Efficient Adaptively Secure Zero-Knowledge from Garbled Circuits

Abstract

Zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols are undoubtedly among the central primitives in cryptography, lending their power to numerous applications such as secure computation, voting, auctions, and anonymous credentials to name a few. The study of efficient ZK protocols for non-algebraic statements has seen rapid progress in recent times, relying on secure computation techniques. The primary contribution of this work lies in constructing efficient UC-secure constant round ZK protocols from garbled circuits that are secure against adaptive corruptions, with communication linear in the size of the statement. We begin by showing that the practically efficient ZK protocol of Jawurek et al. (CCS 2013) is adaptively secure when the underlying oblivious transfer (OT) satisfies a mild adaptive security guarantee. We gain adaptive security with little to no overhead over the static case. A conditional verification technique is then used to obtain a three-round adaptively secure zero-knowledge argument in the non-programmable random oracle model (NPROM). Our three-round protocol yields a proof size that is shorter than the known UC-secure practically-efficient schemes in the short-CRS model with the right choice of security parameters. We draw motivation from state-of-the-art non-interactive secure computation protocols and leveraging specifics of ZK functionality show a two-round protocol that achieves static security. It is a proof, while most known efficient ZK protocols and our three round protocol are only arguments.