Continuous Non-malleable Codes

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Abstract

Non-malleable codes are a natural relaxation of error correcting/ detecting codes that have useful applications in the context of tamper resilient cryptography. Informally, a code is non-malleable if an adversary trying to tamper with an encoding of a given message can only leave it unchanged or modify it to the encoding of a completely unrelated value. This paper introduces an extension of the standard non-malleability security notion - so-called continuous non-malleability - where we allow the adversary to tamper continuously with an encoding. This is in contrast to the standard notion of non-malleable codes where the adversary only is allowed to tamper a single time with an encoding. We show how to construct continuous non-malleable codes in the common split-state model where an encoding consist of two parts and the tampering can be arbitrary but has to be independent with both parts. Our main contributions are outlined below:

We propose a new uniqueness requirement of split-state codes which states that it is computationally hard to find two codewords X = (X 0,X 1) and X′ = (X 0,X 1′) such that both codewords are valid, but X 0 is the same in both X and X′. A simple attack shows that uniqueness is necessary to achieve continuous non-malleability in the split-state model. Moreover, we illustrate that none of the existing constructions satisfies our uniqueness property and hence is not secure in the continuous setting.

We construct a split-state code satisfying continuous non-malleability. Our scheme is based on the inner product function, collision-resistant hashing and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge and requires an untamperable common reference string.

We apply continuous non-malleable codes to protect arbitrary cryptographic primitives against tampering attacks. Previous applications of non-malleable codes in this setting required to perfectly erase the entire memory after each execution and required the adversary to be restricted in memory. We show that continuous non-malleable codes avoid these restrictions.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTheory of Cryptography : 11th Theory of Cryptography Conference, TCC 2014, San Diego, CA, USA, February 24-26, 2014. Proceedings
EditorsYehuda Lindell
Number of pages24
PublisherSpringer
Publication date2014
Pages465-488
ISBN (Print)978-3-642-54241-1
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-54242-8
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014
EventTheory of Cryptography Conference - San Diego, United States
Duration: 24 Feb 201426 Feb 2014
Conference number: 11

Conference

ConferenceTheory of Cryptography Conference
Number11
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Diego
Period24/02/201426/02/2014
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Volume8349
ISSN0302-9743

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