Proving knowledge of a secret isogeny has recently been proposed as a means to generate supersingular elliptic curves of unknown endomorphism ring, but is equally important for cryptographic protocol design as well as for real world deployments. Recently, Cong, Lai and Levin (ACNS'23) have investigated the use of general-purpose (non-interactive) zero-knowledge proof systems for proving the knowledge of an isogeny of degree $2^k$ between supersingular elliptic curves. In particular, their...

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZK) are essential building blocks in threshold cryptosystems like multiparty signatures, distributed key generation, and verifiable secret sharing, allowing parties to prove correct behavior without revealing secrets. Furthermore, universally composable (UC) NIZKs enable seamless composition in the larger cryptosystems. A popular way to construct NIZKs is to compile interactive protocols using the Fiat-Shamir transform. Unfortunately, Fiat-Shamir...

In this paper, we show for the first time it is practical to privately delegate proof generation of zkSNARKs proving up to $2^{20}$ R1CS constraints to a single server. We achieve this by homomorphically computing zkSNARK proof generation, an approach we call blind zkSNARKs. We formalize the concept of blind proofs, analyze their cryptographic properties and show that the resulting blind zkSNARKs remain sound when compiled using BCS compilation. Garg et al. gave a similar framework at CRYPTO...

With the demand of cryptocurrencies, threshold ECDSA recently regained popularity. So far, several methods have been proposed to construct threshold ECDSA, including the usage of OT and homomorphic encryptions (HE). Due to the mismatch between the plaintext space and the signature space, HE-based threshold ECDSA always requires zero-knowledge range proofs, such as Paillier and Joye-Libert (JL) encryptions. However, the overhead of range proofs constitutes a major portion of the total...

Space-efficient SNARKs aim to reduce the prover's space overhead which is one the main obstacles for deploying SNARKs in practice, as it can be prohibitively large (e.g., orders of magnitude larger than natively performing the computation). In this work, we propose Sparrow, a novel space-efficient zero-knowledge SNARK for data-parallel arithmetic circuits with two attractive features: (i) it is the first space-efficient scheme where, for a given field, the prover overhead increases with a...

We improve recent generic proof systems for isogeny knowledge by Cong, Lai, Levin [26] based on circuit satisfiability, by using radical isogeny descriptions [19, 20] to prove a path in the underlying isogeny graph. We then present a new generic construction for a verifiable random function (VRF) based on a one-more type hardness assumption and zero-knowledge proofs. We argue that isogenies fit the constraints of our construction and instantiate the VRF with a CGL walk [22] and our new...

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes [RS60], representing evaluations of univariate polynomials over distinct domains, are foundational in error correction and cryptographic protocols. Traditional RS codes leverage the Fourier domain for efficient encoding and decoding via Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT). However, in fields such as the Reals and some finite prime fields, limited root-of-unity orders restrict these methods. Recent research, particularly in the context of modern STARKs [BSBHR18b], has...

Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) allow a client to evaluate a pseudorandom function (PRF) on her secret input based on a key that is held by a server. In the process, the client only learns the PRF output but not the key, while the server neither learns the input nor the output of the client. The arguably most popular OPRF is due to Naor, Pinkas and Reingold (Eurocrypt 2009). It is based on an Oblivious Exponentiation by the server, with passive security under the Decisional...

We introduce NeutronNova, a new folding scheme for the zero-check relation: an instance-witness pair is in the zero-check relation if a corresponding multivariate polynomial evaluates to zero for all inputs over a suitable Boolean hypercube. The folding scheme is a two-round protocol, and it internally invokes a \emph{single} round of the sum-check protocol. The folding scheme is more efficient than prior state-of-the-art schemes and directly benefits from recent improvements to the...

The MPC-in-the-Head framework has been pro- posed as a solution for Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments of Knowledge (NIZKAoK) due to its efficient proof generation. However, most existing NIZKAoK constructions using this approach require multiple MPC evaluations to achieve negligible soundness error, resulting in proof size and time that are asymptotically at least λ times the size of the circuit of the NP relation. In this paper, we propose a novel method to eliminate the need for...

Value Added Tax (VAT) is a cornerstone of government rev- enue systems worldwide, yet its self-reported nature has historically been vulnerable to fraud. While transaction-level reporting requirements may tackle fraud, they raise concerns regarding data security and overreliance on tax authorities as fully trusted intermediaries. To address these issues, we propose Verifiable VAT, a protocol that enables confidential and verifiable VAT reporting. Our system allows companies to...

Decentralized storage networks, including IPFS and Filecoin, have created a marketplace where individuals exchange storage space for profit. These networks employ protocols that reliably ensure data storage providers accurately store data without alterations, safeguarding the interests of storage purchasers. However, these protocols lack an effective and equitable payment mechanism for data retrieval, particularly when multiple data queriers are involved. This necessitates a protocol that...

We present a new and efficient method to obtain circuit privacy for lattice-based linearly homomorphic encryptions (LHE). In particular, our method does not involve noise-flooding with exponetially large errors or iterative bootstrapping. As a direct result, we obtain a semi-honest oblivious linear evaluation (OLE) protocol with the same efficiency, reducing the communication cost of the prior state of the art by 50%. Consequently, the amortized time of our protocol improves the prior work...

