Abstract Fair exchange is a challenging problem for two mutually distrusting players. It is widely known that fair exchange is impossible without a trusted third party (TTP). However, relying on a single TTP can cause a single-point failure. An intuitive idea is to adopt multiple TTPs to distribute trust. This paper constructs a two-party optimistic fair exchange (OFE) protocol using decentralized ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE), achieving decentralized TTPs. This is achievable because decentralized CP-ABE ciphertext supports a nested access control policy. A nested access control policy fits perfectly in a fair exchange protocol which contains multiple roles (i.e. players and TTPs). Further, we apply non-interactive zero knowledge proofs to prove the well-formedness of ciphertexts, so as to enforce players to follow the protocol specification honestly. Consequently, we construct an OFE protocol in which each player’s operations are publicly verifiable without revealing secret information. Also, we obtain decentralized TTPs with optimism (i.e. the TTPs are involved only when arbitration is required), autonomy (i.e. the TTPs do not need to interact with each other), statelessness (i.e. the TTPs do not need to store data for the exchange protocol) and verifiability (i.e. the TTPs are publicly verifiable). Compared with previous work, our protocol assumes only a public communication channel and each party’s operations are publicly verifiable. Besides, it achieves a favorable $O(n)$ verification complexity in the normal case, where $n$ is the number of TTPs. Finally, we present a proof-of-concept implementation to demonstrate the feasibility.
In this paper, we propose a practically efficient model for securely computing rank-based statistics, e.g., median, percentiles and quartiles, over distributed datasets in the malicious setting without leaking individual data privacy. Based on the binary search technique of Aggarwal et al. (EUROCRYPT \textquotesingle 04), we respectively present an interactive protocol and a non-interactive protocol, involving at most $\log ||R||$ rounds, where $||R||$ is the range size of the dataset elements. Besides, we introduce a series of optimisation techniques to reduce the round complexity. Our computing model is modular and can be instantiated with either homomorphic encryption or secret-sharing schemes. Compared to the state-of-the-art solutions, it provides stronger security and privacy while maintaining high efficiency and accuracy. Unlike differential-privacy-based solutions, it does not suffer a trade-off between accuracy and privacy. On the other hand, it only involves $O(N \log ||R||)$ time complexity, which is far more efficient than those bitwise-comparison-based solutions with $O(N^2\log ||R||)$ time complexity, where $N$ is the dataset size. Finally, we provide a UC-secure instantiation with the threshold Paillier cryptosystem and $Σ$-protocol zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge.
Abstract Decomposition puzzles are pencil-and-paper logic puzzles that involve partitioning a rectangular grid into several regions to satisfy certain rules. In this paper, we construct a generic card-based protocol called printing protocol , which can be used to physically verify solutions of decompositon puzzles. We apply the printing protocol to develop card-based zero-knowledge proof protocols for two such puzzles: Five Cells and Meadows. These protocols allow a prover to physically show that he/she knows solutions of the puzzles without revealing them.
Graham Cormode, Marcel Dall’Agnol, Tom Gur, Christopher W. Hickey
Streaming interactive proofs (SIPs) enable a space-bounded algorithm with one-pass access to a massive stream of data to verify a computation that requires large space, by communicating with a powerful but untrusted prover. This work initiates the study of zero-knowledge proofs for data streams. We define the notion of zero-knowledge in the streaming setting and construct zero-knowledge SIPs for the two main algorithmic building blocks in the streaming interactive proofs literature: the sumcheck and polynomial evaluation protocols. To the best of our knowledge all known streaming interactive proofs are based on either of these tools, and indeed, this allows us to obtain zero-knowledge SIPs for central streaming problems such as index, point and range queries, median, frequency moments, and inner product. Our protocols are efficient in terms of time and space, as well as communication: the verifier algorithm's space complexity is $\mathrm{polylog}(n)$ and, after a non-interactive setup that uses a random string of near-linear length, the remaining parameters are $n^{o(1)}$. En route, we develop an algorithmic toolkit for designing zero-knowledge data stream protocols, consisting of an algebraic streaming commitment protocol and a temporal commitment protocol.Our analyses rely on delicate algebraic and information-theoretic arguments and reductions from average-case communication complexity.
