Giuseppe D’Alconzo

Giuseppe D'Alconzo

Given a cryptographic group action, we show that the Group Action Inverse Problem (GAIP) and other related problems cannot be NP-hard unless the Polynomial Hierarchy collapses. We show this via random self-reductions and the design of interactive proofs. Since cryptographic group actions are the building block of many security protocols, this result serves both as an upper bound on the worst-case complexity of some cryptographic assumptions and as proof that the hardness in the worst and in the average case coincide. We also point out the link with Graph Isomorphism and other related NP intermediate problems.

Giuseppe D'Alconzo, Alessio Meneghetti, Paolo Piasenti

We analyse the security of some variants of the CFS code-based digital signature scheme. We show how the adoption of some code-based hash-functions to improve the efficiency of CFS leads to the ability of an attacker to produce a forgery compatible to the rightful user's public key.