Leakage-Resilient Public-Key Encryption from Obfuscation

The literature on leakage-resilient cryptography contains various leakage models that provide different levels of security. In this work, we consider the bounded leakage and the continual leakage models. In the bounded leakage model (Akavia et al. – TCC 2009), it is assumed that there is a fixed upper bound L on the number of bits the attacker may leak on the secret key in the entire lifetime of the scheme. Alternatively, in the continual leakage model (Brakerski et al. – FOCS 2010, Dodis et al. – FOCS 2010), the lifetime of a cryptographic scheme is divided into “time periods” between which the scheme’s secret key is updated. Furthermore, in its attack the adversary is allowed to obtain some bounded amount of leakage on the current secret key during each time period. In the continual leakage model, a challenging problem has been to provide security against leakage on key updates, that is, leakage that is a function not only of the current secret key but also the randomness used to update it. We propose a new, modular approach to overcome this problem. Namely, we present a compiler that transforms any public-key encryption or signature scheme that achieves a slight strengthening of continual leakage resilience, which we call consecutive continual leakage resilience, to one that is continual leakage resilient with leakage on key updates, assuming indistinguishability obfuscation (Barak et al. — CRYPTO 2001, Garg et al. – FOCS 2013). Under the stronger assumption of public-coin differing-inputs obfuscation (Ishai et al. – TCC 2015) the leakage rate tolerated by our compiled scheme is essentially as good as that of the starting scheme. Our compiler is obtained by making a new connection between the problems of leakage on key updates and so-called “sender-deniable” encryption (Canetti et al. – CRYPTO 1997), which was recently realized for the first time by Sahai and Waters (STOC 2014). In the bounded leakage model, we develop a new approach to constructing leakage-resilient encryption from obfuscation, based upon the public-key encryption scheme from iO and punctured pseudorandom functions due to Sahai and Waters (STOC 2014). In particular, we achieve leakage-resilient public key encryption tolerating L bits of leakage for any L from iO and one-way functions. We build on this to achieve leakage-resilient public key encryption with optimal leakage rate of 1 o(1) based on public-coin differinginputs obfuscation and collision-resistant hash functions. Such a leakage rate is not known to be achievable in a generic way based on public-key encryption alone. We then develop entirely new techniques to construct a new public key encryption scheme that is secure under (consecutive) continual leakage resilience (under appropriate assumptions), which we believe is of independent interest.