In recent years, with the development of information security, secure multi-party computation has gradually become a research hotspot in the field of privacy protection. The intersection and union computation of graphs is an important branch of secure computing geometry. At present, the intersection and union of graphs are almost designed under the semi-honest model, and few solutions are proposed under the malicious model. However, the solution under the malicious model is more secure and has important theoretical and practical significance. In this paper, the possible malicious behaviors of computing the intersection and union of graphs are analyzed. Using the Lifted-ElGamal threshold cryptosystem and zero-knowledge proof method, the secure multi-party computation algorithm of graphs’ intersection and union under the malicious model is designed. The real/ideal model paradigm is used to prove the security of the algorithm, the efficiency of the algorithm is analyzed in detail, and the feasibility is verified through experiment.
We construct the first actively-secure threshold version of the cryptosystem based on class groups from the so-called CL framework (Castagnos and Laguillaumie, 2015). We show how to use our threshold scheme to achieve general universally composable (UC) secure multiparty computation (MPC) with only transparent set-up, i.e., with no secret trapdoors involved. On the way to our goal, we design new zero-knowledge (ZK) protocols with constant communication complexity for proving multiplicative relations between encrypted values. This allows us to use the ZK proofs to achieve MPC with active security with only a constant factor overhead. Finally, we adapt our protocol for the so called “You-Only-Speak-Once” (YOSO) setting, which is a very promising recent approach for performing MPC over a blockchain. This is possible because our key generation protocol is simpler and requires significantly less interaction compared to previous approaches: in particular, our new key generation protocol allows the adversary to bias the public key, but we show that this has no impact on the security of the resulting cryptosystem.
We provide a generic construction to turn any classical Zero-Knowledge (ZK) protocol into a composable (quantum) oblivious transfer (OT) protocol, mostly lifting the round-complexity properties and security guarantees (plain-model/statistical security/unstructured functions...) of the ZK protocol to the resulting OT protocol. Such a construction is unlikely to exist classically as Cryptomania is believed to be different from Minicrypt. In particular, by instantiating our construction using Non-Interactive ZK (NIZK), we provide the first round-optimal (2-message) quantum OT protocol secure in the random oracle model, and round-optimal extensions to string and k-out-of-n OT. At the heart of our construction lies a new method that allows us to prove properties on a received quantum state without revealing additional information on it, even in a non-interactive way, without public-key primitives, and/or with statistical guarantees when using an appropriate classical ZK protocol. We can notably prove that a state has been partially measured (with arbitrary constraints on the set of measured qubits), without revealing any additional information on this set. This notion can be seen as an analog of ZK to quantum states, and we expect it to be of independent interest as it extends complexity theory to quantum languages, as illustrated by the two new complexity classes we introduce, ZKstatesQIP and ZKstatesQMA.
Ball sort puzzle is a popular logic puzzle consisting of several bins containing balls of multiple colors. Each bin works like a stack; a ball has to follow the last-in first-out order. The player has to sort the balls by color such that each bin contains only balls of a single color. In this paper, we propose a physical zero-knowledge proof protocol for the ball sort puzzle using a deck of playing cards, which enables a prover to physically show that he/she knows a solution with $t$ moves of the ball sort puzzle without revealing it. Our protocol is the first zero-knowledge proof protocol for an interactive puzzle involving moving objects.
Marta Bellés-Muñoz, Miguel Isabel, José L. Muñoz, Albert Rubio · 5 authors
A zero-knowledge (ZK) proof guarantees that the result of a computation is correct while keeping part of the computation details private. Some ZK proofs are tiny and can be verified in short time, which makes them one of the most promising technologies for solving two key aspects: the challenge of enabling privacy to public and transparent distributed ledgers and enhancing their scalability limitations. Most practical ZK systems require the computation to be expressed as an arithmetic circuit that is encoded as a set of equations called rank-1 constraint system (R1CS). In this paper, we presentCircom, a programming language and a compiler for designing arithmetic circuits that are compiled to R1CS. More precisely, withCircom, programmers can design arithmetic circuits at a constraint level, and the compiler outputs a file with the R1CS description, and WebAssembly andC++programs to efficiently compute all values of the circuit. We also provide an open-source library calledcircomlibwith multiple circuit templates.Circomcan be complemented withsnarkjs, a library for generating and validating ZK proofs from R1CS. Altogether, our software tools abstract the complexity of ZK proving mechanisms and provide a unique and friendly interface to model low-level descriptions of arithmetic circuits.
