## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2000/013

Concurrent Zero-Knowledge in Poly-logarithmic Rounds

Joe Kilian and Erez Petrank

Abstract: A proof is concurrent zero-knowledge if it remains zero-knowledge when run in an asynchronous environment, such as the Internet. It is known that zero-knowledge is not necessarily preserved in such an environment; Kilian, Petrank and Rackoff have shown that any {\bf 4} rounds zero-knowledge interactive proof (for a non-trivial language) is not concurrent zero-knowledge. On the other hand, Richardson and Kilian have shown that there exists a concurrent zero-knowledge argument for all languages in NP, but it requires a {\bf polynomial} number of rounds. In this paper, we present a concurrent zero-knowledge proof for all languages in NP with a drastically improved complexity: our proof requires only a poly-logarithmic, specifically, $\omega(\log^2 k)$ number of rounds. Thus, we narrow the huge gap between the known upper and lower bounds on the number of rounds required for a zero-knowledge proof that is robust for asynchronous composition.

Category / Keywords: foundations / zero-knowledge

Date: received 24 Apr 2000, revised 28 May 2000

Contact author: erez at cs technion ac il

Available format(s): Postscript (PS) | Compressed Postscript (PS.GZ) | PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2000/013

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