At CRYPTO '94, Cramer, Damgaard, and Schoenmakers introduced a general technique for constructing honest-verifier zero-knowledge proofs of partial knowledge (PPK), where a prover Alice wants to prove to a verifier Bob she knows $\tau$ witnesses for $\tau$ claims out of $k$ claims without revealing the indices of those $\tau$ claims. Their solution starts from a base honest-verifier zero-knowledge proof of knowledge $\Sigma$ and requires to run in parallel $k$ execution of the base...

Sigma protocols are elegant cryptographic proofs that have become a cornerstone of modern cryptography. A notable example is Schnorr's protocol, a zero-knowledge proof-of-knowledge of a discrete logarithm. Despite extensive research, the security of Schnorr's protocol in the standard model is not fully understood. In this paper we study Kilian's protocol, an influential public-coin interactive protocol that, while not a sigma protocol, shares striking similarities with sigma protocols....

Studies of vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE)-based zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols flourish in recent years. Such ZK protocols feature optimal prover computation and a flexibility for handling arithmetic circuits over arbitrary fields. However, most of them have linear communication, which constitutes a bottleneck for handling large statements in a slow network. The pioneer work AntMan (CCS'22), achieved sublinear communication for the first time within VOLE-based ZK, but lost the...

In the Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) of a disjunctive statement, $\mathcal{P}$ and $\mathcal{V}$ agree on $B$ fan-in $2$ circuits $\mathcal{C}_0, \ldots, \mathcal{C}_{B-1}$ over a field $\mathbb{F}$; each circuit has $n_{\mathit{in}}$ inputs, $n_\times$ multiplications, and one output. $\mathcal{P}$'s goal is to demonstrate the knowledge of a witness $(\mathit{id} \in [B]$, $\boldsymbol{w} \in \mathbb{F}^{n_{\mathit{in}}})$, s.t. $\mathcal{C}_{\mathit{id}}(\boldsymbol{w}) = 0$ where neither...

Zero-Knowledge (ZK) protocols allow a prover to demonstrate the truth of a statement without disclosing additional information about the underlying witness. Code-based cryptography has a long history but did suffer from periods of slow development. Recently, a prominent line of research have been contributing to designing efficient code-based ZK from MPC-in-the-head (Ishai et al., STOC 2007) and VOLE-in-the head (VOLEitH) (Baum et al., Crypto 2023) paradigms, resulting in quite efficient...

Zero-Knowledge (ZK) protocols have been a subject of intensive study due to their fundamental importance and versatility in modern cryptography. However, the inherently different nature of quantum information significantly alters the landscape, necessitating a re-examination of ZK designs. A crucial aspect of ZK protocols is their round complexity, intricately linked to $\textit{simulation}$, which forms the foundation of their formal definition and security proofs. In the...

This work introduces Cryptobazaar, a novel scalable, private, and decentralized sealed-bid auction protocol. In particular, our protocol protects the privacy of losing bidders by preserving the confidentiality of their bids while ensuring public verifiability of the outcome and relying only on a single untrusted auctioneer for coordination. At its core, Cryptobazaar combines an efficient distributed protocol to compute the logical-OR for a list of unary-encoded bids with various novel...

The area of modern zero-knowledge proof systems has seen a significant rise in popularity over the last couple of years, with new techniques and optimized constructions emerging on a regular basis. As the field matures, the aspect of implementation attacks becomes more relevant, however side-channel attacks on zero-knowledge proof systems have seen surprisingly little treatment so far. In this paper we give an overview of potential attack vectors and show that some of the underlying...

In this work, we consider the setting where one or more users with low computational resources would lie to outsource the task of proof generation for SNARKs to one external entity, named Prover. We study the scenario in which Provers have access to all statements and witnesses to be proven beforehand. We take a different approach to proof aggregation and design a new protocol that reduces simultaneously proving time and communication complexity, without going through recursive proof...

We provide a novel perspective on a long-standing challenge to the integrity of votes cast without the supervision of a voting booth: "improper influence,'' which we define as any combination of vote buying and voter coercion. In comparison with previous proposals, our system is the first in the literature to protect against a strong adversary who learns all of the voter's keys---we call this property "extreme coercion resistance.'' When keys are stolen, each voter, or their trusted agents...

In recent years a new class of symmetric-key primitives over $\mathbb{F}_p$ that are essential to Multi-Party Computation and Zero-Knowledge Proofs based protocols has emerged. Towards improving the efficiency of such primitives, a number of new block ciphers and hash functions over $\mathbb{F}_p$ were proposed. These new primitives also showed that following alternative design strategies to the classical Substitution-Permutation Network (SPN) and Feistel Networks leads to more efficient...

