Computational Hardness of Collective Coin-Tossing Protocols

Abstract

Ben-Or and Linial, in a seminal work, introduced the full information model to study collective coin-tossing protocols. Collective coin-tossing is an elegant functionality providing uncluttered access to the primary bottlenecks to achieve security in a specific adversarial model. Additionally, the research outcomes for this versatile functionality has direct consequences on diverse topics in mathematics and computer science. This survey summarizes the current state-of-the-art of coin-tossing protocols in the full information model and recent advances in this field. In particular, it elaborates on a new proof technique that identifies the minimum insecurity incurred by any coin-tossing protocol and, simultaneously, constructs the coin-tossing protocol achieving that insecurity bound. The combinatorial perspective into this new proof-technique yields new coin-tossing protocols that are more secure than well-known existing coin-tossing protocols, leading to new isoperimetric inequalities over product spaces. Furthermore, this proof-technique’s algebraic reimagination resolves several long-standing fundamental hardness-of-computation problems in cryptography. This survey presents one representative application of each of these two perspectives.