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From Minicrypt to Obfustopia via Private-Key Functional Encryption

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. As a concrete (yet quite general) example, consider a user who stores her data on a remote server: The user uses the master secret key both for encrypting her data, and for generating functional keys that will enable the server to offer her various useful services.

  2. This is not true in various restricted cases, for example, when the functional encryption scheme has to support an a priori bounded number of functional keys or ciphertexts [39]. However, as mentioned, we focus on schemes that support an unbounded number of functional keys and ciphertexts.

  3. This holds even if the construction is allowed to generate functional keys (in a non-black-box manner) for any circuit that invokes one-way functions in a black-box manner.

  4. Bitansky et al. overcome the black-box barrier introduced by Asharov and Segev [8] by relying on the non-black-box construction of a private-key multi-input functional encryption scheme of Brakerski et al. [13].

  5. In this work, we focus on selectively secure schemes, where an adversary first submits all of its encryption queries, and can then adaptively interact with the key-generation oracle (see Definition 2.7). This notion of security suffices for the applications we consider in this paper.

  6. A similar strategy was also employed by Ananth and Jain [4] that showed how to use any t-input private-key scheme to get a private-key \((t+1)\)-input scheme under the additional assumption that a public-key functional encryption scheme exists. Their construction, however, did not incur the polynomial blowup and could be applied all the way to get a scheme that supports a polynomial number of inputs.

  7. We note that the notion of function privacy is very different from the one in the private-key setting, and in particular, natural definitions already imply obfuscation.

  8. We focus on selective security and do not define full security since there is a generic transformation [3].

  9. The injective one-way function can be relaxed to be a family of one-way functions such that a random element is an injective function with high probability. Furthermore, this primitive will not be used in the construction, but rather only in the proof of security.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Zvika Brakerski and the anonymous referees for many valuable comments. The first author thanks his advisor Moni Naor for his support and guidance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell Tech, New York, USA

    Ilan Komargodski

  2. School of Computer Science and Engineering, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 91904 , Jerusalem, Israel

    Gil Segev

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  1. Ilan Komargodski
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Correspondence to Ilan Komargodski.

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Communicated by Rafail Ostrovsky.

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Ilan Komargodski: Supported in part by a Packard Foundation Fellowship and by an AFOSR Grant FA9550-15-1-0262. Work done while being a Ph.D. student at the Weizmann Institute of Science, supported by grants from the Israel Science Foundation (No. 950/16) and by a Levzion Fellowship.

Gil Segev: Supported by the European Union’s 7th Framework Program (FP7) via a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant, by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Framework Program (H2020) via an ERC Grant (Grant No. 714253), by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant No. 483/13), by the Israeli Centers of Research Excellence (I-CORE) Program (Center No. 4/11), by the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Grant No. 2014632), and by a Google Faculty Research Award.

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Komargodski, I., Segev, G. From Minicrypt to Obfustopia via Private-Key Functional Encryption. J Cryptol 33, 406–458 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00145-019-09327-x

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