Cryptographic primitives enforcing communication and storage complexity

Abstract

We introduce a new type of cryptographic primitives which enforce high communication or storage complexity. To evaluate these primitives on a random input, one has to engage in a protocol of high communication complexity, or one has to use a lot of storage. Therefore, the ability to compute these primitives constitutes a certain "proof of work," since the computing party is forced to contribute a lot of its communication or storage resources to this task. Such primitives can be used in applications which deal with non-malicious but selfishly resource-maximizing parties. For example, they can be useful in constructing peer-to-peer systems which are robust against so called "free riders." In this paper we define two such primitives, a communication-enforcing signature and a storage-enforcing commitment scheme, and we give constructions for both.