extra ingredient, computational complexity. Specifically, we need for it to be easy (in the sense of polynomial-time) for anyone to compute the rightward arrows in the diagram, but hard to learn how to compute the downward (decryption) arrows except with some special information that we will call a "secret key." In short, homomorphic encryption is simply a homomorphism that has been "hardened" in the complexity-theoretic sense. Homomorphic encryption allows anyone to compute on encrypted data, without needing (or being able) to decrypt, has many exciting applications. Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) systems, which allow a rich (functionally complete) set of operations, were finally discovered in 2009. But all of the FHE systems that we have discovered so far follow the same blueprint, and we still wonder whether there are other ways to build FHE. This survey presents homomorphic encryption from a mathematical point of view, illustrating with several examples how to start from a homomorphism and harden it to make it suitable for cryptography, pointing out pitfalls and attacks to avoid, laying out the current blueprint for FHE, and (I hope) serving as an inspiration and useful guide in the development of new approaches to FHE.

Homomorphic encryption (HE) protects data in-use, but can be computationally expensive. To avoid the costly bootstrapping procedure that refreshes ciphertexts, some works have explored client-aided outsourcing protocols, where the client intermittently refreshes ciphertexts for a server that is performing homomorphic computations. But is this approach secure against malicious servers? We present a CPA-secure encryption scheme that is completely insecure in this setting. We define a new notion of security, called funcCPA, that we prove is sufficient. Additionally, we show: Namely, funcCPA-security lies strictly between CPA-security and CCA2-security (under reasonable assumptions), and has an interesting relationship with circular security, though it is not known to be equivalent.

Non-interactive publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) schemes enables (re-)sharing of secrets in a decentralized setting in the presence of malicious parties. A recently proposed application of PVSS schemes is to enable permissionless proof-of-stake blockchains to “keep a secret” via a sequence of committees that share that secret. These committees can use the secret to produce signatures on the blockchain’s behalf, or to disclose hidden data conditioned on consensus that some event has occurred. That application needs very large committees with thousands of parties, so the PVSS scheme in use must be efficient enough to support such large committees, in terms of both computation and communication. Yet, previous PVSS schemes have large proofs and/or require many exponentiations over large groups. We present a non-interactive PVSS scheme in which the underlying encryption scheme is based on the learning with errors (LWE) problem. While lattice-based encryption schemes are very fast, they often have long ciphertexts and public keys. We use the following two techniques to conserve bandwidth: First, we adapt the Peikert-Vaikuntanathan-Waters (PVW) encryption scheme to the multi-receiver setting, so that the bulk of the parties’ keys is a common random string. The resulting scheme yields (1) amortized plaintext/ciphertext rate, where concretely the rate is ≈ 1/60 for 100 parties, ≈ 1/8 for 1000 parties, and approaching 1/2 as the number of parties grows. Second, we use bulletproofs over a DL-group of order about 256 bits to get compact proofs of correct encryption/decryption of shares. Alternating between the lattice and DL settings is relatively painless, as we equate the LWE modulus with the order of the group. We also show how to reduce the the number of exponentiations in the bulletproofs by applying Johnson-Lindenstrauss-like compression to reduce the dimension of the vectors whose properties must be verified. An implementation of our PVSS with 1000 parties showed that it is feasible even at that size, and should remain so even with one or two order of magnitude increase in the committee size.

The inherent difficulty of maintaining stateful environments over long periods of time gave rise to the paradigm of serverless computing, where mostly stateless components are deployed on demand to handle computation tasks, and are torn down once their task is complete. Serverless architecture could offer the added benefit of improved resistance to targeted denial-of-service attacks, by hiding from the attacker the physical machines involved in the protocol until after they complete their work. Realizing such protection, however, requires that the protocol only uses stateless parties, where each party sends only one message and never needs to speaks again. Perhaps the most famous example of this style of protocols is the Nakamoto consensus protocol used in Bitcoin: A peer can win the right to produce the next block by running a local lottery (mining) while staying covert. Once the right has been won, it is executed by sending a single message. After that, the physical entity never needs to send more messages. We refer to this as the You-Only-Speak-Once (YOSO) property, and initiate the formal study of it within a new model that we call the YOSO model. Our model is centered around the notion of roles, which are stateless parties that can only send a single message. Crucially, our modelling separates the protocol design, that only uses roles, from the role-assignment mechanism, that assigns roles to actual physical entities. This separation enables studying these two aspects separately, and our YOSO model in this work only deals with the protocol-design aspect. We describe several techniques for achieving YOSO MPC; both computational and information theoretic. Our protocols are synchronous and provide guaranteed output delivery (which is important for application domains such as blockchains), assuming honest majority of roles in every time step. We describe a practically efficient computationally-secure protocol, as well as a proof-of-concept information theoretically secure protocol.

