Satellite Applications of Homomorphic Encryption

Thales UK has been investigating the use of Homomorphic Encryption (HE) in satellite scenarios. In particular, our assessment has focused on the data processing of imaging products; one of the many types of signal processing applications which could have been chosen.  

It is relatively simple to find signal processing satellite applications where HE could, in theory at least, provide real benefit. In particular, to provide end-to-end security of data from the sensor on the satellite to the end user, while allowing the potentially complex and specialised signal processing to be performed on shared (and less trusted from the end user’s point of view) infrastructure. The real challenge has been to find such applications that are potentially practical in the near term, using Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption (SHE).

Consider the Sentinel 2 Multi Spectral Imager which is a representative example of an earth observation satellite (in this case designed for environmental monitoring). In order to be suitable for the application of HE to provide sensor to end user security, all the signal processing algorithms would have to be amenable to HE. It turns out that many of them potentially are, in particular the deconvolution algorithms that use Fourier Transforms. However, other parts of the processing are more difficult to deal with in HE. For example, processing to deal with imperfections such as:

• saturated pixels
• no data pixels and partially corrected pixels (crosstalk correction)
• defective pixels

These are very simple algorithms, but involve a lot of conditional operators (<, >, etc. to test pixel values) that would be expensive when implemented on HE encrypted data.

A much more promising candidate is Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) (e.g. Envisat). SAR is used to provide high precision, and often 3D, imaging for applications such as sea ice and glacier monitoring, vegetation coverage analysis, disaster monitoring and traffic surveillance. Being a radio-based technique, it is not affected by weather or the lack of daylight. The raw data collected by the satellite consists of a series of radar echoes, and these must be processed to form an image. On examining the details of this processing, it can be seen that the core functionality consists of a series of:

• Fourier Transforms (and their inverses)
• Hadamard products of matrices

These can be implemented, in theory at least, with a low multiplicative depth, and without the need for conditional operators. This is therefore a good candidate application for SHE, but much work needs to be done to demonstrate its practicality. 

Provably Weak Instances of Ring-LWE Revisited

In Crypto 2015, Elias, Lauter, Ozman and Stange [ELOS15] proposed a successful attack on the decision version of the non-dual Ring-LWE problem over number fields $K$ for two specific families of defining polynomials. Both families have the common feature that the coefficients of the polynomials are dependent on the modulus $q$.

We extended this attack to the search version of Ring-LWE by using that the error distributions in such number fields are very skewed by moving away from the Minkowski space. Particularly, the largest errors either wrap around modulo $q$ (and thus make it impossible to decrypt the secret), or the smallest ones are so negligible that we obtain exact linear equations that reveal the secret. Our attack applies to every modulus up to $q$, and requires less samples.

Let $M$ be the $n \times n$ matrix of the canonical embedding $K \to \mathbb{C}^n$ with respect to the polynomial basis of $K$, and let $N$ be its inverse. The "skewness" of the errors can be nicely described by the singular value decomposition (SVD) of the matrix $N$ and the condition number $k(N) = s_1(N)/s_n(N)$, where $s_1$ and $s_n$ are the biggest and the smallest singular values correspondingly.

Recall that the SVD is given by $N = U \cdot \Sigma \cdot \overline{V}^t$, where $U$, $V$ are unitary matrices and $\Sigma$ is a diagonal matrix containing the singular values. The image of a unit sphere under $N$ will result in an ellipsoid whose axes are defined by the columns of $U$, with length equal to the corresponding singular value. Hence, the condition number captures how heavily this ellipsoid is deformed.

All vulnerable instances in [ELOS15] are defined by polynomials $f_{n, a, b} = x^n +ax + b$, where $a$ and $b$ are such that  $f(1) = 0 \bmod q$, which is the property that they exploit, but that our attack does not need. If we consider their first family of samples, where $a = 0$ and $b = q - 1$, the SVD of $N$ is of the form $I_{n \times n} \cdot \Sigma \cdot \overline{V}^t$. Thus a spherical error distribution on the Minkowski space with the parameter $\sigma$ induces an elliptical distribution on the number field, where the $i$th coordinate is distributed by a Gaussian with $\sigma_i = s_i(N) \cdot \sigma$. Moreover, the condition number is close to the modulus $q$, that is, the elliptical distribution is stretched along axes whose lengths range roughly from $\sigma_1$ to $q \cdot \sigma_1$. For the second family we did not find such an explicit form of the SVD. Nevertheless, the unitary matrix $U$ remains close to being diagonal (see the heat map below) and the singular values form a near-geometric series again leading to a condition number close to $q$.

It can be easily seen that for both families and for the choices of $\sigma$ made in [ELOS15], the Ring-LWE distribution generates negligible errors in the higher terms of the polynomial basis. More precisely each Ring-LWE sample $(a, b = a \cdot s + e)$ can be written as

\[ M_{a} \cdot (s_0, s_1, \dots, s_{n-1})^t = (b_{0}, b_{1}, \dots, b_{n-1})^t - (e_{0}, e_{1}, \dots, e_{n-1})^t , \]

where $M_{a}$ corresponds to multiplication by $a$. By rounding, the higher error terms are removed and the last equations become exact equations in the coefficients of the secret. If the highest $\left\lceil n/k \right\rceil$ error terms round to zero then we need only $k$ Ring-LWE samples to reveal the secret (for these concrete examples 10 samples amply suffice).

