Communication and Round Efficient Information Checking Protocol

TL;DR

This paper introduces an optimized Information Checking Protocol (ICP) with minimal communication and rounds, enhancing the foundation for secure secret sharing and multiparty computation.

Contribution

It extends the basic ICP definition and presents a new ICP achieving optimal communication and round complexity, with properties like linearity for broader cryptographic applications.

Findings

Achieves best known communication complexity among ICPs

Attains minimal round complexity in ICPs

Supports properties like linearity for secure protocols

Abstract

In this paper, we present a very important primitive called Information Checking Protocol (ICP) which plays an important role in constructing statistical Verifiable Secret Sharing (VSS) and Weak Secret Sharing (WSS) protocols. Informally, ICP is a tool for authenticating messages in the presence of computationally unbounded corrupted parties. Here we extend the basic bare-bone definition of ICP, introduced by Rabin et al. and then present an ICP that attains the best communication complexity and round complexity among all the existing ICPs in the literature. We also show that our ICP satisfies several interesting properties such as linearity property which is an important requirement in many applications of ICP. Though not presented in this paper, we can design communication and round efficient statistical (i.e involves negligible error probability in computation) VSS and Multiparty Computation (MPC) protocol using our new ICP.