,
Ilan Komargodski
,
Manu Kondapaneni
,
Jad Silbak
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Non-malleable codes allow a sender to transmit a message to a receiver, while providing a "best-possible" integrity guarantee to ensure that no attacker - who cannot already decode the message - can meaningfully tamper the message in transit. If tampered, the received message should either be invalid or unrelated to the original message. Non-malleable time-lock puzzles (TLPs) are a special case of non-malleable codes for bounded polynomial-depth tampering with very efficient encoding. In this work, we give generic techniques for constructing non-malleable codes and non-malleable TLPs with improved rate, which captures the ratio of a message’s length to its encoding length. A key contribution of our work is identifying a security notion for non-malleability, which we term "CCA-hiding", sufficient for our compilers. CCA-hiding is a relaxation of CCA-security for encryption or commitments to the fine-grained setting of codes, and requires that the encoded message remains hidden, even given a decoding oracle for any other codeword. Intriguingly, CCA-hiding does not imply non-malleability in the fine-grained setting, as is the case for encryption and commitments. Using our new techniques, we give the following constructions: - Rate-1 CCA-hiding TLPs in the plain model. - Rate-1 non-malleable codes for bounded polynomial-depth tampering in the auxiliary-input random oracle model (AI-ROM). - Rate-(1/2) non-malleable TLPs in the AI-ROM.
@InProceedings{freitag_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2026.62,
author = {Freitag, Cody and Komargodski, Ilan and Kondapaneni, Manu and Silbak, Jad},
title = {{Improved Rate for Non-Malleable Codes and Time-Lock Puzzles}},
booktitle = {17th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2026)},
pages = {62:1--62:24},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-410-9},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2026},
volume = {362},
editor = {Saraf, Shubhangi},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2026.62},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-253490},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2026.62},
annote = {Keywords: Non-malleable codes, Time-lock puzzles}
}