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Anonymous Whistleblowing over Authenticated Channels

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Theory of Cryptography (TCC 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13748))

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Abstract

The goal of anonymous whistleblowing is to publicly disclose a message while at the same time hiding the identity of the sender in a way that even if suspected of being the sender, this cannot be proven. While many solutions to this problem have been proposed over the years, they all require some form of interaction with trusted or non-colluding parties. In this work, we ask whether this is fundamentally inherent. We put forth the notion of anonymous transfer as a primitive allowing to solve this problem without relying on any participating trusted parties.

We initiate the theoretical study of this question, and derive negative and positive results on the existence of such a protocol. We refute the feasibility of asymptotically secure anonymous transfer, where the message will be received with overwhelming probability while at the same time the identity of the sender remains hidden with overwhelming probability. On the other hand, resorting to fine-grained cryptography, we provide a heuristic instantiation (assuming ideal obfuscation) which guarantees that the message will be correctly received with overwhelming probability and the identity of the sender leaks with vanishing probability. Our results provide strong foundations for the study of the possibility of anonymous communications through authenticated channels, an intriguing goal which we believe to be of fundamental interest.

T. Agrikola and S. Maier—Supported by funding from the topic Engineering Secure Systems of the Helmholtz Association (HGF) and by KASTEL Security Research Labs.

G. Couteau—Supported by ANR SCENE.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This follows directly from the fact that given undetectable secure computation for any function \(\textit{f}\), we can directly construct AT by computing a function that lets two potential senders insert either a bitstring for transfer or \(\bot \) and outputs one of them (i.e. the one input that is not \(\bot \)) to the receiver.

  2. 2.

    A \(\textit{c}\)-round protocol corresponds to a synchronous model, where each message is broadcasted and the messages in each round only depend on messages from previous rounds, see [ACM21] for a formal definition.

  3. 3.

    We slightly abuse notation but we believe the meaning to be clear.

  4. 4.

    Since the protocol is silent-receiver, there is no message from the receiver; furthermore, assuming that the sender message is \(\textit{m}\)-bit is without loss of generality, since otherwise the protocol is trivially not anonymous.

  5. 5.

    See [ACM21] for a definition of sEUF-CMA, IND$-CCA and ideal obfuscation.

  6. 6.

    This is denoted in the figure by the \(\textsf{CointossS}_{( \textit{p} )}^{( \pi )}( \sigma , \overline{\sigma } )\) function, which returns \(\sigma \), i.e. the first argument, with probability \(\textit{p}\), and \(\overline{\sigma }\), i.e. the second argument, with the complementary probability \(( 1-\textit{p} )\), where the randomness for \(\textit{p}\) is extracted from the argument provided by \(\pi \).

  7. 7.

    Secrecy is an additional property we require for Strong AT. Secrecy means that no third party can extract the transferred bit from the transcript (see the full version [ACM21] for the formal definition). This property will be relevant for applications that use AT as a building block.

  8. 8.

    This is in contrast to the Hellinger-distance \(\textsf{H}\) which yields tighter bounds but where the amount of information from a single query really depends on the oracle \(\textsf{O}_{\chi }\) which is queried. This makes it harder to provide meaningful bounds for adversaries querying different oracles with their \(\textit{t}\) samples.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Rafael Pass for insightful comments and contributions to early stages of this work.

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Correspondence to Thomas Agrikola .

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Agrikola, T., Couteau, G., Maier, S. (2022). Anonymous Whistleblowing over Authenticated Channels. In: Kiltz, E., Vaikuntanathan, V. (eds) Theory of Cryptography. TCC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13748. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22365-5_24

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