We present an efficient zero-knowledge argument of knowledge system customized for the Paillier cryptosystem. Our system enjoys sublinear proof size, low verification cost, and acceptable proof generation effort, while also supporting batch proof generation/verification. Existing works specialized for Paillier cryptosystem feature linear proof size and verification time. Using existing sublinear argument systems for generic statements (e.g., zk-SNARK) results in unaffordable proof generation...

Several cryptographic primitives, especially succinct proofs of various forms, transform the satisfaction of high-level properties to the existence of a polynomial quotient between a polynomial that interpolates a set of values with a cleverly arranged divisor. Some examples are SNARKs, like Groth16, and polynomial commitments, such as KZG. Such a polynomial division naively takes $O(n \log n)$ time with Fast Fourier Transforms, and is usually the asymptotic bottleneck for these...

Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove the truth of a statement without disclosing any extra information. Recent years have seen great improvements in zero-knowledge proofs. Among them, zero-knowledge SNARKs are notable for their compact and efficiently-verifiable proofs, but have relatively high prover costs. To accelerate proving, distributed zero-knowledge proof systems (Wu et al., Usenix Security 2018) are proposed: by distributing the proving process across multiple machines,...

The recent VOLE-based interactive zero-knowledge (VOLE-ZK) protocols along with non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs based on MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) and VOLE-in-the-Head (VOLEitH) extensively utilize the commitment schemes, which adopt a circular correlation robust (CCR) hash function as the core primitive. Nevertheless, the state-of-the-art CCR hash construction by Guo et al. (S&P'20), building from random permutations, can only provide 128-bit security, when it is instantiated...

Privacy preserving systems often need to allow anonymity while requiring accountability. For anonymous clients, depending on application, this may mean banning/revoking their accounts, docking their reputation, or updating their state in some complex access control scheme. Frequently, these operations happen asynchronously when some violation, e.g., a forum post, is found well after the offending action occurred. Malicious clients, naturally, wish to evade this asynchronous negative...

We present Mova, a folding scheme for R1CS instances that does not require committing to error or cross terms, nor makes use of the sumcheck protocol. We compute concrete costs and provide benchmarks showing that, for reasonable parameter choices, Mova's Prover is about $5$ to $10$ times faster than Nova's Prover, and about $1.05$ to $1.3$ times faster than Hypernova's Prover (applied to R1CS instances) -- assuming the R1CS witness vector contains only small elements. Mova's Verifier has a...

Non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs of knowledge have proven to be highly relevant for securely realizing a wide array of applications that rely on both privacy and correctness. They enable a prover to convince any party of the correctness of a public statement for a secret witness. However, most NIZKs do not natively support proving knowledge of a secret witness that is distributed over multiple provers. Previously, collaborative proofs [51] have been proposed to overcome this...

FRI is a cryptographic protocol widely deployed today as a building block of many efficient SNARKs that help secure transactions of hundreds of millions of dollars per day. The Fiat-Shamir security of FRI—vital for understanding the security of FRI-based SNARKs—has only recently been formalized and established by Block et al. (ASIACRYPT ’23). In this work, we complement the result of Block et al. by providing a thorough concrete security analysis of non-interactive FRI under various...

We present TaSSLE, a new lookup argument for decomposable tables with minimal commitment costs. The construction generalizes techniques introduced in Lasso (Eurocrypt '24) which take advantage of the internal structure present in such tables to avoid the need for any party to need to commit to, or even construct, the entire table. This allows the use of lookups against very large tables, with applications including new design strategies for "zero-knowledge virtual machines". We show that...

Waku is a privacy-preserving, generalized, and decentralized messaging protocol suite. Waku uses GossipSub for message routing and Rate Limiting Nullifiers (RLN) for spam protection. GossipSub ensures fast and reliable peer-to-peer message delivery in a permissionless environment, while RLN enforces a common publishing rate limit using zero-knowledge proofs. This paper presents a practical evaluation of message propagation latency in Waku. First, we estimate latencies analytically,...

Remote attestation (RA) protocols have been widely used to evaluate the integrity of software on remote devices. Currently, the state-of-the-art RA protocols lack a crucial feature: transparency. This means that the details of the final attestation verification are not openly accessible or verifiable by the public. Furthermore, the interactivity of these protocols often limits attestation to trusted parties who possess privileged access to confidential device data, such as pre-shared...

As deep learning is being widely adopted across various domains, ensuring the integrity of models has become increasingly crucial. Despite the recent advances in Zero-Knowledge Machine Learning (ZKML) techniques, proving the inference over large ML models is still prohibitive. To enable practical ZKML, model simplification techniques like pruning and quantization should be applied without hesitation. Contrary to conventional belief, recent development in ML space have demonstrated that these...

Range proofs serve as a protocol for the prover to prove to the verifier that a committed number resides within a specified range, such as $[0,2^n)$, without disclosing the actual value. These proofs find extensive application in various domains, including anonymous cryptocurrencies, electronic voting, and auctions. However, the efficiency of many existing schemes diminishes significantly when confronted with batch proofs encompassing multiple elements. The pivotal challenge arises...

