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Computer Science @ Rochester
Monday, November 28, 2011
11:00 AM
Computer Studies Bldg. 209
Rafael Pass
Cornell University
Constant-round Non-malleable Commitments from One-way Functions
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.

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, the AFOSR Young Investigator Award in 2010, and the Alfred P. Sloan Award in 2011.

Refreshments will be provided at 10:45AM