Cryptographic commitments

A cryptographic commitment is a scheme that allows one to commit to a chosen value while keeping it hidden to others, with the ability to reveal the value at a later time. A commitment scheme has two core properties in that they are binding and hiding. The binding property ensures that a commitment can never be opened to two different values. Therefore, if one value was used to create the commitment no other value can later be used to open it. The hiding property ensures that the commitment itself leaks no information about the committed value. Findora’s cryptographic module uses the Pedersen commitment scheme, an information-theoretically, computationally binding scheme. Pedersen commitments are additionally homomorphic, enabling secure multiparty computation to be implemented in Findora. We use Pedersen commitments enabled by elliptic curves for more efficient computation.