Single-input Scheme Research Articles

From Minicrypt to Obfustopia via Private-Key Functional Encryption

Private-key functional encryption enables fine-grained access to symmetrically encrypted data. Although private-key functional encryption (supporting an unbounded number of keys and ciphertexts) seems significantly weaker than its public-key variant, its known realizations all rely on public-key functional encryption. At the same time, however, up until recently it was not known to imply any public-key primitive, demonstrating our poor understanding of this primitive. Bitansky et al. (Theory of cryptography—14th international conference, TCC 2016-B, 2016) showed that sub-exponentially secure private-key function encryption bridges from nearly exponential security in Minicrypt to slightly super-polynomial security in Cryptomania, and from sub-exponential security in Cryptomania to Obfustopia. Specifically, given any sub-exponentially secure private-key functional encryption scheme and a nearly exponentially secure one-way function, they constructed a public-key encryption scheme with slightly super-polynomial security. Assuming, in addition, a sub-exponentially secure public-key encryption scheme, they then constructed an indistinguishability obfuscator (or a public-key functional encryption scheme if the given building blocks are polynomially secure). We show that quasi-polynomially secure private-key functional encryption bridges from sub-exponential security in Minicrypt all the way to Cryptomania. First, given any quasi-polynomially secure private-key functional encryption scheme, we construct an indistinguishability obfuscator for circuits with inputs of poly-logarithmic length. Then, we observe that such an obfuscator can be used to instantiate many natural applications of indistinguishability obfuscation. Specifically, relying on sub-exponentially secure one-way functions, we show that quasi-polynomially secure private-key functional encryption implies not just public-key encryption but leads all the way to public-key functional encryption for circuits with inputs of poly-logarithmic length. Moreover, relying on sub-exponentially secure injective one-way functions, we show that quasi-polynomially secure private-key functional encryption implies a hard-on-average distribution over instances of a PPAD-complete problem. Underlying our constructions is a new transformation from single-input functional encryption to multi-input functional encryption in the private-key setting. The previously known such transformation (Brakerski et al. J Cryptol 31(2):434–520, 2018) required a sub-exponentially secure single-input scheme, and obtained a scheme supporting only a slightly super-constant number of inputs. Our transformation both relaxes the underlying assumption and supports more inputs: Given any quasi-polynomially secure single-input scheme, we obtain a scheme supporting a poly-logarithmic number of inputs.

Multi-input Functional Encryption in the Private-Key Setting: Stronger Security from Weaker Assumptions

We construct a general-purpose multi-input functional encryption scheme in the private-key setting. Namely, we construct a scheme where a functional key corresponding to a function f enables a user holding encryptions of $$x_1, \ldots , x_t$$ to compute $$f(x_1, \ldots , x_t)$$ but nothing else. This is achieved starting from any general-purpose private-key single-input scheme (without any additional assumptions) and is proven to be adaptively secure for any constant number of inputs t. Moreover, it can be extended to a super-constant number of inputs assuming that the underlying single-input scheme is sub-exponentially secure. Instantiating our construction with existing single-input schemes, we obtain multi-input schemes that are based on a variety of assumptions (such as indistinguishability obfuscation, multilinear maps, learning with errors, and even one-way functions), offering various trade-offs between security assumptions and functionality. Previous and concurrent constructions of multi-input functional encryption schemes either rely on stronger assumptions and provided weaker security guarantees (Goldwasser et al. in Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT, 2014; Ananth and Jain in Advances in cryptology—CRYPTO, 2015), or relied on multilinear maps and could be proven secure only in an idealized generic model (Boneh et al. in Advances in cryptology—EUROCRYPT, 2015). In comparison, we present a general transformation that simultaneously relies on weaker assumptions and guarantees stronger security.