The celebrated result by Gentry and Wichs established a theoretical barrier for succinct non-interactive arguments (SNARGs), showing that for (expressive enough) hard-on-average languages we must assume non-falsifiable assumptions. We further investigate those barriers by showing new negative and positive results related to extractability and to the preprocessing model.

A number of recent works have constructed cryptographic protocols with flavors of adaptive security by having a randomly-chosen anonymous committee run at each round. Since most of these protocols are stateful, transferring secret states from past committees to future, but still unknown, committees is a crucial challenge.

We show that three popular universal zero-knowledge SNARKs (Plonk, Sonic, and Marlin) are updatable SRS simulation extractable NIZKs and signatures of knowledge (SoK) out-of-the-box avoiding any compilation overhead. Towards this we generalize results for the Fiat–Shamir (FS) transformation, which turns interactive protocols into signature schemes, non-interactive proof systems, or SoK in the random oracle model (ROM).