Concurrent Knowledge Extraction in Public-Key Models

Knowledge extraction is a fundamental notion, modeling machine possession of values (witnesses) in a computational complexity sense and enabling one to argue about the internal state of a party in a protocol without probing its internal secret state. However, when transactions are concurrent, say over the Internet, with players possessing public keys (as is common in cryptography), assuring that entities “know” what they claim to know, where adversaries may be well coordinated across different transactions, turns out to be much more subtle and in need of re-examination. In such settings, mixing the public-key structure as part of the language and statements is a natural adversarial strategy. Here, we investigate how to formally treat knowledge possession by parties interacting concurrently in the public-key model. More technically, we look into the relative power of the notion of “concurrent knowledge extraction” (CKE) for concurrent zero knowledge (CZK) in the bare public-key (BPK) model, where the language and statements being proved can be dynamically and adaptively chosen by the prover and may be possibly based on verifiers’ public keys. By concrete attacks against some existing natural protocols, we first show that concurrent soundness and normal arguments of knowledge do not guarantee concurrent verifier security in the public-key setting. Here, roughly speaking, concurrent verifier security says that the malicious concurrent prover should “know" all the witnesses to all the possibly public-key-related statements adaptively chosen and successfully proved in the concurrent sessions. These concrete attacks serve as a good motivation for understanding “possession of knowledge” for concurrent transactions with registered public keys, i.e., the subtleties of concurrent knowledge extraction in the public-key model. This motivates us to introduce and formalize the notion of CKE, along with clarifications of various subtleties. Two implementations are then presented for constant-round concurrently knowledge extractable concurrent zero-knowledge (CZK–CKE) argument for $$\mathcal {NP}$$NP in the BPK model: One protocol is generic and based on standard polynomial-time assumptions, whereas the other protocol is computationally efficient and employs complexity leveraging in a novel way. Both protocols can be practically instantiated for some specific number-theoretic languages without going through general $$\mathcal {NP}$$NP-reductions. Of independent interest are the discussions about the subtleties surrounding the fundamental structure of Feige–Shamir zero knowledge in the BPK model.