Cryptographic primitive research comprises much of the body of modern cryptographic research. This kind of research aims to produce useful primitives – building blocks with which we can design systems to enforce complex and subtle security requirements. Cryptographic primitive research often involves noticing a new problem that needs a simple solution, or a different way of setting up a problem...

Context. Cryptographic protocols are distributed programs which use cryptographic primitives to secure communication over untrusted networks (such as the Internet). They are designed to achieve security properties such as confidentiality, authentication or anonymity. Due to the complexity of cryptographic primitives, the inherent concurrency and the untrusted nature of networks, their design ha...

The main objective of this work is twofold. On the one hand, it gives a brief overview of the area of two-party cryptographic protocols. On the other hand, it proposes new schemes and guidelines for improving the practice of robust protocol design. In order to achieve such a double goal, a tour through the descriptions of the two main cryptographic primitives is carried out. Within this survey,...

Spacecrafts are extensively used by public and private sectors to support a variety of services. Considering the cost and the strategic importance of these spacecrafts, there has been an increasing demand to utilize strong cryptographic primitives to assure their security. Moreover, it is of utmost importance to consider fault tolerance in their designs due to the harsh environment found in spa...

The primitives of Oblivious Transfer (OT) and Bit Commitment (BC) are fundamental in the cryptographic protocol design. OT is a complete primitive for secure two-party computation, while zero-knowledge proofs are based on BC. In this work, the implementations of OT and BC with unconditional security for both parties are considered. The security of these protocols does not depend on unproven int...

We introduce a new type of cryptographic primitives which enforce high communication or storage complexity. To evaluate these primitives on a random input, one has to engage in a protocol of high communication complexity, or one has to use a lot of storage. Therefore, the ability to compute these primitives constitutes a certain “proof of work,” since the computing party is forced to contribute...

When discussing protocol properties in the symbolic (DolevYao; term-based) model of cryptography, the set of cryptographic primitives is defined by the constructors of the term algebra and by the equational theory on top of it. The set of considered primitives is not easily modifiable during the discussion. In particular, it is unclear what it means to define a new primitive from the existing o...

In this work we present a modification of a well-established measure of dependence appropriate for the analysis of stopping times for adversarial processes on cryptographic primitives. We apply this measure to construct generic criteria for the ideal behavior of fixed functions in both the random oracle and ideal permutation setting. More significantly, we provide a nontrivial extension of the ...

Starting with the seminal paper of Impagliazzo and Rudich [18], there has been a large body of work showing that various cryptographic primitives cannot be reduced to each other via “black-box” reductions. The common interpretation of these results is that there are inherent limitations in using a primitive as a black box, and that these impossibility results can be overcome only by explicitly ...