Abstract. We present a new constant round additively homomorphic commitment scheme with (amortized) computational and communication complexity linear in the size of the string committed to. Our scheme is based on the non-homomorphic commitment scheme of Cascudo et al. presented at PKC 2015. However, we manage to add the additive homomorphic property, while at the same time reducing the constants. In fact, when opening a large enough batch of commitments we achieve an amortized communication complexity converging to the length of the message committed to, i.e., we achieve close to rate 1 as the commitment protocol by Garay et al. from Eurocrypt 2014. A main technical improvement over the scheme mentioned above, and other schemes based on using error correcting codes for UC commitment, we develop a new technique which allows to based the extraction property on erasure decoding as opposed to error correction. This allows to use a code with significantly smaller minimal distance and allows to use codes without efficient decoding. Our scheme only relies on standard assumptions. Specifically we require a pseudorandom number generator, a linear error correcting code and an ideal oblivious transfer functionality. Based on this we prove our scheme secure in the Universal Composability (UC) framework against a static and malicious adversary corrupting any number of parties. On a practical note, our scheme improves significantly on the non-homomorphic scheme of Cascudo et al. Based on their observations in regards to efficiency of using linear error correcting codes for commitments we conjecture that our commitment scheme might in practice be more efficient than all existing constructions of UC commitment, even non-homomorphic constructions and even constructions in the random oracle model. In particular, the amortized price of computing one of our commitments is less than that of evaluating a hash function once.
We present a general framework for constructing non-interactive universally composable (UC) commitment schemes that are secure against adaptive adversaries in the non-erasure setting under a single re-usable common reference string. Previously, such “fully-equipped ” UC commitment schemes are only known in [8, 9], with an unavoidable overhead of O(κ) in the sense of communication and computational complexities; meaning that to commit λ bits, the communication and computational costs require O(λκ), where κ denotes the security parameter. Efficient construction of a fully-equipped UC commitment scheme was a long-standing open problem. We introduce a cryptographic primitive, called all-but-many encryptions (ABMEs), and prove that it is a translation of fully-equipped UC commitment in the primitive level. We then construct ABMEs from cryptographic primitives that we call a probabilistic pseudo random function family and extractable sigma protocols – the former is a probabilistic version of a pseudo random function family and the latter is a special kind of sigma (i.e., canonical 3-round public-coin HVSZK) protocols with some extractability. We provide fully-equipped UC commitment schemes from ABMEs under DDH and DCR-based assumptions, respectively. In particular, the DCR-based scheme is the first fully-equipped UC commitment scheme with optimal expansion factor Ω(1); to commit κ bits, the communication and computational costs are Ω(κ). We further construct a fully-equipped UC commitment scheme from a general assumption (in which trap-door permutations exist), which is far more efficient than the previous construction [9], because, unlike [9], our construction does not require non-interactive zero-knowledge proof systems. 1
Abstract. We propose a new security measure for commitment pro-tocols, called Universally Composable (UC) Commitment. The measure guarantees that commitment protocols behave like an \\ideal commitment service, " even when concurrently composed with an arbitrary set of pro-tocols. This is a strong guarantee: it implies that security is maintained even when an unbounded number of copies of the scheme are running concurrently, it implies non-malleability (not only with respect to other copies of the same protocol but even with respect to other protocols), it provides resilience to selective decommitment, and more. Unfortunately, two-party uc commitment protocols do not exist in the plain model. However, we construct two-party uc commitment proto-cols, based on general complexity assumptions, in the common reference string model where all parties have access to a common string taken from a predetermined distribution. The protocols are non-interactive, in the sense that both the commitment and the opening phases consist of a single message from the committer to the receiver.