Rational Proofs against Rational Verifiers

Rational proofs, introduced by Azar and Micali (STOC 2012), are a variant of interactive proofs in which the prover is rational, and may deviate from the protocol for increasing his reward. Guo et al. (ITCS 2014) demonstrated that rational proofs are relevant to delegation of computation. By restricting the prover to be computationally bounded, they presented a one-round delegation scheme with sublinear verification for functions computable by log-space uniform circuits with logarithmic depth. In this work, we study rational proofs in which the verifier is also rational, and may deviate from the protocol for decreasing the prover’s reward. We construct a three-message delegation scheme with sublinear verification for functions computable by log-space uniform circuits with polylogarithmic depth in the random oracle model.