The corresponding paper will appear soon on the Eprint.

Wouter Castryck, Ilia Iliashenko and Fre Vercauteren.

Workshop on Lattice Cryptography

It is the day after AsiaCrypt 2015 and there are two workshops being held in Auckland. The one which is most relevant for my research is that on Lattice Based Cryptography; which consists of four talks. One by Jung Hee Cheon on "Multilinear Maps and Their Cryptanalysis", one by Amit Sahai on "Obfuscation", one by Fre Vercauteren on "Weak Instances of RLWE" and one by Martin Albrecht on "Small Secret LWE".

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Cheon first described a very naive version of multi-linear maps and then went on to show how this can be attacked by creating non-trivial encodings of zero, and then taking greatest common divisors. Then he went on to generalise this naive scheme to the CLT scheme (which is a bit like the DGHV FHE scheme). The naive attack does not apply to CLT as the dimension increased, meaning taking naive greatest common divisors would not work. Cheon then showed how to extend the naive attack to the CLT case by turning the gcd extraction into an eigenvalue extraction problem. This done by building quadratic forms which represent encodings of zero. The result is that for the CLT scheme one can break the equivalent of the DLP problem.

Cheon then went on to present the GGH scheme, which is a bit like the NTRU FHE scheme; except the instead of encrypting via c=[(m+r*p)/z] for an integer p, one encodes via c=[(m+r*g)/z] for a polynomial g which generates the ideal lattice <g>. Modifying the prior attack in this situation allows us to recover a basis of this ideal. But finding a short vector in this lattice can be hard. However, by utilizing encodings of zero one can actually solve the equivalent of the CDH problem.

Both attacks rely heavily on the presence of encodings of zero. So the attacks do not apply to situations in which one does not publish such encodings; i.e. applications such as indistinguishability Obfuscation (iO).

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Amit Sahai then gave an introduction to iO; he motivated it via an analogy of an attacker who captures your brain and is able to read and tamper with every neuron, yet we still do not want the attacker to know what we are thinking about. This is the problem which obfuscation tries to solve in the computing realm. Martin pointed out that this would be a great way to produce malware!

Amit then put Multi-Party Computation within this analogy. He suggested we can think of MPC as protecting our brain against the tampering adversary, by dividing the brain up into portions. As long as one portion is kept out of the adversaries control we can use MPC to protect our thoughts. Obfuscation tries to do the same, without there needing to be an honest part of the brain.

Any program which is suitable for obfuscation must be unlearnable from query access to the program. Since otherwise the adversary could learn the program from the input/output behaviour. However, black-box obfuscation has been shown to be impossible; essentially because their are contrived programs which are unlearnable but for which one cannot produce an obfuscation, since any obfuscated program has an explicit attack against it.

This is why iO as a concept was presented; since it at least seems possible to achieve. The idea is that if you have two equivalent programs and we obfuscate one of them, then the adversary cannot tell which one we obfuscated. One way of thinking of this is as a psuedo-canonicalizer. The question is what useful can one do if we could create an obfuscator which satisfied the iO definition. Amit gave the application of building demo versions of software, without needing to re-engineer the software.

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Fre Vercauteren then discussed a more in depth analysis of a paper from CRYPTO this year on Weak Instances of Ring-LWE. The CRYPTO paper gave instances where decision Ring-LWE was easy, but search appeared to be hard. However, Fre's talk showed that the search problem was in fact easy from the start, and thus the CRYPTO paper was less surprising than it at first seemed to be. As with all things on Ring-LWE the question arises as to how to choose the error distributions.

Fre spend the first part of his talk discussing the geometry of number fields, and in particular the Minkowski embedding. The Ring-LWE problem generates errors according to a discrete Gaussian distribution in the Minkowski embedding, Poly-LWE is to generate the errors according to a discrete Gaussian in the polynomial embedding.

Eisentrager et al discussed cases for which Poly-LWE was easy, these were then extended by Elias et al to special cases of decision Ring-LWE. They did this by mapping the special Ring-LWE instance to a special Poly-LWE instance.This is done by pulling back the problem from Ring-LWE to Poly-LWE via the matrix which defines the Minkowski embedding. The Poly-LWE attack requires that q is larger than f(1), and hence q will "kind of show up" in the coefficients of the defining polynomial f. So the fields being attacked, are very special indeed.


(This post originally appeared in the BristolCrypto blog)

C++ Library dedicated to arithmetic on cyclotomic rings: NFLlib

As a new Phd student working on the HEAT project at the UPMC, I spent the last two months reading some stuff about Fully Homomorphic Encryption. Among my different readings, I have noticed an article presenting a new promising open-source C++ library: NFLlib. It has been developed for both the HEAT project and CRYPTOCOMP and is dedicated to ideal lattice cryptography.

