International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

On the Complexity of Fair Coin Flipping

Authors:
Iftach Haitner
Nikolaos Makriyannis
Eran Omri
Download:
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-03807-6_20
Search ePrint
Search Google
Conference: TCC 2018
Abstract: A two-party coin-flipping protocol is $$\varepsilon $$ε-fair if no efficient adversary can bias the output of the honest party (who always outputs a bit, even if the other party aborts) by more than $$\varepsilon $$ε. Cleve [STOC ’86] showed that r-round o(1 / r)-fair coin-flipping protocols do not exist. Awerbuch et al. [Manuscript ’85] constructed a $$\varTheta (1/\sqrt{r})$$Θ(1/r)-fair coin-flipping protocol, assuming the existence of one-way functions. Moran et al. [Journal of Cryptology ’16] constructed an r-round coin-flipping protocol that is $$\varTheta (1/r)$$Θ(1/r)-fair (thus matching the aforementioned lower bound of Cleve [STOC ’86]), assuming the existence of oblivious transfer.The above gives rise to the intriguing question of whether oblivious transfer, or more generally “public-key primitives”, is required for an $$o(1/\sqrt{r})$$o(1/r)-fair coin flipping. This question was partially answered by Dachman-Soled et al. [TCC ’11] and Dachman-Soled et al. [TCC ’14], who showed that restricted types of fully black-box reductions cannot establish $$o(1/\sqrt{r})$$o(1/r)-fair coin-flipping protocols from one-way functions. In particular, for constant-round coin-flipping protocols, [10] yields that black-box techniques from one-way functions can only guarantee fairness of order $$1/\sqrt{r}$$1/r.We make progress towards answering the above question by showing that, for any constant , the existence of an $$1/(c\cdot \sqrt{r})$$1/(c·r)-fair, r-round coin-flipping protocol implies the existence of an infinitely-often key-agreement protocol, where c denotes some universal constant (independent of r). Our reduction is non black-box and makes a novel use of the recent dichotomy for two-party protocols of Haitner et al. [FOCS ’18] to facilitate a two-party variant of the attack of Beimel et al. [FOCS ’18] on multi-party coin-flipping protocols.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{tcc-2018-28998,
  title={On the Complexity of Fair Coin Flipping},
  booktitle={Theory of Cryptography},
  series={Theory of Cryptography},
  publisher={Springer},
  volume={11239},
  pages={539-562},
  doi={10.1007/978-3-030-03807-6_20},
  author={Iftach Haitner and Nikolaos Makriyannis and Eran Omri},
  year=2018
}