Blockchains are gaining traction and acceptance, not just for cryptocurrencies, but increasingly as an architecture for distributed computing. In this work we seek solutions that allow a public blockchain to act as a trusted long-term repository of secret information: Our goal is to deposit a secret with the blockchain, specify how it is to be used (e.g., the conditions under which it is released), and have the blockchain keep the secret and use it only in the specified manner (e.g., release only it once the conditions are met). This simple functionality enables many powerful applications, including signing statements on behalf of the blockchain, using it as the control plane for a storage system, performing decentralized program-obfuscation-as-aservice, and many more. Using proactive secret sharing techniques, we present a scalable solution for implementing this functionality on a public blockchain, in the presence of a mobile adversary controlling a small minority of the participants. The main challenge is that, on the one hand, scalability requires that we use small committees to represent the entire system, but, on the other hand, a mobile adversary may be able to corrupt the entire committee if it is small. For this reason, existing proactive secret sharing solutions are either non-scalable or insecure in our setting. We approach this challenge via “player replaceability”, which ensures the committee is anonymous until after it performs its actions. Our main technical contribution is a system that allows sharing and re-sharing of secrets among the members of small dynamic committees, without knowing who they are until after they perform their actions and erase their secrets. Our solution handles a fully mobile adversary corrupting roughly 1/4 of the participants at any time, and is scalable in terms of both the number of parties and the number of time intervals.

Blockchains are gaining traction and acceptance, not just for cryptocurrencies but increasingly as a general-purpose architecture for distributed computing. In this work we seek solutions that allow a blockchain to act as a trusted long-term repository of secret information: Our goal is to deposit a secret with the blockchain and specify how to use it (e.g., the conditions under which it is released), and have the blockchain keep this information secret and use it only in the requested manner (e.g., only release it once the conditions are met). This simple functionality would be an enabler for many powerful applications, including signing statements on behalf of the blockchain, using blockchain as the control plane for a storage system, performing decentralized program-obfuscation-as-a-service, and many more. We present a scalable solution for implementing this functionality on a public proof-of-stake blockchain, in the presence of a mobile adversary controlling a small minority of the stake, using proactive secret sharing techniques. The main challenge is that, on the one hand, scalability requires that we use small committees to represent the entire stake, but, on the other hand, a mobile adversary may be able to corrupt the entire committee if it is small. For this reason, prior proactive secret sharing solutions are either non-scalable or insecure in our setting. We solve this issue using “player replaceability”, where the committee is anonymous until after it performs its actions, as in the Algorand blockchain. (Algorand uses player replaceability to defend against DDoS attacks.) Our main technical contribution is a system that allows sharing and re-sharing of secrets among the members of small dynamic committees, without knowing who they are until after they perform their actions. Our solution handles a fully mobile adversary corrupting less than 25% of the stake at any time, and is scalable in terms of both the number of parties on the blockchain and the number of time intervals. Blockchain, Mobile Adversary, Player Replacability, Proactive Secret Sharing

Homomorphic encryption (HE) is often viewed as impractical, both in communication and computation. Here we provide an additively homomorphic encryption scheme based on (ring) LWE with nearly optimal rate ( 1-ϵ for any ϵ >0 ). Moreover, we describe how to compress many Gentry-Sahai-Waters (GSW) ciphertexts (e.g., ciphertexts that may have come from a homomorphic evaluation) into (fewer) high-rate ciphertexts. Using our high-rate HE scheme, we are able for the first time to describe a single-server private information retrieval (PIR) scheme with sufficiently low computational overhead so as to be practical for large databases. Single-server PIR inherently requires the server to perform at least one bit operation per database bit, and we describe a rate-(4/9) scheme with computation which is not so much worse than this inherent lower bound. In fact it is probably less than whole-database AES encryption – specifically about 2.3 mod-q multiplication per database byte, where q is about 50 to 60 bits. Asymptotically, the computational overhead of our PIR scheme is Õ(loglogλ+ logloglog N) , where λ is the security parameter and N is the number of database files, which are assumed to be sufficiently large.

