It is becoming important for the client to be able to check whether the AI inference services have been correctly calculated. Since the weight values in a CNN model are assets of service providers, the client should be able to check the correctness of the result without them. The Zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Argument of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) allows verifying the result without input and weight values. However, the proving time in zk-SNARK is too slow to be applied to real AI applications. This article proposes a new efficient verifiable convolutional neural network (vCNN) framework that greatly accelerates the proving performance. We introduce a new efficient relation representation for convolution equations, reducing the proving complexity of convolution from O(ln) to O(l+n) compared to existing zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) approaches, where l and n denote the size of the kernel and the data in CNNs. Experimental results show that the proposed vCNN improves proving performance by 20-fold for a simple MNIST and 18,000-fold for VGG16. The security of the proposed scheme is formally proven.
A group key agreement protocol (GKA) allows a set of players to establish a shared secret key which can be used to secure a subsequent communication. Several efficient constant-round GKA's have been proposed. However, their performance degrades if some players fail during protocol execution. This is a problem in practice, e.g. for mobile nodes communicating over wireless media, which can loose connectivity during the protocol execution. Current constant-round GKA protocols are either efficient and non-robust or robust but not efficient: Assuming a reliable broadcast communication medium, the standard encryption-based group key agreement protocol can be robust against arbitrary number of node faults, but the size of the messages broadcast by every player is proportional to the number of players. In contrast, non-robust group key agreement can be achieved with each player broadcasting just constant-sized messages. We propose a novel 2-round group key agreement protocol which tolerates up to T node failures using O(T)-sized messages, for any T. To exemplify the usefulness of this flexible trade-off between message size and fault tolerance, we show that the new protocol implies a fully-robust group key agreement with O(log n)-sized messages and expected round complexity close to 2, assuming random node faults. The proposed protocol is secure under the (standard) Decisional Square Diffie-Hellman assumption.
In the Internet of Things (IoT) systems, it is often required to deliver a secure message to a group of devices. The public key broadcast encryption is an efficient primitive to handle IoT broadcasts, by allowing a user (or a device) to broadcast encrypted messages to a group of legitimate devices. This paper proposes an IoT-friendly subset representation called Combinatorial Subset Difference (CSD), which generalizes the existing subset difference (SD) method by allowing wildcards (*) in any position of the bitstring. Based on the CSD representation, we first propose an algorithm to construct the CSD subset, and a CSD-based public key broadcast encryption scheme. By providing the most general subset representation, the proposed CSD-based construction achieves a minimal header size among the existing broadcast encryption. The experimental result shows that our CSD saves the header size by 17% on average and more than 1000 times when assuming a specific IoT example of IP address with 20 wildcards and total users, compared to the SD-based broadcast encryption. We prove the semantic security of CSD-based broadcast encryption under the standard l-BDHE assumption, and extend the construction to a chosen-ciphertext-attack (CCA)-secure version.
The Hadamard product (also known as element-wise multiplication) is a fundamental operation in linear algebra, performed by multiplying corresponding elements of two matrices with the same dimensions. This operation plays a crucial role in various fields, including cryptography, where it enables efficient and parallelizable computations on large datasets—particularly in the design of cryptographic protocols such as zero-knowledge proofs. In this paper, we propose a transparent and efficient method for proving the Hadamard product between vectors that are independently committed in the groups G1 and G2 under a pairing operation e : G1 ×G2 → GT . For a vector of length n, the prover has a complexity of Oλ(n), while the proof size is Oλ(log n). The verifier operates with a complexity of Oλ(log n), which includes O(log n) operations in GT and only O(1) pairing operations, making verification highly efficient. We prove the security of our scheme under the Symmetric External Diffie-Hellman (SXDH) assumption. Furthermore, we propose an aggregator for Groth16 (EUROCRYPT 2016) zk-SNARKs and a proof aggregation technique for the general case of the KZG polynomial commitment scheme (ASIACRYPT 2010), where all crs are distinct. Both applications do not require an additional trusted setup, support logarithmic-sized aggregated proofs, and significantly reduce the verifier’s pairing operations to O(1).
Wildcarded identity-based encryption (WIBE) is an encryption system where one can encrypt messages to multiple users by specifying a pattern, which is a set of identity strings or wildcards. It is a useful primitive for practical applications where users are defined with multiple attributes (or affiliations), such as organization networks or IoT firmware updates. However, the ciphertext size in traditional WIBE schemes are linear to the number of wildcards in the pattern; since the ciphertext size determines the payload in network systems, it degrades the practicality when deployed in transmission-sensitive systems. In this paper, we represent scalable wildcarded identity-based encryption (SWIBE), which achieves a constant-size ciphertext regardless of the number of wildcards (or depth of patterns). the SWIBE scheme also allows the wildcard usage key derivation as well as encryption: a user with wildcarded pattern can delegate keys for the fixed pattern. Compared to the existing WIBE schemes, the SWIBE scheme is the first approach to yield constant-size ciphertext. Moreover, SWIBE also improves encryption time and decryption time while maintaining a key size of , comparable to the key size of L in WIBE schemes (where L is a depth of the pattern). The experimental results show that the decryption time is 3 to 10 times faster than the existing WIBE schemes, and 650 times faster than the attribute-based encryption with constant-size ciphertext. For the security, we first propose the selective-CPA-secure SWIBE scheme in a prime order bilinear group and extend it to be selective-CCA-secure. Then we also propose a fully-secure SWIBE scheme which can overcome the selective security.