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Revisiting Lower and Upper Bounds for Selective Decommitments.

Rafail Ostrovsky, Vanishree Rao, Alessandra Scafuro, Ivan Visconti

Published Jan 1, 2011• 1 citation
OpenAlex

Abstract

In [DNRS99, DNRS03], Dwork et al. opened the fundamental question of existence of commitment schemes that are secure against selective opening attacks (SOA, for short). In [BHY09] Bellare, Hofheinz, and Yilek, and Hofheinz in [Hof11] solved this problem positively by presenting a scheme which is based on non-black-box use of a one-way permutation and which has superconstant number of rounds. The achieved solution however opened other challenging questions on improvements of round complexity and on possibility of obtaining fully black-box schemes where access to an underlying primitive and to an adversary are black-box only. Recently, in TCC 2011, Xiao ([Xia11a]) investigated on how to achieve (nearly) optimal SOA-secure commitment schemes where optimality is in the sense of both the round complexity and the black-box use of cryptographic primitives. The work of Xiao focuses on a simulation-based security notion of SOA. Moreover, the various results in [Xia11a] focus only on either parallel or concurrent SOA. In this work we first point out various issues in the claims of [Xia11a] that actually re-open several of the questions left open in [BHY09, Hof11]. Then, we provide new lower bounds and concrete constructions that produce a very different state-of-the-art compared to the one given in [Xia11a]. More specifically, denoting by (x, y) the round complexity of a scheme that requires x rounds in the commitment phase and y rounds in the decommitment phase, and by considering only (like in [Xia11a]) the setting of black-box simulation for SOA-security, we show that: 1. There is an issue in the result of [Xia11a] on the existence of (3, 1)-round schemes for parallel SOA; in fact, we are able to contradict their impossibility result by presenting a (3, 1)-round scheme based on black-box use of trapdoor commitments. Moreover, we can instantiate such a scheme with a non-black-box use of a one-way function, thus producing a (3, 1)-round scheme based on any one-way function that improves the result of [BHY09, Hof11] from logarithmic round complexity to 3 (optimal), also under optimal complexity assumptions. We also show a (3, 3)-round scheme based on black-box use of any one-way permutation. 2. There is an issue in the proof of security for parallel composition of the (4, 1)-round scheme given in [Xia11a]; thus such scheme may not be secure. We show instead a (4, 1)-round scheme based on black-box use of any weak trapdoor commitment scheme, and a (5, 1)round scheme based on black-box use of any one-way permutation. 3. There is an issue in the proof of security of the concurrent SOA-secure scheme of [Xia11a]. This issue emerges under the case where the simulator cannot itself efficiently sample from ∗Departments of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics, UCLA, 3732D Boelter Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095-1596, U.S. Email: rafail@cs.ucla.edu †Department of Computer Science, UCLA, 3771 Boelter Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095-1596, U.S. Email: vanishri@cs.ucla.edu ‡Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Salerno, Italy. Email. scafuro@dia.unisa.it §Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Salerno, Italy. Email. visconti@dia.unisa.it

