Proposal: Framework for Snarky Ceremonies

Succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (SNARKs) have found widescale adoption in recent years. The most efficient SNARKs require a distributed ceremony protocol to generate public parameters, also known as a structured reference string (SRS). We propose a general security framework for non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) arguments with a ceremony protocol. In particular, our framework generalizes the notion of updatable reference strings, proposed by Groth, Kohlweiss, Maller, Meiklejohn, and Miers [Crypto, 2018], to multiple independent update phases. Importantly, this allows us to also capture existing setup ceremonies as performed for Groth16 SNARKs.