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Asymmetric subversion attacks on signature and identification schemes

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Abstract

Studies of subversion attack against cryptosystem could be dated to several decades ago, while the Snowden revelation in 2013 has set off a new wave of exploring possible approaches to protect or subvert cryptography primitives in practice. Inspired by kleptographic attacks proposed by Young et al. [Crypto’96], we present the asymmetric subversion attack on signature and identification schemes in this work. Our contributions is summarized as follows:

  • We present the asymmetric subversion model for signature and identification schemes. The properties of our model are stronger than that of existing subversion model proposed by Giuseppe et al. [CCS’15] and show higher requirement in attack goal.

  • We propose the notion of splittable signature scheme and give a universal asymmetric subversion attack on such schemes. Our attack is independent of secret key size and more efficient than symmetric attacks introduced by Giuseppe et al. [CCS’15].

  • We introduce the asymmetric subversion attack on a special type of identification schemes and show that it can be transformed from splittable signature scheme.

Our subversion attack is demonstrated to be practical and could be mounted on many common schemes, which shows the danger of subversion attacks and spurs the exploring of effective deterrents.

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Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 61702541, No.61872087), the Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by CAST (Grant No. 2017QNRC001), and the Science Research Plan Program by NUDT (Grant No, ZK17-03-46).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Defense Technology, No.109, Deya Road, Kaifu District, Changsha, China

    Yi Wang, Rongmao Chen, Chi Liu, Baosheng Wang & Yongjun Wang

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  1. Yi Wang
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  2. Rongmao Chen
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  3. Chi Liu
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  4. Baosheng Wang
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  5. Yongjun Wang
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Correspondence to Rongmao Chen.

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A preliminary version of this paper appears in the proceedings of ACISP 2018 [1].

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Wang, Y., Chen, R., Liu, C. et al. Asymmetric subversion attacks on signature and identification schemes. Pers Ubiquit Comput 26, 849–862 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-018-01193-x

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