### A New Approach to Efficient Non-Malleable Zero-Knowledge

##### Abstract

Non-malleable zero-knowledge, originally introduced in the context of man-in-the-middle attacks, serves as an important building block to protect against concurrent attacks where different protocols may coexist and interleave. While this primitive admits almost optimal constructions in the plain model, they are several orders of magnitude slower in practice than standalone zero-knowledge. This is in sharp contrast to non-malleable commitments where practical constructions (under the DDH assumption) have been known for a while. We present a new approach for constructing efficient non-malleable zero-knowledge for all languages in NP, based on a new primitive called instance-based non-malleable commitment (IB-NMC). We show how to construct practical IB-NMC by leveraging the fact that simulators of sub-linear zero-knowledge protocols can be much faster than the honest prover algorithm. With an efficient implementation of IB-NMC, our approach yields the first general-purpose non-malleable zero-knowledge protocol that achieves practical efficiency in the plain model. All of our protocols can be instantiated from symmetric primitives such as block-ciphers and hash functions, have reasonable efficiency in practice, and are general-purpose. Our techniques also yield the first efficient non-malleable commitment scheme without public-key assumptions.

Note: Missing citation added: - Juan A. Garay, Philip D. MacKenzie, and Ke Yang. Strengthening Zero-Knowledge Protocols Using Signatures. (EUROCRYPT 2003)

Available format(s)
Publication info
A major revision of an IACR publication in CRYPTO 2022
Keywords
Non-malleability Efficiency Symmetric Assumptions
Contact author(s)
allekim @ cs stonybrook edu
xiao crypto @ gmail com
omkant @ cs stonybrook edu
History
2022-08-20: revised
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2022/767

CC BY-NC-ND

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/767,
author = {Allen Kim and Xiao Liang and Omkant Pandey},
title = {A New Approach to Efficient Non-Malleable Zero-Knowledge},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2022/767},
year = {2022},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/767}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/767}
}

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