Efficient String-Commitment from Weak Bit-Commitment

Kai-Min Chung, Feng-Hao Liu, Chi-Jen Lu, Bo-Yin Yang

Abstract: We study security amplification for commitment schemes and improve the efficiency of black-box security amplification in the computational setting, where the security holds against PPT active adversaries. We show that ω(logs) black-box calls to a weak bit-commitment scheme with constant security is sufficient to construct a commitment scheme with standard negligible security, where s denotes the security parameter and ω(logs) denotes any super-logarithmic function of s. Furthermore, the resulting scheme is a string commitment scheme that can commit to O(logs)-bit strings. This improves on previous work of Damgård et al. [DKS99] and Halevi and Rabin [HR08], whose transformations require ω(log2 s) black-box calls to commit a single bit.