UNIVERSAL ARGUMENTS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS

We put forward a new type of computationally sound proof system called universal arguments. Universal arguments are related but different from both CS proofs (as defined by Micali [SIAM J. Comput., 37 (2000), pp. 1253-1298]) and arguments (as defined by Brassard, Chaum, and Crepeau [J. Comput. System Sci., 37 (1988), pp. 156-189]. In particular, we adopt the instance-based prover-efficiency paradigm of CS proofs but follow the computational-soundness condition of argument systems (i.e., we consider only cheating strategies that are implementable by polynomial-size circuits). We show that universal arguments can be constructed based on standard intractability assumptions that refer to polynomial-size circuits (rather than based on assumptions that refer to subexponential-size circuits as used in the construction of CS proofs). Furthermore, these protocols have a constant number of rounds and are of the public-coin type. As an application of these universal arguments, we weaken the intractability assumptions used in the non-black-box zero-knowledge arguments of Barak [in Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Symposiun on Foundations of Computer Science, 2001]. Specifically, we only utilize intractability assumptions that refer to polynomial-size circuits (rather than assumptions that refer to circuits of some "nice" superpolynomial size).