Testable commitments

Abstract

A key challenge in litigation is verifying that all relevant case content has been produced. Adding to the challenge is the fact that litigating parties are both bound to produce relevant documents and bound to protect private information (e.g. medical information). This leaves open the possibility of withholding content inappropriately, and verifying that this has not occurred is a time-consuming process involving the presiding judge. We introduce testable commitments: a cryptographic technique for verifying that only the right information has been withheld with only minimal involvement from a trusted third party. We present a construction of testable commitments and discuss its implementation.