Batching, Aggregation, and Zero-Knowledge Proofs in Bilinear Accumulators

Abstract

An accumulator is a cryptographic primitive that allows a prover to succinctly commit to a set of values while being able to provide proofs of (non-)membership. A batch proof is an accumulator proof that can be used to prove (non-)membership of multiple values simultaneously. In this work, we present a zero-knowledge batch proof with constant proof size and constant verification in the Bilinear Pairings (BP) setting. Our scheme is 16x to 42x faster than state-of-the-art SNARK-based zero-knowledge batch proofs in the RSA setting. Additionally, we propose protocols that allow a prover to aggregate multiple individual non-membership proofs, in the BP setting, into a single batch proof of constant size. Our construction for aggregation satisfies a strong soundness definition-one where the accumulator value can be chosen arbitrarily. We evaluate our techniques and systematically compare them with RSA-based alternatives. Our evaluation results showcase several scenarios for which BP accumulators are clearly preferable and can serve as a guideline when choosing between the two types of accumulators.