Vinod Vaikuntanathan's research while affiliated with Idenix Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and other places

Publications (185)

Preprint
We study the complexity of lattice problems in a world where algorithms, reductions, and protocols can run in superpolynomial time, revisiting four foundational results: two worst-case to average-case reductions and two protocols. We also show a novel protocol. 1. We prove that secret-key cryptography exists if $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{n})$-approximate...
Chapter
Aggregate signatures (Boneh, Gentry, Lynn, Shacham, Eurocrypt 2003) enable compressing a set of N signatures on N different messages into a short aggregate signature. This reduces the space complexity of storing the signatures from linear in N to a fixed constant (that depends only on the security parameter). However, verifying the aggregate signat...
Chapter
We construct a classically verifiable succinct interactive argument for quantum computation (BQP) with communication complexity and verifier runtime that are poly-logarithmic in the runtime of the BQP computation (and polynomial in the security parameter). Our protocol is secure assuming the post-quantum security of indistinguishability obfuscation...
Preprint
FHE offers protection to private data on third-party cloud servers by allowing computations on the data in encrypted form. However, to support general-purpose encrypted computations, all existing FHE schemes require an expensive operation known as bootstrapping. Unfortunately, the computation cost and the memory bandwidth required for bootstrapping...
Preprint
Full-text available
We construct a classically verifiable succinct interactive argument for quantum computation (BQP) with communication complexity and verifier runtime that are poly-logarithmic in the runtime of the BQP computation (and polynomial in the security parameter). Our protocol is secure assuming the post-quantum security of indistinguishability obfuscation...
Preprint
Given the computational cost and technical expertise required to train machine learning models, users may delegate the task of learning to a service provider. We show how a malicious learner can plant an undetectable backdoor into a classifier. On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a me...
Preprint
Full-text available
We show direct and conceptually simple reductions between the classical learning with errors (LWE) problem and its continuous analog, CLWE (Bruna, Regev, Song and Tang, STOC 2021). This allows us to bring to bear the powerful machinery of LWE-based cryptography to the applications of CLWE. For example, we obtain the hardness of CLWE under the class...
Preprint
Full-text available
We show a general method of compiling any $k$-prover non-local game into a single-prover interactive game maintaining the same (quantum) completeness and (classical) soundness guarantees (up to negligible additive factors in a security parameter). Our compiler uses any quantum homomorphic encryption scheme (Mahadev, FOCS 2018; Brakerski, CRYPTO 201...
Chapter
The question of minimizing the computational overhead of cryptography was put forward by the work of Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky and Sahai (STOC 2008). The main conclusion was that, under plausible assumptions, most cryptographic primitives can be realized with constant computational overhead. However, this ignores an additive term that may depen...
Preprint
Full-text available
Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) allows arbitrarily complex computations on encrypted data without ever needing to decrypt it, thus enabling us to maintain data privacy on third-party systems. Unfortunately, sustaining deep computations with FHE requires a periodic noise reduction step known as bootstrapping. The cost of the bootstrapping operati...
Chapter
The main conceptual contribution of this paper is a unification of two leading paradigms for constructing succinct argument systems, namely Kilian’s protocol and the $$\mathsf {BMW}$$ (Biehl-Meyer-Wetzel) heuristic. We define the notion of a multi-extractable somewhere statistically binding ($$\mathsf {meSSB}$$) hash family, an extension of the not...
Chapter
We present a construction of indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) that relies on the learning with errors (LWE) assumption together with a new notion of succinctly sampling pseudorandom LWE samples. We then present a candidate LWE sampler whose security is related to the hardness of solving systems of polynomial equations. Our construction improve...
Chapter
Block ciphers such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (Rijndael) are used extensively in practice, yet our understanding of their security continues to be highly incomplete. This paper promotes and continues a research program aimed at proving the security of block ciphers against important and well-studied classes of attacks. In particular, we in...
