Aydin Abadi (UCL)

Polynomial Representation Is Tricky: Maliciously Secure Private Set Intersection Revisited

Private Set Intersection protocols (PSIs) allow parties to compute the intersection of their private sets, such that nothing about the sets’ elements beyond the intersection is revealed. PSIs have a variety of applications, primarily in efficiently supporting data sharing in a privacy-preserving manner. At Eurocrypt 2019, Ghosh and Nilges proposed three efficient PSIs based on the polynomial representation of sets and proved their security against active adversaries. In this talk, I will discuss that these three PSIs are susceptible to several serious attacks. The attacks let an adversary (1) learn the correct intersection while making its victim believe that the intersection is empty, (2) learn a certain element of its victim’s set beyond the intersection, and (3) delete multiple elements of its victim’s input set. I will explain why the proofs did not identify these attacks and discuss how the issues can be rectified.
This is a joint work with Steven Murdoch (UCL) and Thomas Zacharias (University of Edinburgh)

Luca De Feo (IBM Research)

On the (in)security of ElGamal in OpenPGP

Do you think you know ElGamal encryption? Think twice.

We uncover vulnerabilities in the OpenPGP ecosystem stemming from confusion about the definition of ElGamal encryption (and the lack of an unequivocable standard). The first vulnerability leads to practical plaintext recovery in a limited number of cases. The second one, combined with side-channel leakage we found in some popular OpenPGP libraries, leads to feasible key recovery, in relatively rare cases.

We hope that these attacks, that we dub "cross-configuration", serve as a cautionary tale for standards designers. Cryptographic algorithms, even when they may appear very simple, hide a great deal of complexity in the choices of parameters and data representation. While an instantiation may appear to be safe in isolation, the interaction of two incompatible instantiations may lead to a security disaster, which can only be avoided by a carefully written standard.

Joint work with Bertram Poettering and Alessandro Sorniotti.

Yuzhe Tang (Syracuse University)

Understanding and Hardening Blockchain Systems Security under DoS Attacks

Ethereum is the largest smart-contract platform and second-largest cryptocurrency only after Bitcoin. Under the hood, Ethereum is a peer-to-peer network where miner nodes come to a consensus and decide what transactions to include in the blockchain. In practice, Ethereum's P2P network receives transactions sent from millions of web clients and propagates them to the tens of thousands of miner nodes. While the blockchain-to-client communication channel is a part of the system's critical path, its security is understudied in the existing research literature. This talk presents our recent research examining Ethereum systems security under the denial-of-service attack vectors (CCS'21, NDSS'21, and IMC'21). The security vulnerabilities discovered in these works have been confirmed and then fixed by the Ethereum developer community.