Paper 2013/073

Zero-Knowledge Using Garbled Circuits: How To Prove Non-Algebraic Statements Efficiently

Marek Jawurek, Florian Kerschbaum, and Claudio Orlandi

Abstract

Zero-knowledge protocols are one of the fundamental concepts in modern cryptography and have countless applications. However, after more than 30 years from their introduction, there are only very few languages (essentially those with a group structure) for which we can construct zero-knowledge protocols that are efficient enough to be used in practice. In this paper we address the problem of how to construct efficient zero-knowledge protocols for generic languages and we propose a protocol based on Yao's garbled circuit technique. The motivation for our work is that in many cryptographic applications it is useful to be able to prove efficiently statements of the form e.g., ``I know x s.t. y=SHA-256(x)'' for a common input y (or other ``unstructured'' languages), but no efficient protocols for this task are currently known. It is clear that zero-knowledge is a subset of secure two-party computation (i.e., any protocol for generic secure computation can be used to do zero-knowledge). The main contribution of this paper is to construct an efficient protocol for the special case of secure two-party computation where only one party has input (like in the zero-knowledge case). The protocol achieves active security and is essentially only twice as slow as Yao's garbled circuit protocol. This is a great improvement with respect to the cut-n-choose technique to make Yao's protocol actively secure, where the complexity grows linearly with the security parameter.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. This is an extended version of a paper appeared at CCS 2013
DOI
10.1145/2508859.2516662
Keywords
Zero-knowledgeGarbled CircuitsSecure Two-Party ComputationActive Security
Contact author(s)
orlandi @ cs au dk
History
2013-08-26: last of 2 revisions
2013-02-20: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2013/073
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2013/073,
      author = {Marek Jawurek and Florian Kerschbaum and Claudio Orlandi},
      title = {Zero-Knowledge Using Garbled Circuits: How To Prove Non-Algebraic Statements Efficiently},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2013/073},
      year = {2013},
      doi = {10.1145/2508859.2516662},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/073}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/073}
}
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