What a lovely hat

Paper 2024/688

Succinct Functional Commitments for Circuits from k-Lin

Abstract

A functional commitment allows a user to commit to an input $\mathbf{x}$ and later, open the commitment to an arbitrary function $\mathbf{y} = f(\mathbf{x})$. The size of the commitment and the opening should be sublinear in $|\mathbf{x}|$ and $|f|$. In this work, we give the first pairing-based functional commitment for arbitrary circuits where the size of the commitment and the size of the opening consist of a constant number of group elements. Security relies on the standard bilateral $k$-$\mathsf{Lin}$ assumption. This is the first scheme with this level of succinctness from falsifiable bilinear map assumptions (previous approaches required SNARKs for $\mathsf{NP}$). This is also the first functional commitment scheme for general circuits with $\mathsf{poly}(\lambda)$-size commitments and openings from any assumption that makes fully black-box use of cryptographic primitives and algorithms. As an immediate consequence, we also obtain a succinct non-interactive argument for arithmetic circuits (i.e., a SNARG for $\mathsf{P}/\mathsf{poly}$) with a universal setup and where the proofs consist of a constant number of group elements. In particular, the CRS in our SNARG only depends on the size of the arithmetic circuit $|C|$ rather than the circuit $C$ itself; the same CRS can be used to verify computations with respect to different circuits. Our construction relies on a new notion of projective chainable commitments which may be of independent interest.