A Complete Problem for Statistical Zero Knowledge

Amit Sahai and Salil Vadhan

Abstract

We present the first complete problem for SZK, the class of (promise) problems possessing statistical zero-knowledge proofs (against an honest verifier). The problem, called STATISTICAL DIFFERENCE, is to decide whether two efficiently 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:


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