Lattice-based universal accumulator with nonmembership arguments

Abstract

Universal accumulator provides a way to accumulate a set of elements into one. For each element accumulated, it can provide a short membership (resp. nonmembership) witness to attest the fact that the element has been (resp. has not been) accumulated. When combined with a suitable zero-knowledge proof system, it can be used to construct many privacy-preserving applications. However, existing universal accumulators are usually based on non-standard assumptions, e.g., the Strong RSA assumption and the Strong Diffie-Hellman assumptions, and are not secure against quantum attacks. In this paper, we propose the first lattice-based universal accumulator from standard lattice-based assumptions. The starting point of our work is the lattice-based accumulator with Merkle-tree structure proposed by Libert et al. (Eurocrypt’16). We present a novel method to generate short witnesses for non-accumulated members in a Merkle-tree, and give the construction of universal accumulator. Besides, we also propose the first zero-knowledge arguments to prove the possession of the nonmembership witness of a non-accumulated value in the lattice-based setting via the abstract Stern’s protocol of Libert et al. (Asiacrypt’17). Moreover, our proposed universal accumulator can be used to construct many privacy-preserving cryptographic primitives, such as group signature and anonymous credential.