arXiv subjects

Hongrui Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Hongrui Cui.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

A system capable of verifiably and privately screening global DNA synthesis

Printing custom DNA sequences is essential to scientific and biomedical research, but the technology can be used to manufacture plagues as well as cures. Just as ink printers recognize and reject attempts to counterfeit money, DNA synthesizers and assemblers should deny unauthorized requests to make viral DNA that could be misused. There are three complications. First, we don't need to quickly update printers to deal with newly discovered currencies, whereas we regularly learn of new potential pandemic viruses and other biological threats. Second, convincing counterfeit bills can't be printed in small pieces and taped together, while preventing the distributed synthesis and subsequent re-assembly of controlled sequences will require tracking which DNA fragments have been ordered across all providers and benchtop devices while protecting legitimate customer privacy. Finally, counterfeiting can at worst undermine faith in currency, whereas unauthorized DNA synthesis could be used to deliberately cause pandemics. Here we describe SecureDNA, a free, privacy-preserving, and fully automated system capable of verifiably screening all DNA synthesis orders of 30+ nucleotides against an up-to-date database of controlled sequences, and its operational performance and specificity when applied to 67 million nucleotides of DNA synthesized by providers in the United States, Europe, and China.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Bicoptor: Two-round Secure Three-party Non-linear Computation without Preprocessing for Privacy-preserving Machine Learning

The overhead of non-linear functions dominates the performance of the secure multiparty computation (MPC) based privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML). This work introduces a family of novel secure three-party computation (3PC) protocols, Bicoptor, which improve the efficiency of evaluating non-linear functions. The basis of Bicoptor is a new sign determination protocol, which relies on a clever use of the truncation protocol proposed in SecureML (S\&P 2017). Our 3PC sign determination protocol only requires two communication rounds, and does not involve any preprocessing. Such sign determination protocol is well-suited for computing non-linear functions in PPML, e.g. the activation function ReLU, Maxpool, and their variants. We develop suitable protocols for these non-linear functions, which form a family of GPU-friendly protocols, Bicoptor. All Bicoptor protocols only require two communication rounds without preprocessing. We evaluate Bicoptor under a 3-party LAN network over a public cloud, and achieve more than 370,000 DReLU/ReLU or 41,000 Maxpool (find the maximum value of nine inputs) operations per second. Under the same settings and environment, our ReLU protocol has a one or even two orders of magnitude improvement to the state-of-the-art works, Falcon (PETS 2021) or Edabits (CRYPTO 2020), respectively without batch processing.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2021

Device-Independent-Quantum-Randomness-Enhanced Zero-Knowledge Proof

Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is a fundamental cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to convince a verifier of the validity of a statement without leaking any further information. As an efficient variant of ZKP, non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZKP) adopting the Fiat-Shamir heuristic is essential to a wide spectrum of applications, such as federated learning, blockchain and social networks. However, the heuristic is typically built upon the random oracle model making ideal assumptions about hash functions, which does not hold in reality and thus undermines the security of the protocol. Here, we present a quantum resolution to the problem. Instead of resorting to a random oracle model, we implement a quantum randomness service. This service generates random numbers certified by the loophole-free Bell test and delivers them with postquantum cryptography (PQC) authentication. Employing this service, we conceive and implement a NIZKP of the three-colouring problem. By bridging together three prominent research themes, quantum non-locality, PQC and ZKP, we anticipate this work to open a new paradigm of quantum information science.

quant-ph↗