Call for Papers: 3nd International Conference on Symbolic Computation and Cryptography

CIEM – Castro Urdiales, Spain, 11-13 July 2012, http://scc2012.unican.es/

CALL FOR PAPERS

IMPORTANT DATES

• Deadline for submission: April 28, 2012
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: May 18, 2012
• Deadline for final version: May 30, 2012
• Deadline for registration: June 12, 2012
• Deadline for special issue JSC: September 30, 2012

SCC 2012 is the third edition of a new series of conferences where  research and development in symbolic computation and cryptography may be presented and discussed. It is organized in response to the growing  interest in applying and developing methods, techniques, and software  tools of symbolic computation for cryptography. The use of Lattice  Reduction algorithms in cryptology and the application of Groebner  bases in the context of algebraic attacks are typical examples of  explored applications. The SCC 2012 conference is co-located with  third Workshop on Mathematical Cryptology (WMC 2012, http://wmc2012.unican.es/) , an event also organized by research group Algorithmic Mathematics  And Cryptography (AMAC), which will be held on 9-11 July 2012.

Summer School on Tools :: Mykonos, Greece :: 28.5 – 1.6.

Slightly redacted announcement for the 2012 Summer School on Tools below.

Following the success of the ECRYPT Workshop on Tools for Cryptanalysis 2010,the ECRYPT II Symmetric Techniques Virtual Lab (SymLab) is pleased to announce the 2012 Summer School on Tools. Covering selected topics in both symmetric and asymmetric cryptography, this summer school will provide a thorough overview of some of the most important cryptographic tools that emerged in recent years. While the summer school is aimed primarily at postgraduate students, attendance is open to all.

SymbolicData

Sage has many optional packages, about 50 actually. However, it is not necessarily well known what some of these do. For example, recently William asked me to fix some issue in the optional database_symbolic_data (still needing review btw. hint hint) package which bought it back to my attention. Shortly after, Burcin mentioned to me that he spent considerable time copy’n'pasting some standard ideals from some package to Sage’s input format. Time which he probably wouldn’t have spent if he’d known about the SymbolicData.org database and it’s Sage interface. Here’s in it action:

Ring-LWE and the GB(N) Problem

Over at the Bristol Cryptography Blog Martijn Stam writes about our “Polly Cracker, Revisted” paper:

We did not discuss the paper  in great detail, but Jake did mention one interesting avenue for continued research. Given that this new approach allows one to cast both LWE and approximate GCD in the same framework, can one also capture ring-LWE. If so, this might enable a better comparison of the various fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) schemes out there. The hope expressed by Jake was that this might allow a reduction to standard LWE (for the current batch of ring-LWE schemes), which would boost our confidence in those schemes.

This motivated me to express the Ring-LWE problem in a language of Gröbner bases, here’s what I could come up with so far.

Challenge matrices

Now, that we have a decent PNG reader/writer in M4RI, it’s much easier to get some challenge matrices out of the library. Below, I list and link a few such matrices as they appear during Gröbner basis computations.

file	matrix dimensions	density	PLE	M4RI	GB
HFE 25 matrix 5 (5.1M)	12307 x 13508	0.07600	1.03	0.59	0.81
HFE 30 matrix 5 (16M)	19907 x 29323	0.06731	4.79	2.70	4.76
HFE 35 matrix 5 (37M)	29969 x 55800	0.05949	19.33	9.28	19.51
Mutant matrix (39M)	26075 x 26407	0.18497	5.71	3.98	2.10
random n=24, m=26 matrix 3 (30M)	37587 x 38483	0.03832	20.69	21.08	19.36
random n=24_ m=26 matrix 4 (24M)	37576 x 32288	0.04073	18.65	28.44	17.05
SR(2,2,2,4) compressed, matrix 2 (328K)	5640 x 14297	0.00333	0.40	0.29	0.18
SR(2,2,2,4) compressed, matrix 4 (2.4M)	13665 x 17394	0.01376	2.18	3.04	2.04
SR(2,2,2,4) compressed, matrix 5 (2.8M)	11606 x 16282	0.03532	1.94	4.46	1.59
SR(2,2,2,4) matrix 6 (1.4M)	13067 x 17511	0.00892	1.90	2.09	1.38
SR(2,2,2,4) matrix 7 (1.7M)	12058 x 16662	0.01536	1.53	1.93	1.66
SR(2,2,2,4) matrix 9 (36M)	115834 x 118589	0.00376	528.21	578.54	522.98

The first three rows are from GB computations for the hidden field equations cryptosystem (those matrices were provided by Michael Brickenstein). The “mutant” row is a matrix as it appears during a run of the MXL2 algorithm on a random system (I believe). It was contributed by Wael Said. The rows “random n=25,m=26″ are matrices as they appear during a GB computation with PolyBoRi for a random system of equations in 24 variables and 26 equations. The remaining rows are matrices from PolyBoRi computations on small scale AES instances. Those rows which have “compressed” in their description correspond to systems where “linear variables” were eliminate before running the Gröbner basis algorithm.

