Despite over 25 years of research on non-malleable commitments in the plain model, their round complexity has remained open. The goal of achieving non-malleable commitment protocols with only one or two rounds has been especially elusive. Pass (TCC 2013, CC 2016) captured this difficulty by proving important impossibility results regarding two-round non-malleable commitments. This led to the widespread belief that achieving two-round non-malleable commitments was impossible from standard sub-exponential assumptions. We show that this belief was false. Indeed, we obtain the following positive results:
- We construct the first two-message non-malleable commitments satisfying the strong definition of non-malleability with respect to commitment, assuming standard sub-exponential assumptions, namely: sub-exponentially hard one-way permutations, sub-exponential ZAPs, and sub-exponential DDH. Furthermore, our protocol is public-coin.
- We also obtain two-message private-coin non-malleable commitments with respect to commitment, assuming only sub-exponentially hard DDH or QR or N^{th}-residuosity.
- We bootstrap the above protocols (under the same assumptions) to obtain constant bounded-concurrent non-malleability while preserving round complexity.