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Subversion-Resilient Public Key Encryption with Practical Watchdogs

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Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2021 (PKC 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12710))

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Abstract

Restoring the security of maliciously implemented cryptosystems has been widely considered challenging due to the fact that the subverted implementation could arbitrarily deviate from the official specification. Achieving security against adversaries that can arbitrarily subvert implementations seems to inherently require trusted component assumptions and/or architectural properties. At ASIACRYPT 2016, Russell et al. proposed an attractive model where a watchdog is used to test and approve individual components of an implementation before or during deployment. Such a detection-based strategy has been useful for designing various cryptographic schemes that are provably resilient to subversion.

We consider Russell et al.’s watchdog model from a practical perspective regarding watchdog efficiency. We find that the asymptotic definitional framework, while permitting strong positive theoretical results, does not yet guarantee practical watchdogs, due to the fact that the running time of a watchdog is only bounded by an abstract polynomial. Hence, in the worst case, the running time of the watchdog might exceed the running time of the adversary, which seems impractical for most applications. We adopt Russell et al.’s watchdog model to the concrete security setting and design the first subversion-resilient public-key encryption scheme which allows for extremely efficient watchdogs with only linear running time.

At the core of our construction is a new variant of a combiner for key encapsulation mechanisms (KEMs) by Giacon et al. (PKC’18). We combine this construction with a new subversion-resilient randomness generator that also can be checked by an efficient watchdog, even in constant time, which could be of independent interest for the design of other subversion-resilient cryptographic schemes. Our work thus shows how to apply Russell et al.’s watchdog model to design subversion-resilient cryptography with efficient watchdogs. We insist that this work does not intend to show that the watchdog model outperforms other defense approaches, but to demonstrate that practical watchdogs are practically achievable.

The first author was supported by the research training group “Human Centered Systems Security” (NERD.NRW) sponsored by the state of North-Rhine Westphalia. The second author was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62032005, No. 61702541, No. 61872087, No. 61872089) and the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by China Association for Science and Technology (No. YESS20170128). The third author was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement 802823.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Such a trusted operation is also required in the PKE construction by Russell et al.. in [28].

  2. 2.

    In our model the adversary provides an implementation of each building block instead of an implementation of \(\mathsf {KEMSR}\).

  3. 3.

    Even though it is straightforward to extend our description to the general case capturing both classical cases of “indistinguishability” and “search problems”, we refrain from introducing additional notation to achieve this. We will only consider indistinguishability in this paper.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Moti Yung and the anonymous reviewers of PKC 2021 for their helpful comments and suggestions, and in particular Cristina Onete for shepherding this paper and providing very detailed and valuable inputs.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Wuppertal, Wuppertal, Germany

    Pascal Bemmann & Tibor Jager

  2. School of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China

    Rongmao Chen

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  1. Pascal Bemmann
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Correspondence to Pascal Bemmann .

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  1. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Juan A. Garay

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Bemmann, P., Chen, R., Jager, T. (2021). Subversion-Resilient Public Key Encryption with Practical Watchdogs. In: Garay, J.A. (eds) Public-Key Cryptography – PKC 2021. PKC 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12710. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75245-3_23

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