Paper 2015/1093

C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$: A Framework for Building Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs

Ahmed Kosba, Zhichao Zhao, Andrew Miller, Yi Qian, Hubert Chan, Charalampos Papamanthou, Rafael Pass, abhi shelat, and Elaine Shi

Abstract

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are a powerful cryptographic primitive used in privacy-preserving protocols. We design and build C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$, the first system enabling developers to build efficient, composable, non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs for generic, user-defined statements. C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$ extends state-of-the-art SNARK constructions by applying known strengthening transformations to yield UC-composable zero-knowledge proofs suitable for modular use in larger cryptographic protocols. To attain fast practical performance, C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$ includes a library of several ``SNARK-friendly'' cryptographic primitives. These primitives are used in the strengthening transformations in order to reduce the overhead of achieving composable security. Our open-source library of optimized arithmetic circuits for these functions are up to 40$\times$ more efficient than standard implementations and are thus of independent interest for use in other NIZK projects. Finally, we evaluate C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$ on applications such as anonymous credentials, private smart contracts, and nonoutsourceable proof-of-work puzzles and demonstrate 5$\times$ to 8$\times$ speedup in these application settings compared to naive implementations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
SNARKUniversal ComposabilityNIZK
Contact author(s)
elaine @ cs cornell edu
History
2017-04-09: last of 7 revisions
2015-11-10: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2015/1093
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2015/1093,
      author = {Ahmed Kosba and Zhichao Zhao and Andrew Miller and Yi Qian and Hubert Chan and Charalampos Papamanthou and Rafael Pass and abhi shelat and Elaine Shi},
      title = {C$\emptyset$C$\emptyset$: A Framework for Building Composable Zero-Knowledge Proofs},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2015/1093},
      year = {2015},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1093}
}
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