Improved non-interactive zero knowledge with applications to post-quantum signatures

Recent work, including ZKBoo, ZKB++, and Ligero, has developed efficient non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge (NIZKPoKs) for Boolean circuits based on symmetric-key primitives alone, using the “MPC-in-the-head” paradigm of Ishai et al. We show how to instantiate this paradigm with MPC protocols in the preprocessing model; once optimized, this results in an NIZKPoK with shorter proofs (and comparable computation) as in prior work for circuits containing roughly 300-100,000 AND gates. In contrast to prior work, our NIZKPoK also supports witness-independent preprocessing, which allows the prover to shift most of its work to an offline phase before the witness is known. We use our NIZKPoK to construct a signature scheme based only on symmetric-key primitives (and hence with “post-quantum” security). The resulting scheme has shorter signatures than the scheme built using ZKB++ (and comparable signing/verification time), and is even competitive with hash-based signature schemes. To further highlight the flexibility and power of our NIZKPoK, we also use it to build efficient ring and group signatures based on symmetric-key primitives alone. To our knowledge, the resulting schemes are the most efficient constructions of these primitives that offer post-quantum security.