## The Chaining Lemma and Its Application

We present a new information-theoretic result which we call the Chaining Lemma. It considers a so-called "chain" of random variables, defined by a source distribution X-(0) with high min-entropy and a number (say, t in total) of arbitrary functions (T-1,...,T-t) which are applied in succession to that source to generate the chain X-(0) (sic) X-(1) (sic) X-(2)...(sic) X-(t). Intuitively, the Chaining Lemma guarantees that, if the chain is not too long, then either (i) the entire chain is "highly random", in that every variable has high min-entropy; or (ii) it is possible to find a point j (1 <= j <= t) in the chain such that, conditioned on the end of the chain i.e. X-(j) (sic) X(j+1)...(sic) X-(t), the preceding part X-(0) (sic) X-(1)...(sic) X-(j) remains highly random. We think this is an interesting information-theoretic result which is intuitive but nevertheless requires rigorous case-analysis to prove. We believe that the above lemma will find applications in cryptography. We give an example of this, namely we show an application of the lemma to protect essentially any cryptographic scheme against memorytampering attacks. We allow several tampering requests, the tampering functions can be arbitrary, however, they must be chosen from a bounded size set of functions that is fixed a priori.

Editor(s):
Lehmann, A
Wolf, S
Published in:
Information Theoretic Security (Icits 2015), 9063, 181-196
Presented at:
8th International Conference on Information-Theoretic Security (ICITS), Univ Svizzera italiana, Lugano, SWITZERLAND, MAY 02-05, 2015
Year:
2015
Publisher:
Berlin, Springer-Verlag Berlin
ISSN:
0302-9743
ISBN:
978-3-319-17470-9; 978-3-319-17469-3
Laboratories:

Record created 2015-12-02, last modified 2018-03-17

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