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Title: Completeness Theorems for Adaptively Secure Broadcast
The advent of blockchain protocols has reignited the interest in adaptively secure broadcast; it is by now well understood that broadcasting over a diffusion network allows an adaptive adversary to corrupt the sender depending on the message it attempts to send and change it. Hirt and Zikas [Eurocrypt ’10] proved that this is an inherent limitation of broadcast in the simulation-based setting—i.e., this task is impossible against an adaptive adversary corrupting a majority of the parties (a task that is achievable against a static adversary). The contributions of this paper are two-fold. First, we show that, contrary to previous perception, the above limitation of adaptively secure broadcast is not an artifact of simulation-based security, but rather an inherent issue of adaptive security. In particular, we show that: (1) it also applies to the property-based broadcast definition adapted for adaptive adversaries, and (2) unlike other impossibilities in adaptive security, this impossibility cannot be circumvented by adding a programmable random oracle, in neither setting, property-based or simulation-based. Second, we turn to the resource-restricted cryptography (RRC) paradigm [Garay et al., Eurocrypt ’20], which has proven useful in circumventing impossibility results, and ask whether it also affects the above negative result. We answer this question in the affirmative, by showing that time-lock puzzles (TLPs)—which can be viewed as an instance of RRC—indeed allow for achieving the property-based definition and circumvent the impossibility of adaptively secure broadcast. The natural question is then, do TLPs also allow for simulation-based adaptively secure broadcast against corrupted majorities? We answer this question in the negative. However, we show that a positive result can be achieved via a non-committing analogue of TLPs in the programmable random-oracle model. Importantly, and as a contribution of independent interest, we also present the first (limited) composition theorem in the resource-restricted setting, which is needed for the complexity-based, non-idealized treatment of TLPs in the context of other protocols.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2055568
PAR ID:
10513596
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Editor(s):
Handschuh, Helena; Lysyanskaya, Anna
Publisher / Repository:
Springer
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2023
Edition / Version:
LNCS, volume 14081
ISBN:
978-3-031-38556-8
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3–38
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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