Secure sampling of public parameters for succinct zero knowledge proofs

Eli Ben-Sasson, Alessandro Chiesa, Matthew Green, Eran Tromer, Madars Virza

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

102 Scopus citations

Abstract

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZKs) are a powerful cryptographic tool, with numerous potential applications. However, succinct NIZKs (e.g., zk-SNARK schemes) necessitate a trusted party to generate and publish some public parameters, to be used by all provers and verifiers. This party is trusted to correctly run a probabilistic algorithm (specified by the the proof system) that outputs the public parameters, and publish them, without leaking any other information (such as the internal randomness used by the algorithm), violating either requirement may allow malicious parties to produce convincing 'proofs' of false statements. This trust requirement poses a serious impediment to deploying NIZKs in many applications, because a party that is trusted by all users of the envisioned system may simply not exist. In this work, we show how public parameters for a class of NIZKs can be generated by a multi-party protocol, such that if at least one of the parties is honest, then the result is secure (in both aforementioned senses) and can be subsequently used for generating and verifying numerous proofs without any further trust. We design and implement such a protocol, tailored to efficiently support the state-of-the-art NIZK constructions with short and easy-to-verify proofs (Parno et al. IEEE S&P '13, Ben-Sasson et al. USENIX Sec '14, Danezis et al., ASIACRYPT '14). Applications of our system include generating public parameters for systems such as Zero cash (Ben-Sasson et al. IEEE S&P '13) and the scalable zero-knowledge proof system of (Ben-Sasson et al. CRYPTO '14).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2015
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages287-304
Number of pages18
ISBN (Electronic)9781467369497
DOIs
StatePublished - 17 Jul 2015
Event36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2015 - San Jose, United States
Duration: 18 May 201520 May 2015

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy
Volume2015-July
ISSN (Print)1081-6011

Conference

Conference36th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, SP 2015
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose
Period18/05/1520/05/15

Keywords

  • distributed key generation
  • succinct non-interactive arguments
  • zero knowledge

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