Chapter
MiniQCrypt is a world where quantum-secure one-way functions exist, and quantum communication is possible. We construct an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol in MiniQCrypt that achieves simulation-security in the plain model against malicious quantum polynomial-time adversaries, building on the foundational work of Crépeau and Killian (FOCS 1988) and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Sparse linear regression is the well-studied inference problem where one is given a design matrix $\mathbf{A} \in \mathbb{R}^{M\times N}$ and a response vector $\mathbf{b} \in \mathbb{R}^M$, and the goal is to find a solution $\mathbf{x} \in \mathbb{R}^{N}$ which is $k$-sparse (that is, it has at most $k$ non-zero coordinates) and minimizes the pre...
Preprint
Full-text available
Balancing the needs of data privacy and predictive utility is a central challenge for machine learning in healthcare. In particular, privacy concerns have led to a dearth of public datasets, complicated the construction of multi-hospital cohorts and limited the utilization of external machine learning resources. To remedy this, new methods are requ...
Article
2020 ACM. This paper shows several connections between data structure problems and cryptography against preprocessing attacks. Our results span data structure upper bounds, cryptographic applications, and data structure lower bounds, as summarized next. First, we apply Fiat-Naor inversion, a technique with cryptographic origins, to obtain a data st...
Article
Much of modern cryptography, starting from public-key encryption and going beyond, is based on the hardness of structured (mostly algebraic) problems like factoring, discrete log, or finding short lattice vectors. While structure is perhaps what enables advanced applications, it also puts the hardness of these problems in question. In particular, t...
Chapter
We met as a group during the Homomorphic Encryption Standardization Workshop on July 13–14, 2017, hosted at Microsoft Research in Redmond, and again during the second workshop on March 15–16, 2018 in MIT. Researchers from around the world represented government, industry, and academia. There are several research groups around the world who have mad...
Preprint
MiniQCrypt is a world where quantum-secure one-way functions exist, and quantum communication is possible. We construct an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol in MiniQCrypt that achieves simulation-security in the plain model against malicious quantum polynomial-time adversaries, building on the foundational work of Bennett, Brassard, Cr\'epeau and Sk...
Preprint
In this work, we show the first worst-case to average-case reduction for the classical $k$-SUM problem. A $k$-SUM instance is a collection of $m$ integers, and the goal of the $k$-SUM problem is to find a subset of $k$ elements that sums to $0$. In the average-case version, the $m$ elements are chosen uniformly at random from some interval $[-u,u]$...
Chapter
The Fiat-Shamir transform is a methodology for compiling a (public-coin) interactive proof system for a language L into a non-interactive argument system for L. Proving security of the Fiat-Shamir transform in the standard model, especially in the context of succinct arguments, is largely an unsolved problem. The work of Canetti et al. (STOC 2019)...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) refer to observational studies of a genome-wide set of genetic variants across many individuals to see if any genetic variants are associated with a certain trait. A typical GWAS analysis of a disease phenotype involves iterative logistic regression of a case/control phenotype on a single-neucloti...
Chapter
We revisit the well-studied problem of extracting nearly uniform randomness from an arbitrary source of sufficient min-entropy. Strong seeded extractors solve this problem by relying on a public random seed, which is unknown to the source. Here, we consider a setting where the seed is reused over time and the source may depend on prior calls to the...
Chapter
Dwork and Naor (FOCS ’00) defined ZAPs as 2-message witness-indistinguishable proofs that are public-coin. We relax this to ZAPs with private randomness (ZAPRs), where the verifier can use private coins to sample the first message (independently of the statement being proved), but the proof must remain publicly verifiable given only the protocol tr...
Article
International Association for Cryptologic Research 2020. Dwork and Naor (FOCS ’00) defined ZAPs as 2-message witness-indistinguishable proofs that are public-coin. We relax this to ZAPs with private randomness (ZAPRs), where the verifier can use private coins to sample the first message (independently of the statement being proved), but the proof m...
