Information Security and Cryptography Research Group

Unifying Zero-knowledge Proofs of Knowledge

Ueli Maurer

Advances in Cryptology - AfricaCrypt 2009, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Jun 2009.

We present a simple zero-knowledge proof of knowledge protocol of which many protocols in the literature are instantiations. These include Schnorr's protocol for proving knowledge of a discrete logarithm, the Fiat-Shamir and Guillou-Quisquater protocols for proving knowledge of a modular root, protocols for proving knowledge of representations (like Okamoto's protocol), protocols for proving equality of secret values, a protocol for proving the correctness of a Diffie-Hellman key, protocols for proving the multiplicative relation of three commitments (as required in secure multi-party computation), and protocols used in credential systems. This shows that a single simple treatment (and proof), at a high level of abstraction, can replace the individual previous treatments. Moreover, one can devise new instantiations of the protocol.

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{Maurer09,
    author       = {Ueli Maurer},
    title        = {Unifying Zero-knowledge Proofs of Knowledge},
    editor       = {B. Preneel},
    booktitle    = {Advances in Cryptology - AfricaCrypt 2009},
    series       = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science},
    year         = 2009,
    month        = 6,
    publisher    = {Springer-Verlag},
}

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