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Losing information

Rafail Ostrovsky, Brett Hemenway

In the first part of this work, Chapter 3 we present new and general constructions of lossy encryption schemes. The Selective Opening problem is as follows: suppose an adversary receives n commitments (or encryptions) of (possibly) correlated messages, and now the adversary can choose n/2 of the messages, and receive de-commitments (or decryptions and the randomness used to encrypt them). Do the unopened commitments (encryptions) remain secure? A protocol achieving this type of security is called secure against a selective opening adversary (SOA). This question arises naturally in the context of Byzantine Agreement and Secure Multiparty Computation, where an active adversary is able to eavesdrop on all the wires, and then choose a subset of players to corrupt. Unfortunately, the traditional definitions of security (IND-CPA, IND-CCA) do not guarantee security in this setting. In this paper: · We formally define re-randomizable encryption and show that every re-randomizable encryption scheme gives rise to efficient encryptions secure against a selective opening adversary. (Very informally, an encryption is re-randomizable, if given any ciphertext, there is an efficient way to map it to an almost uniform re-encryption of the same underlying message). · We show that statistically-hiding 2-round Oblivious Transfer (OT) implies Lossy Encryption and so do smooth hash proof systems, as defined by Cramer-Shoup. Combining this with known results immediately shows that Private Information Retrieval and homomorphic encryption both imply Lossy Encryption, and thus Selective Opening Secure Public Key Encryption. In the second part of this work, Chapter 4, we focus on constructing lossy trapdoor functions. Lossy trapdoor functions (LTDFs) were introduced by Peikert and Waters in STOC '08. Since their introduction, lossy trapdoor functions have found many uses in cryptography. In the work of Peikert and Waters, lossy trapdoor functions were used to give an efficient construction of a chosen-ciphertext secure (IND-CCA2) cryptosystem. Lossy trapdoor functions were then shown to imply deterministic encryption by Boldyreva, Fehr and O'Neill in CRYPTO '08. In TCC '09, Rosen and Segev showed that lossy trapdoor functions are correlated product secure, meaning that they remain one-way even when evaluated on correlated inputs. In this section we extend the notion of smooth hash proof systems as defined by Cramer and Shoup in Eurocrypt '02, to include an additional homomorphic property. We call this primitive smooth homomorphic hash proof systems . We show that smooth homomorphic projective hash proof systems include all Diverse Group Systems, as defined by Cramer and Shoup. Using this definition, we show that · Smooth homomorphic hash proof systems imply LTDFs. · Diverse group systems as defined in [CS02] imply LTDFs. These are the first known generic constructions of LTDFs. · Applying our generic construction the specific constructions of smooth hash proof systems given by Cramer and Shoup, we obtain the first construction of fully lossy trapdoor functions from the quadratic residuosity (QR) assumption. We also obtain a novel construction of LTDFs from Paillier's decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption. · Applying the black-box separation results of Rosen and Segev, we show that there is a black-box separation between smooth homomorphic hash proof systems and one-way trapdoor permutations. In the third part of this work, Chapter 5, we examine in what situations we can construct lossy trapdoor functions from the seemingly weaker primitive lossy encryption. Injective one-way trapdoor functions are one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives. In this section we give a novel construction of injective trapdoor functions based on oblivious transfer for long strings. Our main result is to show that any 2-message statistically sender-private semi-honest oblivious transfer (OT) for strings longer than the sender randomness implies the existence of injective one-way trapdoor functions. This is perhaps surprising given the black box separation of injective one-way trapdoor functions from many common cryptographic protocols, e.g. IND-CCA encryption. As a tool for creating injective one-way trapdoor functions, we define a new notion of security for a public key encryption scheme called Randomness Dependent Message (RDM) security, and use it as a stepping stone for creating injective one-way trapdoor functions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

•Jan 1, 2010•1 citation

Two-Round and Non-Interactive Concurrent Non-Malleable Commitments from Time-Lock Puzzles

Huijia Lin, Rafael Pass, Pratik Soni

Non-malleable commitments are a fundamental cryptographic tool for preventing against (concurrent) man-in-the-middle attacks. Since their invention by Dolev, Dwork, and Naor in 1991, the round-complexity of non-malleable commitments has been extensively studied, leading up to constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitments based only on one-way functions, and even 3-round concurrent non-malleable commitments based on subexponential one-way functions. But constructions of two-round, or non-interactive, nonmalleable 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 a two-round concurrent non-malleable commitment based on subexponential “standard-type” assumptions-notably, assuming the existence of the following primitives (all with subexponential 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),(3) can be based on e.g., the discrete log assumption 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 quite extensively studied since; the most popular instantiation relies on the assumption that 2t repeated squarings mod N = pq require “roughly” 2t parallel time. Our notion of a “weak” time-lock puzzle, requires only that the puzzle cannot be solved in parallel time 2tϵ(and thus we only need to rely on the relatively mild assumption that there are no huge improvements in the parallel complexity of repeated squaring algorithms). We additionally show that if replacing assumption (2) for a non-interactive witness indistinguishable proof (NIWI), and (3) for a uniform collision-resistant hash function, then a non-interactive (i.e., one-message) version of our protocol satisfies concurrent non-malleability w.r.t. uniform attackers.

Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science•Oct 1, 2017•52 citations

Studies in Non-Malleable Commitment

Chen-Kuei Lee

Non-malleable commitment is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives in that it is often used as a basic building block in modern cryptography. Briefly, a commitment scheme allows a sender to commit to a value while keeping the value secret from the receiver. In addition, when the commitment is opened in a later stage, the scheme guarantees that the sender can reveal only the unique value being committed to in the previous stage. A commitment scheme is said to be non-malleable if no adversary can succeed in committing to a related massage m', after seeing a commitment of a message m. In this dissertation, we study the construction of non-malleable commitments and some of their applications.A black-box construction of non-malleable commitment is presented in the first part of this dissertation. Our protocol requires only a constant number of rounds and satisfies the standard notion of non-malleability w.r.t. commitment. Our technique is based on ideas from the ``zero-knowledge from secure multi-party computation'' paradigm by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC 2007). Furthermore, our construction only uses one-way functions as a black-box and thus does not depend on the actual implementation details of the functions. Prior to our result, under the standard notion of security, no black-box construction of constant-round non-malleable commitment was known. Hence, our main result closes the gap between black-box and non-black-box constructions for the problem of non-malleable commitment.In the second part of this dissertation, we show that our technique can be applied to multiple applications. Specifically, we extend our work to obtain a constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitment, a constant-round multi-party parallel coin tossing, and a non-malleable statistically hiding commitment (according to the notion of non-malleability w.r.t. opening.) Additionally, all results mentioned above are based only on a black-box use of one-way functions.

•Jan 1, 2013•0 citations

Constructing Non-malleable Commitments: A Black-Box Approach

Vipul Goyal, Chen-Kuei Lee, Rafail Ostrovsky +1 more

We propose the first black-box construction of non-malleable commitments according to the standard notion of non-malleability with respect to commitment. Our construction additionally only requires a constant number of rounds and is based only on (black-box use of) one-way functions. Prior to our work, no black-box construction of non-malleable commitments was known (except for relaxed notions of security) in any (polynomial) number of rounds based on any cryptographic assumption. This closes the wide gap existent between black-box and non-black-box constructions for the problem of non-malleable commitments. Our construction relies on (and can be seen as a generalization of) the recent non-malleable commitment scheme of Goyal (STOC 2011). We also show how to get black-box constructions for a host of other cryptographic primitives. We extend our construction to get constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitments, constant-round multi-party coin tossing, and non-malleable statistically hiding commitments (satisfying the notion of non-malleability with respect to opening). All of the mentioned results make only a black-box use of one-way functions. Our primary technical contribution is a novel way of implementing the proof of consistency typically required in the constructions of non-malleable commitments (and other related primitives). We do this by relying on ideas from the ``zero-knowledge from secure multi-party computation" paradigm of Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC 2007). We extend in a novel way this ``computation in the head" paradigm (which can be though of as bringing powerful error-correcting codes into purely computational setting). To construct a non-malleable commitment scheme, we apply our computation in the head techniques to the recent (constant-round) construction of Goyal. Along the way, we also present a simplification of the construction of Goyal where a part of the protocol is implemented in an information theoretic manner. Such a simplification is crucial for getting a black-box construction. This is done by making use of pair wise-independent hash functions and strong randomness extractors. We show that our techniques have multiple applications, as elaborated in the paper. Hence, we believe our techniques might be useful in other settings in future.

Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science•Oct 1, 2012•87 citations

Round-Efficient Black-Box Construction of Composable Multi-Party Computation.

Susumu Kiyoshima

We present a round-efficient black-box construction of a general multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that satisfies composability in the plain model. The security of our protocol is proven in the angel-based UC framework [Prabhakaran and Sahai, STOC’04] under the minimal assumption of the existence of semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols. The round complexity of our protocol is $$\max (\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n), O(R_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}))$$ when the round complexity of the underlying oblivious transfer protocol is $$R_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}$$ . Since constant-round semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols can be constructed under standard assumptions (such as the existence of enhanced trapdoor permutations), our result gives a $$\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n)$$ -round protocol under these assumptions. Previously, only an $$O(\max (n^{\epsilon }, R_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}))$$ -round protocol was shown, where $$\epsilon >0$$ is an arbitrary constant. We obtain our MPC protocol by constructing a $$\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n)$$ -round CCA-secure commitment scheme in a black-box way under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions.

