Adaptively secure threshold cryptography: Introducing concurrency, removing erasures

Abstract

We put forward two new measures of security for threshold schemes secure in the adaptive adversary model: security under concurrent composition; and security without the assumption of reliable erasure. Using novel constructions and analytical tools, in both these settings, we exhibit efficient secure threshold protocols for a variety of cryptographic applications. In particular, based on the recent scheme by Cramer-Shoup, we construct adaptively secure threshold cryptosystems secure against adaptive chosen ciphertext attack under the DDH intractability assumption. Our techniques are also applicable to other cryptosystems and signature schemes, like RSA, DSS, and ElGamal. Our techniques include the first efficient implementation, for a wide but special class of protocols, of secure channels in erasure-free adaptive model. Of independent interest, we present the notion of a committed proof.