Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2021/219

Snarky Ceremonies

Markulf Kohlweiss and Mary Maller and Janno Siim and Mikhail Volkhov

Abstract: Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) have found numerous applications in the blockchain setting and elsewhere. The most efficient SNARKs require a distributed ceremony protocol to generate public parameters, also known as a structured reference string (SRS). Our contributions are two-fold: 1. We give a security framework for non-interactive zero-knowledge arguments with a ceremony protocol. 2. We revisit the ceremony protocol of Groth's SNARK [Bowe et al., 2017]. We show that the original construction can be simplified and optimized, and then prove its security in our new framework. Importantly, our construction avoids the random beacon model used in the original work.

Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Zero Knowledge, NIZK, zk-SNARK, ceremony

Date: received 26 Feb 2021, last revised 26 Feb 2021

Contact author: mikhail volkhov at ed ac uk

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Version: 20210302:145817 (All versions of this report)

Short URL: ia.cr/2021/219