Research in Cryptography , Information Security and Algorithm Development 9807 - 12 & 26 Progress Report : January 1 , 2000 — June 30 , 2000

In previous work, Professor Rivest has proposed a new scheme for achieving information-theoretically secure commitments when both parties are computationally unbounded. The value committed to by Alice is informationtheoretically concealed from Bob (until revealed), but Alice can only change the value committed to with negligible probability. The scheme utilizes both a trusted third party and private channels between all pairs of parties to achieve this result (without some such extensions, the result was known to be unachievable).