In this work we study the efficiency of Zero-Knowledge (ZK) arguments of knowledge, particularly exploring Multi-Verifier ZK (MVZK) protocols as a midway point between Non-Interactive ZK and Designated-Verifier ZK, offering versatile applications across various domains. We introduce a new MVZK protocol designed for the preprocessing model, allowing any constant fraction of verifiers to be corrupted, potentially colluding with the prover. Our contributions include the first MVZK over rings....

This paper presents a new architecture for metadata-private messaging that counters scalability challenges by offloading most computations to the clients. At the core of our design is a distributed private information retrieval (PIR) protocol, where the responder delegates its work to alleviate PIR's computational bottleneck and catches misbehaving delegates by efficiently verifying their results. We introduce DPIR, a messaging system that uses distributed PIR to let a server storing...

Polynomials play a central role in cryptography. In the context of Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), protocols can be exclusively expressed using polynomials, making them a powerful abstraction tool, as demonstrated in most ZK research papers. Our first contribution is a high-level framework that enables practitioners to implement ZKPs in a more natural way, based solely on polynomial primitives. ZK provers are considered computationally intensive algorithms with a high degree of...

The trading of data is becoming increasingly important as it holds substantial value. A blockchain-based data marketplace can provide a secure and transparent platform for data exchange. To facilitate this, developing a fair data exchange protocol for digital goods has garnered considerable attention in recent decades. The Zero Knowledge Contingent Payment (ZKCP) protocol enables trustless fair exchanges with the aid of blockchain and zero-knowledge proofs. However, applying this protocol in...

Collaborative zk-SNARK (USENIX'22) allows multiple parties to jointly create a zk-SNARK proof over distributed secrets (also known as the witness). It provides a promising approach to proof outsourcing, where a client wishes to delegate the tedious task of proof generation to many servers from different locations, while ensuring no corrupted server can learn its witness (USENIX'23). Unfortunately, existing work remains a significant efficiency problem, as the protocols rely heavily on a...

Decentralized payments have evolved from using pseudonymous identifiers to much more elaborate mechanisms to ensure privacy. They can shield the amounts in payments and achieve untraceability, e.g., decoy-based untraceable payments use decoys to obfuscate the actual asset sender or asset receiver. There are two types of decoy-based payments: full decoy set payments that use all other available users as decoys, e.g., Zerocoin, Zerocash, and ZCash, and user-defined decoy set payments where...

In the *Distributed Secret Sharing Generation* (DSG) problem $n$ parties wish to obliviously sample a secret-sharing of a random value $s$ taken from some finite field, without letting any of the parties learn $s$. *Distributed Key Generation* (DKG) is a closely related variant of the problem in which, in addition to their private shares, the parties also generate a public ``commitment'' $g^s$ to the secret. Both DSG and DKG are central primitives in the domain of secure multiparty...

The significance of succinct zero-knowledge proofs has increased considerably in recent times. However, one of the major challenges that hinder the prover's efficiency is when dealing with Boolean circuits. In particular, the conversion of each bit into a finite field element incurs a blow-up of more than 100x in terms of both memory usage and computation time. This work focuses on data-parallel Boolean circuits that contain numerous identical sub-circuits. These circuits are widely used...

In this paper we propose verifiable secret sharing (VSS) schemes secure for any honest majority in the synchronous model, and that only use symmetric-key cryptographic tools, therefore having plausibly post-quantum security. Compared to the state-of-the-art scheme with these features (Atapoor et al., Asiacrypt `23), our main improvement lies on the complexity of the ``optimistic'' scenario where the dealer and all but a small number of receivers behave honestly in the sharing phase: in this...

We revisit the question of the overhead to achieve full security (i.e., guaranteed output delivery) in secure multiparty computation (MPC). Recent works have closed the gap between full security and semi-honest security, by introducing protocols where the parties first compute the circuit using a semi-honest protocol and then run a verification step with sublinear communication in the circuit size. However, in these works the number of interaction rounds in the verification step is also...

The round complexity of interactive proof systems is a key question of practical and theoretical relevance in complexity theory and cryptography. Moreover, results such as QIP = QIP(3) (STOC'00) show that quantum resources significantly help in such a task. In this work, we initiate the study of round compression of protocols in the bounded quantum storage model (BQSM). In this model, the malicious parties have a bounded quantum memory and they cannot store the all the qubits that are...

We explain how to extend the Bitcoin backbone model of Garay et al. (Eurocrypt, 2015) to accommodate for redactable blockchains. Our extension captures fluid blockchain-based databases (with mutability requirements) and compliance with existing legislation, such as the GDPR right to be forgotten, or the need to erase offending data from nodes’ databases that would otherwise provoke legal shutdowns. Our redactable backbone protocol retains the essential properties of blockchains. Leveraging...

The need for third-party auditors in privacy-preserving Key Transparency (KT) systems presents a deployment challenge. In this short note, we take a simple privacy-preserving KT system that provides strong security guarantees in the presence of an honest auditor (OPTIKS) and show how to add a auditor-free mode to it. The auditor-free mode offers slightly weaker security. We formalize this security property and prove that our proposed protocol satisfies our security definition.