•Jan 1, 2014•0 citations

Two-Round and Non-Interactive Concurrent Non-Malleable Commitments from Time-Lock Puzzles

Huijia Lin, Rafael Pass, Pratik Soni

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 $2^t$, 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.

SIAM Journal on Computing•Jan 1, 2020•3 citations
In [DNRS99, DNRS03], Dwork et al. opened the fundamental question of existence of commitment schemes that are secure against selective opening attacks (SOA, for short). In [BHY09] Bellare, Hofheinz, and Yilek, and Hofheinz in [Hof11] solved this problem positively by presenting a scheme which is based on non-black-box use of a one-way permutation and which has superconstant number of rounds. The achieved solution however opened other challenging questions on improvements of round complexity and on possibility of obtaining fully black-box schemes where access to an underlying primitive and to an adversary are black-box only. Recently, in TCC 2011, Xiao ([Xia11a]) investigated on how to achieve (nearly) optimal SOA-secure commitment schemes where optimality is in the sense of both the round complexity and the black-box use of cryptographic primitives. The work of Xiao focuses on a simulation-based security notion of SOA. Moreover, the various results in [Xia11a] focus only on either parallel or concurrent SOA. In this work we first point out various issues in the claims of [Xia11a] that actually re-open several of the questions left open in [BHY09, Hof11]. Then, we provide new lower bounds and concrete constructions that produce a very different state-of-the-art compared to the one given in [Xia11a]. More specifically, denoting by (x, y) the round complexity of a scheme that requires x rounds in the commitment phase and y rounds in the decommitment phase, and by considering only (like in [Xia11a]) the setting of black-box simulation for SOA-security, we show that: 1. There is an issue in the result of [Xia11a] on the existence of (3, 1)-round schemes for parallel SOA; in fact, we are able to contradict their impossibility result by presenting a (3, 1)-round scheme based on black-box use of trapdoor commitments. Moreover, we can instantiate such a scheme with a non-black-box use of a one-way function, thus producing a (3, 1)-round scheme based on any one-way function that improves the result of [BHY09, Hof11] from logarithmic round complexity to 3 (optimal), also under optimal complexity assumptions. We also show a (3, 3)-round scheme based on black-box use of any one-way permutation. 2. There is an issue in the proof of security for parallel composition of the (4, 1)-round scheme given in [Xia11a]; thus such scheme may not be secure. We show instead a (4, 1)-round scheme based on black-box use of any weak trapdoor commitment scheme, and a (5, 1)round scheme based on black-box use of any one-way permutation. 3. There is an issue in the proof of security of the concurrent SOA-secure scheme of [Xia11a]. This issue emerges under the case where the simulator cannot itself efficiently sample from ∗Departments of Computer Science and Department of Mathematics, UCLA, 3732D Boelter Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095-1596, U.S. Email: rafail@cs.ucla.edu †Department of Computer Science, UCLA, 3771 Boelter Hall, Los Angeles CA 90095-1596, U.S. Email: vanishri@cs.ucla.edu ‡Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Salerno, Italy. Email. scafuro@dia.unisa.it §Dipartimento di Informatica, University of Salerno, Italy. Email. visconti@dia.unisa.it
In the first part of this work, Chapter 3 we present new and general constructions of lossy encryption schemes. The Selective Opening problem is as follows: suppose an adversary receives n commitments (or encryptions) of (possibly) correlated messages, and now the adversary can choose n/2 of the messages, and receive de-commitments (or decryptions and the randomness used to encrypt them). Do the unopened commitments (encryptions) remain secure? A protocol achieving this type of security is called secure against a selective opening adversary (SOA). This question arises naturally in the context of Byzantine Agreement and Secure Multiparty Computation, where an active adversary is able to eavesdrop on all the wires, and then choose a subset of players to corrupt. Unfortunately, the traditional definitions of security (IND-CPA, IND-CCA) do not guarantee security in this setting. In this paper: · We formally define re-randomizable encryption and show that every re-randomizable encryption scheme gives rise to efficient encryptions secure against a selective opening adversary. (Very informally, an encryption is re-randomizable, if given any ciphertext, there is an efficient way to map it to an almost uniform re-encryption of the same underlying message). · We show that statistically-hiding 2-round Oblivious Transfer (OT) implies Lossy Encryption and so do smooth hash proof systems, as defined by Cramer-Shoup. Combining this with known results immediately shows that Private Information Retrieval and homomorphic encryption both imply Lossy Encryption, and thus Selective Opening Secure Public Key Encryption. In the second part of this work, Chapter 4, we focus