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Two-Prover Bit-Commitments : Classical, Quantum and Non-Signaling

Max Fillinger

Published Mar 19, 2019• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This thesis considers multi-prover commitment schemes whose security is based on restrictions on the communication between the provers. The results are applicable to so-called relativistic commitment schemes: schemes whose security is guaranteed by the fact that information does not travel faster than the speed of light. A commitment scheme is a cryptographic protocol solving the following problem: One party, the prover, has selected a value which he wants to keep secret at first. The prover wants to have the option to reveal it to the other party, the verifier, at a later time, but the verifier wants a guarantee that no value other than the originally selected one can be revealed. Standard commitment schemes can only be proven secure with computational hardness assumptions. This can be circumvented by splitting the prover into multiple entities and restricting their communication, e.g., no communication at all, or communication only with a delay (as in relativistic commitment schemes). This dissertation introduces new methods for analyzing and designing such multi-prover schemes. As an application, we show that the Lunghi et al. commitment scheme from 2015 has much stronger security that their original analysis indicated.

Related papers

Multi-Prover Commitments Against Non-Signaling Attacks

Serge Fehr, Max Fillinger

We reconsider the concept of multi-prover commitments, as introduced in the late eighties in the seminal work by Ben-Or et al. As was recently shown by Crépeau et al., the security of known two-prover commitment schemes not only relies on the explicit assumption that the provers cannot communicate, but also depends on their information processing capabilities. For instance, there exist schemes that are secure against classical provers but insecure if the provers have quantum information processing capabilities, and there are schemes that resist such quantum attacks but become insecure when considering general so-called non-signaling provers, which are restricted solely by the requirement that no communication takes place. This poses the natural question whether there exists a two-prover commitment scheme that is secure under the sole assumption that no communication takes place; no such scheme is known. In this work, we give strong evidence for a negative answer: we show that any single-round two-prover commitment scheme can be broken by a non-signaling attack. Our negative result is as bad as it can get: for any candidate scheme that is (almost) perfectly hiding, there exists a strategy that allows the dishonest provers to open a commitment to an arbitrary bit (almost) as successfully as the honest provers can open an honestly prepared commitment, i.e., with probability (almost) 1 in case of a perfectly sound scheme. In the case of multi-round schemes, our impossibility result is restricted to perfectly hiding schemes. On the positive side, we show that the impossibility result can be circumvented by considering three provers instead: there exists a three-prover commitment scheme that is secure against arbitrary non-signaling attacks.

arXiv:1505.03040•May 12, 2015•1 citation

Cryptography with spacetime constraints

Kaushik Chakraborty

In this thesis we have studied how to exploit relativistic constraints such as the non-superluminal signalling principle to design secure cryptographic primitives like position-verification and bit commitment. According to non-superluminal signalling principle, no physical carrier of information can travel faster than the speed of light. This put a constraint on the communication time between two distant stations. One can consider this delay in information transfer as a temporal non-communication constraint. Cryptographic primitives like bit-commitment, oblivious transfer can be implemented with perfect secrecy under such non-communication assumption between the agents. The first part of this thesis has studied how non-signalling constraints can be used for secure position verification. Here, we have discussed about a strategy which can attack any position verification scheme. In the next part of this thesis we have discussed about the nonlocal games, relevant for studying relativistic bit commitment protocols. We have established an upper bound on the classical value of such family of games. The last part of this thesis discusses about two relativistic bit commitment protocols and their security against classical adversaries. We conclude this thesis by giving a brief summary of the content of each chapter and mentioning interesting open problems. These open problems can be very useful for better understanding of the role of spacetime constraints such as non-superluminal signalling in designing perfectly secure cryptographic primitives.

•Oct 12, 2017•0 citations

Robust relativistic bit commitment

Kaushik Chakraborty, André Chailloux, Anthony Leverrier

Relativistic cryptography exploits the fact that no information can travel faster than the speed of light in order to obtain security guarantees that cannot be achieved from the laws of quantum mechanics alone. Recently, Lunghi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 030502 (2015)] presented a bit-commitment scheme where each party uses two agents that exchange classical information in a synchronized fashion, and that is both hiding and binding. A caveat is that the commitment time is intrinsically limited by the spatial configuration of the players, and increasing this time requires the agents to exchange messages during the whole duration of the protocol. While such a solution remains computationally attractive, its practicality is severely limited in realistic settings since all communication must remain perfectly synchronized at all times. In this work, we introduce a robust protocol for relativistic bit commitment that tolerates failures of the classical communication network. This is done by adding a third agent to both parties. Our scheme provides a quadratic improvement in terms of expected sustain time compared with the original protocol, while retaining the same level of security.

arXiv:1608.03398•Physical Review A•Dec 12, 2016•1 citation

On the Composition of Two-Prover Commitments, and Applications to Multi-Round Relativistic Commitments

