Paper 2016/903

From Indifferentiability to Constructive Cryptography (and Back)

Ueli Maurer and Renato Renner

Abstract

The concept of indifferentiability of systems, a generalized form of indistinguishability, was proposed in 2004 to provide a simplified and generalized explanation of impossibility results like the non-instantiability of random oracles by hash functions due to Canetti, Goldreich, and Halevi (STOC 1998). But indifferentiability is actually a constructive notion, leading to possibility results. For example, Coron {\em et al.} (Crypto 2005) argued that the soundness of the construction $C(f)$ of a hash function from a compression function $f$ can be demonstrated by proving that $C(R)$ is indifferentiable from a random oracle if $R$ is an ideal random compression function. The purpose of this short paper is to describe how the indifferentiability notion was a precursor to the theory of constructive cryptography and thereby to provide a simplified and generalized treatment of indifferentiability as a special type of constructive statement.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Published by the IACR in TCC 2016
Contact author(s)
maurer @ inf ethz ch
History
2016-09-15: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2016/903
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2016/903,
      author = {Ueli Maurer and Renato Renner},
      title = {From Indifferentiability to Constructive Cryptography (and Back)},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2016/903},
      year = {2016},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/903}
}
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