Book
International Association for Cryptologic Research 2020. The Fiat-Shamir transform is a methodology for compiling a (public-coin) interactive proof system for a language L into a non-interactive argument system for L. Proving security of the Fiat-Shamir transform in the standard model, especially in the context of succinct arguments, is largely an...
Article
Marshall Ball, Elette Boyle, Akshay Degwekar, Apoorvaa Deshpande, Alon Rosen, Vinod. Reductions between problems, the mainstay of theoretical computer science, efficiently map an instance of one problem to an instance of another in such a way that solving the latter allows solving the former.1 The subject of this work is “lossy” reductions, where t...
Article
International Association for Cryptologic Research 2020. We revisit the well-studied problem of extracting nearly uniform randomness from an arbitrary source of sufficient min-entropy. Strong seeded extractors solve this problem by relying on a public random seed, which is unknown to the source. Here, we consider a setting where the seed is reused...
Chapter
We construct private-key and public-key functional encryption schemes in the bounded-key setting; that is, secure against adversaries that obtain an a-priori bounded number of functional keys (also known as the collusion bound).
Chapter
Middle-product learning with errors (MP-LWE) was recently introduced by Rosca, Sakzad, Steinfeld and Stehlé (CRYPTO 2017) as a way to combine the efficiency of Ring-LWE with the more robust security guarantees of plain LWE. While Ring-LWE is at the heart of efficient lattice-based cryptosystems, it involves the choice of an underlying ring which is...
Chapter
We initiate a systematic study of pseudorandom functions (PRFs) that are computable by simple matrix branching programs; we refer to these objects as “matrix PRFs”. Matrix PRFs are attractive due to their simplicity, strong connections to complexity theory and group theory, and recent applications in program obfuscation.
Article
2019, International Association for Cryptologic Research. Middle-product learning with errors (MP-LWE) was recently introduced by Rosca, Sakzad, Steinfeld and Stehlé (CRYPTO 2017) as a way to combine the efficiency of Ring-LWE with the more robust security guarantees of plain LWE. While Ring-LWE is at the heart of efficient lattice-based cryptosyst...
Conference Paper
Article
We show that assuming the strong exponential-Time hypothesis (SETH), there are no non-Trivial algorithms for the nearest codeword problem (NCP), the minimum distance problem (MDP), or the nearest codeword problem with preprocessing (NCPP) on linear codes over any finite field. More precisely, we show that there are no NCP, MDP, or NCPP algorithms r...
Book
We construct private-key and public-key functional encryption schemes in the bounded-key setting; that is, secure against adversaries that obtain an a-priori bounded number of functional keys (also known as the collusion bound). An important metric considered in the literature on bounded-key functional encryption schemes is the dependence of the ru...
Chapter
We consider the problem of Non-Interactive Two-Party Secure Computation (NISC), where Rachel wishes to publish an encryption of her input x, in such a way that any other party, who holds an input y, can send her a single message which conveys to her the value f(x, y), and nothing more. We demand security against malicious parties. While such protoc...
Preprint
Given a set of integers $\{a_1, \ldots, a_N\}$, the 3SUM problem requires finding $a_i, a_j, a_k \in A$ such that $a_i + a_j = a_k$. A preprocessing version of 3SUM, called 3SUM-Indexing, considers an initial offline phase where a computationally unbounded algorithm receives $a_1,\ldots,a_N$ and produces a data structure with $S$ words of $w$ bits...
Chapter
We present a worst case decoding problem whose hardness reduces to that of solving the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem, in some parameter regime. Prior to this work, no worst case hardness result was known for LPN (as opposed to syntactically similar problems such as Learning with Errors). The caveat is that this worst case problem is only...
Article
International Association for Cryptologic Research 2019. We present a worst case decoding problem whose hardness reduces to that of solving the Learning Parity with Noise (LPN) problem, in some parameter regime. Prior to this work, no worst case hardness result was known for LPN (as opposed to syntactically similar problems such as Learning with Er...
