Abstract

We present the rst complete problem for SZK, the class of promise problems possessing statistical zero-knowledge proofs (against an honest veri er). The problem, called Statistical Difference, is to decide whether two eciently samplable distributions are either statistically close or far apart. This gives a new characterization of SZK that makes no reference to interaction or zero knowledge. We propose the use of complete problems to unify and extend the study of statistical zero knowledge. To this end, we examine several consequences of our Completeness Theorem and its proof, such as: A way to make every (honest-veri er) statistical zero-knowledge proof very communication ecient, with the prover sending only one bit to the veri er (to achieve soundness error 1=2). Simpler proofs of many of the previously known results about statistical zero knowledge, such as the Fortnow and Aiello{Hastad upper bounds on the complexity of SZK and Okamoto's result that SZK is closed under complement.

Citations