Compact Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Small Hamming Weight

Abstract

We introduce a new technique that allows to give a zero-knowledge proof that a committed vector has Hamming weight bounded by a given constant. The proof has unconditional soundness and is very compact: It has size independent of the length of the committed string, and for large fields, it has size corresponding to a constant number of commitments. We show five applications of the technique that play on a common theme, namely that our proof allows us to get malicious security at small overhead compared to semi-honest security: (1) actively secure k-out-of-n OT from black-box use of 1-out-of-2 OT, (2) separable accountable ring signatures, (3) more efficient preprocessing for the TinyTable secure two-party computation protocol, (4) mixing with public verifiability, and (5) PIR with security against a malicious client.