On Reverse Elastic Channels and the Asymmetry of Commitment Capacity under Channel Elasticity

Amitalok J. Budkuley, Pranav Joshi, Manideep Mamindlapally, Anuj Kumar Yadav

Commitment is an important cryptographic primitive. It is well known that noisy channels are a promising resource to realize commitment in an information-theoretically secure manner. However, oftentimes, channel behaviour may be poorly characterized thereby limiting the commitment throughput and/or degrading the security guarantees; particularly problematic is when a dishonest party, unbeknown to the honest one, can maliciously alter the channel characteristics. Reverse elastic channels (RECs) are an interesting class of such unreliable channels, where only a dishonest committer, say, Alice can maliciously alter the channel. RECs have attracted recent interest in the study of several cryptographic primitives. Our principal contribution is the REC commitment capacity characterization; this proves a recent related conjecture. A key result is our tight converse which analyses a specific cheating strategy by Alice. RECs are closely related to the classic unfair noisy channels (UNCs); elastic channels (ECs), where only a dishonest receiver Bob can alter the channel, are similarly related. In stark contrast to UNCs, both RECs and ECs always exhibit positive commitment throughput for all non-trivial parameters. Interestingly, our results show that channels with exclusive one-sided elasticity for dishonest parties, exhibit a fundamental asymmetry where a committer with one-sided elasticity has a more debilitating effect on the commitment throughput than a receiver.

picture_as_pdf flag

Knowledge Graph

arrow_drop_up

Comments

Sign up or login to leave a comment