Roman Langrehr

Deniable authentication allows Alice to authenticate a message to Bob, while retaining deniability towards third parties. In particular, not even Bob can convince a third party that Alice authenticated that message. Clearly, in this setting Bob should not be considered trustworthy. Furthermore, deniable authentication is necessary for deniable key exchange, as explicitly desired by Signal and off-the-record (OTR) messaging.

In this work we focus on (publicly verifiable) designated verifier signatures (DVS), which are a widely used primitive to achieve deniable authentication. We propose a definition of deniability against malicious verifiers for DVS. We give a construction that achieves this notion in the random oracle (RO) model. Moreover, we show that our notion is not achievable in the standard model with a concrete attack; thereby giving a non-contrived example of the RO heuristic failing.

All previous protocols that claim to achieve deniable authentication against malicious verifiers (like Signal’s initial handshake protocols X3DH and PQXDH) rely on the Extended Knowledge of Diffie–Hellman (EKDH) assumption. We show that this assumption is broken and that these protocols do not achieve deniability against malicious verifiers.

Non-interactive key exchange (NIKE) schemes like the Diffie-Hellman key exchange are a widespread building block in several cryptographic protocols. Since the Diffie-Hellman key exchange is not post-quantum secure, it is important to investigate post-quantum alternatives.

We analyze the security of the LWE-based NIKE by Ding et al. (ePrint 2012) and Peikert (PQCrypt 2014) in a multi-user setting where the same public key is used to generate shared keys with multiple other users. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange achieves this security notion. The mentioned LWE-based NIKE scheme comes with an inherent correctness error (Guo et al., PKC 2020), and this has significant implications for the multi-user security, necessitating a closer examination.

Single-user security generically implies multi-user security when all users generate their keys honestly for NIKE schemes with negligible correctness error. However, the LWE-based NIKE requires a super-polynomial modulus to achieve a negligible correctness error, which makes the scheme less efficient. We show that
- generically, single-user security does not imply multi-user security when the correctness error is non-negligible, but despite this
- the LWE-based NIKE with polynomial modulus is multi-user secure for honest users when the number of users is fixed in advance. This result takes advantage of the leakage-resilience properties of LWE.

We then turn to a stronger model of multi-user security that allows adversarially generated public keys. For this model, we consider a variant of the LWE-based NIKE where each public key is equipped with a NIZKPoK of the secret key. Adding NIZKPoKs is a standard technique for this stronger model and Hesse et al. (Crypto 2018) showed that this is sufficient to achieve security in the stronger multi-user security model for perfectly correct NIKEs (which the LWE-based NIKE is not). We show that
- for certain parameters that include all parameters with polynomial modulus, the LWE-based NIKE can be efficiently attacked with adversarially generated public keys, despite the use of NIZKPoKs, but
- for suitable parameters (that require a super-polynomial modulus), this security notion is achieved by the LWE-based NIKE with NIZKPoKs.
This stronger security notion has been previously achieved for LWE-based NIKE only in the QROM, while all our results are in the standard model.