We study interactive proof systems (IPSes) in a strong adversarial setting where the machines of honest parties might be corrupted and under control of the adversary. Our aim is to answer the following, seemingly paradoxical, questions:
At EUROCRYPT 2015, Mironov and Stephens-Davidowitz introduced cryptographic reverse firewalls (RFs) as an attractive approach to tackling such questions.
Intuitively, a RF for Peggy/Vic is an external party that sits between Peggy/Vic and the outside world and whose scope is to sanitize Peggy’s/Vic’s incoming and outgoing messages in the face of subversion of her/his computer, e.g. in order to destroy subliminal channels.
In this paper, we put forward several natural security properties for RFs in the concrete setting of IPSes. As our main contribution, we construct efficient RFs for different IPSes derived from a large class of Sigma protocols that we call malleable. A nice feature of our design is that it is completely transparent, in the sense that our RFs can be directly applied to already deployed IPSes, without the need to re-implement them.
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