Efficient Batch Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Low Degree Polynomials

The work of Bootle et al. (EUROCRYPT 2016) constructs an extremely efficient zero-knowledge argument for arithmetic circuit satisfiability in the discrete logarithm setting. However, the argument does not treat relations involving commitments, and furthermore, for simple polynomial relations, the complex machinery employed is unnecessary. In this work, we give a framework for expressing simple relations between commitments and field elements, and present a zero-knowledge argument which is considerably more efficient than Bootle et al. in the case where the polynomials in the relation have low degree. Our method also directly yields a batch protocol, which allows many copies of the same relation to be more efficiently proved and verified in a single argument. We instantiate our protocol with concrete polynomial relations to construct zero-knowledge arguments for membership proofs, polynomial evaluation proofs, and range proofs. Our work can be seen as a unified explanation of the underlying ideas of these protocols. In some of these instantiations we also achieve better efficiency than the state of the art

Cryptanalysis of Compact-LWE

As an invited speaker of the ACISP 2017 conference, Dongxi Liu recently introduced a new lattice-based encryption scheme (joint work with Li, Kim and Nepal) designed for lightweight IoT applications, and announced plans to submit it to the NIST postquantum competition. The new scheme is based on a variant of standard LWE called Compact-LWE, but is claimed to achieve high security levels in considerably smaller dimensions than usual lattice-based schemes. In fact, the proposed parameters, allegedly suitable for 138-bit security, involve the Compact-LWE assumption in dimension only 13. In this note, we show that this particularly aggressive choice of parameters fails to achieve the stated security level. More precisely, we show that ciphertexts in the new encryption scheme can be decrypted using the public key alone with >99.9% probability in a fraction of a second on a standard PC, which is not quite as fast as legitimate decryption, but not too far off

Lattice-Based Succinct Arguments for NP with Polylogarithmic-Time Verification

Succinct arguments that rely on the Merkle-tree paradigm introduced by Kilian (STOC 92) suffer from larger proof sizes in practice due to the use of generic cryptographic primitives. In contrast, succinct arguments with the smallest proof sizes in practice exploit homomorphic commitments. However these latter are quantum insecure, unlike succinct arguments based on the Merkle-tree paradigm. A recent line of works seeks to address this limitation, by constructing quantum-safe succinct arguments that exploit lattice-based commitments. The eventual goal is smaller proof sizes than those achieved via the Merkle-tree paradigm. Alas, known constructions lack succinct verification. In this paper, we construct the first interactive argument system for NP with succinct verification that, departing from the Merkle-tree paradigm, exploits the homomorphic properties of lattice-based commitments. For an arithmetic circuit with N gates, our construction achieves verification time polylog(N) based on the hardness of the Ring Short-Integer-Solution (RSIS) problem. The core technique in our construction is a delegation protocol built from commitment schemes based on leveled bilinear modules, a new notion that we deem of independent interest. We show that leveled bilinear modules can be realized from pre-quantum and from post-quantum cryptographic assumptions

Sumcheck Arguments and their Applications

We introduce a class of interactive protocols, which we call *sumcheck arguments*, that establishes a novel connection between the sumcheck protocol (Lund et al. JACM 1992) and folding techniques for Pedersen commitments (Bootle et al. EUROCRYPT 2016). We define a class of sumcheck-friendly commitment schemes over modules that captures many examples of interest, and show that the sumcheck protocol applied to a polynomial associated with the commitment scheme yields a succinct argument of knowledge for openings of the commitment. Building on this, we additionally obtain succinct arguments for the NP-complete language R1CS over certain rings. Sumcheck arguments enable us to recover as a special case numerous prior works in disparate cryptographic settings (discrete logarithms, pairings, groups of unknown order, lattices), providing one framework to understand them all. Further, we answer open questions raised in prior works, such as obtaining a lattice-based succinct argument from the SIS assumption for satisfiability problems over rings

More Efficient Amortization of Exact Zero-Knowledge Proofs for LWE

We propose a practical zero-knowledge proof system for proving knowledge of short solutions s, e to linear relations A s + e= u mod q which gives the most efficient solution for two naturally-occurring classes of problems. The first is when A is very ``tall\u27\u27, which corresponds to a large number of LWE instances that use the same secret s. In this case, we show that the proof size is independent of the height of the matrix (and thus the length of the error vector e) and rather only linearly depends on the length of s. The second case is when A is of the form A\u27 tensor I, which corresponds to proving many LWE instances (with different secrets) that use the same samples A\u27. The length of this second proof is square root in the length of s, which corresponds to square root of the length of all the secrets. Our constructions combine recent advances in ``purely\u27\u27 lattice-based zero-knowledge proofs with the Reed-Solomon proximity testing ideas present in some generic zero-knowledge proof systems -- with the main difference is that the latter are applied directly to the lattice instances without going through intermediate problems

DualDory: Logarithmic-Verifier Linkable Ring Signatures through Preprocessing

A linkable ring signature allows a user to sign anonymously on behalf of a group while ensuring that multiple signatures from the same user are detected. Applications such as privacy-preserving e-voting and e-cash can leverage linkable ring signatures to significantly improve privacy and anonymity guarantees. To scale to systems involving large numbers of users, short signatures with fast verification are a must. Concretely efficient ring signatures currently rely on a trusted authority maintaining a master secret, or follow an accumulator-based approach that requires a trusted setup. In this work, we construct the first linkable ring signature with both logarithmic signature size and verification that does not require any trusted mechanism. Our scheme, which relies on discrete-log type assumptions and bilinear maps, improves upon a recent concise ring signature called DualRing by integrating improved preprocessing arguments to reduce the verification time from linear to logarithmic in the size of the ring. Our ring signature allows signatures to be linked based on what message is signed, ranging from linking signatures on any message to only signatures on the same message. We provide benchmarks for our scheme and prove its security under standard assumptions. The proposed linkable ring signature is particularly relevant to use cases that require privacy-preserving enforcement of threshold policies in a fully decentralized context, and e-voting

