English

A Tight Lower Bound on Adaptively Secure Full-Information Coin Flip

Cryptography and Security 2024-10-29 v3

Abstract

In a distributed coin-flipping protocol, Blum [ACM Transactions on Computer Systems '83], the parties try to output a common (close to) uniform bit, even when some adversarially chosen parties try to bias the common output. In an adaptively secure full-information coin flip, Ben-Or and Linial [FOCS '85], the parties communicate over a broadcast channel, and a computationally unbounded adversary can choose which parties to corrupt along the protocol execution. Ben-Or and Linial proved that the nn-party majority protocol is resilient to O(n)O(\sqrt{n}) corruptions (ignoring poly-logarithmic factors), and conjectured this is a tight upper bound for any nn-party protocol (of any round complexity). Their conjecture was proved to be correct for single-turn (each party sends a single message) single-bit (a message is one bit) protocols Lichtenstein, Linial and Saks [Combinatorica '89], symmetric protocols Goldwasser, Tauman Kalai and Park [ICALP '15], and recently for (arbitrary message length) single-turn protocols Tauman Kalai, Komargodski and Raz [DISC '18]. Yet, the question of many-turn protocols was left entirely open. In this work, we close the above gap, proving that no nn-party protocol (of any round complexity) is resilient to ω(n)\omega(\sqrt{n}) (adaptive) corruptions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2005.01565,
  title  = {A Tight Lower Bound on Adaptively Secure Full-Information Coin Flip},
  author = {Iftach Haitner and Yonatan Karidi-Heller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.01565},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T15:17:47.950Z