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NIZKs with Maliciously Chosen CRS: Subversion Advice-ZK and Accountable Soundness

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Security and Cryptography for Networks (SCN 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14973))

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Abstract

Trusted setup is commonly used for non-interactive proof and argument systems. However, there is no guarantee that the setup parameters in these systems are generated in a trustworthy manner. Building upon previous works, we conduct a systematic study of non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments in the common reference string model where the authority running the trusted setup might be corrupted. We explore both zero-knowledge and soundness properties in this setting.

  • We consider a new notion of NIZK called subversion advice-ZK NIZK that strengthens the notion of zero-knowledge with malicious authority security considered by Ananth, Asharov, Dahari and Goyal (EUROCRYPT’21), and present a construction of a subversion advice-ZK NIZK from the sub-exponential hardness of learning with errors.

  • We introduce a new notion that strengthens the traditional definition of soundness, called accountable soundness, and present generic compilers that lift any NIZK for interesting languages in NP to additionally achieve accountable soundness.

  • Finally, we combine our results for both subversion advice-ZK and accountable soundness to achieve a subversion advice-ZK NIZK that also satisfies accountable soundness. This results in the first NIZK construction that satisfies meaningful notions of both soundness and zero-knowledge even for maliciously chosen CRS.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We stress that this extractor interacts with the malicious authority online without being able to rewind it. This is because, in the real world, we cannot rewind such an authority.

  2. 2.

    By “sparse” we mean that \(L \subseteq \varSigma \) of some domain \(\varSigma \), and \(|L| / |\varSigma |\) is exponentially small in the security parameter.

  3. 3.

    In our construction, S can be set to be \(2^{\omega (\log \lambda )}\) assuming \(2^{\lambda ^{\epsilon }}\)-hardness of either a one-way permutation or a collision-resistant hash function.

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Acknowledgements

This work was done partially when Pratik Soni was visiting Carnegie Mellon University, where he was supported by a DARPA SIEVE grant, and an ACE center award from the Algorand Foundation. Gilad Asharov and Hadar Kaner were supported by Israel Science Foundation (grant No. 2439/20), JP Morgan Faculty Research Award, and European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie SklodowskaCurie grant agreement No. 891234. Prabhanjan Ananth is supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 2329938 and Grant No. 2341004.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, USA

    Prabhanjan Ananth

  2. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Gilad Asharov & Hadar Kaner

  3. NTT Research, Palo Alto, USA

    Vipul Goyal & Brent Waters

  4. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

    Vipul Goyal

  5. University of Utah, Salt Lake City, USA

    Pratik Soni

  6. University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

    Brent Waters

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  1. Prabhanjan Ananth
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  4. Hadar Kaner
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  5. Pratik Soni
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Correspondence to Pratik Soni .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi di Salerno, Fisciano, Italy

    Clemente Galdi

  2. Télécom Paris, Paris, France

    Duong Hieu Phan

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Ananth, P., Asharov, G., Goyal, V., Kaner, H., Soni, P., Waters, B. (2024). NIZKs with Maliciously Chosen CRS: Subversion Advice-ZK and Accountable Soundness. In: Galdi, C., Phan, D.H. (eds) Security and Cryptography for Networks. SCN 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14973. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-71070-4_1

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