Everlasting multi-party computation

Abstract

A protocol has everlasting security if it is secure against adversaries that are computationally unlimited after the protocol execution. This models the fact that we cannot predict which cryptographic schemes will be broken, say, several decades after the protocol execution. In classical cryptography, everlasting security is difficult to achieve: even using trusted setup like common reference strings or signature cards, many tasks such as secure communication and oblivious transfer cannot be achieved with everlasting security. An analogous result in the quantum setting excludes protocols based on common reference strings, but not protocols using a signature card. We define a variant of the Universal Composability framework, everlasting quantum-UC, and show that in this model, we can implement secure communication and general multi-party computation using signature cards as trusted setup. © 2013 International Association for Cryptologic Research.