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How to Play with Witness Encryption without the Theoretical Hassle (Or: weak forms of WE and good stuff we can get from them)

Series: CSA Crypto Seminar

Speaker: Matteo Campanelli, Research Scientist, Protocol Labs

Date/Time: Apr 14 14:30:00

Location: Microsoft Teams - Online

Abstract:
Witness encryption (WE), allows one to encrypt a message to a statement for some NP language, such that any user holding a witness for it can decrypt the ciphertext. If we could construct this primitive, we would be able to do without certificate authorities, but also to use it as an extremely versatile building block in other cryptographic applications.
Unfortunately, from a theoretical standpoint, it is still unclear whether we will be able to instantiate a general-purpose witness encryption scheme from reliable assumptions soon (unless we go through iO).
In this talk we tackle the questions:
What are other weak-but-useful variants of WE that we can actually construct? And what efficiency properties would we require from them?
We discuss some recent works in this direction and their applications, in particular on forms of non-interactive (and reusable) MPC (Ben and Lin, TCC20), where parties can securely compute a function by broadcasting a single message, assuming only an encoding of their input exists on a bulletin board.

This talk is partly a presentation of the work in: Link

Speaker Bio:
Matteo Campanelli is a research scientist at Protocol Labs. His main focus is on efficient proof systems, zero-knowledge and not. He has previously been a post-doctoral researcher at Aarhus University (2020-2021) and at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid (2018-2020). He studied for his doctorate at the City University of New York (CUNY) where he worked with Rosario Gennaro. In 2018 both Rosario and CUNY made the careless blunder of giving him a PhD. Microsoft team link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_OGM0NWYwNDItMDhlMC00NDg5LTk2Y2EtMjU4ZTEyM2U2ZTFi%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%226f15cd97-f6a7-41e3-b2c5-ad4193976476%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%221beaa166-3a14-437e-9106-75a2e2caebeb%22%7d Meeting ID: 437 189 149 30 Passcode: qgUMvF

Host Faculty: Prof. Chaya Ganesh