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Theory of Cryptography Conference

TCC 2020: Theory of Cryptography pp 1–18Cite as

Recursive Proof Composition from Accumulation Schemes

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNSC,volume 12551)

Abstract

Recursive proof composition has been shown to lead to powerful primitives such as incrementally-verifiable computation (IVC) and proof-carrying data (PCD). All existing approaches to recursive composition take a succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (SNARK) and use it to prove a statement about its own verifier. This technique requires that the verifier run in time sublinear in the size of the statement it is checking, a strong requirement that restricts the class of SNARKs from which PCD can be built. This in turn restricts the efficiency and security properties of the resulting scheme.

Bowe, Grigg, and Hopwood (ePrint 2019/1021) outlined a novel approach to recursive composition, and applied it to a particular SNARK construction which does not have a sublinear-time verifier. However, they omit details about this approach and do not prove that it satisfies any security property. Nonetheless, schemes based on their ideas have already been implemented in software.

In this work we present a collection of results that establish the theoretical foundations for a generalization of the above approach. We define an accumulation scheme for a non-interactive argument, and show that this suffices to construct PCD, even if the argument itself does not have a sublinear-time verifier. Moreover we give constructions of accumulation schemes for SNARKs, which yield PCD schemes with novel efficiency and security features.

Keywords

  • Succinct arguments
  • Proof-carrying data
  • Recursive proof composition

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  • DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-64378-2_1
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Notes

  1. 1.

    We remark that the notion of an accumulation scheme is distinct from the notion of a cryptographic accumulator for a set (e.g., an RSA accumulator), which provides a succinct representation of a large set while supporting membership queries.

  2. 2.

    This is not precisely the case, because the verifier is required to reject immediately if it ever makes a query \(\mathsf {q}\) with \(\varPhi _\circ (\mathsf {q}) = 0\).

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank William Lin for pointing out an error in a prior version of the construction of \(\mathsf {PC}_{\scriptscriptstyle \mathsf {DL}}\), and Github user 3for for pointing out errors in a prior version of the construction of \(\mathsf {PC}_{\scriptscriptstyle \mathsf {AGM}}\). This research was supported in part by: the Berkeley Haas Blockchain Initiative and a donation from the Ethereum Foundation. Benedikt Bünz performed part of the work while visiting the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stanford University, Stanford, USA

    Benedikt Bünz

  2. UC Berkeley, Berkeley, USA

    Alessandro Chiesa, Pratyush Mishra & Nicholas Spooner

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  1. Benedikt Bünz
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  2. Alessandro Chiesa
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  4. Nicholas Spooner
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Correspondence to Pratyush Mishra .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cornell Tech, New York, NY, USA

    Prof. Rafael Pass

  2. Institute of Science and Technology Austria, Klosterneuburg, Austria

    Krzysztof Pietrzak

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Bünz, B., Chiesa, A., Mishra, P., Spooner, N. (2020). Recursive Proof Composition from Accumulation Schemes. In: Pass, R., Pietrzak, K. (eds) Theory of Cryptography. TCC 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12551. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64378-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64378-2_1

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