We introduce a new, concretely efficient, transparent polynomial commitment scheme with logarithmic verification time and communication cost that can run on any group. Existing group-based polynomial commitment schemes must use less efficient groups, such as class groups of unknown order or pairing-based groups to achieve transparency (no trusted setup), making them expensive to adopt in practice.  We offer the first group-based polynomial commitment scheme that can run on any group s.t....

A sequence of recent works, concluding with Mu et al. (Eurocrypt, 2024) has shown that every problem $\Pi$ admitting a non-interactive statistical zero-knowledge proof (NISZK) has an efficient zero-knowledge batch verification protocol. Namely, an NISZK protocol for proving that $x_1,\dots,x_k \in \Pi$ with communication that only scales poly-logarithmically with $k$. A caveat of this line of work is that the prover runs in exponential-time, whereas for NP problems it is natural to hope to...

TLS oracles allow a TLS client to offer selective data provenance to an external (oracle) node such that the oracle node is ensured that the data is indeed coming from a pre-defined TLS server. Typically, the client/user supplies their credentials to the server and reveals selective data using zero-knowledge proofs to demonstrate certain server-offered information to oracles while ensuring the secrecy of the rest of the TLS transcript. Conceptually, this is a standard three-party secure...

The universal composability (UC) framework is a “gold standard” for security in cryptography. UC-secure protocols achieve strong security guarantees against powerful adaptive adversaries, and retain these guarantees when used as part of larger protocols. Zero knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zkSNARKs) are a popular cryptographic primitive that are often used within larger protocols deployed in dynamic environments, and so UC-security is a highly desirable, if not...

We present distributed key generation and decryption protocols for an additively homomorphic cryptosystem based on class groups, improving on a similar system proposed by Braun, Damgård, and Orlandi at CRYPTO '23. Our key generation is similarly constant round but achieves lower communication complexity than the previous work. This improvement is in part the result of relaxing the reconstruction property required of the underlying integer verifiable secret sharing scheme. This eliminates the...

Multiple works have designed or used maliciously secure honest majority MPC protocols over $\mathbb{Z}_{2^k}$ using replicated secret sharing (e.g. Koti et al. USENIX'21). A recent trend in the design of such MPC protocols is to first execute a semi-honest protocol, and then use a check that verifies the correctness of the computation requiring only sublinear amount of communication in terms of the circuit size. The so-called Galois ring extensions are needed in order to execute such checks...

Foreign field arithmetic often creates significant additional overheads in zero-knowledge proof circuits. Previous work has offloaded foreign arithmetic from proof circuits by using effective and often simple primitives such as Sigma protocols. While these successfully move the foreign field work outside of the circuit, the costs for the Sigma protocol’s verifier still remains high. In use cases where the verifier is constrained computationally this poses a major challenge. One such use case...

This paper presents a comprehensive security analysis of the Adh zero-knowledge proof system, a novel lattice-based, quantum-resistant proof of possession system. The Adh system offers compact key and proof sizes, making it suitable for real-world digital signature and public key agreement protocols. We explore its security by reducing it to the hardness of the Module-ISIS problem and introduce three new variants: Module-ISIS , Module-ISIS*, and Module-ISIS**. These constructions enhance...

In this paper we explore efficient ways to prove correctness of elliptic curve pairing relations. Pairing-based cryptographic protocols such as the Groth16 and Plonk SNARKs and the BLS signature scheme are used extensively in public blockchains such as Ethereum due in large part to their small size. However the relatively high cost of pairing computation remains a practical problem for many use cases such as verification ``in circuit" inside a SNARK. This naturally arises in recursive SNARK...

Despite much progress, general-purpose secure multi-party computation (MPC) with active security may still be prohibitively expensive in settings with large input datasets. This particularly applies to the secure evaluation of graph algorithms, where each party holds a subset of a large graph. Recently, Araki et al. (ACM CCS '21) showed that dedicated solutions may provide significantly better efficiency if the input graph is sparse. In particular, they provide an efficient protocol for...

With the growing adoption of cloud computing, the ability to store data and delegate computations to powerful and affordable cloud servers have become advantageous for both companies and individual users. However, the security of cloud computing has emerged as a significant concern. Particularly, Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) cannot assure data confidentiality and computations integrity in mission-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a confidential and verifiable delegation...

Fischlin's transform (CRYPTO 2005) is an alternative to the Fiat-Shamir transform that enables straight-line extraction when proving knowledge. In this work we focus on the problem of using the Fischlin transform to construct UC-secure zero-knowledge from Sigma protocols, since UC security -- that guarantees security under general concurrent composition -- requires straight-line (non-rewinding) simulators. We provide a slightly simplified transform that is much easier to understand, and...

The advancement of succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (SNARK) with constant proof size has significantly enhanced the efficiency and privacy of verifiable computation. Verifiable computation finds applications in distributed computing networks, particularly in scenarios where nodes cannot be generally trusted, such as blockchains. However, fully harnessing the efficiency of SNARK becomes challenging when the computing targets in the network change frequently, as the SNARK...