Preprint
We continue the study of computational limitations in learning robust classifiers, following the recent work of Bubeck, Lee, Price and Razenshteyn. First, we demonstrate classification tasks where computationally efficient robust classifiers do not exist, even when computationally unbounded robust classifiers do. We rely on the hardness of decoding...
Book
2019, International Association for Cryptologic Research. We initiate a systematic study of pseudorandom functions (PRFs) that are computable by simple matrix branching programs; we refer to these objects as “matrix PRFs”. Matrix PRFs are attractive due to their simplicity, strong connections to complexity theory and group theory, and recent applic...
Article
Indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) is a tremendous notion, powerful enough to give rise to almost any known cryptographic object. Prior candidate IO constructions were based on specific assumptions on algebraic objects called multi-linear graded encodings. We present a generic construction of indistinguishability obfuscation from public-key func...
Chapter
A traitor tracing scheme is a public key encryption scheme for which there are many secret decryption keys. Any of these keys can decrypt a ciphertext; moreover, even if a coalition of users collude, put together their decryption keys and attempt to create a new decryption key, there is an efficient algorithm to trace the new key to at least one th...
Conference Paper
We study secret sharing schemes for general (non-threshold) access structures. A general secret sharing scheme for n parties is associated to a monotone function F:{0,1}ⁿ→{0,1}. In such a scheme, a dealer distributes shares of a secret s among n parties. Any subset of parties T ⊆ [n] should be able to put together their shares and reconstruct the s...
Article
Full-text available
We study secure and undetectable communication in a world where governments can read all encrypted communications of citizens. We consider a world where the only permitted communication method is via a government-mandated encryption scheme, using government-mandated keys. Citizens caught trying to communicate otherwise (e.g., by encrypting strings...
Article
The growing popularity of cloud-based machine learning raises a natural question about the privacy guarantees that can be provided in such a setting. Our work tackles this problem in the context where a client wishes to classify private images using a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained by a server. Our goal is to build efficient protocols w...
Article
A watermarking scheme for programs embeds some information called a mark into a program while preserving its functionality. No adversary can remove the mark without damaging the functionality of the program. In this work, we study the problem of watermarking various cryptographic programs such as pseudorandom function (PRF) evaluation, decryption,...
Article
2018 Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. We show how to construct indistinguishability obfuscation (\bfi/bfO) for RAM programs with bounded space, assuming/bfi/bfO for circuits and one-way functions, both with subexponential security. That is, given a RAM program whose computation requires space s(n) in the worst case for inputs of leng...
Article
2018, International Association for Cryptologic Research. We carry out a systematic study of the GGH15 graded encoding scheme used with general branching programs. This is motivated by the fact that general branching programs are more efficient than permutation branching programs and also substantially more expressive in the read-once setting. Our...
Article
We study secret sharing schemes for general (non-threshold) access structures. A general secret sharing scheme for n parties is associated to a monotone function F: {0, 1}n → {0, 1}. In such a scheme, a dealer distributes shares of a secret s among n parties. Any subset of parties T ⊆ [n] should be able to put together their shares and reconstruct...
Article
International Association for Cryptologic Research 2018. In anonymous identity-based encryption (IBE), ciphertexts not only hide their corresponding messages, but also their target identity. We construct an anonymous IBE scheme based on the Computational Diffie-Hellman (CDH) assumption in general groups (and thus, as a special case, based on the ha...
