One-way permutations, interactive hashing and statistically hiding commitments

Abstract

We present a lower bound on the round complexity of a natural class of black-box constructions of statistically hiding commitments from one-way permutations. This implies a Ω(n/log n) lower bound on the round complexity of a computational form of interactive hashing, which has been used to construct statistically hiding commitments (and related primitives) from various classes of one-way functions, starting with the work of Naor, Ostrovsky, Venkatesan and Yung (J. Cryptology, 1998). Our lower bound matches the round complexity of the protocol studied by Naor et al. © International Association for Cryptologic Research 2007.