Blockchain technologies recently received a considerable amount of attention. While the initial focus was mainly on the use of blockchains in the context of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, application scenarios now go far beyond this. Most blockchains have the property that once some object, e.g., a block or a transaction, has been registered to be included into the blockchain, it is persisted and there are no means to modify it again. While this is an essential feature of most blockchain scenarios, it is still often desirable-at times it may be even legally required-to allow for breaking this immutability in a controlled way. Only recently, Ateniese et al. (EUROS&P 2017) proposed an elegant solution to this problem on the block level. Thereby, the authors replace standard hash functions with so-called chameleon-hashes (Krawczyk and Rabin, NDSS 2000). While their work seems to offer a suitable solution to the problem of controlled rewriting of blockchains, their approach is too coarse-grained in that it only offers an all-or-nothing solution. We revisit this idea and introduce the novel concept of policybased chameleon-hashes (PCH). PCHs generalize the notion of chameleon-hashes by giving the party computing a hash the ability to associate access policies to the generated hashes. Anyone who possesses enough privileges to satisfy the policy can then find arbitrary collisions for a given hash. We then apply this concept to transaction-level rewriting within blockchains, and thus support fine-grained and controlled modifiability of blockchain objects. Besides modeling PCHs, we present a generic construction of PCHs (using a strengthened version of chameleon-hashes with ephemeral trapdoors which we also introduce), rigorously prove its security, and instantiate it with efficient building blocks. We report first implementation results.
Abstract. We adapt the concept of a programmable hash function (PHF, Crypto 2008) to a setting in which a multilinear map is available. This enables new PHFs with previously unachieved parameters.To demonstrate their usefulness, we show how our (standard-model) PHFs can replace random oracles in several well-known cryptographic constructions. Namely, we obtain standard-model versions of the BonehFranklin identity-based encryption scheme, the Boneh-Lynn-Shacham signature scheme, and the Sakai-Ohgishi-Kasahara identity-based noninteractive key exchange (ID-NIKE) scheme. The ID-NIKE scheme is the first scheme of its kind in the standard model.Our abstraction also allows to derive hierarchical versions of the above schemes in settings with multilinear maps. This in particular yields simple and efficient hierarchical generalizations of the BF, BLS, and SOK schemes. In the case of hierarchical ID-NIKE, ours is the first such scheme with full security, in either the random oracle model or the standard model.While our constructions are formulated with respect to a generic multilinear map, we also outline the necessary adaptations required for the recent "noisy" multilinear map candidate due to Garg, Gentry, and Halevi.
We construct an identity-based encryption (IBE) scheme that is tightly secure in a very strong sense. Specifically, we consider a setting with many instances of the scheme and many encryptions per instance. In this setting, we reduce the security of our scheme to a variant of a simple assumption used for a similar purpose by Chen and Wee (Crypto 2013). The security loss of our reduction is O(k) (where k is the security parameter). Our scheme is the first IBE scheme to achieve this strong flavor of tightness under a simple assumption. Technically, our scheme is a variation of the IBE scheme by Chen and Wee. However, in order to "lift" their results to the multi-instance, multi-ciphertext case, we need to develop new ideas. In particular, while we build on (and extend) their high-level proof strategy, we deviate significantly in the low-level proof steps.
We put forward new techniques for designing signature schemes. As a result, we present practical signature schemes based on the CDH, the RSA, and the SIS assumptions. Our schemes compare favorably with existing schemes based on these assumptions. Our core idea is the use of tag-based signatures. Concretely, each signatures contains a tag which is uniformly chosen from a suitable tag set. Intuitively, the tag provides a way to embed instances of computational problems. Indeed, carefully choosing these tag spaces provides new ways to partition the set of possible message-tag pairs into "signable" and "unsignable" pairs. In our security proof, we will thus be able to sign all adversarially requested messages, and at the same time use an adversarially generated forgery with suitably large probability.
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