Abstract. We present a new protocol that allows two players to ex-change digital signatures over the Internet in a fair way, so that either each player gets the other’s signature, or neither player does. The ob-vious application is where the signatures represent items of value, for example, an electronic check or airline ticket. The protocol can also be adapted to exchange encrypted data. The protocol relies on a trusted third party, but is “optimistic, ” in that the third party is only needed in cases where one player attempts to cheat or simply crashes. A key feature of our protocol is that a player can always force a timely and fair termination, without the cooperation of the other player. 1

Constant-round zero-knowledge proof systems for every language in NP are presented, assuming the existence of a collection of claw-free functions. In particular, it follows that such proof systems exist assuming the intractability of either the Discrete Logarithm Problem or the Factoring Problem for Blum Integers.

In this note, we present new zero-knowledge interac-tive proofs and arguments for languages in NP. To show that z G L, with an error probability of at most 2-k, our zero-knowledge proof system requires O(lzlc’) + O(lg ” l~l)k ideal bit commitments, where c1 and cz depend only on L. This construction is the first in the ideal bit commitment model that achieves large values of k more efficiently than by running k independent iterations of the base interactive proof system. Under suitable complexity assumptions, we exhibit a zero-knowledge arguments that require O(lg ’ Izl)ki bits of communication, where c depends only on L, and 1 is the security parameter for the prover.l This is the first construction in which the total amount of communication can be less than that needed to transmit the NP witness. Our protocols are based on efficiently checkable proofs for NP [4].

We introduce the notion of Resettable Zero-Knowledge (rZK), a new security measure for cryptographic protocols which strengthens the classical notion of zero-knowledge. In essence, an rZK protocol is one that remains zero knowledge even if an adversary can interact with the prover many times, each time resetting the prover to its initial state and forcing him to use the same random tape.

"Zero-knowledge arguments" is a fundamental cryptographic primitive which allows one polynomial-time player to convince another polynomial-time player of the validity of an NP statement, without revealing any additional information in the information-theoretic sense. Despite their practical and theoretical importance, it was only known how to implement zero-knowledge arguments based on specific algebraic assumptions; basing them on a general complexity assumption was open since their introduction in 1986 [BCC, BC, CH]. In this paper, we finally show a general construction, which can be based on any one-way permutation. We stress that our scheme is efficient: both players can execute only polynomial-time programs during the protocol. Moreover, the security achieved is on-line: in order to cheat and validate a false theorem, the prover must break a cryptographic assumption on-line during the conversation, while the verifier can not find (ever!) any information unconditionally (in the i...

We re-examine Paillier's cryptosystem, and show that by choosing a particular discrete log base g, and by introducing an alternative decryption procedure, we can extend the scheme to allow an arbitrary exponent e instead of N. The use of low exponents substantially increases the eciency of the scheme. The semantic security is now based on a new decisional assumption, namely the hardness of deciding whether an element is a "small" e-th residue modulo N². We also

We introduce chameleon signatures that provide with an undeniable commitment of the signer to the contents of the signed document (as regular digital signatures do) but, at the same time, do not allow the recipient of the signature to disclose the contents of the signed information to any third party without the signer's consent. These signatures are closely related to "undeniable signatures", but chameleon signatures allow for simpler and more efficient realizations than the latter. In particular, they are essentially non-interactive and do not involve the design and complexity of zero-knowledge proofs on which traditional undeniable signatures are based. Instead, chameleon signatures are generated under the standard method of hash-then-sign. Yet, the hash functions which are used are chameleon hash functions. These hash functions are characterized by the nonstandard property of being collision-resistant for the signer but collision tractable for the recipient. We present simple and efficient constructions of chameleon hashing and chameleon signatures. The former can be constructed based on standard cryptographic assumptions (such as the hardness of factoring or discrete logarithms) and have efficient realizations based on these assumptions. For the signature part we can use any digital signature (such as RSA or DSS) and prove the unforgeability property of the resultant chameleon signatures solely based on the unforgeability of the underlying digital signature in use.

We study the round complexity of various cryptographic protocols. Our main result is a tight lower bound on the round complexity of any fully-black-box construction of a statistically-hiding commitment scheme from one-way permutations, and even from trapdoor permutations. This lower bound matches the round complexity of the statistically-hiding commitment scheme due to Naor, Ostrovsky, Venkatesan and Yung (CRYPTO ’92). As a corollary, we derive similar tight lower bounds for several other cryptographic protocols, such as single-server private information retrieval, interactive hashing, and oblivious transfer that guarantees statistical security for one of the parties. Our techniques extend the collision-finding oracle due to Simon (EUROCRYPT ’98) to the setting of interactive protocols (our extension also implies an alternative proof for the main property of the original oracle). In addition, we substantially extend the reconstruction paradigm of Gennaro and Trevisan (FOCS ‘00). In both cases, our extensions are quite delicate and may be found useful in proving additional black-box separation results.

We revisit the following question: what are the minimal assumptions needed to construct statistically-hiding commitment schemes? Naor et al. show how to construct such schemes based on any one-way permutation. We improve upon this by showing a construction based on any approximable preimage-size one-way function. These are one-way functions for which it is possible to efficiently approximate the number of pre-images of a given output. A special case is the class of regular one-way functions where all points in the image of the function have the same number of pre-images. We also prove two additional results related to statistically-hiding commitment. First, we prove a (folklore) parallel composition theorem showing, roughly speaking, that the statistical hiding property of any such commitment scheme is amplified exponentially when multiple independent parallel executions of the scheme are carried out. Second, we show a compiler which transforms any commitment scheme which is statistically hiding against an honest-but-curious receiver into one which is statistically hiding even against a malicious receiver. 1

We show that every language in NP has a statistical zero-knowledge argument system under the (minimal) complexity assumption that one-way functions exist. In such protocols, even a computationally unbounded verifier cannot learn anything other than the fact that the assertion being proven is true, whereas a polynomial-time prover cannot convince the verifier to accept a false assertion except with negligible probability. This resolves an open question posed by Naor, Ostrovsky, Venkatesan, and Yung (CRYPTO ‘92, J. Cryptology ‘98). Departing from previous works on this problem, we do not construct standard statistically hiding commitments from any one-way function. Instead, we construct a relaxed variant of commitment schemes called “1-out-of-2-binding commitments,” recently introduced by Nguyen and Vadhan (STOC ‘06).