The paper “Subversion-Resistant Quasi-Adaptive NIZK and Applications to Modular zk-SNARKs” by Behzad Abdolmaleki (Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Bochum) and Daniel Slamanig, Scientist at AIT Center for Digital Safety & Security, received the Best Paper Award at the 20th International Conference on Cryptology and Network Security (CANS 2021). In his paper he deals with zero knowledge (NIZK) proofs. Behind this is a fascinating cryptographic concept that allows a party (the prover) to convince another party (the verifier) of the truth of a statement without revealing any information beyond this fact.
An example of this would be proving to someone that you have solved a Sudoku puzzle without revealing its solution. Even more so are non-interactive zero knowledge (NIZK) proofs, in which the proof is only a single message from the prover and can be verified by anyone. Such NIZK proofs form the basis of many privacy technologies and in recent years have taken a foundational role in the design of privacy-friendly cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications. A drawback of NIZK proofs is that they require an all trusted entity to honestly set up some common information that is available to all parties. If this setup process is not performed honestly, i.e., subverted, then the security of the NIZK breaks down. The paper now studies a certain type of NIZK proofs that is used in modular designs of practical NIZK proofs in such a subversion setting and presents efficient constructions.
About CANS
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Conference website: https://cans2021.at/
Published version: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92548-2_26
Open version: http://eprint.iacr.org/2020/364.pdf