on constructing lossy trapdoor functions. Lossy trapdoor functions (LTDFs) were introduced by Peikert and Waters in STOC '08. Since their introduction, lossy trapdoor functions have found many uses in cryptography. In the work of Peikert and Waters, lossy trapdoor functions were used to give an efficient construction of a chosen-ciphertext secure (IND-CCA2) cryptosystem. Lossy trapdoor functions were then shown to imply deterministic encryption by Boldyreva, Fehr and O'Neill in CRYPTO '08. In TCC '09, Rosen and Segev showed that lossy trapdoor functions are correlated product secure, meaning that they remain one-way even when evaluated on correlated inputs. In this section we extend the notion of smooth hash proof systems as defined by Cramer and Shoup in Eurocrypt '02, to include an additional homomorphic property. We call this primitive smooth homomorphic hash proof systems . We show that smooth homomorphic projective hash proof systems include all Diverse Group Systems, as defined by Cramer and Shoup. Using this definition, we show that · Smooth homomorphic hash proof systems imply LTDFs. · Diverse group systems as defined in [CS02] imply LTDFs. These are the first known generic constructions of LTDFs. · Applying our generic construction the specific constructions of smooth hash proof systems given by Cramer and Shoup, we obtain the first construction of fully lossy trapdoor functions from the quadratic residuosity (QR) assumption. We also obtain a novel construction of LTDFs from Paillier's decisional composite residuosity (DCR) assumption. · Applying the black-box separation results of Rosen and Segev, we show that there is a black-box separation between smooth homomorphic hash proof systems and one-way trapdoor permutations. In the third part of this work, Chapter 5, we examine in what situations we can construct lossy trapdoor functions from the seemingly weaker primitive lossy encryption. Injective one-way trapdoor functions are one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives. In this section we give a novel construction of injective trapdoor functions based on oblivious transfer for long strings. Our main result is to show that any 2-message statistically sender-private semi-honest oblivious transfer (OT) for strings longer than the sender randomness implies the existence of injective one-way trapdoor functions. This is perhaps surprising given the black box separation of injective one-way trapdoor functions from many common cryptographic protocols, e.g. IND-CCA encryption. As a tool for creating injective one-way trapdoor functions, we define a new notion of security for a public key encryption scheme called Randomness Dependent Message (RDM) security, and use it as a stepping stone for creating injective one-way trapdoor functions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
Non-malleable commitments are a fundamental cryptographic tool for preventing against (concurrent) man-in-the-middle attacks. Since their invention by Dolev, Dwork, and Naor in 1991, the round-complexity of non-malleable commitments has been extensively studied, leading up to constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitments based only on one-way functions, and even 3-round concurrent non-malleable commitments based on subexponential one-way functions. But constructions of two-round, or non-interactive, nonmalleable 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 a two-round concurrent non-malleable commitment based on subexponential “standard-type” assumptions-notably, assuming the existence of the following primitives (all with subexponential 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),(3) can be based on e.g., the discrete log assumption 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 quite extensively studied since; the most popular instantiation relies on the assumption that 2t repeated squarings mod N = pq require “roughly” 2t parallel time. Our notion of a “weak” time-lock puzzle, requires only that the puzzle cannot be solved in parallel time 2tϵ(and thus we only need to rely on the relatively mild assumption that there are no huge improvements in the parallel complexity of repeated squaring algorithms). We additionally show that if replacing assumption (2) for a non-interactive witness indistinguishable proof (NIWI), and (3) for a uniform collision-resistant hash function, then a non-interactive (i.e., one-message) version of our protocol satisfies concurrent non-malleability w.r.t. uniform attackers.
