Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2016/112

On the (In)security of SNARKs in the Presence of Oracles

Dario Fiore and Anca Nitulescu

Abstract: In this work we study the feasibility of knowledge extraction for succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) in a scenario that, to the best of our knowledge, has not been analyzed before. While prior work focuses on the case of adversarial provers that may receive (statically generated) {\em auxiliary information}, here we consider the scenario where adversarial provers are given {\em access to an oracle}. For this setting we study if and under what assumptions such provers can admit an extractor. Our contribution is mainly threefold.

First, we formalize the question of extraction in the presence of oracles by proposing a suitable proof of knowledge definition for this setting. We call SNARKs satisfying this definition O-SNARKs. Second, we show how to use O-SNARKs to obtain formal and intuitive security proofs for three applications (homomorphic signatures, succinct functional signatures, and SNARKs on authenticated data) where we recognize an issue while doing the proof under the standard proof of knowledge definition of SNARKs. Third, we study whether O-SNARKs exist, providing both negative and positive results. On the negative side, we show that, assuming one way functions, there do not exist O-SNARKs in the standard model for every signing oracle family (and thus for general oracle families as well). On the positive side, we show that when considering signature schemes with appropriate restrictions on the message length O-SNARKs for the corresponding signing oracles exist, based on classical SNARKs and assuming extraction with respect to specific distributions of auxiliary input.

Category / Keywords: foundations / succinct non-interactive arguments, knowledge extraction, digital signatures

Original Publication (with major differences): IACR-TCC-2016

Date: received 10 Feb 2016, last revised 23 Aug 2016

Contact author: dario fiore at imdea org

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20160823:070001 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2016/112

Discussion forum: Show discussion | Start new discussion