Paper 2020/1618

Proof-Carrying Data without Succinct Arguments

Benedikt Bünz and Alessandro Chiesa and William Lin and Pratyush Mishra and Nicholas Spooner

Abstract

Proof-carrying data (PCD) is a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables mutually distrustful parties to perform distributed computations that run indefinitely. Known approaches to construct PCD are based on succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) that have a succinct verifier or a succinct accumulation scheme for their proofs. In this paper we show how to obtain PCD without relying on SNARKs. We construct a PCD scheme given any non-interactive argument of knowledge (e.g., with linear-size proofs) that has a *split accumulation scheme*, which is a weak form of accumulation that we introduce. We additionally construct a transparent non-interactive argument of knowledge for R1CS whose accumulation is verifiable via a *constant number of group and field operations*. This leads, via the random oracle heuristic and our result above, to efficiency improvements for PCD. Along the way, we construct a split accumulation scheme for a simple polynomial commitment scheme based on Pedersen commitments. Our results are supported by a modular and efficient implementation.