Usually, a proof of a theorem contains more knowledge than the mere fact that the theorem is true. For instance, to prove that a graph is Hamiltonian it suffices to exhibit a Hamiltonian tour in it; however, this seems to contain more knowledge than the single bit Hamiltonian/non-Hamiltonian.In this paper a computational complexity theory of the “knowledge” contained in a proof is developed. Zero-knowledge proofs are defined as those proofs that convey no additional knowledge other than the correctness of the proposition in question. Examples of zero-knowledge proof systems are given for the languages of quadratic residuosity and 'quadratic nonresiduosity. These are the first examples of zero-knowledge proofs for languages not known to be efficiently recognizable.

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The knowledge complexity of interactive proof-systems

We present two fully secure functional encryption schemes: a fully secure attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme and a fully secure (attribute-hiding) predicate encryption (PE) scheme for inner-product predicates. In both cases, previous constructions were only proven to be selectively secure. Both results use novel strategies to adapt the dual system encryption methodology introduced by Waters. We construct our ABE scheme in composite order bilinear groups, and prove its security from three static assumptions. Our ABE scheme supports arbitrary monotone access formulas. Our predicate encryption scheme is constructed via a new approach on bilinear pairings using the notion of dual pairing vector spaces proposed by Okamoto and Takashima.

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Fully secure functional encryption: attribute-based encryption and (hierarchical) inner product encryption

Bit coin is the first digital currency to see widespread adoption. While payments are conducted between pseudonyms, Bit coin cannot offer strong privacy guarantees: payment transactions are recorded in a public decentralized ledger, from which much information can be deduced. Zero coin (Miers et al., IEEE SaP 2013) tackles some of these privacy issues by unlinking transactions from the payment's origin. Yet, it still reveals payments' destinations and amounts, and is limited in functionality. In this paper, we construct a full-fledged ledger-based digital currency with strong privacy guarantees. Our results leverage recent advances in zero-knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs). First, we formulate and construct decentralized anonymous payment schemes (DAP schemes). A DAP scheme enables users to directly pay each other privately: the corresponding transaction hides the payment's origin, destination, and transferred amount. We provide formal definitions and proofs of the construction's security. Second, we build Zero cash, a practical instantiation of our DAP scheme construction. In Zero cash, transactions are less than 1 kB and take under 6 ms to verify - orders of magnitude more efficient than the less-anonymous Zero coin and competitive with plain Bit coin.

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Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin

We present a somewhat homomorphic encryption scheme that is both very simple to describe and analyze, and whose security (quantumly) reduces to the worst-case hardness of problems on ideal lattices. We then transform it into a fully homomorphic encryption scheme using standard "squashing" and "bootstrapping" techniques introduced by Gentry (STOC 2009).

One of the obstacles in going from "somewhat" to full homomorphism is the requirement that the somewhat homomorphic scheme be circular secure, namely, the scheme can be used to securely encrypt its own secret key. For all known somewhat homomorphic encryption schemes, this requirement was not known to be achievable under any cryptographic assumption, and had to be explicitly assumed. We take a step forward towards removing this additional assumption by proving that our scheme is in fact secure when encrypting polynomial functions of the secret key.

Our scheme is based on the ring learning with errors (RLWE) assumption that was recently introduced by Lyubashevsky, Peikert and Regev (Eurocrypt 2010). The RLWE assumption is reducible to worstcase problems on ideal lattices, and allows us to completely abstract out the lattice interpretation, resulting in an extremely simple scheme. For example, our secret key is s, and our public key is (a, b = as+2e), where s, a, e are all degree (n - 1) integer polynomials whose coefficients are independently drawn from easy to sample distributions.

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Fully homomorphic encryption from ring-LWE and security for key dependent messages

In this work, we study indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption for general circuits: Indistinguishability obfuscation requires that given any two equivalent circuits C0 and C1 of similar size, the obfuscations of C0 and C1 should be computationally indistinguishable. In functional encryption, cipher texts encrypt inputs x and keys are issued for circuits C. Using the key SKC to decrypt a cipher text CTx = Enc(x), yields the value C(x) but does not reveal anything else about x. Furthermore, no collusion of secret key holders should be able to learn anything more than the union of what they can each learn individually. We give constructions for indistinguishability obfuscation and functional encryption that supports all polynomial-size circuits. We accomplish this goal in three steps: - (1) We describe a candidate construction for indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 circuits. The security of this construction is based on a new algebraic hardness assumption. The candidate and assumption use a simplified variant of multilinear maps, which we call Multilinear Jigsaw Puzzles. (2) We show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for NC1 together with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (with decryption in NC1) to achieve indistinguishability obfuscation for all circuits. (3) Finally, we show how to use indistinguishability obfuscation for circuits, public-key encryption, and non-interactive zero knowledge to achieve functional encryption for all circuits. The functional encryption scheme we construct also enjoys succinct cipher texts, which enables several other applications.

