Papers for

security protocol designers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Logic describes how repeated announcements change truth over time

Eventual and Strong Eventual Notions in Public Announcements

Abstract: In dynamic epistemic logic, the four notions of success, self-refutation, true lies, and impossible lies have been discussed in the context of public announcements. In this paper, we introduce eventual and strong eventual versions of these notions, as well as their transfinite versions, which allow transfinite iteration of announcements. We also introduce the notions of always informativeness when true or false. For example, a formula is eventually self-refuting if, whenever initially true, it eventually becomes false at some finite stage under iterated announcements, and strong eventual self-refutation further requires the formula to remain false at all sufficiently late stages. There are two main results. The first result gives the relationship among strong eventual notions, eventual notions, and several other conditions including conditions on the limit of the truth values of the announced formula, the uniform bound condition, and the fixed-point views of the Moore sentence and the self-fulfilling sentence. The second result gives the relationship among finite and transfinite versions of the eventual and strong eventual notions and the fixed-point views.

Mon 21 SeptLogic in Computer ScienceMultiagent Systems
The gist
Some statements can change their truth value when announced publicly, sometimes becoming false after being true or vice versa. This paper explores new ways to understand what happens when announcements happen again and again, even infinitely many times. The authors study conditions where statements eventually settle into being true or false, and how fast this happens. They connect these ideas to well-known logical puzzles and show how different versions of these changes relate to each other.
Open 2609.24006v1

How critical sets in Latin squares improve secret sharing reliability

Critical sets of Latin squares based on autoparatopisms

Abstract: In cryptography, critical sets of Latin squares have particularly been implemented to design secret sharing schemes. A main problem in these cryptographic protocols arises from absent holders of pieces of information that are common to different critical sets, because they become indispensable to recover the secret. This paper solves this problem by making use of the orbits of entries described by the autoparatopism group of the Latin square under consideration. To this end, we introduce the more general problem of computing critical sets of Latin squares having a given paratopism in their autoparatopism group. These critical sets depend only on the conjugacy class of the autoparatopism and the main class of the Latin square under consideration. Based on this fact, as an illustrative example, we determine the smallest and largest sizes of critical sets associated with autoparatopisms of Latin squares of order up to six. We implement this approach in the design of a new secret sharing scheme.

Fri 18 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
The paper addresses a common problem in secret sharing schemes where some pieces of information are held by multiple people, making some holders indispensable to recover the secret. The authors use mathematical symmetries called autoparatopisms of Latin squares to organize these pieces of information into groups called orbits. By doing this, they create special critical sets that avoid overlapping dependencies. They test this method on small Latin squares and show how it can design better secret sharing methods.
Open 2609.21532v1

Witness encryption created using prime order cyclic groups

Witness Encryption via Prime-Order Generic Groups

Abstract: We unconditionally construct witness encryption for NP in the classical generic-group model, using an ordinary cyclic group of prime order. For SAT instances of size $n$, the encryption algorithm runs in time poly$(n)$, and any satisfying assignment can be used to decrypt in poly$(n)$ time with correctness error $2^{-n^{Ω(1)}}$. If no satisfying assignment exists, then every generic adversary making at most $n^{Θ(\log n)}$ group queries has distinguishing advantage at most $n^{-Θ(\log n)}$. Along the way, we prove the first superconstant-factor NP-hardness of approximation result for homogeneous MinRank under randomized polynomial-time reductions, achieving a logarithmic gap even when the rank-one witness has a Boolean right factor.

Wed 16 SeptCryptography and Security
The gist
Some problems in computer science are easy to check but hard to solve. The paper shows a way to create 'witness encryption,' where you can lock a message using a problem and unlock it only if you have a solution to that problem. This encryption uses special mathematical groups with prime order and guarantees security in a general setting for computers that interact with these groups in any possible way. The authors also prove some new hardness results for a related mathematical puzzle called MinRank, which supports the security of their construction.
Open 2609.18275v1