Volume 13, Issue 3-4

A family of ring-based cryptosystems, including the multilinear maps of Garg, Gentry and Halevi [Candidate multilinear maps from ideal lattices, Advances in Cryptology—EUROCRYPT 2013, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 7881, Springer, Heidelberg 2013, 1–17] and the fully homomorphic encryption scheme of Smart and Vercauteren [Fully homomorphic encryption with relatively small key and ciphertext sizes, Public Key Cryptography—PKC 2010, Lecture Notes in Comput. Sci. 6056, Springer, Berlin 2010, 420–443], are based on the hardness of finding a short generator of a principal ideal (short-PIP) in a number field typically in ℚ⁢(ζ2s){\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{2^{s}})}. In this paper, we present a polynomial-time quantum algorithm for recovering a generator of a principal ideal in ℚ⁢(ζ2s){\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{2^{s}})}, and we recall how this can be used to attack the schemes relying on the short-PIP in ℚ⁢(ζ2s){\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{2^{s}})} by using the work of Cramer et al. [R. Cramer, L. Ducas, C. Peikert and O. Regev, Recovering short generators of principal ideals in cyclotomic rings, IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive 2015, https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/313], which is derived from observations of Campbell, Groves and Shepherd [SOLILOQUY, a cautionary tale]. We put this attack into perspective by reviewing earlier attempts at providing an efficient quantum algorithm for solving the PIP in ℚ⁢(ζ2s){\mathbb{Q}(\zeta_{2^{s}})}. The assumption that short-PIP is hard was challenged by Campbell, Groves and Shepherd. They proposed an approach for solving short-PIP that proceeds in two steps: first they sketched a quantum algorithm for finding an arbitrary generator (not necessarily short) of the input principal ideal. Then they suggested that it is feasible to compute a short generator efficiently from the generator in step 1. Cramer et al. validated step 2 of the approach by giving a detailed analysis. In this paper, we focus on step 1, and we show that step 1 can run in quantum polynomial time if we use an algorithm for the continuous hidden subgroup problem (HSP) due to Eisenträger et al. [K. Eisenträger, S. Hallgren, A. Kitaev and F. Song, A quantum algorithm for computing the unit group of an arbitrary degree number field, Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing—STOC’14, ACM, New York 2014, 293–302].

We present a technique to enhance the security of the Goldreich, Goldwasser and Halevi (GGH) scheme. The security of GGH has practically been broken by lattice reduction techniques. Those attacks are successful due to the structure of the basis used in the secret key. In this work, we aim to present a new technique to alleviate this problem by modifying the public key which hides the structure of the corresponding private key. We intersect the initial lattice with a random one while keeping the initial lattice as our secret key and use the corresponding result of the intersection as the public key. We show sufficient evidence that this technique will make GGH implementations secure against the aforementioned attacks.

Recently, Attrapadung (Eurocrypt 2014) proposed a generic framework for fully (adaptively) secure predicate encryption (PE) based on a new primitive, called pair encodings . The author shows that if the underlying pair encoding scheme is either perfectly secure or computationally (doubly-selectively) secure, then the PE scheme will be fully secure. Although the pair encodings were solely introduced for PE, we show that these can also be used to construct predicate signatures, a signature analogue of PE. More precisely, we propose a generic construction of predicate signature (PS) from pair encoding schemes. Our construction provides unconditional signer privacy, and unforgeability in the adaptive model. Thereafter, we instantiate many PS schemes with new results, e.g., the first practical PS schemes for regular languages, the first attribute-based signature (ABS) scheme with constant-size signatures in the adaptive model, unbounded ABS with large universes in key-policy flavor, etc.

We improve on the first fall degree bound of polynomial systems that arise from a Weil descent along Semaev’s summation polynomials relevant to the solution of the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem via Gröbner basis algorithms.