53 research outputs found
No Superluminal Signaling Implies Unconditionally Secure Bit Commitment
Bit commitment (BC) is an important cryptographic primitive for an agent to
convince a mutually mistrustful party that she has already made a binding
choice of 0 or 1 but only to reveal her choice at a later time. Ideally, a BC
protocol should be simple, reliable, easy to implement using existing
technologies, and most importantly unconditionally secure in the sense that its
security is based on an information-theoretic proof rather than computational
complexity assumption or the existence of a trustworthy arbitrator. Here we
report such a provably secure scheme involving only one-way classical
communications whose unconditional security is based on no superluminal
signaling (NSS). Our scheme is inspired by the earlier works by Kent, who
proposed two impractical relativistic protocols whose unconditional securities
are yet to be established as well as several provably unconditionally secure
protocols which rely on both quantum mechanics and NSS. Our scheme is
conceptually simple and shows for the first time that quantum communication is
not needed to achieve unconditional security for BC. Moreover, with purely
classical communications, our scheme is practical and easy to implement with
existing telecom technologies. This completes the cycle of study of
unconditionally secure bit commitment based on known physical laws.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors due to a crucial
oversight on an earlier work by A. Ken
Big Data Refinement
"Big data" has become a major area of research and associated funding, as well as a focus of utopian thinking. In the still growing research community, one of the favourite optimistic analogies for data processing is that of the oil refinery, extracting the essence out of the raw data. Pessimists look for their imagery to the other end of the petrol cycle, and talk about the "data exhausts" of our society.
Obviously, the refinement community knows how to do "refining". This paper explores the extent to which notions of refinement and data in the formal methods community relate to the core concepts in "big data". In particular, can the data refinement paradigm can be used to explain aspects of big data processing
An Elementary Completeness Proof for Secure Two-Party Computation Primitives
In the secure two-party computation problem, two parties wish to compute a
(possibly randomized) function of their inputs via an interactive protocol,
while ensuring that neither party learns more than what can be inferred from
only their own input and output. For semi-honest parties and
information-theoretic security guarantees, it is well-known that, if only
noiseless communication is available, only a limited set of functions can be
securely computed; however, if interaction is also allowed over general
communication primitives (multi-input/output channels), there are "complete"
primitives that enable any function to be securely computed. The general set of
complete primitives was characterized recently by Maji, Prabhakaran, and
Rosulek leveraging an earlier specialized characterization by Kilian. Our
contribution in this paper is a simple, self-contained, alternative derivation
using elementary information-theoretic tools.Comment: 6 pages, extended version of ITW 2014 pape
On the Commitment Capacity of Unfair Noisy Channels
Noisy channels are a valuable resource from a cryptographic point of view.
They can be used for exchanging secret-keys as well as realizing other
cryptographic primitives such as commitment and oblivious transfer. To be
really useful, noisy channels have to be consider in the scenario where a
cheating party has some degree of control over the channel characteristics.
Damg\r{a}rd et al. (EUROCRYPT 1999) proposed a more realistic model where such
level of control is permitted to an adversary, the so called unfair noisy
channels, and proved that they can be used to obtain commitment and oblivious
transfer protocols. Given that noisy channels are a precious resource for
cryptographic purposes, one important question is determining the optimal rate
in which they can be used. The commitment capacity has already been determined
for the cases of discrete memoryless channels and Gaussian channels. In this
work we address the problem of determining the commitment capacity of unfair
noisy channels. We compute a single-letter characterization of the commitment
capacity of unfair noisy channels. In the case where an adversary has no
control over the channel (the fair case) our capacity reduces to the well-known
capacity of a discrete memoryless binary symmetric channel
Secure Two-Party Computation over a Z-Channel
In secure two-party computation, two mutually distrusting parties are interested in jointly computing a function, while preserving the privacy of their respective inputs. However, when communicating over a clear channel, security against computationally unbounded adversaries is impossible. Thus is the importance of noisy channels, over which we can build Oblivious Transfer (OT), a fundamental primitive in cryptography and the basic building block for any secure multi-party computation. The noisy channels commonly used in current constructions are mostly derived from the Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC), which is modified to extend the capabilities of an attacker. Still, these constructions are based on very strong assumptions, in particular on the error probability, which makes them hard to implement. In this paper, we provide a protocol achieving oblivious transfer over a Z-channel, a natural channel model in various contexts, ranging from optical to covert communication. The protocol proves to be particularly efficient for a large range of error probabilities p (e.g., for 0.17 ≤ p ≤ 0.29 when a security parameter ε = 10− 9 is chosen), where it requires a limited amount of data to be sent through the channel. Our construction also proves to offer security against unfair adversaries, who are able to select the channel probability within a fixed range. We provide coding schemes that can further increase the efficiency of the protocol for probabilities distant from the range mentioned above, and also allow the use of a Z-channel with an error probability greater than 0.5. The flexibility and the efficiency of the construction make an actual implementation of oblivious transfer a more realistic prospect
Building Oblivious Transfer on Channel Delays
In the information-theoretic setting, where adversaries have unlimited computational power, the fundamental cryptographic primitive Oblivious Transfer (OT) cannot be securely achieved if the parties are communicating over a clear channel. To preserve secrecy and security, the players have to rely on noise in the communication. Noisy channels are therefore a useful tool to model noise behavior and build protocols implementing OT. This paper explores a source of errors that is inherently present in practically any transmission medium, but has been scarcely studied in this context: delays in the communication. In order to have a model for the delays that is both general and comparable to the channels usually used for OT – such as the Binary Symmetric Channel (BSC) – we introduce a new noisy channel, the Binary Discrete-time Delaying Channel (BDDC). We show that such a channel realistically reproduces real-life communication scenarios where delays are hard to predict and we propose a protocol for achieving oblivious transfer over the BDDC. We analyze the security of our construction in the semi-honest setting, showing that our realization of OT substantially decreases the protocol sensitivity to the user’s knowledge of the channel compared to solutions relying on other channel properties, and is very efficient for wide ranges of delay probabilities. The flexibility and generality of the model opens the way for future implementation in media where delays are a fundamental characteristic
Secure bit commitment from relativistic constraints
We investigate two-party cryptographic protocols that are secure under
assumptions motivated by physics, namely relativistic assumptions
(no-signalling) and quantum mechanics. In particular, we discuss the security
of bit commitment in so-called split models, i.e. models in which at least some
of the parties are not allowed to communicate during certain phases of the
protocol. We find the minimal splits that are necessary to evade the
Mayers-Lo-Chau no-go argument and present protocols that achieve security in
these split models. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of local versus global
command, a subtle issue that arises when the split committer is required to
delegate non-communicating agents to open the commitment. We argue that
classical protocols are insecure under global command in the split model we
consider. On the other hand, we provide a rigorous security proof in the global
command model for Kent's quantum protocol [Kent 2011, Unconditionally Secure
Bit Commitment by Transmitting Measurement Outcomes]. The proof employs two
fundamental principles of modern physics, the no-signalling property of
relativity and the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.Comment: published version, IEEE format, 18 pages, 8 figure
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