Highly-efficient universally-composable commitments based on the DDH assumption

Universal composability (a.k.a. UC security) provides very strong security guarantees for protocols that run in complex real-world environments. In particular, security is guaranteed to hold when the protocol is run concurrently many times with other secure and possibly insecure protocols. Commitment schemes are a basic building block in many cryptographic constructions, and as such universally composable commitments are of great importance in constructing UC-secure protocols. In this paper, we construct highly efficient UC-secure commitments from the standard DDH assumption, in the common reference string model. Our commitment stage is non-interactive, has a common reference string with O(1) group elements, and has complexity of O(1) exponentiations for committing to a group element (to be more exact, the effective cost is that of 231/3 exponentiations overall, for both the commit and decommit stages). We present a construction that is secure in the presence of static adversaries, and a construction that is secure in the presence of adaptive adversaries with erasures, where the latter construction has an effective additional cost of just exponentiations.