Constructions and Bounds for Unconditionally Secure Commitment Schemes.
Carlo Blundo, Barbara Masucci, Douglas R. Stinson, Ruizhong Wei
Abstract
Commitment schemes have been extensively studied since they were introduced by Blum in 1982. Rivest recently showed how to construct unconditionally secure commitment schemes, assuming the existence of a trusted initializer. In this paper, we present a formal mathematical model for such schemes, and analyze their binding and concealing properties. In particular, we show that such schemes cannot be perfectly concealing: there is necessarily a small probability that Alice can cheat Bob by committing to one value but later revealing a dierent value. We prove several bounds on Alice's cheating probability, and present constructions of schemes that achieve optimal cheating probabilities. We also show a close link between commitment schemes and the classical \\ane resolvable designs". 1 Introduction Commitment schemes were rst introduced by Blum [2] in 1982. In a commitment scheme, there is a sender, Alice, and a receiver, Bob. The scheme consists of a commit protocol and a reveal protocol...