Concretely-Efficient Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Arithmetic Circuits and Their Application to Lattice-Based Cryptography

In this work we present a new interactive Zero-Knowledge Argument of knowledge for general arithmetic circuits. Our protocol is based on the “MPC-in-the-head”-paradigm of Ishai et al. (STOC 2009) and follows the recent “MPC-in-the-head with Preprocessing” as proposed by Katz, Kolesnikov and Wang (ACM CCS 2018). However, in contrast to Katz et al. who used the “cut-and-choose” approach for pre-processing, we show how to incorporate the well-known “sacrificing” paradigm into “MPC-in-the-head”, which reduces the proof size when working over arithmetic circuits. Our argument system uses only lightweight symmetric-key primitives and utilizes a simplified version of the so-called SPDZ-protocol.