## CryptoDB

### Mary Maller

#### Publications

Year
Venue
Title
2021
EUROCRYPT
In this paper we introduce a distributed key generation (DKG) protocol with aggregatable and publicly verifiable transcripts. As compared with prior approaches, our DKG reduces the size of the final transcript and the time to verify it from O(n^2) to O(n), where n denotes the number of parties. We also revisit existing DKG security definitions, which are quite strong, and propose new and natural relaxations. As a result, we can prove the security of our aggregatable DKG as well as that of several existing DKGs, including the popular Pedersen variant. We show that, under these new definitions, these existing DKGs can be used to yield secure threshold variants of popular cryptosystems such as El-Gamal encryption and BLS signatures. We also prove that our DKG can be securely combined with a new efficient verifiable unpredictable function (VUF), whose security we prove in the random oracle model. Finally, we experimentally evaluate our DKG and show that the per-party overheads scale linearly and are practical: for 64 parties it takes 71ms to share and 359ms to verify the overall transcript, while these respective costs for 8192 parties are 8s and 42.2s.
2021
ASIACRYPT
Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) have found numerous applications in the blockchain setting and elsewhere. The most efficient SNARKs require a distributed ceremony protocol to generate public parameters, also known as a structured reference string (SRS). Our contributions are two-fold: \begin{compactitem} \item We give a security framework for non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments with a ceremony protocol. \item We revisit the ceremony protocol of Groth's SNARK [Bowe et al., 2017]. We show that the original construction can be simplified and optimized, and then prove its security in our new framework. Importantly, our construction avoids the random beacon model used in the original work. \end{compactitem}
2021
ASIACRYPT
We present a generalized inner product argument and demonstrate its applications to pairing-based languages. We apply our generalized argument to prove that an inner pairing product is correctly evaluated with respect to committed vectors of $n$ source group elements. With a structured reference string (SRS), we achieve a logarithmic-time verifier whose work is dominated by $6 \log n$ target group exponentiations. Proofs are of size $6 \log n$ target group elements, computed using $6n$ pairings and $4n$ exponentiations in each source group. We apply our inner product arguments to build the first polynomial commitment scheme with succinct (logarithmic) verification, $O(\sqrt{d})$ prover complexity for degree $d$ polynomials (not including the cost to evaluate the polynomial), and a SRS of size $O(\sqrt{d})$. Concretely, this means that for $d=2^{28}$, producing an evaluation proof in our protocol is $76\times$ faster than doing so in the KZG commitment scheme, and the CRS in our protocol is $1000\times$ smaller: $13$MB vs $13$GB for KZG. As a second application, we introduce an argument for aggregating $n$ Groth16 zkSNARKs into an $O(\log n)$ sized proof. Our protocol is significantly faster ($>1000\times$) than aggregating SNARKs via recursive composition: we aggregate $\sim 130,000$ proofs in $25$ minutes, versus $90$ proofs via recursive composition. Finally, we further apply our aggregation protocol to construct a low-memory SNARK for machine computations that does not rely on recursive composition. For a computation that requires time $T$ and space $S$, our SNARK produces proofs in space $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(S+T)$, which is significantly more space efficient than a monolithic SNARK, which requires space $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(S \cdot T)$.
2020
EUROCRYPT
We present a general methodology to construct preprocessing zkSNARKs where the structured reference string (SRS) is universal and updatable. This exploits a novel application of *holographic* IOPs, a natural generalization of holographic PCPs [Babai et al., STOC 1991]. We use our methodology to obtain a preprocessing zkSNARK where the SRS has linear size and arguments have constant size. Our construction improves on Sonic [Maller et al., CCS 2019], the prior state of the art in this setting, in all efficiency parameters: proving is an order of magnitude faster and verification is twice as fast, even with smaller SRS size and argument size. Our construction is most efficient when instantiated in the algebraic group model (also used by Sonic), but we also demonstrate how to realize it under concrete knowledge assumptions. The core of our zkSNARK is a new holographic IOP for rank-1 constraint satisfiability (R1CS), which is the first to achieve linear proof length and constant query complexity (among other efficiency features).
2018
CRYPTO
By design, existing (pre-processing) zk-SNARKs embed a secret trapdoor in a relation-dependent common reference strings (CRS). The trapdoor is exploited by a (hypothetical) simulator to prove the scheme is zero knowledge, and the secret-dependent structure facilitates a linear-size CRS and linear-time prover computation. If known by a real party, however, the trapdoor can be used to subvert the security of the system. The structured CRS that makes zk-SNARKs practical also makes deploying zk-SNARKS problematic, as it is difficult to argue why the trapdoor would not be available to the entity responsible for generating the CRS. Moreover, for pre-processing zk-SNARKs a new trusted CRS needs to be computed every time the relation is changed.In this paper, we address both issues by proposing a model where a number of users can update a universal CRS. The updatable CRS model guarantees security if at least one of the users updating the CRS is honest. We provide both a negative result, by showing that zk-SNARKs with private secret-dependent polynomials in the CRS cannot be updatable, and a positive result by constructing a zk-SNARK based on a CRS consisting only of secret-dependent monomials. The CRS is of quadratic size, is updatable, and is universal in the sense that it can be specialized into one or more relation-dependent CRS of linear size with linear-time prover computation.
2018
ASIACRYPT
There have been tremendous advances in reducing interaction, communication and verification time in zero-knowledge proofs but it remains an important challenge to make the prover efficient. We construct the first zero-knowledge proof of knowledge for the correct execution of a program on public and private inputs where the prover computation is nearly linear time. This saves a polylogarithmic factor in asymptotic performance compared to current state of the art proof systems.We use the TinyRAM model to capture general purpose processor computation. An instance consists of a TinyRAM program and public inputs. The witness consists of additional private inputs to the program. The prover can use our proof system to convince the verifier that the program terminates with the intended answer within given time and memory bounds. Our proof system has perfect completeness, statistical special honest verifier zero-knowledge, and computational knowledge soundness assuming linear-time computable collision-resistant hash functions exist. The main advantage of our new proof system is asymptotically efficient prover computation. The prover’s running time is only a superconstant factor larger than the program’s running time in an apples-to-apples comparison where the prover uses the same TinyRAM model. Our proof system is also efficient on the other performance parameters; the verifier’s running time and the communication are sublinear in the execution time of the program and we only use a log-logarithmic number of rounds.
2017
CRYPTO
2016
ASIACRYPT