Nicholas Brandt

dblp:294/0788 · also Nicholas-Philip Brandt · DBLP profile ↗
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5ranked-venue papers
5as first author
5since 2021 · last 2025
0000-0002-5120-6346ORCID · corroborated

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Security and privacy · 5 · 5 first-author · 5 since 2021Theory of computation · 3 · 3 first-author · 3 since 2021
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 Tightly-Secure Blind Signatures in Pairing-Free Groups
abstract
We construct the first blind signature scheme that achieves all of the following properties simultaneously: The third property enables a reasonably efficient solution, and in fact signatures in our scheme comprise 10 group elements and 29 $$\mathbb {Z} _p$$ -elements. Our scheme starts from a pairing-based non-blind signature scheme (Abe et al., JoC 2023), and uses recent techniques of Chairattana-Apirom, Tessaro, and Zhu (CRYPTO 2024) to replace the pairings used in this scheme with non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs in the random oracle model. This conversion is not generic or straightforward (also because prior works have converted only significantly simpler signature schemes), and we are required to improve upon and innovate existing techniques in several places. As an interesting side note, and unlike previous works, our techniques only require a non-programmable random oracle, and our signature scheme achieves predicate blindness (which means that the user can prove statements about the signed message during the signing process).
Nicholas Brandt, Dennis Hofheinz, Michael Klooß, Michael Reichle
ASIACRYPT (6)1
2025 Constrained Verifiable Random Functions Without Obfuscation and Friends
abstract
CVRFs are PRFs that unify the properties of verifiable and constrained PRFs. Since they were introduced concurrently by Fuchsbauer and Chandran-Raghuraman-Vinayagamurthy in 2014, it has been an open problem to construct CVRFs without using heavy machinery such as multilinear maps, obfuscation or functional encryption. We solve this problem by constructing a prefix-constrained verifiable PRF that does not rely on the aforementioned assumptions. Essentially, our construction is a verifiable version of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF. To achieve verifiability we leverage degree-2 algebraic PRGs and bilinear groups. In short, proofs consist of intermediate values of the Goldreich-Goldwasser-Micali PRF raised to the exponents of group elements. These outputs can be verified using pairings since the underlying PRG is of degree 2. We prove the selective security of our construction under the Decisional Square Diffie-Hellman (DSDH) assumption and a new assumption, which we dub recursive Decisional Diffie-Hellman (recursive DDH). We prove the soundness of recursive DDH in the generic group model assuming the hardness of the Multivariate Quadratic (MQ) problem and a new variant thereof, which we call MQ+. Last, in terms of applications, we observe that our CVRF is also an exponent (C)VRF in the plain model. Exponent VRFs were recently introduced by Boneh et al. (Eurocrypt’25) with various applications to threshold cryptography in mind. In addition to that, we give further applications for prefix-CVRFs in the blockchain setting, namely, stake-pooling and compressible randomness beacons.
Nicholas Brandt, Miguel Cueto Noval, Christoph U. Günther, Akin Ünal, Stella Wohnig
TCC (4)1
2024 Lower Bounds for Levin-Kolmogorov Complexity
Nicholas Brandt
TCC (1)1
2023 On the Correlation Complexity of MPC with Cheater Identification
Nicholas Brandt, Sven Maier, Tobias Müller 0005, Jörn Müller-Quade
FC (1)1
2022 The Price of Verifiability: Lower Bounds for Verifiable Random Functions
Nicholas Brandt, Dennis Hofheinz, Julia Kastner 0001, Akin Ünal
TCC (2)1