Conference Paper
In a constrained PRF, the owner of the PRF key K can generate constrained keys $$K_f$$ that allow anyone to evaluate the PRF on inputs x that satisfy the predicate f (namely, where f(x) is “true”) but reveal no information about the PRF evaluation on the other inputs. A private constrained PRF goes further by requiring that the constrained key $$K_... Conference Paper Lin and Tessaro (ePrint 2017) recently proposed indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) and functional encryption (FE) candidates and proved their security based on two assumptions: a standard assumption on bilinear maps and a non-standard assumption on “Goldreich-like” pseudorandom generators. In a nutshell, their second assumption requires the exis... Article Full-text available We develop two IND-CPA-secure multihop unidirectional Proxy Re-Encryption (PRE) schemes by applying the Ring-LWE (RLWE) key switching approach from the homomorphic encryption literature. Unidirectional PRE is ideal for secure publish-subscribe operations where a publisher encrypts information using a public key without knowing upfront who the subsc... Article Fine-grained cryptographic primitives are ones that are secure against adversaries with an a-priori bounded polynomial amount of resources (time, space or parallel-time), where the honest algorithms use less resources than the adversaries they are designed to fool. Such primitives were previously studied in the context of time-bounded adversaries (... Conference Paper We present new protocols for conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS), where two parties want to disclose a secret to a third party if and only if their respective inputs satisfy some predicate. Conference Paper Much of modern cryptography, starting from public-key encryption and going beyond, is based on the hardness of structured (mostly algebraic) problems like factoring, discrete log or finding short lattice vectors. While structure is perhaps what enables advanced applications, it also puts the hardness of these problems in question. In particular, th... Article Lin and Tessaro (Eprint 2017/250) recently proposed indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption candidates and proved their security based on a standard assumption on bilinear maps and a non-standard assumption on Goldreich-like'' pseudorandom generators (PRG). In a nutshell, they require the existence of pseudo-random generators ... Conference Paper We show a general compiler that transforms a large class of erroneous cryptographic schemes (such as public-key encryption, indistinguishability obfuscation, and secure multiparty computation schemes) into perfectly correct ones. The transformation works for schemes that are correct on all inputs with probability noticeably larger than half, and ar... Conference Paper We give three fully homomoprhic encryption (FHE) schemes that are secure against non-adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (CCA1). For the first two, we extend the generic transformation of Boneh, Canetti, Halevi and Katz to turn any multi-key identity-based FHE scheme into a CCA1-secure FHE scheme. We then show two instantiations of multi-key identit... Article We propose a new notion of secure multiparty computation aided by a computationally powerful but untrusted "cloud" server. In this notion, on-the-fly multiparty computation (MPC), the cloud can noninteractively perform arbitrary dynamically chosen computations on data belonging to arbitrary dynamically chosen sets of users chosen. All users' input... Article Full-text available International Association for Cryptologic Research 2017. We show a general compiler that transforms a large class of erroneous cryptographic schemes (such as public-key encryption, indistinguishability obfuscation, and secure multiparty computation schemes) into perfectly correct ones. The transformation works for schemes that are correct on all in... Article International Association for Cryptologic Research 2017. We present new protocols for conditional disclosure of secrets (CDS), where two parties want to disclose a secret to a third party if and only if their respective inputs satisfy some predicate. – For general predicates (Formula Presented.), we present two protocols that achieve o(N1/2) commun... Article International Association for Cryptologic Research 2017. Much of modern cryptography, starting from public-key encryption and going beyond, is based on the hardness of structured (mostly algebraic) problems like factoring, discrete log or finding short lattice vectors. While structure is perhaps what enables advanced applications, it also puts the... Article 2017, International Association for Cryptologic Research. Lin and Tessaro (ePrint 2017) recently proposed indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) and functional encryption (FE) candidates and proved their security based on two assumptions: a standard assumption on bilinear maps and a non-standard assumption on “Goldreich-like” pseudorandom generators... Article 2017, International Association for Cryptologic Research. In a constrained PRF, the owner of the PRF key K can generate constrained keys K_f that allow anyone to evaluate the PRF on inputs x that satisfy the predicate f (namely, where