Steganography-Free Zero-Knowledge

Behzad Abdolmaleki; Nils Fleischhacker; Vipul Goyal; Abhishek Jain; Giulio Malavolta

Paper 2022/1263

Steganography-Free Zero-Knowledge

Behzad Abdolmaleki, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum, Germany

Nils Fleischhacker, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

Vipul Goyal, NTT Research and Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Abhishek Jain, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA

Giulio Malavolta, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum, Germany

Abstract

We revisit the well-studied problem of preventing steganographic communication in multi-party communications. While this is known to be a provably impossible task, we propose a new model that allows circumventing this impossibility. In our model, the parties first publish a single message during an honest non-interactive pre-processing phase and then later interact in an execution phase. We show that in this model, it is indeed possible to prevent any steganographic communication in zero-knowledge protocols. Our solutions rely on standard cryptographic assumptions.

Note: Full version

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Cryptographic protocols
Publication info: A major revision of an IACR publication in TCC 2022
Keywords: Steganography zero-knowledge proof multi-party communications
Contact author(s): abdolmaleki behzad ir @ gmail com
mail @ nilsfleischhacker de
vipul @ cmu edu
abhishek @ cs jhu edu
giulio malavolta @ hotmail it
History: 2022-09-26: approved; 2022-09-23: received; See all versions
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2022/1263
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1263,
      author = {Behzad Abdolmaleki and Nils Fleischhacker and Vipul Goyal and Abhishek Jain and Giulio Malavolta},
      title = {Steganography-Free Zero-Knowledge},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/1263},
      year = {2022},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1263}
}