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  1. We present TVA, a multi-party computation (MPC) system for secure analytics on secret-shared time series data. TVA achieves strong security guarantees in the semi-honest and malicious settings, and high expressivity by enabling complex analytics on inputs with unordered and irregular timestamps. TVA is the first system to support arbitrary composition of oblivious window operators, keyed aggregations, and multiple filter predicates, while keeping all data attributes private, including record timestamps and user-defined values in query predicates. At the core of the TVA system lie novel protocols for secure window assignment: (i) a tumbling window protocol that groups records into fixed-length time buckets and (ii) two session window protocols that identify periods of activity followed by periods of inactivity. We also contribute a new protocol for secure division with a public divisor, which may be of independent interest. We evaluate TVA on real LAN and WAN environments and show that it can efficiently compute complex window-based analytics on inputs of 2^22 records with modest use of resources. When compared to the state-of-the-art, TVA achieves up to 5.8× lower latency in queries with multiple filters and two orders of magnitude better performance in window aggregation. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available August 1, 2024
  2. Report that provides practical advice for bridging CS and Law in academia 
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  3. A central notion in U.S. copyright law is judging the substantial similarity between an original and an (allegedly) derived work. Capturing this notion has proven elusive, and the many approaches offered by case law and legal scholarship are often ill-defined, contradictory, or internally-inconsistent. This work suggests that key parts of the substantial-similarity puzzle are amendable to modeling inspired by theoretical computer science. Our proposed framework quantitatively evaluates how much "novelty" is needed to produce the derived work with access to the original work, versus reproducing it without access to the copyrighted elements of the original work. "Novelty" is captured by a computational notion of description length, in the spirit of Kolmogorov-Levin complexity, which is robust to mechanical transformations and availability of contextual information. This results in an actionable framework that could be used by courts as an aid for deciding substantial similarity. We evaluate it on several pivotal cases in copyright law and observe that the results are consistent with the rulings, and are philosophically aligned with the abstraction-filtration-comparison test of Altai. 
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  4. This work examines privacy laws and regulations that limit disclosure of personal data, and explores whether and how these restrictions apply when participants use cryptographically secure multi-party computation (MPC). By protecting data during use, MPC offers the promise of conducting data science in a way that (in some use cases) meets or even exceeds most people’s conceptions of data privacy. With MPC, it is possible to correlate individual records across multiple datasets without revealing the underlying records, to conduct aggregate analysis across datasets which parties are otherwise unwilling to share for competitive reasons, and to analyze aggregate statistics across datasets which no individual party may lawfully hold. However, most adoptions of MPC to date involve data that is not subject to privacy protection under the law. We posit that a major impediment to the adoption of MPC—on the data that society has deemed most worthy of protection—is the difficulty of mapping this new technology onto the design principles of data privacy laws. While a computer scientist might reasonably believe that transforming any data analysis into its privacy-protective variant using MPC is a clear win, we show in this work that the technological guarantees of MPC do not directly imply compliance with privacy laws. Specifically, a lawyer will likely want to ask several important questions about the pre-conditions that are necessary for MPC to succeed, the risk that data might inadvertently or maliciously be disclosed to someone other than the output party, and what recourse to take if this bad event occurs. We have two goals for this work: explaining why the privacy law questions are nuanced and that the lawyer is correct to proceed cautiously, and providing a framework that lawyers can use to reason systematically about whether and how MPC implicates data privacy laws in the context of a specific use case. Our framework revolves around three questions: a definitional question on whether the encodings still constitute ‘personal data,’ a process question about whether the act of executing MPC constitutes a data disclosure event, and a liability question about what happens if something goes wrong. We conclude by providing advice to regulators and suggestions to early adopters to spur uptake of MPC. It is our hope that this work provides the first step toward a methodology that organizations can use when contemplating the use of MPC. 
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  5. If a court knows that a respondent knows the password to a device, can the court compel the respondent to enter that password into the device? In this work, we propose a new approach to the foregone conclusion doctrine from Fisher v. U.S. that governs the answer to this question. The Holy Grail of this line of work would be a framework for reasoning about whether the testimony implicit in any action is already known to the government. In this paper we attempt something narrower. We introduce a framework for specifying actions for which all implicit testimony is, constructively, a foregone conclusion. Our approach is centered around placing the burden of proof on the government to demonstrate that it is not “rely[ing] on the truthtelling” of the respondent. Building on original legal analysis and using precise computer science formalisms, we propose demonstrability as a new central concept for describing compelled acts. We additionally provide a language for whether a compelled action meaningfully entails the respondent to perform in a manner that is “as good as” the government’s desired goal. Then, we apply our definitions to analyze the compellability of several cryptographic primitives including decryption, multifactor authentication, commitment schemes, and hash functions. In particular, our framework reaches a novel conclusion about compelled decryption in the setting that the encryption scheme is deniable: the government can compel but the respondent is free to use any password of her choice. 