Serge Fehr, Max Fillinger

We consider the related notions of two-prover and of relativistic commitment schemes. In recent work, Lunghi et al. proposed a new relativistic commitment scheme with a multi-round sustain phase that enables to keep the binding property alive as long as the sustain phase is running. They prove security of their scheme against classical attacks; however, the proven bound on the error parameter is very weak: it blows up doubly exponentially in the number of rounds. In this work, we give a new analysis of the multi-round scheme of Lunghi et al., and we show a linear growth of the error parameter instead (also considering classical attacks only). Our analysis is based on a new and rather general composition theorem for two-prover commitment schemes. The proof of our composition theorem is based on a better understanding of the binding property of two-prover commitments that we provide in the form of new definitions and relations among them. These new insights are certainly of independent interest and are likely to be useful in other contexts as well. Finally, our work gives rise to several interesting open problems, for instance extending our results to the quantum setting, where the dishonest provers are allowed to perform measurements on an entangled quantum state in order to try to break the binding property.

arXiv:1507.00240•Jul 1, 2015•2 citations

Classical and quantum strategies for bit commitment schemes in the two-prover model

Simard, Jean-Raymond.

We show that the long-standing assumption of "no-communication" between the provers of the two-prover model is not sufficiently precise to guarantee the security of a bit commitment scheme against malicious adversaries. Indeed, we show how a simple correlated random variable, which does not allow to communicate, can be used to cheat a simplified version (sBGKW) of the bit commitment scheme of Ben-Or, Goldwasser, Kilian, and Wigderson [BGKW88]. Instead we propose a stronger notion of separation between the two provers which takes into account correlated computations. To emphasize the risk that entanglement still represents for the security of a commitment scheme despite the stronger notion of separation, we present two variations of the sBGKW scheme that can be cheated by quantum provers with probability (almost) one. A complete proof of security against quantum adversaries is then given for the sBGKW scheme. By reduction we also obtain the security of the original BGKW scheme against quantum provers. For the unfamiliar reader, basic notions of quantum processing are provided to facilitate the understanding of the proofs presented.

•Jan 1, 2007•0 citations

Practical Relativistic Bit Commitment

Tommaso Lunghi, Jędrzej Kaniewski, Félix Bussières +4 more

Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Alice wishes to commit a secret bit to Bob. Perfectly secure bit commitment between two mistrustful parties is impossible through an asynchronous exchange of quantum information. Perfect security is, however, possible when Alice and Bob each split into several agents exchanging classical information at times and locations suitably chosen to satisfy specific relativistic constraints. In this Letter we first revisit a previously proposed scheme [C. Crépeau et al., Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 7073, 407 (2011)] that realizes bit commitment using only classical communication. We prove that the protocol is secure against quantum adversaries for a duration limited by the light-speed communication time between the locations of the agents. We then propose a novel multiround scheme based on finite-field arithmetic that extends the commitment time beyond this limit, and we prove its security against classical attacks. Finally, we present an implementation of these protocols using dedicated hardware and we demonstrate a 2 ms-long bit commitment over a distance of 131 km. By positioning the agents on antipodal points on the surface of Earth, the commitment time could possibly be extended to 212 ms.