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Candidate Indistinguishability Obfuscation and Functional Encryption for all Circuits

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and non-interactive witnessindistinguishable proofs have played a significant role in the theory of cryptography. However, lack of efficiency has prevented them from being used in practice. One of the roots of this inefficiency is that non-interactive zeroknowledge proofs have been constructed for general NP-complete languages such as Circuit Satisfiability, causing an expensive blowup in the size of the statement when reducing it to a circuit. The contribution of this paper is a general methodology for constructing very simple and efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs and non-interactive witness-indistinguishable proofs that work directly for groups with a bilinear map, without needing a reduction to Circuit Satisfiability.

Groups with bilinear maps have enjoyed tremendous success in the field of cryptography in recent years and have been used to construct a plethora of protocols. This paper provides non-interactive witness-indistinguishable proofs and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that can be used in connection with these protocols. Our goal is to spread the use of non-interactive cryptographic proofs from mainly theoretical purposes to the large class of practical cryptographic protocols based on bilinear groups.

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Efficient non-interactive proof systems for bilinear groups

Non-interactive arguments enable a prover to convince a verifier that a statement is true. Recently there has been a lot of progress both in theory and practice on constructing highly efficient non-interactive arguments with small size and low verification complexity, so-called succinct non-interactive arguments SNARGs and succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge SNARKs.

Many constructions of SNARGs rely on pairing-based cryptography. In these constructions a proof consists of a number of group elements and the verification consists of checking a number of pairing product equations. The question we address in this article is how efficient pairing-based SNARGs can be.

Our first contribution is a pairing-based preprocessing SNARK for arithmetic circuit satisfiability, which is an NP-complete language. In our SNARK we work with asymmetric pairings for higher efficiency, a proof is only 3 group elements, and verification consists of checking a single pairing product equations using 3 pairings ini¾?total. Our SNARK is zero-knowledge and does not reveal anything about the witness the prover uses to make the proof.

As our second contribution we answer an open question of Bitansky, Chiesa, Ishai, Ostrovsky and Paneth TCC 2013 by showing that linear interactive proofs cannot have a linear decision procedure. It follows from this that SNARGs where the prover and verifier use generic asymmetric bilinear group operations cannot consist of a single group element. This gives the first lower bound for pairing-based SNARGs. It remains an intriguing open problem whether this lower bound can be extended to rule out 2 group element SNARGs, which would prove optimality of our 3 element construction.

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On the Size of Pairing-Based Non-interactive Arguments

We construct non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments for circuit satisfiability with perfect completeness, perfect zero-knowledge and computational soundness. The non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments have sub-linear size and very efficient public verification. The size of the non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments can even be reduced to a constant number of group elements if we allow the common reference string to be large. Our constructions rely on groups with pairings and security is based on two new cryptographic assumptions; we do not use the Fiat-Shamir heuristic or random oracles.

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Short Pairing-Based Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs play an essential role in many cryptographic protocols. We suggest several NIZK proof systems based on prime order groups with a bilinear map. We obtain linear size proofs for relations among group elements without going through an expensive reduction to an NP-complete language such as Circuit Satisfiability. Security of all our constructions is based on the decisional linear assumption.

The NIZK proof system is quite general and has many applications such as digital signatures, verifiable encryption and group signatures. We focus on the latter and get the first group signature scheme satisfying the strong security definition of Bellare, Shi and Zhang [7] in the standard model without random oracles where each group signature consists only of a constant number of group elements.

We also suggest a simulation-sound NIZK proof of knowledge, which is much more efficient than previous constructions in the literature.

Caveat: The constants are large, and therefore our schemes are not practical. Nonetheless, we find it very interesting for the first time to have NIZK proofs and group signatures that except for a constant factor are optimal without using the random oracle model to argue security.

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Simulation-sound NIZK proofs for a practical language and constant size group signatures

A modular approach for cryptographic protocols leads to a simple design but often inefficient constructions. On the other hand, ad hoc constructions may yield efficient protocols at the cost of losing conceptual simplicity. We suggest structure-preserving commitments and signatures to overcome this dilemma and provide a way to construct modular protocols with reasonable efficiency, while retaining conceptual simplicity.

We focus on schemes in bilinear groups that preserve parts of the group structure, which makes it easy to combine them with other primitives such as non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for bilinear groups.

We say that a signature scheme is structure-preserving if its verification keys, signatures, and messages are elements in a bilinear group, and the verification equation is a conjunction of pairing-product equations. If moreover the verification keys lie in the message space, we call them automorphic. We present several efficient instantiations of automorphic and structure-preserving signatures, enjoying various other additional properties, such as simulatability. Among many applications, we give three examples: adaptively secure round-optimal blind signature schemes, a group signature scheme with efficient concurrent join, and an efficient instantiation of anonymous proxy signatures.

A further contribution is homomorphic trapdoor commitments to group elements which are also length reducing. In contrast, the messages of previous homomorphic trapdoor commitment schemes are exponents.

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Jens Groth

Papers

Efficient non-interactive proof systems for bilinear groups

On the Size of Pairing-Based Non-interactive Arguments

Short Pairing-Based Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments

Simulation-sound NIZK proofs for a practical language and constant size group signatures

Structure-preserving signatures and commitments to group elements