Xin Liu, Xiaomeng Liu, Ruiling Zhang, Dan Luo · 6 authors
Manhattan distance is mainly used to calculate the total absolute wheelbase of two points in the standard coordinate system. The secure computation of Manhattan distance is a new geometric problem of secure multi-party computation. At present, the existing research secure computing protocols for Manhattan distance cannot resist the attack of malicious participants. In the real scene, the existence of malicious participants makes it necessary to study a solution that can resist malicious attacks. This paper first analyzes malicious attacks of the semi-honest model protocol of computing Manhattan distance and then designs an advanced protocol under the malicious model by using the Goldwasser–Micali encryption system and Paillier encryption algorithm, and utilizing some cryptographic tools such as the cut-choose method and zero-knowledge proof. Finally, the real/ideal model paradigm method is used to prove the security of the malicious model protocol. Compared with existing protocols, the experimental simulation shows that the proposed protocol can resist malicious participant attacks while maintaining high efficiency. It has practical value.
We present a forward-secure public-key encryption (PKE) scheme without key update, i.e. both public and private keys are immutable. In contrast, prior forward-secure PKE schemes achieve forward security by constantly updating the secret keys. Our scheme is based on witness encryption by Garg et al. (STOC 2013) and a proof-of-stake blockchain with the distinguishable forking property introduced by Goyal et al. (TCC 2017), and ensures a ciphertext cannot be decrypted more than once, thereby rendering a compromised secret key useless with respect to decryption of past ciphertext the legitimate user has already decrypted. In this work, we formalize the notion of blockchain-based forward-secure PKE, show the feasibility of constructing a forward-secure PKE scheme without key update, and discuss interesting properties of our scheme such as post-compromise security.
Carsten Baum, Robin Jadoul, Emmanuela Orsini, Peter Schöll · 5 authors
Zero-Knowledge protocols have increasingly become both popular and practical in recent years due to their applicability in many areas such as blockchain systems. Unfortunately, public verifiability and small proof sizes of zero-knowledge protocols currently come at the price of strong assumptions, large prover time, or both, when considering statements with millions of gates. In this regime, the most prover-efficient protocols are in the designated verifier setting, where proofs are only valid to a single party that must keep a secret state.
The assignment problem is an essential problem in many application fields and frequently used to optimize resource usage. The problem is well understood and various efficient algorithms exist to solve the problem. However, it was unclear what practical performance could be achieved for privacy-preserving implementations based on multiparty computation (MPC) by leveraging more efficient solution strategies than MPC-based generic simplex solvers for linear programs. We solve this question by implementing and comparing different optimized MPC algorithms to solve the assignment problem for reasonable problem sizes. Our empirical approach revealed various insights to MPC-based optimization and we measured a significant (50x) speed-up compared to the known simplex-based approach. Furthermore, we also study the overhead introduced by making the results publicly verifiable by means of non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs. By leveraging modern proof systems we also achieve significant speed-up for proof and verification times compared to the previously proposed approaches as well as compact proof sizes. Our research was motivated by a real-world use case, based on detailed discussions with representative stakeholders from the aviation industry.
Cloud computing can provide users with sufficient computing resources, storage, and bandwidth to meet their needs. Data security and privacy protection are among the new threats faced by users. Searchable encryption is the combination of search technology and encryption technology. Searchable encryption can upload the user’s data to the cloud server after special encryption, and can realize the function of retrieving according to keywords. Comparatively to symmetric searchable encryption (SSE), public key searchable encryption (PEKS) simplifies key management greatly. However, most existing public key authenticated encryption with keyword search (PAEKS) schemes are based bilinear pairing, making them computationally expensive. Apart from this, complex retrieval requirements and the integrity of the results had not been considered. To address these problems, we propose a blockchain-based PAEKS schemes supporting multi-keyword queries and integrity verification. In addition, we provide security proofs for the PAEKS scheme under the decisional oracle Diffie-Hellman (DODH) assumption. This scheme a scheme that requires less storage and computational power than other schemes of the same kind.