f(x) is “true”) but reveal no information about the PRF evaluation on the other inputs. A private constrained PRF g... Conference Paper The notion of Zero Knowledge has driven the field of cryptography since its conception over thirty years ago. It is well established that two-message zero-knowledge protocols for NP do not exist, and that four-message zero-knowledge arguments exist under the minimal assumption of one-way functions. Resolving the precise round complexity of zero-kno... Conference Paper Motivated by the impossibility of achieving fairness in secure computation [Cleve, STOC 1986], recent works study a model of fairness in which an adversarial party that aborts on receiving output is forced to pay a mutually predefined monetary penalty to every other party that did not receive the output. These works show how to design protocols for... Article Motivated by the impossibility of achieving fairness in secure computation [Cleve, STOC 1986], recent works study a model of fairness in which an adversarial party that aborts on receiving output is forced to pay a mutually predefined monetary penalty to every other party that did not receive the output. These works show how to design protocols for... Article The notion of Zero Knowledge has driven the field of cryptography since its conception over thirty years ago. It is well established that two-message zero-knowledge protocols for NP do not exist, and that four-message zero-knowledge arguments exist under the minimal assumption of one-way functions. Resolving the precise round complexity of zero-kno... Conference Paper We construct an LWE-based key-policy attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme that supports attributes of unbounded polynomial length. Namely, the size of the public parameters is a fixed polynomial in the security parameter and a depth bound, and with these fixed length parameters, one can encrypt attributes of arbitrary length. Similarly, any poly... Conference Paper Fine-grained cryptographic primitives are ones that are secure against adversaries with an a-priori bounded polynomial amount of resources (time, space or parallel-time), where the honest algorithms use less resources than the adversaries they are designed to fool. Such primitives were previously studied in the context of time-bounded adversaries (... Article We construct an LWE-based key-policy attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme that supports attributes of unbounded polynomial length. Namely, the size of the public parameters is a fixed polynomial in the security parameter and a depth bound, and with these fixed length parameters, one can encrypt attributes of arbitrary length. Similarly, any poly... Conference Paper A watermarking scheme for programs embeds some information called a mark into a program while preserving its functionality. No adversary can remove the mark without damaging the functionality of the program. In this work, we study the problem of watermarking various cryptographic programs such as pseudorandom function (PRF) evaluation, decryption,... Conference Paper Time-lock puzzles are a mechanism for sending messages "to the future". A sender can quickly generate a puzzle with a solution s that remains hidden until a moderately large amount of time t has elapsed. The solution s should be hidden from any adversary that runs in time significantly less than t, including resourceful parallel adversaries with po... Conference Paper We show how to securely obfuscate conjunctions, which are functions f(x1,...,xn) = ∧i∈I yⁱ where I ⊆ [n] and each literal yi is either just xi or ¬ xi e.g., f(xi,...,x_n) = xi ⊆ ¬ x3 ⊆ ¬ x7 ... ⊆ x{n-1. Whereas prior work of Brakerski and Rothblum (CRYPTO 2013) showed how to achieve this using a non-standard object called cryptographic multilinear... Conference Paper We show general transformations from subexponentially-secure approximate indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) where the obfuscated circuit agrees with the original circuit on a \(1/2+\epsilon$$ fraction of inputs on a certain samplable distribution, into exact indistinguishability obfuscation where the obfuscated circuit and the original circuit...
Article
We show how to securely obfuscate conjunctions, which are functions f(x[subscript 1], . . . , x[subscript n]) = ∧[subscript i∈I] y[superscript i] where I ⊆ [n] and each literal y[subscript i] is either just x[subscript i] or ¬x[subscript i] e.g., f(x[subscript 1], . . . , x_n) = x[subscript 1] ⊆ ¬ x[subscript 3] ⊆ ¬ x[subscript 7] · · · ⊆ x[subscri...
Conference Paper
The possibility of basing the security of cryptographic objects on the (minimal) assumption that $$\mathbf{NP } \nsubseteq \mathbf{BPP }$$ is at the very heart of complexity-theoretic cryptography. Most known results along these lines are negative, showing that assuming widely believed complexity-theoretic conjectures, there are no reductions fro...
Article
Time-lock puzzles are a mechanism for sending messages "to the future". A sender can quickly generate a puzzle with a solution s that remains hidden until a moderately large amount of time t has elapsed. The solution s should be hidden from any adversary that runs in time significantly less than t, including resourceful parallel adversaries with po...