Abstract
A recent line of work has explored the use of physically unclonable functions (PUFs) for secure computation, with the goals of (1) achieving universal composability without additional setup and/or (2) obtaining unconditional security (i.e., avoiding complexity-theoretic assumptions). Initial work assumed that all PUFs, even those created by an attacker, are honestly generated. Subsequently, researchers have investigated models in which an adversary can create malicious PUFs with arbitrary behavior. Researchers have considered both malicious PUFs that might be stateful, as well as malicious PUFs that can have arbitrary behavior but are guaranteed to be stateless. We settle the main open questions regarding secure computation in the malicious-PUF model:
We prove that unconditionally secure oblivious transfer is impossible, even in the stand-alone setting, if the adversary can construct (malicious) stateful PUFs.
We show that if the attacker is limited to creating (malicious) stateless PUFs, then universally composable two-party computation is possible, unconditionally.
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Notes
This is easy to do by having \({\mathcal {S}}\) choose a random “trapdoor” \(\mathsf{td}\), and then create a circuit with the following behavior: on input \(x \ne \mathsf{td}\), return \(h_k(x)\) and concatenate x to the state; on input \(\mathsf{td}\), return the current state. Note that creating PUFs in this way will have only a negligible effect on the output of an honest execution of any PUF-based protocol, since the probability that the PUF is queried with \(\mathsf{td}\) during execution of the protocol is negligible.
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Acknowledgements
Work of Nils Fleischhacker and Dominique Schröder was done in part while at Saarland University and while visiting the University of Maryland. Their work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through funding for the Center for IT-Security, Privacy, and Accountability (CISPA; see www.cispa-security.org). The visit of Nils Fleischhacker was supported by the Saarbrücken Graduate School of Computer Science funded by the German National Excellence Initiative, and the visit of Dominique Schröder was supported by NSF Award #1223623. Work of Dominique Schröder was also supported by an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor Program Award. Work of Jonathan Katz was supported in part by NSF Award #1223623, as well as by a Humboldt Award. Work of Anna Lysyanskaya was supported by NSF Awards #0964379 and #1012060.
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Dachman-Soled, D., Fleischhacker, N., Katz, J. et al. Feasibility and Infeasibility of Secure Computation with Malicious PUFs. J Cryptol 33, 595–617 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-019-09329-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-019-09329-9