Anonymity in Shared Symmetric Key Primitives

We provide a stronger definition of anonymity in the context of shared symmetric key primitives, and show that existing schemes do not provide this level of anonymity. A new scheme is presented to share symmetric key operations amongst a set of participants according to a (t, n)-threshold access structure. We quantify the amount of information the output of the shared operation provides about the group of participants which collaborated to produce it.

Hash Families and Cover-Free Families with Cryptographic Applications

This thesis is focused on hash families and cover-free families and their application to problems in cryptography. We present new necessary conditions for generalized separating hash families, and provide new explicit constructions. We then consider three cryptographic applications of hash families and cover-free families. We provide a stronger de nition of anonymity in the context of shared symmetric key primitives and give a new scheme with improved anonymity properties. Second, we observe that nding the invalid signatures in a set of digital signatures that fails batch veri cation is a group testing problem, then apply and compare many group testing algorithms to solve this problem e ciently. In particular, we apply group testing algorithms based on cover-free families. Finally, we construct a one-time signature scheme based on cover-free families with short signatures

Group Testing and Batch Verification

We observe that finding invalid signatures in batches of signatures that fail batch verification is an instance of the classical group testing problem. We present and compare new sequential and parallel algorithms for finding invalid signatures based on group testing algorithms. Of the five new algorithms, three show improved performance for many parameter choices, and the performance gains are especially notable when multiple processors are available.

New Bounds for Generalized Separating Hash Families

The main result of this paper is a necessary condition for generalized separating hash families. We extend previous methods used to obtain upper bounds for separating hash family types {w, w} and {w, w − 1} to the general case {w1, w2,..., wt} for t ≥ 2.

A bound on the size of separating hash families

The paper provides an upper bound on the size of a (generalised) separating hash family, a notion introduced by Stinson, Wei and Chen. The upper bound generalises and unifies several previously known bounds which apply in special cases, namely bounds on perfect hash families, frameproof codes, secure frameproof codes and separating hash families of small type