Название: Asymmetric Cryptography: Primitives and Protocols
Автор: David Pointcheval
Издательство: Wiley-ISTE
Год: 2022
Страниц: 301
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.0 MB

With the seminal paper by Diffie and Hellman, and the introduction to public-key cryptography, a very broad area of research has emerged. Public-key cryptography includes not only the asymmetric variants of encryption and authentication, i.e. public-key encryption and signature schemes, but also many other innovative and impressively powerful tools. This book aims at presenting the main cryptographic primitives that have been proposed within the last 40 years, with chapters written by famous cryptographers, who are all specialists in the specific domains, with several publications in the main international venues on cryptography. I am very honored they all accepted my invitation to participate and make this book as complete as possible. This book starts with a presentation of the main primitives of public key cryptography, namely public-key encryption and signatures, including definitions and security models. This chapter also gives the flavor of the meaning of provable security, explaining what it means when one claims a cryptographic scheme to be secure.

In the second chapter we present zero-knowledge proofs. This is a quite magical tool that is thereafter used as a building block in many other protocols. Zero-knowledge proofs allow to convince a verifier of the validity of any true statement, without revealing any additional information. In the same vein, secure multiparty computation allows two or more players with private inputs to compute the output of a well-defined function on these joint inputs, without revealing anything else than this intended output.

After they were initially used for attacking the discrete logarithm problem on elliptic curves, pairings have extensively been applied to construct new primitives, primarily to propose new types of encryption and signature schemes. Consequently, we first make a general introduction to pairing-based cryptography, and then we present advanced cryptographic schemes for confidentiality and authentication, which satisfy additional properties. The first such scheme we present is broadcast encryption, which improves on usual encryption by targeting multiple recipients when sending private information. One could of course give the same decryption key to many users, but if one wants to dynamically change the target set, different personal decryption keys are required. With traitor tracing, it is then possible to trace traitors who reveal their decryption keys to non-legitimate users. Attribute-based encryption is a generalization of broadcast encryption, where the target set can be specified by a policy and attributes. It is then possible to describe the target set in a fine-grained manner, for each new ciphertexts. Advanced signatures add anonymity properties to signature and authentication. Thanks to pairings, it is indeed possible to efficiently authenticate to a service without revealing much about personal data.

The various chapters give a broad overview of some recent advances in public-key cryptography. This is definitely not exhaustive, and each presentation is the author’s point of view of the field. There are some general descriptions, or sometimes more focused examples to illustrate the purpose. They are appropriate for a large audience to discover or learn more about public-key cryptography.