Interactive Non-Malleable Codes

Abstract

Non-malleable codes (NMC) introduced by Dziembowski et al. [ICS’10] allow one to encode “passive” data in such a manner that when a codeword is tampered, the original data either remains completely intact or is essentially destroyed.

In this work, we initiate the study of interactive non-malleable codes (INMCs) that allow for encoding “active communication” rather than passive data. An INMC allows two parties to engage in an interactive protocol such that an adversary who is able to tamper with the protocol messages either leaves the original transcript intact (i.e., the parties are able to reconstruct the original transcript) or the transcript is completely destroyed and replaced with an unrelated one.

We formalize a tampering model for interactive protocols and put forward the notion of INMCs. Since constructing INMCs for general adversaries is impossible (as in the case of non-malleable codes), we construct INMCs for several specific classes of tampering functions. These include bounded state, split state, and fragmented sliding window tampering functions. We also obtain lower bounds for threshold tampering functions via a connection to interactive coding. All of our results are unconditional.