LaPSuS—A Lattice-Based Private Stream Aggregation Scheme Under Scrutiny

Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) allows clients to send encryptions of their private values to an aggregator that is then able to learn the sum of these values but nothing else. It has since found many applications in practice, e.g. for smart metering or federated learning. In 2018, Becker et al. proposed the first lattice-based PSA scheme LaPS (NDSS 2018), with putative post-quantum security, which has subsequently been patented. In this paper, we describe two attacks on LaPS that break the claimed aggregator obliviousness security notion, where the second attack even allows to recover the secret keys of the clients, given enough encryptions. Moreover, we review the PSA literature for other occurrences of the responsible flawed proof steps. By explicitly tracking down and discussing these flaws, we clarify and hope to contribute to the literature on PSA schemes, in order to prevent further insecure schemes in practice. Finally, we point out that a Real-or-Random variant of the security notion that is often used as a substitute to make proofs easier, is not well-defined and potentially weaker than the standard PSA security notion. We propose a well defined variant and show that it is equivalent to the standard security notion of PSA under mild assumptions.