A note on strong protomodularity, actions and quotients

In order to study the problems of extending an action along a quotient of the acted object and along a quotient of the acting object, we investigate some properties of the fibration of points. In fact, we obtain a characterization of protomodular categories among quasi-pointed regular ones, and, in the semi-abelian case, a characterization of strong protomodular categories. Eventually, we return to the initial questions by stating the results in terms of internal actions

Bourn-normal monomorphisms in regular Mal'tsev categories

Normal monomorphisms in the sense of Bourn describe the equivalence classes of an internal equivalence relation. Although the definition is given in the fairly general setting of a category with finite limits, later investigations on this subject often focus on protomodular settings, where normality becomes a property. This paper clarifies the connections between internal equivalence relations and Bourn-normal monomorphisms in regular Mal'tesv categories with pushouts of split monomorphisms along arbitrary morphisms, whereas a full description is achieved for quasi-pointed regular Mal'tsev categories with pushouts of split monomorphisms along arbitrary morphisms.Comment: This vesion fixes one error present in the last section of the previous versio

Automated Cryptographic Analysis of the Pedersen Commitment Scheme

Aiming for strong security assurance, recently there has been an increasing interest in formal verification of cryptographic constructions. This paper presents a mechanised formal verification of the popular Pedersen commitment protocol, proving its security properties of correctness, perfect hiding, and computational binding. To formally verify the protocol, we extended the theory of EasyCrypt, a framework which allows for reasoning in the computational model, to support the discrete logarithm and an abstraction of commitment protocols. Commitments are building blocks of many cryptographic constructions, for example, verifiable secret sharing, zero-knowledge proofs, and e-voting. Our work paves the way for the verification of those more complex constructions.Comment: 12 pages, conference MMM-ACNS 201

The snail lemma for internal groupoids

We establish a generalized form both of the Gabriel-Zisman exact sequence associated with a pointed functor between pointed groupoids, and of the Brown exact sequence associated with a fibration of pointed groupoids. Our generalization consists in replacing pointed groupoids with groupoids internal to a pointed regular category with reflexive coequalizer