Formalising Σ -Protocols and Commitment Schemes Using CryptHOL

D. Butler*, A. Lochbihler, D. Aspinall, A. Gascón

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

Machine-checked proofs of security are important to increase the rigour of provable security. In this work we present a formalised theory of two fundamental two party cryptographic primitives: Σ-protocols and Commitment Schemes. Σ-protocols allow a prover to convince a verifier that they possess some knowledge without leaking information about the knowledge. Commitment schemes allow a committer to commit to a message and keep it secret until revealing it at a later time. We use CryptHOL (Lochbihler in Archive of formal proofs, 2017) to formalise both primitives and prove secure multiple examples namely; the Schnorr, Chaum-Pedersen and Okamoto Σ-protocols as well as a construction that allows for compound (AND and OR) Σ-protocols and the Pedersen and Rivest commitment schemes. A highlight of the work is a formalisation of the construction of commitment schemes from Σ-protocols (Damgard in Lecture notes, 2002). We formalise this proof at an abstract level using the modularity available in Isabelle/HOL and CryptHOL. This way, the proofs of the instantiations come for free.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)521-567
Number of pages47
JournalJournal of Automated Reasoning
Volume65
Early online date9 Sept 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • Commitment schemes
  • Cryptography
  • Isabelle/HOL
  • Provable security
  • Sigma protocols

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