The VOLE-in-the-Head paradigm, recently introduced by Baum et al. (Crypto 2023), is a compiler that uses SoftspokenOT (Crypto 2022) to transfer any VOLE-based designated verifier zero-knowledge protocol into a publicly verifiable zero-knowledge protocol. Together with the Fiat-Shamir transformation, a new digital signature scheme FAEST (faest.info) is proposed, and it outperforms all MPC-in-the-Head signatures. We propose a new candidate post-quantum signature scheme from the Multivariate...

We construct perfect zero-knowledge probabilistically checkable proofs (PZK-PCPs) for every language in #P. This is the first construction of a PZK-PCP for any language outside BPP. Furthermore, unlike previous constructions of (statistical) zero-knowledge PCPs, our construction simultaneously achieves non-adaptivity and zero knowledge against arbitrary (adaptive) polynomial-time malicious verifiers. Our construction consists of a novel masked sumcheck PCP, which uses the...

An Oblivious Pseudo-Random Function (OPRF) is a two-party protocol for jointly evaluating a Pseudo-Random Function (PRF), where a user has an input x and a server has an input k. At the end of the protocol, the user learns the evaluation of the PRF using key k at the value x, while the server learns nothing about the user's input or output. OPRFs are a prime tool for building secure authentication and key exchange from passwords, private set intersection, private information retrieval,...

Transport Layer Security ( TLS ) is foundational for safeguarding client-server communication. However, it does not extend integrity guarantees to third-party verification of data authenticity. If a client wants to present data obtained from a server, it cannot convince any other party that the data has not been tampered with. TLS oracles ensure data authenticity beyond the client-server TLS connection, such that clients can obtain data from a server and ensure provenance to any third...

Proofs of Liabilities (PoL) allow an untrusted prover to commit to its liabilities towards a set of users and then prove independent users' amounts or the total sum of liabilities, upon queries by users or third-party auditors. This application setting is highly dynamic. User liabilities may increase/decrease arbitrarily and the prover needs to update proofs in epoch increments (e.g., once a day for a crypto-asset exchange platform). However, prior works mostly focus on the static case and...

In this paper, we explore a novel Zero-knowledge Virtual Machine (zkVM) framework leveraging succinct, non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for verifiable computation over any code. Our approach divides program execution proof into two stages. In the first stage, the process breaks down program execution into segments, identifying and grouping identical sections. These segments are then proved through data-parallel circuits that allow for varying amounts of duplication. In the subsequent...

EdDSA, standardized by both IRTF and NIST, is a variant of the well-known Schnorr signature scheme based on Edwards curves, benefitting from stateless and deterministic derivation of nonces (i.e., it does not require a reliable source of randomness or state continuity). Recently, NIST called for multi-party threshold EdDSA signatures in one mode of verifying such nonce derivation via zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. However, it is challenging to translate the stateless and deterministic benefits...

In this work, we focus on Single-Input Functionality (SIF), which can be viewed as a special case of MPC. In a SIF, only one distinguished party called the dealer holds a private input. SIF allows the dealer to perform a computation task with other parties without revealing any additional information about the private input. SIF has diverse applications, including multiple-verifier zero-knowledge, and verifiable relation sharing. As our main contribution, we propose the first 1-round SIF...

We present a novel technique within the MPC-in-the-Head framework, aiming to design efficient zero-knowledge protocols and digital signature schemes. The technique allows for the simultaneous use of additive and multiplicative sharings of secret information, enabling efficient proofs of linear and multiplicative relations. The applications of our technique are manifold. It is first applied to construct zero-knowledge arguments of knowledge for Double Discrete Logarithms (DDLP). The...

Zero-knowledge circuits are frequently required to prove gadgets that are not optimised for the constraint system in question. A particularly daunting task is to embed foreign arithmetic such as Boolean operations, field arithmetic, or public-key cryptography. We construct techniques for offloading foreign arithmetic from a zero-knowledge circuit including: (i) equality of discrete logarithms across different groups; (ii) scalar multiplication without requiring elliptic curve...

Motivated by the need for a massively decentralized network concurrently servicing many clients, we present novel low-overhead UC-secure, publicly verifiable, threshold ECDSA protocols with identifiable abort. For the first time, we show how to reduce the message complexity from O(n^2) to O(n) and the computational complexity from O(n) to practically O(1) (per party, where n is the number of parties). We require only a broadcast channel for communication. Therefore, we natively support...

A zero-knowledge proof enables a prover to convince a verifier that $x \in S$, without revealing anything beyond this fact. By running a zero-knowledge proof $k$ times, it is possible to prove (still in zero-knowledge) that $k$ separate instances $x_1,\dots,x_k$ are all in $S$. However, this increases the communication by a factor of $k$. Can one do better? In other words, is (non-trivial) zero-knowledge batch verification for $S$ possible? Recent works by Kaslasi et al. (TCC 2020,...