The last three columns give running times (quite rough ones!) for computing an echelon form (not reduced) using (a) the M4RI algorithm, (b) PLE decomposition and (c) a first implementation of the TRSM for trivial pivots trick. As you can see, currently it’s not straight-forward to pick which strategy to use to eliminate matrices appearing during Gröbner basis computations: the best algorithm to pick varies between different problems and the differences can be dramatic.

Chen & Nguyen’s algorithm and Arora & Ge’s algorithm

In Faster Algorithms for Approximate Common Divisors: Breaking Fully-Homomorphic-Encryption Challenges over the Integers Yuanmi Chen and Phong Q. Nguyen (preprint here) propose a new algorithm for solving the approximate GCD problem. It drops the complexity from to in the general case and from to in the partial case (one multiple of is given noise-free) which is a pretty big deal.

The algorithm is based on two key ideas (explained using the partial approximate GCD problem):

Yet another Polly Cracker talk

… but this time

• it has less formal definitions.
• I also added a section talking about trading noise for degree and
• a brief discussion on related work.

Speaking of related work: Efficient Fully Homomorphic Encryption from (Standard) LWE by Zvika Brakerski and Vinod Vaikuntanathan is a good read. In summary, it has two main contributions:

1. a somewhat homomorphic scheme based on LWE which turns out to be the same (as far as I can tell) as ours and
2. a new dimension reduction trick which allows to turn it into a fully homomorphic scheme.

What is kind of curious about this work is its explicit non-algebraic perspective. While we talk about LWE from a multivariate polynomial ideal perspective the authors of 2011/344 explicitly state that their scheme is not.  I am not sure we’d have seen the dimension reduction trick with our perspective, though.

Polly Cracker, Revisited

I’ve been mentioning this work a few times; well,  finally a pre-print is ready (by myself, Pooya Farshim, Jean-Charles Faugère and Ludovic Perret).

In this paper we initiate the formal treatment of cryptographic constructions – commonly known as “Polly Cracker” – based on the hardness of computing remainders modulo an ideal over multivariate polynomial rings. This work is motivated by the observation that the Ideal Remainder (IR) problem is one of the most natural candidates to build homomorphic encryption schemes. To this end, we start by formalising and studying the relation between the ideal remainder problem and the problem of computing a Gröbner basis.

We show both positive and negative results.

On the negative side, we define a symmetric Polly Cracker encryption scheme and prove that this scheme only achieves bounded CPA security under the hardness of the IR problem. Furthermore, using results from computational commutative algebra we show that a large class of algebraic transformations cannot convert this scheme to a fully secure Polly Cracker-type scheme.

On the positive side, we formalise noisy variants of the ideal membership, ideal remainder, and Gröbner basis problems. These problems can be seen as natural generalisations of the LWE problem and the approximate GCD problem over polynomial rings. After formalising and justifying the hardness of the noisy assumptions we show – following the recent progress on homomorphic encryption – that noisy encoding of messages results in a fully IND-CPA secure somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme. Together with a standard symmetric-to-asymmetric transformation for additively homomorphic schemes, we provide a positive answer to the long standing open problem proposed by Barkee et al. (and later also by Gentry) of constructing a secure Polly Cracker-type cryptosystem reducible to the hardness of solving a random system of equations. Indeed, our results go beyond that by also providing a new family of somewhat homomorphic encryption schemes based on new, but natural, hard problems.

Our results also imply that Regev’s LWE-based public-key encryption scheme is (somewhat) multiplicatively homomorphic for appropriate choices of parameters. Finally, we estimate the parameters which define our cryptosystem and give a proof-of-concept implementation.

Sage source code included, have fun.

Slides: Introduction to Algebraic Techniques in Block Cipher Cryptanalysis

This morning I delivered my talk titled “Algebraic Techniques in Cryptanlysis (of block ciphers with a bias towards Gröbner bases)” at the ECrypt PhD Summerschool here in Albena, Bulgaria. I covered:

1. Why bother
2. Setting up equation systems
3. Solving (GBs, SAT solvers, MIP, Cube Testers)
4. “Advanced” Techniques

Well, here are the slides, which perhaps spend too much time explaining F4.

PS: This is as good as any opportunity to point to the paper “Algebraic Techniques in Differential Cryptanalysis Revisited” by Meiqin Wang, Yue Sun, Nicky Mouha and Bart Preneel accepted at ACISP 2011. I don’t agree with every statement in the paper – which revisits techniques Carlos and I proposed in 2009 – but our FSE 2009 paper does deserve a good whipping, i.e., we were way too optimistic about our attack.

Postdoc Position at LIP6

My team is hiring:

One-year post-doctoral position announcement

A 12-month postdoctoral position is available at the INRIA/LIP6/UPMC SALSA team on Campus Jussieu (located in the “Quartier Latin” of Paris, France). We are seeking candidates to apply for this position. The postdoc will work in the joint ANR/NSFC EXACTA project on polynomial system solving and its applications in cryptography, computational geometry, and biology.