Impossibility on Tamper-Resilient Cryptography with Uniqueness Properties

In this work, we show negative results on the tamper-resilience of a wide class of cryptographic primitives with uniqueness properties, such as unique signatures, verifiable random functions, signatures with unique keys, injective one-way functions, and encryption schemes with a property we call unique-message property. Concretely, we prove that for these primitives, it is impossible to derive their (even extremely weak) tamper-resilience from any common assumption, via black-box reductions. Our proofs exploit the simulatable attack paradigm proposed by Wichs (ITCS ’13), and the tampering model we treat is the plain model, where public parameters and public/secret key pairs are potentially tampered with.