Non-malleable commitment is one of the most fundamental cryptographic primitives in that it is often used as a basic building block in modern cryptography. Briefly, a commitment scheme allows a sender to commit to a value while keeping the value secret from the receiver. In addition, when the commitment is opened in a later stage, the scheme guarantees that the sender can reveal only the unique value being committed to in the previous stage. A commitment scheme is said to be non-malleable if no adversary can succeed in committing to a related massage m', after seeing a commitment of a message m. In this dissertation, we study the construction of non-malleable commitments and some of their applications.A black-box construction of non-malleable commitment is presented in the first part of this dissertation. Our protocol requires only a constant number of rounds and satisfies the standard notion of non-malleability w.r.t. commitment. Our technique is based on ideas from the ``zero-knowledge from secure multi-party computation'' paradigm by Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC 2007). Furthermore, our construction only uses one-way functions as a black-box and thus does not depend on the actual implementation details of the functions. Prior to our result, under the standard notion of security, no black-box construction of constant-round non-malleable commitment was known. Hence, our main result closes the gap between black-box and non-black-box constructions for the problem of non-malleable commitment.In the second part of this dissertation, we show that our technique can be applied to multiple applications. Specifically, we extend our work to obtain a constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitment, a constant-round multi-party parallel coin tossing, and a non-malleable statistically hiding commitment (according to the notion of non-malleability w.r.t. opening.) Additionally, all results mentioned above are based only on a black-box use of one-way functions.
We propose the first black-box construction of non-malleable commitments according to the standard notion of non-malleability with respect to commitment. Our construction additionally only requires a constant number of rounds and is based only on (black-box use of) one-way functions. Prior to our work, no black-box construction of non-malleable commitments was known (except for relaxed notions of security) in any (polynomial) number of rounds based on any cryptographic assumption. This closes the wide gap existent between black-box and non-black-box constructions for the problem of non-malleable commitments. Our construction relies on (and can be seen as a generalization of) the recent non-malleable commitment scheme of Goyal (STOC 2011). We also show how to get black-box constructions for a host of other cryptographic primitives. We extend our construction to get constant-round concurrent non-malleable commitments, constant-round multi-party coin tossing, and non-malleable statistically hiding commitments (satisfying the notion of non-malleability with respect to opening). All of the mentioned results make only a black-box use of one-way functions. Our primary technical contribution is a novel way of implementing the proof of consistency typically required in the constructions of non-malleable commitments (and other related primitives). We do this by relying on ideas from the ``zero-knowledge from secure multi-party computation" paradigm of Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC 2007). We extend in a novel way this ``computation in the head" paradigm (which can be though of as bringing powerful error-correcting codes into purely computational setting). To construct a non-malleable commitment scheme, we apply our computation in the head techniques to the recent (constant-round) construction of Goyal. Along the way, we also present a simplification of the construction of Goyal where a part of the protocol is implemented in an information theoretic manner. Such a simplification is crucial for getting a black-box construction. This is done by making use of pair wise-independent hash functions and strong randomness extractors. We show that our techniques have multiple applications, as elaborated in the paper. Hence, we believe our techniques might be useful in other settings in future.
We present a round-efficient black-box construction of a general multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that satisfies composability in the plain model. The security of our protocol is proven in the angel-based UC framework [Prabhakaran and Sahai, STOC’04] under the minimal assumption of the existence of semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols. The round complexity of our protocol is max⁡(O~(log⁡2n),O(ROT))\max (\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n), O(R_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}))max(O(log2n),O(ROT​)) when the round complexity of the underlying oblivious transfer protocol is ROTR_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}ROT​ . Since constant-round semi-honest oblivious transfer protocols can be constructed under standard assumptions (such as the existence of enhanced trapdoor permutations), our result gives a O~(log⁡2n)\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n)O(log2n) -round protocol under these assumptions. Previously, only an O(max⁡(nϵ,ROT))O(\max (n^{\epsilon }, R_{{{{\mathsf {O}}}{{\mathsf {T}}}}}))O(max(nϵ,ROT​)) -round protocol was shown, where ϵ>0\epsilon >0ϵ>0 is an arbitrary constant. We obtain our MPC protocol by constructing a O~(log⁡2n)\widetilde{O}(\log ^2n)O(log2n) -round CCA-secure commitment scheme in a black-box way under the assumption of the existence of one-way functions.
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 2t2^t2t, 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.