Computational Soundness of Formal Indistinguishability and Static Equivalence

In the investigation of the relationship between the formal and the computational view of cryptography, a recent approach, first proposed in [10], uses static equivalence from cryptographic pi calculi as a notion of formal indistinguishability. Previous work [10,1] has shown that this yields the sou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inAdvances in Computer Science - ASIAN 2006. Secure Software and Related Issues pp. 182 - 196
Main Authors Bana, Gergei, Mohassel, Payman, Stegers, Till
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Closed Term
Computational Algebra
Encryption Scheme
Equational Theory
Formal Indistinguishability
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Summary:In the investigation of the relationship between the formal and the computational view of cryptography, a recent approach, first proposed in [10], uses static equivalence from cryptographic pi calculi as a notion of formal indistinguishability. Previous work [10,1] has shown that this yields the soundness of natural interpretations of some interesting equational theories, such as certain cryptographic operations and a theory of XOR. In this paper however, we argue that static equivalence is too coarse to allow sound interpretations of many natural and useful equational theories. We illustrate this with several explicit examples in which static equivalence fails to work. To fix the problem, we propose a notion of formal indistinguishability that is more flexible than static equivalence. We provide a general framework along with general theorems, and then discuss how this new notion works for the explicit examples where static equivalence fails to ensure soundness.
ISBN:9783540775041
3540775048
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-77505-8_14