In classical cryptography, one-way functions (OWFs) play a central role as the minimal primitive that (almost) all primitives imply. The situation is more complicated in quantum cryptography, in which honest parties and adversaries can use quantum computation and communication, and it is known that analogues of OWFs in the quantum setting might not be minimal. In this work we ask whether OWFs are minimal for the intermediate setting of post-quantum cryptography, in which the protocols are classical while they shall resist quantum adversaries. We show that for a wide range of natural settings, if a primitive Q implies OWFs, then so does its (uniformly or non-uniformly secure) post-quantum analogue. In particular, we show that if a primitive Q implies any other primitive P that has a 2-message security game (e.g., OWFs) through a black-box classical security reduction R, then one can always (efficiently) turn any polynomial-size quantum adversary breaking P into a polynomial-size quantum adversary breaking Q. Note that this result holds even if the implementation of P using that of Q is arbitrarily non-black-box. We also prove extensions of this result for when the reduction R anticipates its oracle adversary to be deterministic, whenever either of the following conditions hold: (1) the adversary needs to win the security game of Q only with non-negligible probability (e.g., Q is collision-resistant hashing) or (2) that either of P and Q have “falsifiable” security games (this is the case when P is OWFs). Our work leaves open answering our main question when Q implies OWFs through a non-black-box security reduction, or when P uses a more complicated security game than a two-message one.
We provide a non-interactive quantum bit commitment scheme which has statistically-hiding and computationally-binding properties from any quantum one-way function. Our protocol is basically a parallel composition of the previous non-interactive quantum bit commitment schemes (based on quantum one-way permutations, due to Dumais, Mayers and Salvail (EUROCRYPT 2000)) with pairwise independent hash functions. To construct our non-interactive quantum bit commitment scheme from any quantum one-way function, we follow the procedure below: (i) from Dumais-Mayers-Salvail scheme to a weakly-hiding and 1-out-of-2 binding commitment (of a parallel variant); (ii) from the weakly-hiding and 1-out-of-2 binding commitment to a strongly-hiding and 1-out-of-2 binding commitment; (iii) from the strongly-hiding and 1-out-of-2 binding commitment to a normal statistically-hiding commitment. In the classical case, statistically-hiding bit commitment scheme (by Haitner, Nguyen, Ong, Reingold and Vadhan (SIAM J. Comput., Vol.39, 2009)) is also constructible from any one-way function. While the classical statistically-hiding bit commitment has large round complexity, our quantum scheme is non-interactive, which is advantageous over the classical schemes. A main technical contribution is to provide a quantum analogue of the new interactive hashing theorem, due to Haitner and Reingold (CCC 2007). Moreover, the parallel composition enables us to simplify the security analysis drastically.
Non-malleable commitments are a fundamental cryptographic tool for preventing (concurrent) man-in-the-middle attacks. Since their invention by Dolev, Dwork, and Naor in 1991, their round-complexity has been extensively studied, leading up to constant-round protocols based on one-way functions (OWFs), and three-round protocols based on sub-exponential OWFs, and standard polynomial-time hardness assumptions such as decisional Diffie--Hellman (DDH) and ZAPs (i.e., two-round witness-indistinguishable proofs). But constructions of two-round, or non-interactive, non-malleable commitments have so far remained elusive; the only known construction relied on a strong and non-falsifiable assumption with a non-malleability flavor. Additionally, a recent result by Pass shows the impossibility of basing two-round non-malleable commitments on falsifiable assumptions using a polynomial-time black-box security reduction. In this work, we show how to overcome this impossibility using super-polynomial-time hardness assumptions. Our main result demonstrates the existence of two-round concurrent non-malleable commitments based on the following four primitives (all with sub-exponential security): (1) non-interactive commitments, (2) ZAPs (i.e., 2-round witness indistinguishable proofs), (3) collision-resistant hash functions, and (4) a “weak” time-lock puzzle. Primitives (1), (2), and (3) can be based on, e.g., the discrete log and the RSA assumption. Time-lock puzzles---puzzles that can be solved by “brute-force” in time
2t, but cannot be solved significantly faster even using parallel computers---were proposed by Rivest, Shamir, and Wagner in 1996 and have been extensively studied since. We additionally obtain a non-interactive (i.e., one-message) version of our protocol satisfying concurrent non-malleability w.r.t. uniform attackers and show that our non-malleable commitments satisfy an even stronger notion of chosen commitment attack security.