International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 28 April 2023

Alex Dalton, David Thomas, Peter Cheung
ePrint Report ePrint Report
VC schemes provide a mechanism for verifying the output of a remotely executed program. These are used to support computing paradigms wherein a computationally restricted client, the Verifier, wishes to delegate work to a more powerful but untrusted server, the Prover. The Verifier wishes to detect any incorrect results, be they accidental or malicious. The current state-of-the-art is only close-to-practical, usually because of a computationally demanding setup which must be amortised across repeat executions. We present a VC scheme for verifying the output of arithmetic circuits with a small one-time setup, KGen, independent of the size of the circuit being verified, and a insignificantly small constant program specific setup, ProbGen. To our knowledge our VC scheme is the first built from the hardness of integer factoring, a standard cryptographic assumption. Our scheme has the added novelty that the proofs are simply the raw output of the target computation, and the Prover is in effect blind to the fact they are taking part in a VC scheme at all. Compared to related work our scheme comes at the cost of a more expensive, but still efficient, verification step. Verification is always practical, and the Prover workload is unchanged from unverified outsourced computation. Although our scheme has worse asymptotic performance than the state-of-the-art it is particularly well suited for verifying one-shot programs and the output of large integer polynomial evaluation.
Expand

Additional news items may be found on the IACR news page.