Non-black-box simulation from one-way functions and applications to resettable security

The simulation paradigm, introduced by Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff, is of fundamental importance to modern cryptography. In a breakthrough work from 2001, Barak (FOCS'01) introduced a novel non-black-box simulation technique. This technique enabled the construction of new cryptographic primitives, such as resettably-sound zero-knowledge arguments, that cannot be proven secure using just blackbox simulation techniques. The work of Barak and its followups, however, all require stronger cryptographic hardness assumptions than the minimal assumption of one-way functions. In this work, we show how to perform non-black-box simulation assuming just the existence of one-way functions. In particular, we demonstrate the existence of a constantround resettably-sound zero-knowledge argument based only on the existence of one-way functions. Using this technique, we determine necessary and sufficient assumptions for several other notions of resettable security of zero-knowledge proofs. An additional benefit of our approach is that it seemingly makes practical implementations of non-black-box zero-knowledge viable.