Mutually Independent Commitments

by Moses Liskov, Anna Lysyanskaya, Silvio Micali, Leonid Reyzin and Adam Smith
 
Abstract

We study the two-party commitment problem, where two players have secret values they wish to commit to each other. Traditional commitment schemes cannot be used here because they do not guarantee independence of the committed values. We present three increasingly strong definitions of independence in this setting and give practical protocols for each. Our work is related to work in non-malleable cryptography. However, the two-party commitment problem can be solved much more efficiently than by using non-malleability techniques.

This work appears in Advances in Cryptology -- Asiacrypt 2001, Colin Boyd, editor, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2248, Springer-Verlag, 2001. © IACR.