Asymmetric Subversion Attacks on Signature and Identification Schemes

Abstract

Studies of subversion attack against cryptosystem could be dated to several decades ago, while the Snowden revelation in 2013 has set off a new wave of exploring possible approaches to protect or subvert cryptography primitives in practice. Inspired by kleptographic attacks proposed by Young et al. [Crypto’96], we present the asymmetric subversion attack on signature and identification schemes in this work. Our contributions is summarized as follows:

• We present the asymmetric subversion model for signature and identification schemes. The properties of our model are stronger than that of existing subversion model proposed by Giuseppe et al. [CCS’15] and show higher requirement in attack goal.
• We propose the notion of splittable signature scheme and give a universal asymmetric subversion attack on such schemes. Our attack is independent of secret key size and more efficient than symmetric attacks introduced by Giuseppe et al. [CCS’15].
• We introduce the asymmetric subversion attack on a special type of identification schemes and show that it can be transformed from splittable signature scheme.

Yi Wang

PhD Student (2017–)

Rongmao Chen

PhD., Associate Professor