Linear-Time Probabilistic Proofs with Sublinear Verification for Algebraic Automata Over Every Field

Interactive oracle proofs (IOPs) are a generalization of probabilistically checkable proofs that can be used to construct succinct arguments. Improvements in the efficiency of IOPs lead to improvements in the efficiency of succinct arguments. Key efficiency goals include achieving provers that run in linear time and verifiers that run in sublinear time, where the time complexity is with respect to the arithmetic complexity of proved computations over a finite field $\mathbb{F}$. We consider the problem of constructing IOPs for any given finite field $\mathbb{F}$ with a linear-time prover and polylogarithmic query complexity. Several previous works have achieved these efficiency requirements with $O(1)$ soundness error for NP-complete languages. However, constrained by the soundness error of the sumcheck protocol underlying these constructions, the IOPs achieve linear prover time only for instances in fields of size $\Omega(\log n)$. Recent work (Ron-Zewi and Rothblum, STOC 2022) overcomes this problem, but with linear verification time. We construct IOPs for the algebraic automata problem over any finite field $\mathbb{F}$ with a linear-time prover, polylogarithmic query complexity, and sublinear verification complexity. We additionally prove a similar result to Ron-Zewi and Rothblum for the NP-complete language R1CS using different techniques. The IOPs imply succinct arguments for (nondeterministic) arithmetic computations over any finite field with linear-time proving (given black-box access to a linear-time collision-resistant hash function). Inspired by recent constructions of reverse-multiplication-friendly embeddings, our IOP constructions embed problem instances over small fields into larger fields and adapt previous IOP constructions to the new instances. The IOP provers are modelled as random access machines and use precomputation techniques to achieve linear prover time. In this way, we avoid having to replace the sumcheck protocol

A Framework for Practical Anonymous Credentials from Lattices

We present a framework for building practical anonymous credential schemes based on the hardness of lattice problems. The running time of the prover and verifier is independent of the number of users and linear in the number of attributes. The scheme is also compact in practice, with the proofs being as small as a few dozen kilobytes for arbitrarily large (say up to $2^{128}$) users with each user having several attributes. The security of our scheme is based on a new family of lattice assumptions which roughly states that given short pre-images of random elements in some set $S$, it is hard to create a pre-image for a fresh element in such a set. We show that if the set admits efficient zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge of a commitment to a set element and its pre-image, then this yields practically-efficient privacy-preserving primitives such as blind signatures, anonymous credentials, and group signatures. We propose a candidate instantiation of a function from this family which allows for such proofs and thus yields practical lattice-based primitives

Generalized Fuzzy Password-Authenticated Key Exchange from Error Correcting Codes

Fuzzy Password-Authenticated Key Exchange (fuzzy PAKE) allows cryptographic keys to be generated from authentication data that is both fuzzy and of low entropy. The strong protection against offline attacks offered by fuzzy PAKE opens an interesting avenue towards secure biometric authentication, typo-tolerant password authentication, and automated IoT device pairing. Previous constructions of fuzzy PAKE are either based on Error Correcting Codes (ECC) or generic multi-party computation techniques such as Garbled Circuits. While ECC-based constructions are significantly more efficient, they rely on multiple special properties of error correcting codes such as maximum distance separability and smoothness. We contribute to the line of research on fuzzy PAKE in two ways. First, we identify a subtle but devastating gap in the security analysis of the currently most efficient fuzzy PAKE construction (Dupont et al., Eurocrypt 2018), allowing a man-in-the-middle attacker to test individual password characters. Second, we provide a new fuzzy PAKE scheme based on ECC and PAKE that provides a built-in protection against individual password character guesses and requires fewer, more standard properties of the underlying ECC. Additionally, our construction offers better error correction capabilities than previous ECC-based fuzzy PAKEs

Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More

We propose Bulletproofs, a new non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol with very short proofs and without a trusted setup; the proof size is only logarithmic in the witness size. Bulletproofs are especially well suited for efficient range proofs on committed values: they enable proving that a committed value is in a range using only $2\log_2(n)+9$ group and field elements, where $n$ is the bit length of the range. Proof generation and verification times are linear in $n$. Bulletproofs greatly improve on the linear (in $n$) sized range proofs in existing proposals for confidential transactions in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Moreover, Bulletproofs supports aggregation of range proofs, so that a party can prove that $m$ commitments lie in a given range by providing only an additive $O(\log(m))$ group elements over the length of a single proof. To aggregate proofs from multiple parties, we enable the parties to generate a single proof without revealing their inputs to each other via a simple multi-party computation (MPC) protocol for constructing Bulletproofs. This MPC protocol uses either a constant number of rounds and linear communication, or a logarithmic number of rounds and logarithmic communication. We show that verification time, while asymptotically linear, is very efficient in practice. Moreover, the verification of multiple Bulletproofs can be batched for further speed-up. Concretely, the marginal time to verify an aggregation of 16 range proofs is about the same as the time to verify 16 ECDSA signatures. Bulletproofs build on the techniques of Bootle et al. (EUROCRYPT 2016). Beyond range proofs, Bulletproofs provide short zero-knowledge proofs for general arithmetic circuits while only relying on the discrete logarithm assumption and without requiring a trusted setup. We discuss many applications that would benefit from Bulletproofs, primarily in the area of cryptocurrencies. The efficiency of Bulletproofs is particularly well suited for the distributed and trustless nature of blockchains