Abstract
Accountability of distributed systems aims to ensure that whenever a malicious behavior is observed, it can be irrefutably linked to a malicious node and that every honest node can disprove false accusations. Recent work, such as PeerReview and its extensions, shows how to achieve accountability in both deterministic and randomized systems. The basic idea is to generate tamper-evident logs of the performed computations such that an external auditor can check the system’s actions by mere recomputation. For randomized computations it is more challenging: revealing the seed of the pseudo-random generator in the logs would break the unpredictability of future values. This problem has been addressed in a previous work, CSAR, which formalizes a notion of accountable randomness and presents a realization. Although all these techniques have been proven practical, they dramatically (and inevitably) expose a party’s private data, e.g., secret keys. In many scenarios, such a privacy leak would clearly be unaccepable and thus prevent a successful deployment of accountability systems.
In this work, we study a notion of privacy-preserving accountability for randomized systems. While for deterministic computations zero-knowledge proofs offer a solution (which is even efficient for some computations), for randomized computations we argue that efficient solutions are less trivial. In particular, we show that zero-knowledge proofs are incompatible with the notion of accountable randomness considered in CSAR if we aim at efficient solutions. Therefore, we propose an alternative definition of accountable randomness, and we use it as a building block to develop the new notion of privacy-preserving accountable randomized computation. We present efficient instantiations for interesting classes of computations, in particular for digital signature schemes as the arguably most important cryptographic primitive.
Chapter PDF
References
Argyraki, K., Maniatis, P., Irzak, O., Ashish, S., Shenker, S.: Loss and delay accountability for the internet. In: IEEE International Conference on Network Protocols, ICNP 2007, pp. 194–205 (October 2007)
Backes, M., Druschel, P., Haeberlen, A., Unruh, D.: Csar: A practical and provable technique to make randomized systems accountable. In: Proceedings of the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, NDSS 2009 (2009)
Belenkiy, M., Chase, M., Kohlweiss, M., Lysyanskaya, A.: Compact e-cash and simulatable VRFs revisited. In: Shacham, H., Waters, B. (eds.) Pairing 2009. LNCS, vol. 5671, pp. 114–131. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Bellare, M., Goldwasser, S.: New paradigms for digital signatures and message authentication based on non-interactive zero knowledge proofs. In: Brassard, G. (ed.) CRYPTO 1989. LNCS, vol. 435, pp. 194–211. Springer, Heidelberg (1990)
Boneh, D., Boyen, X.: Short signatures without random oracles and the sdh assumption in bilinear groups. Journal of Cryptology 21, 149–177 (2008)
Canetti, R.: Universally composable security: A new paradigm for cryptographic protocols. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, 2000:67 (2000)
Chase, M., Lysyanskaya, A.: Simulatable VRFs with applications to multi-theorem NIZK. In: Menezes, A. (ed.) CRYPTO 2007. LNCS, vol. 4622, pp. 303–322. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Dingledine, R., Freedman, M.J., Molnar, D.: Accountability. In: Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. O’Reilly and Associates (2001)
Dodis, Y., Yampolskiy, A.: A verifiable random function with short proofs and keys. In: Vaudenay, S. (ed.) PKC 2005. LNCS, vol. 3386, pp. 416–431. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Goldreich, O., Micali, S., Wigderson, A.: How to play any mental game. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, STOC 1987, pp. 218–229. ACM (1987)
Goldwasser, S., Micali, S., Rackoff, C.: The knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems. SIAM J. Comput. 18(1), 186–208 (1989)
Groth, J.: Short pairing-based non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments. In: Abe, M. (ed.) ASIACRYPT 2010. LNCS, vol. 6477, pp. 321–340. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Groth, J., Sahai, A.: Efficient noninteractive proof systems for bilinear groups. SIAM Journal on Computing 41(5), 1193–1232 (2012)
Haeberlen, A., Avramopoulos, I., Rexford, J., Druschel, P.: NetReview: Detecting when interdomain routing goes wrong. In: Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, NSDI 2009 (2009)
Haeberlen, A., Kuznetsov, P., Druschel, P.: PeerReview: Practical accountability for distributed systems. In: Proceedings of the 21st ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, SOSP 2007 (2007)
Hofheinz, D., Shoup, V.: Gnuc: A new universal composability framework. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, p. 303 (2011)
Küsters, R., Truderung, T., Vogt, A.: Accountability: definition and relationship to verifiability. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2010, pp. 526–535 (2010)
Küsters, R.: Simulation-based security with inexhaustible interactive turing machines. In: Proc. 19th IEEE Computer Security Foundations Workshop, pp. 309–320 (2006)
Lampson, B.W.: Computer security in the real world. In: Proc. Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (December 2000)
Laskowski, P., Chuang, J.: Network monitors and contracting systems: competition and innovation. In: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications, SIGCOMM 2006, New York, NY, USA, pp. 183–194 (2006)
Micali, S., Rabin, M.O., Vadhan, S.P.: Verifiable random functions. In: 40th FOCS, New York, New York, USA, October 17-19, pp. 120–130 (1999)
Michalakis, N., Soulé, R., Grimm, R.: Ensuring content integrity for untrusted peer-to-peer content distribution networks. In: Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation, NSDI 2007, p. 11 (2007)
Pfitzmann, B., Waidner, M.: A model for asynchronous reactive systems and its application to secure message transmission. IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, p. 0184 (2001)
Yumerefendi, A.R., Chase, J.S.: Trust but verify: accountability for network services. In: Proceedings of the 11th Workshop on ACM SIGOPS European Workshop, EW 11, New York, NY, USA (2004)
Yumerefendi, A.R., Chase, J.S.: Strong accountability for network storage. In: 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Backes, M., Fiore, D., Mohammadi, E. (2013). Privacy-Preserving Accountable Computation. In: Crampton, J., Jajodia, S., Mayes, K. (eds) Computer Security – ESORICS 2013. ESORICS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8134. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40203-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40203-6_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-40202-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-40203-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)