Distributed Key Generation with Smart Contracts using zk-SNARKs

Sober, Michael; Max Kobelt; Scaffino, Giulia; Kaaser, Dominik; Schulte, Stefan

doi:10.1145/3555776.3577677

Record link:

http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12708/187547
https://doi.org/10.34726/4523

Title:

Distributed Key Generation with Smart Contracts using zk-SNARKs

Citation:

Sober, M., Max Kobelt, Scaffino, G., Kaaser, D., & Schulte, S. (2023). Distributed Key Generation with Smart Contracts using zk-SNARKs. In SAC ’23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (pp. 231–240). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.34726/4523

reposiTUm DOI:

10.34726/4523

Publisher DOI:

10.1145/3555776.3577677

Publication Type:

Inproceedings - Full-Paper Contribution

Language:

English

Authors:

Sober, Michael
Max Kobelt
Scaffino, Giulia
Kaaser, Dominik
Schulte, Stefan

Organisational Unit:

E192-06 - Forschungsbereich Security and Privacy

Published in:

SAC '23: Proceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

ISBN:

978-1-4503-9517-5

Date (published):

7-Jun-2023

Event name:

ACM SAC 2023 The 38th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

Event date:

27-Mar-2023 - 31-Mar-2023

Event place:

Tallinn, Estonia

Number of Pages:

Publisher:

Association for Computing Machinery, New York, US

Peer reviewed:

Yes

Keywords:

Distributed Key Generation; Blockchain; Zero-knowledge Proofs; Smart Contracts

Abstract:

Distributed Key Generation (DKG) is an extensively researched topic as it is fundamental to threshold cryptosystems. Emerging technologies such as blockchains benefit massively from applying threshold cryptography in consensus protocols, randomness beacons, and threshold signatures. However, blockchains and smart contracts also enable further improvements of DKG protocols by providing a decentralized computation and communication platform. For that reason, we propose a DKG protocol that uses smart contracts to ensure the correct execution of the protocol, allow dynamic participation, and provide crypto-economic incentives to encourage honest behavior. The DKG protocol uses a dispute and key derivation mechanism based on Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive Arguments of Knowledge (zk-SNARKs) to reduce the costs of applying smart contracts by moving the computations off-chain, where the smart contract only verifies the correctness of the computation.

Research Areas:

Logic and Computation: 20%
Computer Engineering and Software-Intensive Systems: 80%

Science Branch:

1020 - Informatik: 100%

License:

In Copyright

Appears in Collections:

Conference Paper