Non-black-box simulation from one-way functions and applications to resettable security

The simulation paradigm, introduced by Goldwasser, Micali, and Racko, is of fundamental importance to modern cryptography. In a breakthrough work from 2001, Barak [FOCS 2001, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, CA, 2001, pp. 106{115] introduced a novel non-blackbox simulation technique. This technique enabled the construction of new cryptographic primitives, such as resettably sound zero-knowledge arguments, that cannot be proven secure using just blackbox simulation techniques. The work of Barak and its follow-ups, however, all require stronger cryptographic hardness assumptions than the minimal assumption of one-way functions: the work of Barak requires the existence of collision-resistant hash functions, and a very recent result by Bitansky and Paneth [FOCS 2012, IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, 2012, pp. 223-232] instead requires the existence of an oblivious transfer protocol. In this work, we show how to perform non-black-box simulation assuming just the existence of one-way functions. In particular, we dem nstrate the existence of a constant-round resettably sound zero-knowledge argument based only on the existence of one-way functions. Using this technique, we determine necessary and su cient assumptions for several other notions of resettable security of zero-knowledge arguments.