Published On Mar 10, 2022
Dan Boneh gave this talk as part of the ViSP Distinguished Lecture Series (https://visp.wien/lecture-series).
Abstract: A cryptographic commitment scheme lets one party commit to some data while keeping the data secret. The committer can later open the commitment (uniquely) to reveal the committed data. Commitment Schemes are a fundamental tool in cryptography and have been studied for over four decades. In this talk we will generalize this basic concept, and in particular, develop ways to commit to a secret function. The commitment reveals nothing about the function, however, the committer can later "open" the function at any point, namely efficiently prove that for a given (x,y) the function evaluates to y at the point x. We will discuss some societal applications of this concept, as well as the beautiful algebraic questions that come up when constructing it. The talk will be self contained. This is joint work with Wilson Nguyen and Alex Ozdemir.