We describe a somewhat homomorphic GSW-like encryption scheme, natively encrypting matrices rather than just single elements. This scheme offers much better performance than existing homomorphic encryption schemes for evaluating encrypted (nondeterministic) finite automata (NFAs). Differently from GSW, we do not know how to reduce the security of this scheme from LWE, instead we reduce it from a stronger assumption, that can be thought of as an inhomogeneous variant of the NTRU assumption. This assumption (that we term iNTRU) may be useful and interesting in its own right, and we examine a few of its properties. We also examine methods to encode regular expressions as NFAs, and in particular explore a new optimization problem, motivated by our application to encrypted NFA evaluation. In this problem, we seek to minimize the number of states in an NFA for a given expression, subject to the constraint on the ambiguity of the NFA.

Abstract We present a novel secure search protocol on data and queries encrypted with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE). Our protocol enables organizations (client) to (1) securely upload an unsorted data array x = (x[1], . . . , x[n]) to an untrusted honest-but-curious sever, where data may be uploaded over time and from multiple data-sources; and (2) securely issue repeated search queries q for retrieving the first element (i*, x[i*]) satisfying an agreed matching criterion i* = min { i ∈ [n] | IsMatch(x[i], q) = 1 }, as well as fetching the next matching elements with further interaction. For security, the client encrypts the data and queries with FHE prior to uploading, and the server processes the ciphertexts to produce the result ciphertext for the client to decrypt. Our secure search protocol improves over the prior state-of-the-art for secure search on FHE encrypted data (Akavia, Feldman, Shaul (AFS), CCS’2018) in achieving: – Post-processing free protocol where the server produces a ciphertext for the correct search outcome with overwhelming success probability. This is in contrast to returning a list of candidates for the client to postprocess, or suffering from a noticeable error probability, in AFS. Our post-processing freeness enables the server to use secure search as a sub-component in a larger computation without interaction with the client. – Faster protocol: (a) Client time and communication bandwidth are improved by a log2 n/ log log n factor. (b) Server evaluates a polynomial of degree linear in log n (compare to cubic in AFS), and overall number of multiplications improved by up to log n factor. (c) Employing only GF(2) computations (compare to GF(p) for p ≫ in AFS) to gain both further speedup and compatibility to all current FHE candidates. – Order of magnitude speedup exhibited by extensive benchmarks we executed on identical hardware for implementations of ours versus AFS’s protocols. Additionally, like other FHE based solutions, our solution is setup-free: to outsource elements from the client to the server, no additional actions are performed on x except for encrypting it element by element (each element bit by bit) and uploading the resulted ciphertexts to the server.

We describe obfuscation schemes for matrix-product branching programs that are purely algebraic and employ matrix groups and tensor algebra over a finite field. In contrast to the obfuscation schemes of Garg et al (SICOM 2016) which were based on multilinear maps, these schemes do not use noisy encodings. We prove that there is no efficient attack on our scheme based on re-linearization techniques of Kipnis-Shamir (CRYPTO 99) and its generalization called XL-methodology (Courtois et al, EC2000). We also provide analysis to claim that general Grobner-basis computation attacks will be inefficient. In a generic colored matrix model our construction leads to a virtual-black-box obfuscator for NC circuits. We also provide cryptanalysis based on computing tangent spaces of the underlying algebraic sets. The first two authors were supported by the DARPA Safeware project. Daniel Kane was supported by NSF Award CCF-1553288 (CAREER) and a Sloan Research Fellowship.

