Christian Badertscher

Augmented Secure Channels and the Goal of the TLS 1.3 Record Layer

Motivated by the wide adoption of authenticated encryption and TLS, we suggest a basic channel abstraction, an augmented secure channeli¾?ASC, that allows a sender to send a receiver messages consisting of two parts, where one is privacy-protected and both are authenticity-protected. Working in the tradition of constructive cryptography, we formalize this idea and provide a construction of this kind of channel using the lower-level tool authenticated-encryption. We look at recent proposals on TLSi¾?1.3 and suggest that the criterion by which their security can be judged is quite simple: do they construct an ASC? Due to this precisely defined goal, we are able to give a natural construction that comes with a rigorous security proof and directly leads to a proposal on TLSi¾?1.3 that is provably secure.

Bitcoin as a Transaction Ledger: A Composable Treatment

Bitcoin is one of the most prominent examples of a distributed cryptographic protocol that is extensively used in reality. Nonetheless, existing security proofs are property-based, and as such they do not support composition.

Strengthening Access Control Encryption

Access control encryption (ACE) was proposed by Damgard et al. to enable the control of information flow between several parties according to a given policy specifying which parties are, or are not, allowed to communicate. By involving a special party, called the sanitizer, policy-compliant communication is enabled while policy-violating communication is prevented, even if sender and receiver are dishonest. To allow outsourcing of the sanitizer, the secrecy of the message contents and the anonymity of the involved communication partners is guaranteed.

But Why Does It Work? A Rational Protocol Design Treatment of Bitcoin

An exciting recent line of work has focused on formally investigating the core cryptographic assumptions underlying the security of Bitcoin. In a nutshell, these works conclude that Bitcoin is secure if and only if the majority of the mining power is honest. Despite their great impact, however, these works do not address an incisive question asked by positivists and Bitcoin critics, which is fuelled by the fact that Bitcoin indeed works in reality: Why should the real-world system adhere to these assumptions?

Robust Authenticated Encryption and the Limits of Symmetric Cryptography

Robust authenticated encryption RAE is a primitive for symmetric encryption that allows to flexibly specify the ciphertext expansion, i.e., how much longer the ciphertext is compared to the plaintext. For every ciphertext expansion, RAE aims at providing the best-possible authenticity and confidentiality. To investigate whether this is actually achieved, we characterize exactly the guarantees symmetric cryptography can provide for any given ciphertext expansion. Our characterization reveals not only that RAE reaches the claimed goal, but also, contrary to prior belief, that one cannot achieve full confidentiality without ciphertext expansion. This provides new insights into the limits of symmetric cryptography. Moreover, we provide a rigorous treatment of two previously only informally stated additional features of RAE; namely, we show how redundancy in the message space can be exploited to improve the security and we analyze the exact security loss if multiple messages are encrypted with the same nonce.

Composable and Robust Outsourced Storage

The security of data outsourcing mechanisms has become a crucial aspect of today’s IT infrastructures and they are the cryptographic foundations of real-world applications. The very fundamental goals are ensuring storage integrity and auditability, confidentiality, and access pattern hiding, as well as combinations of all of them. Despite sharing a common setting, security analyses of these tasks are often performed in a stand-alone fashion expressed in different models, which makes it hard to assess the overall security of a protocol or application involving several security schemes at once. In this work, we fill this gap and propose a composable framework suitable to capture various aspects of outsourced storage security and its applications. We instantiate the basic client-server setting in this model, where the goal of the honest client is to retain security in the presence of a malicious server. Three specific contributions of this paper are: 1. We present a novel definition for secure and robust outsourcing schemes and underline why this is needed in practice. Our definition is stronger than previous definitions for oblivious RAM or software protection in that it assures strong security guarantees against active attacks. Schemes meeting the definition not only assure that an attacker cannot learn the access pattern, but guarantee resilience to errors and the prevention of targeted attacks to specific locations. Unfortunately, several existing schemes cannot achieve this high level of security. For completeness, we provide a protocol based on Path ORAM that showcases that stronger security is actually achievable. 2. We present a novel definition for auditable storage, capturing the guarantee that a successful audit implies that the current server state allows the client to retrieve his data. We develop an audit mechanism, based on secure and robust outsourcing schemes, that is similar to the construction by Cash et al. (Eurocrpyt 2013), but is universally composable and fault-tolerant. 3. We revisit the security claim of a widely-used challenge-response audit mechanism, in which the server has to compute a hash H(F||c) on the file F concatenated with a uniformly random challenge c chosen by the client. Being concerned with composable security, we prove that this audit mechanism is not secure, even in the random oracle model, without additional assumptions. The composable security of this basic audit scheme was implicitly assumed in Ristenpart et al. (Eurocrypt 2011). To complete the picture, we state the additional assumptions for this audit mechanism to be provably secure and discuss the implication on practical security.

On Composable Security for Digital Signatures

A digital signature scheme (DSS), which consists of a key-generation, a signing, and a verification algorithm, is an invaluable tool in cryptography. The first and still most widely used security definition for a DSS, existential unforgeability under chosen-message attack, was introduced by Goldwasser, Micali, and Rivest in 1988.

A Constructive Perspective on Signcryption Security

Signcryption is a public-key cryptographic primitive, originally introduced by Zheng (Crypto ’97), that allows parties to establish secure communication without the need of prior key agreement. Instead, a party registers its public key at a certificate authority (CA), and only needs to retrieve the public key of the intended partner from the CA before being able to protect the communication. Signcryption schemes provide both authenticity and confidentiality of sent messages and can offer a simpler interface to applications and better performance compared to generic compositions of signature and encryption schemes.