reusable fuzzy extractors

8 Submissions to publication!!! Code Offset in the Exponent

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This paper is finally published.  Its my new record for number of needed submissions.  The worst part about it is that it was Luke’s first paper and this unnecessarily stunted his growth.

 

I think its very cool but I say that about everything I end up writing up!

Abstract: Fuzzy extractors transform a noisy source e into a stable key which can be reproduced from a nearby value e’. They are a fundamental tool for key derivation from biometric sources. This work introduces code offset in the exponent and uses this construction to build the first reusable fuzzy extractor that simultaneously supports structured, low entropy distributions with correlated symbols and confidence information. These properties are specifically motivated by the most pertinent applications—key derivation from biometrics and physical unclonable functions—which typically demonstrate low entropy with additional statistical correlations and benefit from extractors that can leverage confidence information for efficiency. Code offset in the exponent is a group encoding of the code offset construction (Juels and Wattenberg, CCS 1999) that stores the value e in a one-time pad which is sampled as a codeword, Ax, of a linear error-correcting code: Ax+ e. Rather than encoding Ax+ e directly, code offset in the exponent calls for encoding by exponentiation of a generator in a cryptographically strong group. We demonstrate security of the construction in the generic group model, establishing security whenever the inner product between the error distribution and all vectors in the null space of the code is unpredictable. We show this condition includes distributions supported by multiple prior fuzzy extractors. Our analysis also shows a prior construction of pattern matching obfuscation (Bishop et al., Crypto 2018) is secure for more distributions than previously known.

Public Key Cryptography with Noisy Private Keys

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New Paper: Public Key Cryptography with Noisy Private Keys

Abstract: Passwords bootstrap symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, tying keys to an individual user. Biometrics are intended to strengthen this tie. Unfortunately, biometrics exhibit noise between repeated readings. Fuzzy extractors (Dodis et al., Eurocrypt 2004) derive stable symmetric keys from noisy sources.

We ask if it is also possible for noisy sources to directly replace private keys in asymmetric cryptosystems. We propose a new primitive called public-key cryptosystems with noisy keys. Such a cryptosystem functions when the private key varies according to some metric. An intuitive solution is to combine a fuzzy extractor with a public key cryptosystem. Unfortunately, fuzzy extractors need static helper information to account for noise. This helper information creates fundamental limitations on the resulting cryptosytems.

To overcome these limitations, we directly construct public-key encryption and digital signature algorithms with noisy keys. The core of our constructions is a computational version of the fuzzy vault (Juels and Sudan, Designs, Codes, and Cryptography 2006). Security of our schemes is based on graded encoding schemes (Garg et al., Eurocrypt 2013, Garg et al., TCC 2016). Importantly, our public-key encryption algorithm is based on a weaker model of grading encoding. If functional encryption or indistinguishable obfuscation exist in this weaker model, they also exist in the standard model.

In addition, we use the computational fuzzy vault to construct the first reusable fuzzy extractor (Boyen, CCS 2004) supporting a linear fraction of errors.

Joint work with Charles Herder, Marten van Dijk, and Srinivas Devadas

Pseudoentropic Isometries

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I was excited to join the paper Pseudoentropic Isometries: A New framework for fuzzy extractor reusability by Quentin Alamélou, Paul-Edmond Berthier, Chloe Cachet, Stéphane Cauchie, Benjamin Fuller, Philippe Gaborit, and Sailesh Simhadri.  This paper describes how to use the random oracle to build a reusable fuzzy extractor that corrects a linear fraction of errors.  Presented at AsiaCCS 2018.  The abstract is below.

Abstract:

Fuzzy extractors (Dodis et al., Eurocrypt 2004) turn a noisy secret into a stable, uniformly distributed key. Reusable fuzzy extractors remain secure when multiple keys are produced from a single noisy secret (Boyen, CCS 2004). Boyen proved that any information-theoretically secure reusable fuzzy extractor is subject to strong limitations. Simoens et al. (IEEE S&P, 2009) then showed deployed constructions suffer severe security breaks when reused. Canetti et al. (Eurocrypt 2016) proposed using computational security to sidestep this problem. They constructed a computationally secure reusable fuzzy extractor for the Hamming metric that corrects a sublinear fraction of errors.

We introduce a generic approach to constructing reusable fuzzy extractors. We define a new primitive called a reusable pseudoentropic isometry that projects an input metric space to an output metric space. This projection preserves distance and entropy even if the same input is mapped to multiple output metric spaces. A reusable pseudoentropy isometry yields a reusable fuzzy extractor by 1) randomizing the noisy secret using the isometry and 2) applying a traditional fuzzy extractor to derive a secret key.

We propose reusable pseudoentropic isometries for the set difference and Hamming metrics. The set difference construction is built from composable digital lockers (Canetti and Dakdouk, Eurocrypt 2008) yielding the first reusable fuzzy extractor that corrects a linear fraction of errors. For the Hamming metric, we show that the second construction of Canetti et al. (Eurocrypt 2016) can be seen as an instantiation of our framework. In both cases, the pseudoentropic isometry’s reusability requires noisy secrets distributions to have entropy in each symbol of the alphabet.

Lastly, we implement our set difference solution and describe two use cases.

Strong Key Derivation from Noisy Sources

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My Ph.D. has been completed and defended.  It is titled Strong Key Derivation from Noisy Sources.  It is largely drawn from three papers Computational Fuzzy Extractors, Reusable Fuzzy Extractors for Low-Entropy Distributions, and When are Fuzzy Extractors Possible?  Those papers are more up-to-date than my Ph.D.  My Ph.D does contain a cohesive summary of the results that can be useful as an introduction.