Cryptographic Protocols from Physical Assumptions

17^th December 2020, 14:00
Alexander Koch
Karlsruhe Institute for Technology

Abstract

Security assumptions based on physical principles exhibit several advantages compared to complexity-theoretic ones: the resulting protocols are often simpler, and security guarantees are stronger and more transparent to humans.
I survey these assumptions, and provide a strongly transformational contribution to the area of secure multiparty computation using certain physical objects, including new protocols, a proper formalization, and combinatorial proofs on lower bounds. I separately cover the case of secure payment using very minimal hardware trust assumptions.