This library deals with the arithmetic on the wide spread cyclotomic rings $\mathbb{Z}_q[X]/(X^n+1)$ with $n$ a power of two. At the difference of the Microsoft library SEAL which implements the YASHE encryption scheme, NFLlib provides the elementary functions to build any cryptosystems on those cyclotomic rings. By using Chinese Reminder Theorem, an optimized Number Theoretic Transform and different implementation optimization techniques for SIMD instructions it achieves better performances than the classical libraries NTL and FLINT.

This library will be available soon on https://github.com/quarkslab/NFLlib, in the meantime the Francophones can refer to the article "Quatre millions d'échanges de clés par seconde" (Four millions key-exchanges per second) https://www.sstic.org/media/SSTIC2015/SSTIC-actes/4M_kx_per_sec/SSTIC2015-Article-4M_kx_per_sec-guinet_aguilar_guelton_lepoint.pdf which presents it as well as the performances of a key-exchange protocol using a lattice based encryption scheme. For the non-french speakers an english version has been accepted at CT-RSA 2016 and will be available soon on the Eprint.   

Microsoft Launch SEAL

It is not just the HEAT project which is working on trying to find applications of Somewhat Homomorphic Encryption in practice; others around the world are also doing this. In particular Microsoft Research Labs have just announced a project called SEAL(Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) which is detailed in the following paper: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/258435/ManualHE.pdf with code available here http://sealcrypto.codeplex.com/

The Microsoft work is aimed at medical information, in particular bioinfomatics algorithms related to genomic data. The SEAL project is built around the YASHE SHE scheme based on the cyclotomic ring defined by $X^n+1$, for $n$ a power of two. The associated paper explains how large integers and floating point operations can be encoded within the YASHE scheme.

Using the Rényi divergence rather than the statistical distance in lattice-based cryptography

To analyze the efficiency of the homomorphic encryption schemes at the core of the HEAT project, we studied how the Rényi divergence can be used instead of the statistical distance. The Rényi divergence is a measure of closeness of two probability distributions. In the HEAT project, we obtained that the latter divergence can often be used as an alternative to the statistical distance in security proofs for lattice-based cryptography, and therefore in homomorphic encryption schemes.

Our contributions are as follows:

• Smaller signatures for the Hash-and-Sign Gentry-Peikert-Vaikuntanathan signature scheme
• Smaller storage requirement for the Fiat-Shamir BLISS signature scheme
• Alternative proof that the Learning With Errors problem with noise chosen uniformly in an interval is no easier than the Learning With Errors problem with Gaussian noise (and tighter reduction!)
• Smaller parameters for the dual-Regev encryption scheme

and are described in the article

Improved security proofs in lattice-based cryptography: using the Rényi divergence rather than the statistical distance

Shi Bai and Adeline Langlois and Tancrède Lepoint and Damien Stehlé and Ron Steinfeld

This article has been accepted for publication at ASIACRYPT 2015 and will receive the Best Paper Award.

ASIACRYPT 2015 is one of the top-tier conference of cryptography, organized by the IACR, and will take place in December 2015 in New Zealand.

HEAT Summer School on FHE and MLM in Paris

Last week, the HEAT summer school on Mathematical and Practical aspects of Fully Homomorphic Encryption and Multilinear Maps took place in (almost) sunny Paris. The talks all covered a range of subjects, with around three talks per topic, which allowed for a good in-depth understanding of what was being presented.

The school started off with defining what Fully Homomorphic Encryption is, and why we would want to use it. The main application is, of course, outsourcing computation. I have a bunch of data I want to compute on, but do not want (or cannot) compute it all by myself, so I would like to outsource it to an external server. But I may not trust the server, and do not want it to learn anything about my data. So I would like to have an encryption scheme where I encrypt my data, then send it off to someone to perform computations on it, and at the end I recover the result of the computation. This is exactly what FHE gives us.

Most FHE schemes are based on the Learning with Errors problem, which was presented in detail on the first day. This was presented in [R05]. This was followed by a discussion of the [GSW13] cryptosystem, based on the approximate eigenvector method.

This was followed by a discussion of the Ring Learning with Errors problems, and a brief presentation of the various reductions, as presented in [LPR10].  A presentation of the BGV cryptosystem was given, together with an introduction about the use of Galois theory in RLWE schemes, in order to use the “packed ciphertexts” method.

The third day of the summer school was the day for Multilinear Maps. The CLT and GGH schemes were discussed, and also a brief discussion on attacks. The summary is that although there are zeroizing attacks for all the constructions at the moment, these do not seem to affect the obfuscation applications. All the attacks are constructed from low-level encodings of zero, which is why the attacks do not apply to obfuscation applications.

The morning of the fourth day was very mathematical, and consisted of two talks on the algebraic geometry of numbers and the LLL and BKZ algorithms and on recovering short generators in principal ideal, see here. This was followed by a presentation of zeroizing attacks on multilinear maps. The final day of the school was devoted to obfuscation. This started with stating the surprising fact that if $P=NP$ then this implies that any program can be obfuscated. Thus, unlike any other cryptography, iO cannot imply hardness; but it can be used to leverage hardness. The idea of using straddling sets from [BGKPS] to construct obfuscation from branching programs was also discussed.