IACR News item: 30 September 2014
Jens Groth, Markulf Kohlweiss
ePrint ReportWe use our proof system to instantiate both ring signatures and zerocoin, a novel mechanism for bitcoin privacy.
We use our Sigma-protocol as a (linkable) ad-hoc group identification scheme where the users have public keys that are commitments and demonstrate knowledge of an opening for one of the commitments to unlinkably identify themselves (once) as belonging to the group. Applying the Fiat-Shamir transform on the group identification scheme gives rise to ring signatures, applying it to the linkable group identification scheme gives rise to zerocoin.
Our ring signatures are very small compared to other ring signature schemes and we only assume the users\' secret keys to be the discrete logarithms of single group elements so the setup is quite realistic. Similarly, compared with the original zerocoin protocol we rely on a weak cryptographic assumption and do not require a trusted setup.
A third application of our Sigma protocol is an efficient proof of membership of a secret committed value belonging to a public list.
Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.