Abstract. At Eurocrypt '02 Cramer and Shoup [7] proposed a general paradigm to construct practical public-key cryptosystems secure against adaptive chosen-ciphertext attacks as well as several concrete examples. Among the others they presented a variant of Paillier's [21] scheme achieving such a strong security requirement and for which two, independent, decryption mechanisms are allowed. In this paper we revisit such scheme and show that by considering a different subgroup, one can obtain a different scheme (whose security can be proved with respect to a different mathematical assumption) that allows for interesting applications. In particular we show how to construct a perfectly hiding commitment schemes that allows for an on-line / off-line efficiency tradeoff. The scheme is computationally binding under the assumption that factoring is hard, thus improving on the previous construction by Catalano et al. [5] whose binding property was based on the assumption that inverting RSA[N, N ] (i.e. RSA with the public exponent set to N ) is hard.

Abstract. Authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange allows two principals communicating over a public network, and each holding public/private keys, to agree on a shared secret value. In this paper we study the natural extension of this cryptographic problem to a group of principals. We begin from existing formal security models and refine them to incorporate major missing details (e.g., strong-corruption and concurrent sessions). Within this model we define the execution of a protocol for authenticated dynamic group Diffie-Hellman and show that it is provably secure under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our security result holds in the standard model and thus provides better security guarantees than previously published results in the random oracle model.

Abstract. In this paper, we investigate the recent paradigm for group signatures proposed by Rivest et al . at Asiacrypt '01. We first improve on their ring signature paradigm by showing that it holds under a strictly weaker assumption, namely the random oracle model rather than the ideal cipher. Then we provide extensions to make ring signatures suitable in practical situations, such as threshold schemes or ad-hoc groups. Finally we propose an efficient scheme for threshold scenarios based on a combinatorial method and provably secure in the random oracle model.

Group Diffie-Hellman protocols for Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) are designed to provide a pool of players with a shared secret key which may later be used, for example, to achieve multicast message integrity. Over the years, several schemes have been offered. However, no formal treatment for this cryptographic problem has ever been suggested. In this paper, we present a security model for this problem and use it to precisely define AKE (with "implicit" authentication) as the fundamental goal, and the entity-authentication goal as well. We then define in this model the execution of an authenticated group Diffie-Hellman scheme and prove its security.

Dynamic group Diffie-Hellman protocols for Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) are designed to work in a scenario in which the group membership is not known in advance but where parties may join and may also leave the multicast group at any given time. While several schemes have been proposed to deal with this scenario no formal treatment for this cryptographic problem has ever been suggested. In this paper, we define a security model for this problem and use it to precisely define Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) with "implicit" authentication as the fundamental goal, and the entity-authentication goal as well. We then define in this model the execution of a protocol modified from a dynamic group Diffie-Hellman scheme offered in the litterature and prove its security.