In this work, we introduce a family of asymmetric cryptographic functions based on dynamic number theoretic transformations with multiple rounds of modular arithmetic to enhance diffusion and difficulty of inversion. This function acts as a basic cryptographic building block for a novel communication-efficient zero-knowledge crypto-system. The system as defined exhibits partial homomorphism and behaves as an additive positive accumulator. By using a novel technique to constructively embed...

Pseudorandom Correlation Functions (PCFs) allow two parties, given correlated evaluation keys, to locally generate arbitrarily many pseudorandom correlated strings, e.g. Oblivious Transfer (OT) correlations, which can then be used by the two parties to jointly run secure computation protocols. In this work, we provide a novel and simple approach for constructing PCFs for OT correlation, by relying on constrained pseudorandom functions for a class of constraints containing a weak...

Matrix multiplication is a common operation in applications like machine learning and data analytics. To demonstrate the correctness of such an operation in a privacy-preserving manner, we propose zkMatrix, a zero-knowledge proof for the multiplication of committed matrices. Among the succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge protocols that have an $O(\log n)$ transcript size and $O(\log n)$ verifier time, zkMatrix stands out as the first to achieve $O(n^2)$ prover time and $O(n^2)$ RAM usage...

The notion of collaborative zk-SNARK is introduced by Ozdemir and Boneh (USENIX 2022), which allows multiple parties to jointly create a zk-SNARK proof over distributed secrets (also known as the witness). This approach ensures the privacy of the witness, as no corrupted servers involved in the proof generation can learn anything about the honest servers' witness. Later, Garg et al. continued the study, focusing on how to achieve faster proof generation (USENIX 2023). However, their...

The transition to post-quantum cryptography has been an enormous challenge and effort for cryptographers over the last decade, with impressive results such as the future NIST standards. However, the latter has so far only considered central cryptographic mechanisms (signatures or KEM) and not more advanced ones, e.g., targeting privacy-preserving applications. Of particular interest is the family of solutions called blind signatures, group signatures and anonymous credentials, for which...

The use of zero-knowledge Succinct Non-Interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARK) and similar types of proofs has become increasingly popular as a solution for improving scalability, privacy, and interoperability of blockchain systems. However, even with the most advanced proving systems, verifying a single SNARK proof can require a significant amount of computational resources making it expensive to be performed on-chain. This becomes a noticeable bottleneck in scaling SNARK-based...

We propose protocols in the Compressed Sigma Protocol framework that achieve a succinct verifier. Towards this, we construct a new inner product argument and cast it in the Compressed Sigma Protocol (CSP) framework as a protocol for opening a committed linear form, achieving logarithmic verification. We then use our succinct-verifier CSP to construct a zero-knowledge argument for circuit satisfiability (under the discrete logarithm assumption in bilinear groups) in the updatable...

Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), a cryptographic tool known for decades, have gained significant attention in recent years due to advancements that have made them practically applicable in real-world scenarios. ZKPs can provide unique attributes, such as succinctness, non-interactivity, and the ability to prove knowledge without revealing the information itself, making them an attractive solution for a range of applications. This paper aims to critically analyze the applicability of ZKPs in...

ZK-SNARKs, a fundamental component of privacy-oriented payment systems, identity protocols, or anonymous voting systems, are advanced cryptographic protocols for verifiable computation: modern SNARKs allow to encode the invariants of a program, expressed as an arithmetic circuit, in an appropriate constraint language from which short, zero-knowledge proofs for correct computations can be constructed. One of the most important computations that is run through SNARK systems is the...

Attribute-Based Signature (ABS), introduced by Maji et al. (CT-RSA'11), is an advanced privacy-preserving signature primitive that has gained a lot of attention. Research on ABS can be categorized into three main themes: expanding the expressiveness of signing policies, enabling new functionalities, and providing more diversity in terms of computational assumptions. We contribute to the development of ABS in all three dimensions, by providing a fully dynamic ABS scheme for arbitrary...

The Fiat-Shamir transform is a classical technique for turning any zero-knowledge $\Sigma$-protocol into a signature scheme. In essence, the idea underlying this transform is that deriving the challenge from the digest of the commitment suppresses simulatability and hence provides non-interactive proofs of interaction. It follows from that observation that if one wishes to preserve deniability the challenge size (per round) must be kept low. For instance in the original Fiat-Shamir...

Anonymous Zether, proposed by Bunz et al. (FC, 2020) and subsequently improved by Diamond (IEEE S&P, 2021) is an account-based confidential payment mechanism that works by using a smart contract to achieve privacy (i.e. identity of receivers to transactions and payloads are hidden). In this work, we look at simplifying the existing protocol while also achieving batching of transactions for multiple receivers, while ensuring consensus and forward secrecy. To the best of our knowledge, this...

Enhancing privacy on smart contract-enabled blockchains has garnered much attention in recent research. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) is one of the most popular approaches, however, they fail to provide full expressiveness and fine-grained privacy. To illustrate this, we underscore an underexplored type of Miner Extractable Value (MEV), called Residual Bids Extractable Value (RBEV). Residual bids highlight the vulnerability where unfulfilled bids inadvertently reveal traders’ unmet demands...

