Efficient generic zero-knowledge proofs from commitments

Abstract

Even though zero-knowledge has existed for more than 30 years, few generic and efficient constructions for zero-knowledge exist. In this paper, we present a new kind of commitment scheme on which we can build a novel and efficient zero-knowledge protocol for circuit satisfiability. Our commitment scheme can be constructed in a black-box manner from any commitment scheme. We can prove knowledge of the AES-key which map a particular plaintext to a particular ciphertext in less than 300 milliseconds with a soundness-error of 2−40. The communication complexity of our protocol is less then 5 · k · |C| where k is the statistical security parameter and |C| is the circuit size.