DiSE: Distributed Symmetric-key Encryption

Joint work with: Payman Mohassel (Visa Research, USA), Pratyay Mukherjee (Visa Research, USA), Peter Rindal (Visa Research, USA)

Partial abstract: We put forth the first formal treatment for distributed symmetric-key encryption, proposing new notions of correctness, privacy and authenticity in presence of malicious attackers. We provide strong and intuitive game-based definitions that are easy to understand and yield efficient constructions. We propose a generic construction of threshold authenticated encryption based on any distributed pseudorandom function (DPRF). When instantiated with the two different DPRF constructions proposed by Naor, Pinkas and Reingold (Eurocrypt 1999) and our enhanced versions, we obtain several efficient constructions meeting different security definitions. We implement these variants and provide extensive performance comparisons. Our most efficient instantiation uses only symmetric-key primitives and achieves a throughput of upto 1 million encryptions/decryptions per seconds, or alternatively a sub-millisecond latency with upto 18 participating parties.

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