Secure Computation from Hardware Assumptions

Highly concurrent environments, like the Internet, present new challenges towards design of secure cryptographic protocols. Indeed, it is known that protocols proved secure in the so called 'stand-alone' model, where a protocol is assumed to execute in isolation, are no longer secure in a concurrent environment. In fact, the case of arbitrary composition is so severe that no security can be achieved without an external secure set-up. Numerous such set-ups have been proposed in the literature, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In this thesis, we study two new set-ups motivated by recent advances in secure hardware design: tamper-proof tokens, and physically uncloneable functions. For both set-ups, we provide universally composable protocols for general cryptographic tasks. Additionally, our protocols using tamper-proof tokens are information-theoretically secure, and non-interactive.