Secrecy without one-way functions
This work addresses the foundational issue in cryptography of reducing reliance on one-way functions, offering practical solutions for secure multi-party computations, though it is incremental in building upon existing cryptographic concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of performing secure computations in cryptography without relying on one-way functions, which depend on unproven complexity conjectures like P ≠ NP, by proposing protocols for functions such as sum and product that conceal intermediate results and achieve secure bit commitment with at least three parties, enabling applications like voting and mental poker with negligible computational cost.
We show that some problems in information security can be solved without using one-way functions. The latter are usually regarded as a central concept of cryptography, but the very existence of one-way functions depends on difficult conjectures in complexity theory, most notably on the notorious "$P \ne NP$" conjecture. In this paper, we suggest protocols for secure computation of the sum, product, and some other functions, without using any one-way functions. A new input that we offer here is that, in contrast with other proposals, we conceal "intermediate results" of a computation. For example, when we compute the sum of $k$ numbers, only the final result is known to the parties; partial sums are not known to anybody. Other applications of our method include voting/rating over insecure channels and a rather elegant and efficient solution of Yao's "millionaires' problem". Then, while it is fairly obvious that a secure (bit) commitment between two parties is impossible without a one-way function, we show that it is possible if the number of parties is at least 3. We also show how our (bit) commitment scheme for 3 parties can be used to arrange an unconditionally secure (bit) commitment between just two parties if they use a "dummy" (e.g., a computer) as the third party. We explain how our concept of a "dummy" is different from a well-known concept of a "trusted third party". We also suggest a protocol, without using a one-way function, for "mental poker", i.e., a fair card dealing (and playing) over distance. We also propose a secret sharing scheme where an advantage over Shamir's and other known secret sharing schemes is that nobody, including the dealer, ends up knowing the shares owned by any particular player. It should be mentioned that computational cost of our protocols is negligible to the point that all of them can be executed without a computer.