We describe our recent experience, building a system that uses fully-homomorphic encryption (FHE) to approximate the coefficients of a logistic-regression model, built from genomic data. The aim of this project was to examine the feasibility of a solution that operates "deep within the bootstrapping regime,'' solving a problem that appears too hard to be addressed just with somewhat-homomorphic encryption. As part of this project, we implemented optimized versions of many bread and butter FHE tools. These tools include binary arithmetic, comparisons, partial sorting, and low-precision approximation of arbitrary functions (used for reciprocals, logarithms, etc.). Our solution can handle thousands of records and hundreds of fields, and it takes a few hours to run. To achieve this performance we had to be extremely frugal with expensive bootstrapping and data-movement operations. We believe that our experience in this project could serve as a guide for what is or is not currently feasible to do with fully-homomorphic encryption.

We give a framework for trapdoor-permutation-based sequential aggregate signatures (SAS) that unifies and simplifies prior work and leads to new results. The framework is based on ideal ciphers over large domains, which have recently been shown to be realizable in the random oracle model. The basic idea is to replace the random oracle in the full-domain-hash signature scheme with an ideal cipher. Each signer in sequence applies the ideal cipher, keyed by the message, to the output of the previous signer, and then inverts the trapdoor permutation on the result. We obtain different variants of the scheme by varying additional keying material in the ideal cipher and making different assumptions on the trapdoor permutation. In particular, we obtain the first scheme with lazy verification and signature size independent of the number of signers that does not rely on bilinear pairings. Since existing proofs that ideal ciphers over large domains can be realized in the random oracle model are lossy, our schemes do not currently permit practical instantiation parameters at a reasonable security level, and thus we view our contribution as mainly conceptual. However, we are optimistic tighter proofs will be found, at least in our specific application.

We describe new cryptanalytic attacks on the candidate branching program obfuscator proposed by Garg, Gentry, Halevi, Raykova, Sahai andWaters (GGHRSW) using the GGH13 graded encoding, and its variant using the GGH15 graded encoding as specified by Gentry, Gorbunov and Halevi. All our attacks require very specific structure of the branching programs being obfuscated, which in particular must have some input-partitioning property. Common to all our attacks are techniques to extract information about the "multiplicative bundling" scalars that are used in the GGHRSW construction. For GGHRSW over GGH13, we show how to recover the ideal generating the plaintext space when the branching program has input partitioning. Combined with the information that we extract about the "multiplicative bundling" scalars, we get a distinguishing attack by an extension of the annihilation attack of Miles, Sahai and Zhandry. Alternatively, once we have the ideal we can solve the principle-ideal problem (PIP) in classical subexponential time or quantum polynomial time, hence obtaining a total break. For the variant over GGH15, we show how to use the left-kernel technique of Coron, Lee, Lepoint and Tibouchi to recover ratios of the bundling scalars. Once we have the ratios of the scalar products, we can use factoring and PIP solvers (in classical subexponential time or quantum polynomial time) to find the scalars themselves, then run mixed-input attacks to break the obfuscation.

In this work, we study indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption for general circuits: Indistinguishability obfuscation requires that given any two equivalent circuits C0 and C1 of similar size, the obfuscations of C0 and C1 should be computationally indistinguishable. In functional encryption, cipher texts encrypt inputs x and keys are issued for circuits C. Using the key SKC to decrypt a cipher text CTx = Enc(x), yields the value C(x) but does not reveal anything else about x. Furthermore, no collusion of secret key holders should be able to learn anything more than the union of what they can each learn individually. We give constructions for indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption that supports all polynomial-size circuits. We accomplish this goal in three steps: - (1) We describe a candidate construction for indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 circuits. The security of this construction is based on a new algebraic hardness assumption. The candidate and assumption use a simplified variant of multilinear maps, which we call Multilinear Jigsaw Puzzles. (2) We show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 together with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (with decryption in NC1) to achieve indistinguishability obfuscation for all circuits. (3) Finally, we show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for circuits, public-key encryption, and non-interactive zero knowledge to achieve functional encryption for all circuits. The functional encryption scheme we construct also enjoys succinct cipher texts, which enables several other applications.