On the Equivalence of Generic Group Models

  • Authors:
  • Tibor Jager;Jörg Schwenk

  • Affiliations:
  • Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany;Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ProvSec '08 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Provable Security
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

The generic group model (GGM) is a commonly used tool in cryptography, especially in the analysis of fundamental cryptographic problems, such as the complexity of the discrete logarithm problem [1,2,3] or the relationship between breaking RSA and factoring integers [4,5,6]. Moreover, the GGM is frequently used to gain confidence in the security of newly introduced computational problems or cryptosystems [7,8,9,10,11]. The GGM serves basically as an idealization of an abstract algebraic group: An algorithm is restricted to basic group operations, such as computing the group law, checking for equality of elements, and possibly additional operations, without being able to exploit any specific property of a given group representation. Different models formalizing the notion of generic groups have been proposed in the literature. Although all models aim to capture the same notion, it is not obvious that a security proof in one model implies security in the other model. Thus the validity of a proven statement may depend on the choice of the model. In this paper we prove the equivalence of the models proposed by Shoup [2] and Maurer [3].