Watermarking Cryptographic Functionalities from Standard Lattice Assumptions

A software watermarking scheme allows one to embed a “mark” into a program without significantly altering the behavior of the program. Moreover, it should be difficult to remove the watermark without destroying the functionality of the program. Recently, Cohen et al. (STOC 2016) and Boneh et al. (PKC 2017) showed how to watermark cryptographic functions such as pseudorandom functions (PRFs) using indistinguishability obfuscation. Notably, in their constructions, the watermark remains intact even against arbitrary removal strategies. A natural question is whether we can build watermarking schemes from standard assumptions that achieve this strong mark-unremovability property. We give the first construction of a watermarkable family of PRFs that satisfies this strong mark-unremovability property from standard lattice assumptions (namely, the learning with errors (LWE) and the one-dimensional short integer solution (SIS) problems). As part of our construction, we introduce a new cryptographic primitive called a translucent PRF. We then give a concrete construction of a translucent PRF family from standard lattice assumptions, which in turn yields a watermarkable family of PRFs from the same assumptions.