We revisit the problem of whether the known classic constantround public-coin argument/proof systems are witness hiding for languages/distributions with unique witnesses. Though strong black-box impossibility results are known, we provide some less unexpected positive results on the witness hiding security of these classic protocols: – We give sufficient conditions on a hard distribution over u...

We propose an abstract framework for studying search-to-decision reductions for NP. Specifically, we study the following witness finding problem: for a hidden nonempty set W ⊆ {0, 1}, the goal is to output a witness in W with constant probability by making randomized queries of the form “is Q ∩W nonempty?” where Q ⊆ {0, 1}. Algorithms for the witness finding problem can be seen as a general for...

We explore a new man-in-the-middle adversarial model for multi-prover interactive proofs (MIPs), and construct round-optimal, unconditionally secure, non-malleable MIPs. We compile from a large sub-class of Σ-protocols to a non-malleable MIP, avoiding the use of expensive NP-reductions to Graph Hamiltonicity or other NP-complete problems. Our compiler makes novel use of non-malleable codes – in...

Despite the application of Self-Efficacy Theory (Bandura, 1977, 2000) to many areas of psychology, there is a lack of research on self-efficacy in the ability to testify in court. The present study fills this gap by incrementally developing the construct of Witness Self-Efficacy and establishing its psychometric properties. Study I features exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses yielding ...

Building on the work of Martinetz, Schulten and de Silva, Carlsson, we introduce a 2-parameter family of witness complexes and algorithms for constructing them. This family can be used to determine the gross topology of point cloud data in R or other metric spaces. The 2-parameter family is sensitive to differences in sampling density and thus amenable to detecting patterns within the data set....

In this paper, we introduce a new type of functions to analyze cryptographic protocols statically for the property of secrecy: the Witness-Functions. A Witness-Function is a reliable protocol-dependent function intended to prove the correctness of a protocol through its growth. It bases its calculation on the static part of a message in a role-based speci cation and ignores the dynamic one by i...

Much of the existing bx literature, especially that from the PL community on lenses, has described extensional, state-based formalisms. More recently, attention has turned to incorporating intensional information about edits (typically based on monoid actions), or more generally, deltas (typically based on categories), describing how models are updated. Pervasive in both the conceptual modellin...

Elimination is a basic algebraic operation which geometrically corresponds to projections. This article describes using the numerical algebraic geometric concept of witness sets to compute the projection of an algebraic set. The ideas described in this article apply to computing the image of an algebraic set under any linear map.