Eastern Great Lakes Theory Workshop Talk

Constant-round Non-malleable Commitments from One-way Functions

Rafael Pass, Cornell University

Saturday, October 9, 4:00-5:00pm

ABSTRACT

Commitment schemes are one of the most fundamental cryptographic building blocks. Often described as the "digital" analogue of sealed envelopes, commitment schemes enable a sender to commit itself to a value while keeping it secret from the receiver. For many applications, however, the most basic security guarantees of commitments are not sufficient. For instance, the basic definition of commitments does not rule out an attack where an adversary, upon seeing a commitment to a specific value v, is able to commit to a related value (say, v - 1), even though it does not know the actual value of v.

Non-malleable commitments, introduced by Dolev, Dwork and Naor in 1991, prevent against these types of attacks. In this work, we present the first constant-round non-malleable commitment based on the minimal assumption of one-way functions.

Joint work with Huijia Rachel Lin

Slides

Speaker Bio

Rafael Pass graduated from MIT in 2006 and has since been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He received the NSF Career Award in 2008, the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship in 2009 and the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2010.

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