Automated Cryptographic Analysis of the Pedersen Commitment Scheme
This work provides formal security assurance for a foundational cryptographic protocol used in applications like verifiable secret sharing and e-voting, though it is incremental as it extends an existing verification framework.
The paper tackled the problem of ensuring strong security for cryptographic constructions by presenting a mechanised formal verification of the Pedersen commitment protocol, proving its correctness, perfect hiding, and computational binding properties.
Aiming for strong security assurance, recently there has been an increasing interest in formal verification of cryptographic constructions. This paper presents a mechanised formal verification of the popular Pedersen commitment protocol, proving its security properties of correctness, perfect hiding, and computational binding. To formally verify the protocol, we extended the theory of EasyCrypt, a framework which allows for reasoning in the computational model, to support the discrete logarithm and an abstraction of commitment protocols. Commitments are building blocks of many cryptographic constructions, for example, verifiable secret sharing, zero-knowledge proofs, and e-voting. Our work paves the way for the verification of those more complex constructions.