### Short-lived zero-knowledge proofs and signatures

Arasu Arun, Joseph Bonneau, and Jeremy Clark

##### Abstract

We introduce the short-lived proof, a non-interactive proof of knowledge with a novel feature: after a specified period of time, the proof is no longer convincing. This time-delayed loss of soundness happens "naturally" without further involvement from the prover or any third party. We propose formal definitions for short-lived proofs as well as the special case of short-lived signatures. We show several practical constructions built using verifiable delay functions (VDFs). The key idea in our approach is to allow any party to forge any proof by executing a large sequential computation. Some constructions achieve a stronger property called reusable forgeability in which one sequential computation allows forging an arbitrary number of proofs of different statements. Our work also introduces two novel types of VDFs, re-randomizable VDFs and zero-knowledge VDFs, which may be of independent interest.

Available format(s)
Category
Cryptographic protocols
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
Contact author(s)
jbonneau @ gmail com
aa7977 @ nyu edu
j clark @ concordia ca
History
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/190

CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/190,
author = {Arasu Arun and Joseph Bonneau and Jeremy Clark},
title = {Short-lived zero-knowledge proofs and signatures},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/190},
year = {2022},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/190}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/190}
}

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