CryptoDB
On Witness Encryption and Laconic Zero-Knowledge Arguments
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| Conference: | CRYPTO 2025 |
| Abstract: | Witness encryption (WE) (Garg et al, STOC’13) is a powerful cryptographic primitive that is closely related to the notion of indistinguishability obfuscation (Barak et, JACM’12, Garg et al, FOCS’13). For a given NP-language L, WE for L enables encrypting a message m using an instance x as the public-key, while ensuring that efficient decryption is possible by anyone possessing a witness for x in L, and if x \notin L, then the encryption is hiding. We show that this seemingly sophisticated primitive is equivalent to a communication-efficient version of one of the most classic cryptographic primitives—namely that of a zero-knowledge argument (Goldwasser et al, SIAM’89, Brassard et al, JCSS’88): for any NP-language L, the following are equivalent: – There exists a witness encryption for L; – There exists a laconic (i.e., the prover communication is bounded by O(log n)) special-honest verifier zero-knowledge (SHVZK) argumentfor L. Our approach is inspired by an elegant (one-sided) connection between (laconic) zero-knowledge arguments and public-key encryption established by Berman et al (CRYPTO’17) and Cramer-Shoup (EuroCrypt’02), and the equivalence between a notion of so-called “predictable arguments” and witness encryption by Faonio, Nielsen, and Venturi (PKC’17). |
BibTeX
@inproceedings{crypto-2025-35747,
title={On Witness Encryption and Laconic Zero-Knowledge Arguments},
publisher={Springer-Verlag},
author={Yanyi Liu and Noam Mazor and Rafael Pass},
year=2025
}