arXiv:1411.4917•Physical Review Letters•Jul 13, 2015•52 citations
This thesis considers multi-prover commitment schemes whose security is based on restrictions on the communication between the provers. The results are applicable to so-called relativistic commitment schemes: schemes whose security is guaranteed by the fact that information does not travel faster than the speed of light. A commitment scheme is a cryptographic protocol solving the following problem: One party, the prover, has selected a value which he wants to keep secret at first. The prover wants to have the option to reveal it to the other party, the verifier, at a later time, but the verifier wants a guarantee that no value other than the originally selected one can be revealed. Standard commitment schemes can only be proven secure with computational hardness assumptions. This can be circumvented by splitting the prover into multiple entities and restricting their communication, e.g., no communication at all, or communication only with a delay (as in relativistic commitment schemes). This dissertation introduces new methods for analyzing and designing such multi-prover schemes. As an application, we show that the Lunghi et al. commitment scheme from 2015 has much stronger security that their original analysis indicated.
We reconsider the concept of multi-prover commitments, as introduced in the late eighties in the seminal work by Ben-Or et al. As was recently shown by Crépeau et al., the security of known two-prover commitment schemes not only relies on the explicit assumption that the provers cannot communicate, but also depends on their information processing capabilities. For instance, there exist schemes that are secure against classical provers but insecure if the provers have quantum information processing capabilities, and there are schemes that resist such quantum attacks but become insecure when considering general so-called non-signaling provers, which are restricted solely by the requirement that no communication takes place. This poses the natural question whether there exists a two-prover commitment scheme that is secure under the sole assumption that no communication takes place; no such scheme is known. In this work, we give strong evidence for a negative answer: we show that any single-round two-prover commitment scheme can be broken by a non-signaling attack. Our negative result is as bad as it can get: for any candidate scheme that is (almost) perfectly hiding, there exists a strategy that allows the dishonest provers to open a commitment to an arbitrary bit (almost) as successfully as the honest provers can open an honestly prepared commitment, i.e., with probability (almost) 1 in case of a perfectly sound scheme. In the case of multi-round schemes, our impossibility result is restricted to perfectly hiding schemes. On the positive side, we show that the impossibility result can be circumvented by considering three provers instead: there exists a three-prover commitment scheme that is secure against arbitrary non-signaling attacks.
In this thesis we have studied how to exploit relativistic constraints such as the non-superluminal signalling principle to design secure cryptographic primitives like position-verification and bit commitment. According to non-superluminal signalling principle, no physical carrier of information can travel faster than the speed of light. This put a constraint on the communication time between two distant stations. One can consider this delay in information transfer as a temporal non-communication constraint. Cryptographic primitives like bit-commitment, oblivious transfer can be implemented with perfect secrecy under such non-communication assumption between the agents. The first part of this thesis has studied how non-signalling constraints can be used for secure position verification. Here, we have discussed about a strategy which can attack any position verification scheme. In the next part of this thesis we have discussed about the nonlocal games, relevant for studying relativistic bit commitment protocols. We have established an upper bound on the classical value of such family of games. The last part of this thesis discusses about two relativistic bit commitment protocols and their security against classical adversaries. We conclude this thesis by giving a brief summary of the content of each chapter and mentioning interesting open problems. These open problems can be very useful for better understanding of the role of spacetime constraints such as non-superluminal signalling in designing perfectly secure cryptographic primitives.
Relativistic cryptography exploits the fact that no information can travel faster than the speed of light in order to obtain security guarantees that cannot be achieved from the laws of quantum mechanics alone. Recently, Lunghi et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 030502 (2015)] presented a bit-commitment scheme where each party uses two agents that exchange classical information in a synchronized fashion, and that is both hiding and binding. A caveat is that the commitment time is intrinsically limited by the spatial configuration of the players, and increasing this time requires the agents to exchange messages during the whole duration of the protocol. While such a solution remains computationally attractive, its practicality is severely limited in realistic settings since all communication must remain perfectly synchronized at all times. In this work, we introduce a robust protocol for relativistic bit commitment that tolerates failures of the classical communication network. This is done by adding a third agent to both parties. Our scheme provides a quadratic improvement in terms of expected sustain time compared with the original protocol, while retaining the same level of security.
We consider the related notions of two-prover and of relativistic commitment schemes. In recent work, Lunghi et al. proposed a new relativistic commitment scheme with a multi-round sustain phase that enables to keep the binding property alive as long as the sustain phase is running. They prove security of their scheme against classical attacks; however, the proven bound on the error parameter is very weak: it blows up doubly exponentially in the number of rounds. In this work, we give a new analysis of the multi-round scheme of Lunghi et al., and we show a linear growth of the error parameter instead (also considering classical attacks only). Our analysis is based on a new and rather general composition theorem for two-prover commitment schemes. The proof of our composition theorem is based on a better understanding of the binding property of two-prover commitments that we provide in the form of new definitions and relations among them. These new insights are certainly of independent interest and are likely to be useful in other contexts as well. Finally, our work gives rise to several interesting open problems, for instance extending our results to the quantum setting, where the dishonest provers are allowed to perform measurements on an entangled quantum state in order to try to break the binding property.
We show that the long-standing assumption of "no-communication" between the provers of the two-prover model is not sufficiently precise to guarantee the security of a bit commitment scheme against malicious adversaries. Indeed, we show how a simple correlated random variable, which does not allow to communicate, can be used to cheat a simplified version (sBGKW) of the bit commitment scheme of Ben-Or, Goldwasser, Kilian, and Wigderson [BGKW88]. Instead we propose a stronger notion of separation between the two provers which takes into account correlated computations. To emphasize the risk that entanglement still represents for the security of a commitment scheme despite the stronger notion of separation, we present two variations of the sBGKW scheme that can be cheated by quantum provers with probability (almost) one. A complete proof of security against quantum adversaries is then given for the sBGKW scheme. By reduction we also obtain the security of the original BGKW scheme against quantum provers. For the unfamiliar reader, basic notions of quantum processing are provided to facilitate the understanding of the proofs presented.
Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive in which Alice wishes to commit a secret bit to Bob. Perfectly secure bit commitment between two mistrustful parties is impossible through an asynchronous exchange of quantum information. Perfect security is, however, possible when Alice and Bob each split into several agents exchanging classical information at times and locations suitably chosen to satisfy specific relativistic constraints. In this Letter we first revisit a previously proposed scheme [C. Crépeau et al., Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 7073, 407 (2011)] that realizes bit commitment using only classical communication. We prove that the protocol is secure against quantum adversaries for a duration limited by the light-speed communication time between the locations of the agents. We then propose a novel multiround scheme based on finite-field arithmetic that extends the commitment time beyond this limit, and we prove its security against classical attacks. Finally, we present an implementation of these protocols using dedicated hardware and we demonstrate a 2 ms-long bit commitment over a distance of 131 km. By positioning the agents on antipodal points on the surface of Earth, the commitment time could possibly be extended to 212 ms.