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  6. End-to-end encryption provides strong privacy protections to billions of people, but it also complicates efforts to moderate content that can seriously harm people. To address this concern, Tyagi et al. [CRYPTO 2019] introduced the concept of asymmetric message franking (AMF) so that people can report abusive content to a moderator, while otherwise retaining end-to-end privacy by default and compatibility with anonymous communication systems like Signal’s sealed sender. In this work, we provide a new construction for asymmetric message franking called Hecate that is faster, more secure, and introduces additional functionality compared to Tyagi et al. First, our construction uses fewer invocations of standardized crypto primitives and operates in the plain model. Second, on top of AMF’s accountability and deniability requirements, we also add forward and backward secrecy. Third, we combine AMF with source tracing, another approach to content moderation that has previously been considered only in the setting of non-anonymous networks. Source tracing allows for messages to be forwarded, and a report only identifies the original source who created a message. To provide anonymity for senders and forwarders, we introduce a model of AMF with preprocessing whereby every client authenticates with the moderator out-of-band to receive a token that they later consume when sending a message anonymously. 
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  7. We model and analyze the Signal end-to-end messaging protocol within the UC framework. In particular: - We formulate an ideal functionality that captures end-to-end secure messaging, in a setting with PKI and an untrusted server, against an adversary that has full control over the network and can adaptively and momentarily compromise parties at any time and obtain their entire internal states. In particular our analysis captures the forward secrecy and recovery-of-security properties of Signal and the conditions under which they break. - We model the main components of the Signal architecture (PKI and long-term keys, the backbone continuous-key-exchange or "asymmetric ratchet," epoch-level symmetric ratchets, authenticated encryption) as individual ideal functionalities that are realized and analyzed separately and then composed using the UC and Global-State UC theorems. - We show how the ideal functionalities representing these components can be realized using standard cryptographic primitives under minimal hardness assumptions. Our modeling introduces additional innovations that enable arguing about the security of Signal irrespective of the underlying communication medium, as well as secure composition of dynamically generated modules that share state. These features, together with the basic modularity of the UC framework, will hopefully facilitate the use of both Signal-as-a-whole and its individual components within cryptographic applications. Two other features of our modeling are the treatment of fully adaptive corruptions, and making minimal use of random oracle abstractions. In particular, we show how to realize continuous key exchange in the plain model, while preserving security against adaptive corruptions. 
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  8. Butler, Kevin ; Thomas, Kurt (Ed.)
    Quasi-identifier-based deidentification techniques (QI-deidentification) are widely used in practice, including k-anonymity, ℓ-diversity, and t-closeness. We present three new attacks on QI-deidentification: two theoretical attacks and one practical attack on a real dataset. In contrast to prior work, our theoretical attacks work even if every attribute is a quasi-identifier. Hence, they apply to k-anonymity, ℓ-diversity, t-closeness, and most other QI-deidentification techniques. First, we introduce a new class of privacy attacks called downcoding attacks, and prove that every QI-deidentification scheme is vulnerable to downcoding attacks if it is minimal and hierarchical. Second, we convert the downcoding attacks into powerful predicate singling-out (PSO) attacks, which were recently proposed as a way to demonstrate that a privacy mechanism fails to legally anonymize under Europe's General Data Protection Regulation. Third, we use this http URL to reidentify 3 students in a k-anonymized dataset published by EdX (and show thousands are potentially vulnerable), undermining EdX's claimed compliance with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. The significance of this work is both scientific and political. Our theoretical attacks demonstrate that QI-deidentification may offer no protection even if every attribute is treated as a quasi-identifier. Our practical attack demonstrates that even deidentification experts acting in accordance with strict privacy regulations fail to prevent real-world reidentification. Together, they rebut a foundational tenet of QI-deidentification and challenge the actual arguments made to justify the continued use of k-anonymity and other QI-deidentification techniques. 
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  9. This paper studies Byzantine reliable broadcast (BRB) under asynchronous networks, and improves the state-of-the-art protocols from the following aspects. Near-optimal communication cost: We propose two new BRB protocols for n nodes and input message M that has communication cost O(n|M| +n^2 log n), which is near-optimal due to the lower bound of Ω(n|M| +n^2). The first BRB protocol assumes threshold signature but is easy to understand, while the second BRB protocol is error-free but less intuitive. Improved computation: We propose a new construction that improves the computation cost of the state-of-the-art BRB by avoiding the expensive online error correction on the input message, while achieving the same communication cost. Balanced communication: We propose a technique named balanced multicast that can balance the communication cost for BRB protocols where the broadcaster needs to multicast the message M while other nodes only needs to multicast coded fragments of size O(|M|/n + log n). The balanced multicast technique can be applied to many existing BRB protocols as well as all our new constructions in this paper, and can make every node incur about the same communication cost. Finally, we present a lower bound to show the near optimality of our protocol in terms of communication cost at each node. 
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  10. null (Ed.)
    We propose a new theoretical approach for building anonymous mixing mechanisms for cryptocurrencies. Rather than requiring a fully uniform permutation during mixing, we relax the requirement, insisting only that neighboring permutations are similarly likely. This is defined formally by borrowing from the definition of differential privacy. This relaxed privacy definition allows us to greatly reduce the amount of interaction and computation in the mixing protocol. Our construction achieves O(n * polylog(n)) computation time for mixing n addresses, whereas all other mixing schemes require O(n^2) total computation across all parties. Additionally, we support a smooth tolerance of fail-stop adversaries and do not require any trusted setup. We analyze the security of our generic protocol under the UC framework, and under a stand-alone, game-based definition. We finally describe an instantiation using ring signatures and confidential transactions. 
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