On Cryptographic Assumptions and Challenges

We deal with computational assumptions needed in order to design secure cryptographic schemes. We suggest a classi£cation of such assumptions based on the complexity of falsifying them (in case they happen not to be true) by creating a challenge (competition) to their validity. As an outcome of this classi£cation we propose several open problems regarding cryptographic tasks that currently do not have a good challenge of that sort. The most outstanding one is the design of an ef£cient block ciphers. 1 The Main Dilemma Alice and Bob are veteran cryptographers (see Dif£e [15] for their history; apparently RSA [38] is their £rst cooperation). One day, while Bob is sitting in his of£ce his colleague Alice enters and says: “I have designed a new signature scheme. It has an 120 bits long public key and the signatures are 160 bits long”. That’s fascinating, says Bob, but what computational assumption is it based on? Well, says Alice, it is based on a new trapdoor permutation fk an...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: CRYPTO
• Authors: Moni Naor
• Keywords: Computational Assumptions, CRYPTO 2003, Secure Cryptographic Schemes, Trapdoor Permutation