Isogeny-based cryptography is an instance of post-quantum cryptography whose fundamental problem consists of finding an isogeny between two (isogenous) elliptic curves $E$ and $E'$. This problem is closely related to that of computing the endomorphism ring of an elliptic curve. Therefore, many isogeny-based protocols require the endomorphism ring of at least one of the curves involved to be unknown. In this paper, we explore the design of isogeny based protocols in a scenario where one...

We consider how to design an anonymous data collection protocol that enforces compliance rules. Imagine that each client contributes multiple data items (e.g., votes, location crumbs, or secret shares of its input) to an anonymous network, which mixes all clients' data items so that the receiver cannot determine which data items belong to the same user. Now, each user must prove to an auditor that the set it contributed satisfies a compliance predicate, without identifying which items it...

In recent years, symmetric primitives that focus on arithmetic metrics over large finite fields, characterized as arithmetization-oriented (\texttt{AO}) ciphers, are widely used in advanced protocols such as secure multi-party computations (MPC), fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) and zero-knowledge proof systems (ZK). To ensure good performance in protocols, these \texttt{AO} ciphers are commonly designed with a small number of multiplications over finite fields and low multiplicative...

zkSNARK is a cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to prove to a resource constrained verifier, that it has indeed performed a specified non-deterministic computation correctly, while hiding private witnesses. In this work we focus on lattice based zkSNARK, as this serves two important design goals. Firstly, we get post-quantum zkSNARK schemes with $O(\log (\mbox{Circuit size}))$ sized proofs (without random oracles) and secondly, the easy verifier circuit allows further...

In their seminal work, Ishai, Kushilevitz, Ostrovsky, and Sahai (STOC`07) presented the MPC-in-the-Head paradigm, which shows how to design Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) from secure Multi-Party Computation (MPC) protocols. This paradigm has since then revolutionized and modularized the design of efficient ZKP systems, with far-reaching applications beyond ZKPs. However, to the best of our knowledge, all previous instantiations relied on fully-secure MPC protocols, and have not been able to...

After the pioneering results proposed by Bellare et al in ASIACRYPT 2016, there have been lots of efforts to construct zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge protocols (zk-SNARKs) that satisfy subversion zero knowledge (S-ZK) and standard soundness from the zk-SNARK in the common reference string (CRS) model. The various constructions could be regarded secure in the bare public key (BPK) model because of the equivalence between S-ZK in the CRS model, and uniform...

We prove a tight parallel repetition theorem for $3$-message computationally-secure quantum interactive protocols between an efficient challenger and an efficient adversary. We also prove under plausible assumptions that the security of $4$-message computationally secure protocols does not generally decrease under parallel repetition. These mirror the classical results of Bellare, Impagliazzo, and Naor [BIN97]. Finally, we prove that all quantum argument systems can be generically compiled...

Existing protocols for proving the correct execution of a RAM program in zero-knowledge are plagued by a processor expressiveness tradeoff: supporting fewer instructions results in smaller processor circuits (which improves performance), but may result in more program execution steps because non-supported instruction must be emulated over multiple processor steps (diminishing performance). We present Dora, a very simple and concretely efficient zero-knowledge protocol for RAM programs...

This paper presents MQ on my Mind (MQOM), a digital signature scheme based on the difficulty of solving multivariate systems of quadratic equations (MQ problem). MQOM has been submitted to the NIST call for additional post-quantum signature schemes. MQOM relies on the MPC-in-the-Head (MPCitH) paradigm to build a zero-knowledge proof of knowledge (ZK-PoK) for MQ which is then turned into a signature scheme through the Fiat-Shamir heuristic. The underlying MQ problem is non-structured in the...

In STOC 2019 Canetti et al. showed how to soundly instantiate the Fiat-Shamir transform assuming that prover and verifier have access to the key of a 𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑖𝑛𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑐𝑡𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 ℎ𝑎𝑠ℎ 𝑓𝑢𝑛𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑒𝑓𝑓𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑎𝑏𝑙𝑒 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠. The transform requires the starting protocol to be a special 3-round public-coin scheme that Canetti et al. call 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑑𝑜𝑜𝑟 𝑠𝑖𝑔𝑚𝑎-𝑝𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑜𝑐𝑜𝑙. One downside of the Canetti et al. approach is that the key of the hash function can be used only once (or a pre-determined bounded...

$\Sigma$-protocols are a widely utilized, relatively simple and well understood type of zero-knowledge proofs. However, the well known Schnorr $\Sigma$-protocol for proving knowledge of discrete logarithm in a cyclic group of known prime order, and similar protocols working over this type of groups, are hard to generalize to dealing with other groups. In particular with hidden order groups, due to the inability of the knowledge extractor to invert elements modulo the order. In this paper,...

Isogeny computations in CSIDH (Asiacrypt 2018) are described using a commutative group G acting on the set of supersingular elliptic curves. The commutativity property gives CSIDH enough flexibility to allow the creation of many cryptographic primitives and protocols. Nevertheless, these operations are limited and more complex applications have not yet been proposed. When calling the composition of two group elements of G addition, our goal in this work is to explore exponentiation,...