We show new lower bounds and impossibility results for general (possibly <i>non-black-box</i>) zero-knowledge proofs and arguments. Our main results are that, under reasonable complexity assumptions:
<ol>
<li> There does not exist a two-round zero-knowledge <i>proof</i> system with perfect completeness for an NP-complete language. The previous impossibility result for two-round zero ... more >>>

One of the central questions in Cryptography today is proving security of the protocols ``on the Internet'', i.e., in a concurrent setting where there are multiple interactions between players, and where the adversary can play so called ``man-in-the-middle'' attacks, forwarding and modifying messages between two or more unsuspecting players. Indeed, ... more >>>

An interactive-PCP (say, for the membership $x \in L$) is a
proof that can be verified by reading only one of its bits, with the
help of a very short interactive-proof.
We show that for membership in some languages $L$, there are
interactive-PCPs that are significantly shorter than the known
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We show that if a language $L$ has a 4-round, black-box, computational zero-knowledge proof system with negligible soundness error, then $\bar L \in MA$. Assuming the polynomial hierarchy does not collapse, this means, in particular, that $NP$-complete languages do not have 4-round zero-knowledge proofs (at least with respect to black-box ... more >>>

Learning is a central task in computer science, and there are various
formalisms for capturing the notion. One important model studied in
computational learning theory is the PAC model of Valiant (CACM 1984).
On the other hand, in cryptography the notion of ``learning nothing''
is often modelled by the simulation ... more >>>

We put forth a new computational notion of entropy, which measures the
(in)feasibility of sampling high entropy strings that are consistent
with a given protocol. Specifically, we say that the i'th round of a
protocol (A, B) has _accessible entropy_ at most k, if no
polynomial-time strategy A^* can generate ... more >>>

Motivated by the question of basing cryptographic protocols on stateless tamper-proof hardware tokens, we revisit the question of unconditional two-prover zero-knowledge proofs for $NP$. We show that such protocols exist in the {\em interactive PCP} model of Kalai and Raz (ICALP '08), where one of the provers is replaced by ... more >>>

\emph{Statistical Zero-knowledge proofs} (Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff, SICOMP 1989) allow a computationally-unbounded server to convince a computationally-limited client that an input $x$ is in a language $\Pi$ without revealing any additional information about $x$ that the client cannot compute by herself. \emph{Randomized encoding} (RE) of functions (Ishai and Kushilevitz, FOCS ... more >>>

The seminal result that every language having an interactive proof also has a zero-knowledge interactive proof assumes the existence of one-way functions. Ostrovsky and Wigderson (ISTCS 1993) proved that this assumption is necessary: if one-way functions do not exist, then only languages in BPP have zero-knowledge interactive proofs.

Ben-Or et ... more >>>

The class TFNP is the search analog of NP with the additional guarantee that any instance has a solution. TFNP has attracted extensive attention due to its natural syntactic subclasses that capture the computational complexity of important search problems from algorithmic game theory, combinatorial optimization and computational topology. Thus, one ... more >>>

Many seminal results in Interactive Proofs (IPs) use algebraic techniques based on low-degree polynomials, the study of which is pervasive in theoretical computer science. Unfortunately, known methods for endowing such proofs with zero knowledge guarantees do not retain this rich algebraic structure.

In this work, we develop algebraic techniques for ... more >>>

We study multi-collision-resistant hash functions --- a natural relaxation of collision-resistant hashing that only guarantees the intractability of finding many (rather than two) inputs that map to the same image. An appealing feature of such hash functions is that unlike their collision-resistant counterparts, they do not necessarily require a key. ... more >>>

Since its inception, public-key encryption (PKE) has been one of the main cornerstones of cryptography. A central goal in cryptographic research is to understand the foundations of public-key encryption and in particular, base its existence on a natural and generic complexity-theoretic assumption. An intriguing candidate for such an assumption is ... more >>>

Zero knowledge plays a central role in cryptography and complexity. The seminal work of Ben-Or et al. (STOC 1988) shows that zero knowledge can be achieved unconditionally for any language in NEXP, as long as one is willing to make a suitable physical assumption: if the provers are spatially isolated, ... more >>>

In this work we consider the interplay between multiprover interactive proofs, quantum
entanglement, and zero knowledge proofs — notions that are central pillars of complexity theory,
quantum information and cryptography. In particular, we study the relationship between the
complexity class MIP$^*$ , the set of languages decidable by multiprover interactive ... more >>>

A statistical zero-knowledge proof (SZK) for a problem $\Pi$ enables a computationally unbounded prover to convince a polynomial-time verifier that $x \in \Pi$ without revealing any additional information about $x$ to the verifier, in a strong information-theoretic sense.

Suppose, however, that the prover wishes to convince the verifier that $k$ ... more >>>

Shortly after the introduction of zero-knowledge proofs, Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson (CRYPTO '86) demonstrated their wide applicability by constructing zero-knowledge proofs for the NP-complete problem of graph 3-coloring. A long-standing open question has been whether parallel repetition of their protocol preserves zero knowledge. In this work, we answer this question ... more >>>

A major difficulty in quantum rewinding is the fact that measurement is destructive: extracting information from a quantum state irreversibly changes it. This is especially problematic in the context of zero-knowledge simulation, where preserving the adversary's state is essential.

In this work, we develop new techniques for ... more >>>

Batch proofs are proof systems that convince a verifier that $x_1,\dots, x_t \in L$, for some $NP$ language $L$, with communication that is much shorter than sending the $t$ witnesses. In the case of statistical soundness (where the cheating prover is unbounded but honest prover is efficient), interactive batch proofs ... more >>>

We present a simple alternative exposition of the the recent result of Hirahara and Nanashima (STOC’24) showing that one-way functions exist if (1) every language in NP has a zero-knowledge proof/argument and (2) ZKA contains non-trivial languages. Our presentation does not rely on meta-complexity and we hope it may be ... more >>>

We show that every NP relation that can be verified by a bounded-depth polynomial-sized circuit, or a bounded-space polynomial-time algorithm, has a computational zero-knowledge proof (with statistical soundness) with communication that is only additively larger than the witness length. Our construction relies only on the minimal assumption that one-way functions ... more >>>

In a recent work, Cormode, Dall'Agnol, Gur and Hickey (CCC, 2024) introduced the model of Zero-Knowledge Streaming Interactive Proofs (zkSIPs).
Loosely speaking, such proof-systems enable a prover to convince astreaming verifier that the input $x$, to which it has read-once streaming access, satisfies some property, in such a way that ... more >>>