Paper 2023/1595 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2023/1595 ↗

CDLS: Proving Knowledge of Committed Discrete Logarithms with Soundness

Abstract

$\Sigma$-protocols, a class of interactive two-party protocols, which are used as a framework to instantiate many other authentication schemes, are automatically a proof of knowledge (PoK) given that they satisfy the "special-soundness" property. This fact provides a convenient method to compose $\Sigma$-protocols and PoKs for complex relations. However, composing in this manner can be error-prone. While they must satisfy special-soundness, this is unfortunately not the case for many recently proposed composed practical schemes. Here we explore two schemes: ZKAttest from Faz-Hernández et al. and the ones from Agrawal et al., and show that their $\Sigma$-protocol's suffer from several security misdesigns which invalidate their security proofs, and state a practical cheap attack on ZKAttest's implementation. By exploring and resolving their misdesigns, we propose CDLS, a sound and secure variant of their protocols.