On the impossibility of cryptography with tamperable randomness

Per Austrin, Kai Min Chung, Mohammad Mahmoody, Rafael Pass, Karn Seth

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

28 Scopus citations

Abstract

We initiate a study of the security of cryptographic primitives in the presence of efficient tampering attacks to the randomness of honest parties. More precisely, we consider p-tampering attackers that may efficiently tamper with each bit of the honest parties' random tape with probability p, but have to do so in an "online" fashion. Our main result is a strong negative result: We show that any secure encryption scheme, bit commitment scheme, or zero-knowledge protocol can be "broken" with probability p by a p-tampering attacker.The core of this result is a new Fourier analytic technique for biasing the output of bounded-value functions, which may be of independent interest. We also show that this result cannot be extended to primitives such as signature schemes and identification protocols: assuming the existence of one-way functions, such primitives can be made resilient to (1/poly(n))- tampering attacks where n is the security parameter.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAdvances in Cryptology, CRYPTO 2014 - 34th Annual Cryptology Conference, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages462-479
Number of pages18
EditionPART 1
ISBN (Print)9783662443705
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event34rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2014 - Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Duration: 17 Aug 201421 Aug 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
NumberPART 1
Volume8616 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference34rd Annual International Cryptology Conference, CRYPTO 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySanta Barbara, CA
Period17/08/1421/08/14

Funding

FundersFunder number
Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
European Commission
National Science FoundationCCF-1214844, CNS-1217821, 1214844
Seventh Framework Programme226203

    Keywords

    • Encryption
    • Randomness
    • Tampering

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