Computer Studies Bldg. 209
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.
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