| dc.description.abstract | A cryptographic protocol is defined by the behaviour of the involved parties and the messages
that those parties send to each other. Beside the functionality and the security that a cryptographic
protocol provides, it is also important that the protocol is efficient. In this thesis
we focus on the efficiency parameters of a cryptographic protocol related to the computational
and round complexity. That is, we are interested in the computational cost that the parties
involved in the protocol have to pay and how many interactions between the parties are required
to securely implement the functionality which we are interested in. Another important aspect
of a cryptographic protocol is related to the computational assumptions required to prove that
the protocol is secure. The aim of this thesis is to improve the state of the art with respect to
some cryptographic functionalities where two parties are involved, by providing new techniques
to construct more efficient cryptographic protocols whose security can be proven by relying on
better cryptographic assumptions.
The thesis is divided in three parts. In the first part we consider Secure Two-Party Computation
(2PC), a cryptographic technique that allows to compute a functionality in a secure
way. More precisely, there are two parties, Alice and Bob, willing to compute the output of a
function f given x and y as input. The values x and y represent the inputs of Alice and Bob
respectively. Moreover, each party wants to keep the input secret while allowing the other party
to correctly compute f(x, y). As a first result, we show the first secure 2PC protocol with black
box simulation, secure under standard and generic assumption, with optimal round complexity
in the simultaneous message exchange model. In the simultaneous message exchange model both
parties can send a message in each round; in the rest of this thesis we assume the in each round
only one party can send a message.
We advance the state of the art in secure 2PC also in a relaxed setting. More precisely, in this
setting a malicious party that attacks the protocol to understand the secret input of the honest
party, is forced to follow the protocol description. Moreover, we consider the case in which the
parties want to compute in a secure way the Set-Membership functionality. Such a functionality
allows to check whether an element belongs to a set or not. The proposed protocol improves the
state of the art both in terms of performance and generality. In the second part of the thesis
we show the first 4-round concurrent non-malleable commitment under one-way functions. A
commitment scheme allows the sender to send an encrypted message, called commitment, in
such a way that the message inside the commitment cannot be opened until that an opening
information is provided by the sender. Moreover, there is a unique way in which the commitment
can be open. In this thesis we consider the case in which the sender sends the commitment (e.g.
trough a computer network) that can be eavesdropped by an adversary. In this setting the
adversary can catch the commitment C and modify it thus obtaining a new commitment C0
that contains a message related to the content of C. A non-malleable commitment scheme
prevents such attack, and our scheme can be proved secure even in the case that the adversary
can eavesdrop multiple commitments and in turn, compute and send multiple commitments.
The last part of the thesis concerns proof systems. Let us consider an NP-language, like
the language of graph Hamiltonicity. A proof system allows an entity called prover to prove
that a certain graph (instance) contains a Hamiltonian cycle (witness) to another entity called
verifier. A proof system can be easily instantiated in one round by letting the prover to send
the cycle to the verifier. What we actually want though, is a protocol in which the prover is able
to convince the verifier that a certain graph belongs to the language of graph Hamiltonicity, but
in such a way that no information about the cycle is leaked to the verifier. This kind of proof
systems are called Zero Knowledge. In this thesis we show a non-interactive Zero-Knowledge
proof system, under the assumption that both prover and verifier have access to some honestly
generated common reference string (CRS). The provided construction improves the state of the
art both in terms of efficiency and generality. We consider also the scenario in which prover
and verifier do not have access to some honestly generated information and study the notion of
Witness Indistinguishability. This notion considers instances that admit more than one witness,
e.g. graphs that admit two distinct Hamiltonian cycle (as for the notion of Zero Knowledge,
the notion of Witness Indistinguishability makes sense for all the languages in NP, but for
ease of exposition we keep focusing our attention of the language of graph Hamiltonicity). The
security notion of Witness-Indistinguishability ensures that a verifier, upon receiving a proof
from a prover, is not able to figure out which one of the two Hamiltonian cycles has been used
by the prover to compute the proof. Even though the notion of Witness Indistinguishability is
weaker than the notion of Zero Knowledge, Witness Indistinguishability is widely used in many
cryptographic applications. Moreover, given that a Witness-Indistinguishable protocol can be
constructed using just three rounds of communication compared to the four rounds required to
obtain Zero Knowledge (with black-box simulation), the use of Zero-Knowledge as a building
block to construct a protocol with an optimal number of rounds is sometimes prohibitive. Always
in order to provide a good building block to construct more complicated cryptographic protocols
with a nice round complexity, a useful property is the so called Delayed-Input property. This
property allows the prover to compute all but the last round of the protocol without knowing
the instance nor the witness. Also, the Delayed-Input property allows the verifier to interact
with the prover without knowing the instance at all (i.e. the verifier needs the instance just to
decide whether to accept or not the proof received by the prover). In this thesis we provide the
first efficient Delayed-Input Witness-Indistinguishable proof system that consists of just three
round of communication. [edited by author] | it_IT |
