Simulation-based concurrent non-malleable commitments and decommitments

Abstract

In this paper we consider commitment schemes that are secure against concurrent man-in-the-middle (cMiM) attacks. Under such attacks, two possible notions of security for commitment schemes have been proposed in the literature: concurrent non-malleability with respect to commitment and concurrent non-malleability with respect to decommitment (i.e., opening). After the original notion of non-malleability introduced by [Dolev, Dwork and Naor STOC 91] that is based on the independence of the committed messages, a new and stronger simulation-based notion of non-malleability has been proposed with respect to openings or with respect to commitment [1,2,3,4] by requiring that for any man-in-the-middle adversary there is a stand-alone adversary that succeeds with the same probability. When commitment schemes are used as sub-protocols (which is often the case) the simulation-based notion is much more powerful and simplifies the task of proving the security of the larger protocols. The main result of this paper is a commitment scheme that is simulation-based concurrent non-malleable with respect to both commitment and decommitment. This property protects against cMiM attacks mounted during both commitments and decommitments which is a crucial security requirement in several applications, as in some digital auctions, in which players have to perform both commitments and decommitments. Our scheme uses a constant number of rounds of interaction in the plain model and is the first scheme that enjoys all these properties under the simulation-based definitions. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.