48,399 research outputs found
Quantum Cryptography Beyond Quantum Key Distribution
Quantum cryptography is the art and science of exploiting quantum mechanical
effects in order to perform cryptographic tasks. While the most well-known
example of this discipline is quantum key distribution (QKD), there exist many
other applications such as quantum money, randomness generation, secure two-
and multi-party computation and delegated quantum computation. Quantum
cryptography also studies the limitations and challenges resulting from quantum
adversaries---including the impossibility of quantum bit commitment, the
difficulty of quantum rewinding and the definition of quantum security models
for classical primitives. In this review article, aimed primarily at
cryptographers unfamiliar with the quantum world, we survey the area of
theoretical quantum cryptography, with an emphasis on the constructions and
limitations beyond the realm of QKD.Comment: 45 pages, over 245 reference
Separating Two-Round Secure Computation From Oblivious Transfer
We consider the question of minimizing the round complexity of protocols for secure multiparty computation (MPC) with security against an arbitrary number of semi-honest parties. Very recently, Garg and Srinivasan (Eurocrypt 2018) and Benhamouda and Lin (Eurocrypt 2018) constructed such 2-round MPC protocols from minimal assumptions. This was done by showing a round preserving reduction to the task of secure 2-party computation of the oblivious transfer functionality (OT). These constructions made a novel non-black-box use of the underlying OT protocol. The question remained whether this can be done by only making black-box use of 2-round OT. This is of theoretical and potentially also practical value as black-box use of primitives tends to lead to more efficient constructions.
Our main result proves that such a black-box construction is impossible, namely that non-black-box use of OT is necessary. As a corollary, a similar separation holds when starting with any 2-party functionality other than OT.
As a secondary contribution, we prove several additional results that further clarify the landscape of black-box MPC with minimal interaction. In particular, we complement the separation from 2-party functionalities by presenting a complete 4-party functionality, give evidence for the difficulty of ruling out a complete 3-party functionality and for the difficulty of ruling out black-box constructions of 3-round MPC from 2-round OT, and separate a relaxed "non-compact" variant of 2-party homomorphic secret sharing from 2-round OT
Foundations, Properties, and Security Applications of Puzzles: A Survey
Cryptographic algorithms have been used not only to create robust ciphertexts
but also to generate cryptograms that, contrary to the classic goal of
cryptography, are meant to be broken. These cryptograms, generally called
puzzles, require the use of a certain amount of resources to be solved, hence
introducing a cost that is often regarded as a time delay---though it could
involve other metrics as well, such as bandwidth. These powerful features have
made puzzles the core of many security protocols, acquiring increasing
importance in the IT security landscape. The concept of a puzzle has
subsequently been extended to other types of schemes that do not use
cryptographic functions, such as CAPTCHAs, which are used to discriminate
humans from machines. Overall, puzzles have experienced a renewed interest with
the advent of Bitcoin, which uses a CPU-intensive puzzle as proof of work. In
this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the most important puzzle
construction schemes available in the literature, categorizing them according
to several attributes, such as resource type, verification type, and
applications. We have redefined the term puzzle by collecting and integrating
the scattered notions used in different works, to cover all the existing
applications. Moreover, we provide an overview of the possible applications,
identifying key requirements and different design approaches. Finally, we
highlight the features and limitations of each approach, providing a useful
guide for the future development of new puzzle schemes.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing
Survey
How to Securely Compute the Modulo-Two Sum of Binary Sources
In secure multiparty computation, mutually distrusting users in a network
want to collaborate to compute functions of data which is distributed among the
users. The users should not learn any additional information about the data of
others than what they may infer from their own data and the functions they are
computing. Previous works have mostly considered the worst case context (i.e.,
without assuming any distribution for the data); Lee and Abbe (2014) is a
notable exception. Here, we study the average case (i.e., we work with a
distribution on the data) where correctness and privacy is only desired
asymptotically.
For concreteness and simplicity, we consider a secure version of the function
computation problem of K\"orner and Marton (1979) where two users observe a
doubly symmetric binary source with parameter p and the third user wants to
compute the XOR. We show that the amount of communication and randomness
resources required depends on the level of correctness desired. When zero-error
and perfect privacy are required, the results of Data et al. (2014) show that
it can be achieved if and only if a total rate of 1 bit is communicated between
every pair of users and private randomness at the rate of 1 is used up. In
contrast, we show here that, if we only want the probability of error to vanish
asymptotically in block length, it can be achieved by a lower rate (binary
entropy of p) for all the links and for private randomness; this also
guarantees perfect privacy. We also show that no smaller rates are possible
even if privacy is only required asymptotically.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figure, extended version of submission to IEEE Information
Theory Workshop, 201
A New PVSS Scheme with a Simple Encryption Function
A Publicly Verifiable Secret Sharing (PVSS) scheme allows anyone to verify
the validity of the shares computed and distributed by a dealer. The idea of
PVSS was introduced by Stadler in [18] where he presented a PVSS scheme based
on Discrete Logarithm. Later, several PVSS schemes were proposed. In [2],
Behnad and Eghlidos present an interesting PVSS scheme with explicit membership
and disputation processes. In this paper, we present a new PVSS having the
advantage of being simpler while offering the same features.Comment: In Proceedings SCSS 2012, arXiv:1307.8029. This PVSS scheme was
proposed to be used to provide a distributed Timestamping schem
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