Paper 2026/2286 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2026/2286 ↗

Non-Interactive Black-Box Witness-Indistinguishable Commit-and-Prove via Targeted Hitting-Set Generators

Abstract

Targeted hitting-set generators (HSGs) are primitives that have recently attracted attention in the study of pseudorandomness and derandomization. Recent works have shown that sufficiently strong targeted HSGs can be used to soundly instantiate the Fiat--Shamir transformation, yielding non-interactive protocols against uniform PPT adversaries in the plain model (i.e., without any setup phase for selecting a cryptographic hash function). In particular, Chen et al. (STOC 2025) combined this paradigm with the MPC-in-the-head technique to construct a non-interactive witness-indistinguishable argument for NP from a non-interactive commitment scheme and a targeted HSG. Inspired by these results, we explore other cryptographic applications of this paradigm. Our main result is a black-box construction of a non-interactive witness-indistinguishable commit-and-prove scheme against uniform PPT adversaries in the plain model. Following Chen et al., we obtain our construction by combining the MPC-in-the-head technique with the targeted-HSG-based Fiat--Shamir paradigm. The construction relies on an injective one-way function with efficiently recognizable range and a sufficiently strong targeted HSG. The latter is the same targeted HSG used by Chen et al. and can be instantiated under a very strong but plausible complexity-theoretic assumption.