Abstract

this paper is to explain the various notions involved and to offer a new terminology that emphasizes their differences. There are two orthogonal aspects to zero-knowledge interactive proofs. One is the notion of zero-knowledge and the other is the notion of interactive proof. Unfortunately, these two notions are often thought to be inseparable. This confusion is reminiscent of the long lasting confusion among many people between public-key encryption and digital signature. It is clear that interactive proofs make sense independently of zero-knowledge (after all, Babai's Arthur-Merlin games [Ba] were invented independently of [GMR1]), but it is more subtle to see that a protocol could be zero-knowledge without being an interactive

Citations