### Query-Complexity Amplification for Random Oracles

Grégory Demay, Peter Gaži, Ueli Maurer, and Björn Tackmann

##### Abstract

Increasing the computational complexity of evaluating a hash function, both for the honest users as well as for an adversary, is a useful technique employed for example in password-based cryptographic schemes to impede brute-force attacks, and also in so-called proofs of work (used in protocols like Bitcoin) to show that a certain amount of computation was performed by a legitimate user. A natural approach to adjust the complexity of a hash function is to iterate it $c$~times, for some parameter $c$, in the hope that any query to the scheme requires $c$ evaluations of the underlying hash function. However, results by Dodis et al. (Crypto 2012) imply that plain iteration falls short of achieving this goal, and designing schemes which provably have such a desirable property remained an open problem. This paper formalizes explicitly what it means for a given scheme to amplify the query complexity of a hash function. In the random oracle model, the goal of a secure query-complexity amplifier (QCA) scheme is captured as transforming, in the sense of indifferentiability, a random oracle allowing $R$ queries (for the adversary) into one provably allowing only $r < R$ queries. Turned around, this means that making $r$ queries to the scheme requires at least $R$ queries to the actual random oracle. Second, a new scheme, called collision-free iteration, is proposed and proven to achieve $c$-fold QCA for both the honest parties and the adversary, for any fixed parameter~$c$.

Note: Added a section to show more explicitly that the evaluation of a query-complexity amplifier scheme requires a certain minimum amount of queries to the underlying random oracle.

Available format(s)
Category
Foundations
Publication info
Published elsewhere. MINOR revision.ICITS 2015
Keywords
hash functionsrandom oracleindifferentiabilitymoderately hard functions
Contact author(s)
gregory demay @ inf ethz ch
History
2015-06-12: revised
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/315

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/315,
author = {Grégory Demay and Peter Gaži and Ueli Maurer and Björn Tackmann},
title = {Query-Complexity Amplification for Random  Oracles},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2015/315},
year = {2015},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/315}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/315}
}

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