Fully Bideniable Interactive Encryption

While standard encryption guarantees secrecy of the encrypted plaintext only against an attacker that has no knowledge of the communicating parties’ keys and randomness of encryption, deniable encryption [Canetti et al., Crypto’96] provides the additional guarantee that the plaintext remains secret even in face of authoritative entities that attempt to coerce (or bribe) communicating parties to expose their internal states, including the plaintexts, keys and randomness. To achieve this guarantee, deniable encryption is equipped with a faking algorithm which allows parties to generate fake keys and randomness that make the ciphertext appear consistent with any plaintext of the parties’ choice. To date, only partial results were known: either deniability against coercing only the sender, or against coercing only the receiver [Sahai-Waters, STOC ‘14] or schemes satisfying weaker notions of deniability [O’Neil et al., Crypto ‘11]. In this paper we present the first fully bideniable interactive encryption scheme, thus resolving the 20-years-old open problem. Our scheme also satisfies an additional, incomparable to standard deniability, property called off-the-record deniability, which we introduce in this paper. This property guarantees that, even if the sender claims that one plaintext was used and the receiver claims a different one, the adversary has no way of figuring out who is lying the sender, the receiver, or both. This is useful when parties don’t have means to agree on what fake plaintext to claim, or when one party defects against the other. Our protocol has three messages, which is optimal [Bendlin et al., Asiacrypt’11], and works in a CRS model. We assume subexponential indistinguishability obfuscation (iO) and one way functions. ∗Boston University and Tel Aviv University. Email: canetti@bu.edu †MIT. Email sunoo@csail.mit.edu. ‡Boston University. Email: oxanapob@bu.edu