Prabhanjan Ananth: Universal Obfuscation and Witness Encryption: Boosting Correctness and Combining Security

Abstract:  Over the last few years a new breed of cryptographic primitives has arisen: on one hand they have previously unimagined utility and on the other hand they are not based on simple to state and tried out assumptions.

With the on-going study of these primitives, we are left with several different candidate constructions

each based on a different, not easy to express, mathematical assumptions, where some even turn out to be insecure.

 

A combiner for a cryptographic primitive takes several candidate constructions of the primitive and outputs one construction

that is as good as any of the input constructions. Furthermore, this combiner must be efficient:

the resulting construction should remain polynomial-time even when combining polynomially many candidates. Combiners are

especially important for a primitive where there are several competing constructions whose security is hard to evaluate, as is the case for

indistinguishability obfuscation (IO) and witness encryption (WE).

 

One place where the need for combiners appears is in design of a universal construction, where one wishes to find "one

construction to rule them all" (theoretically): an explicit construction that is secure if any

construction of the primitive exists.

 

In a recent paper, Goldwasser and Kalai posed as a challenge finding universal constructions for indistinguishability obfuscation

and witness encryption. In this work we resolve this issue: we construct universal schemes for IO, and

for witness encryption, and also resolve the existence of combiners for these primitives along the way.

For IO, our universal construction and combiners can be built based on either assuming DDH, or assuming LWE, with security

against sub-exponential adversaries. For witness encryption, we need only one-way functions secure against

polynomial time adversaries.

 

Joint work with Aayush Jain, Moni Naor, Amit Sahai and Eylon Yogev.