Paper 2020/207 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2020/207 ↗

(Public) Verifiability For Composable Protocols Without Adaptivity Or Zero-Knowledge

Abstract

The Universal Composability (UC) framework (FOCS '01) is the current standard for proving security of cryptographic protocols under composition. It allows to reason about complex protocol structures in a bottom-up fashion: any building block that is UC-secure can be composed arbitrarily with any other UC-secure construction while retaining their security guarantees. Unfortunately, some protocol properties such as the verifiability of outputs require excessively strong tools to achieve in UC. In particular, ``obviously secure'' constructions cannot directly be shown to be UC-secure, and verifiability of building blocks does not easily carry over to verifiability of the composed construction. In this work, we study Non-Interactive (Public) Verifiability of UC protocols, i.e. under which conditions a verifier can ascertain that a party obtained a specific output from the protocol. The verifier may have been part of the protocol execution or not, as in the case of public verifiability. We consider a setting used in a number of applications where it is ok to reveal the input of the party whose output gets verified and analyze under which conditions such verifiability can generically be achieved using ``cheap'' cryptographic primitives. That is, we avoid having to rely on adaptively secure primitives or heavy computational tools such as NIZKs. As Non-Interactive Public Verifiability is crucial when composing protocols with a public ledger, our approach can be beneficial when designing these with provably composable security and efficiency in mind.