An Overview of Cryptographic Accumulators

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of cryptographic accumulators, explaining their properties, performance trade-offs, and practical applications, filling a gap in existing surveys.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed comparison and application guide for various cryptographic accumulators, highlighting their properties and performance implications.

Findings

Cryptographic accumulators are space- and time-efficient for set-membership tests.

Different accumulator types have distinct properties affecting performance.

The paper clarifies how properties influence complexity and communication overhead.

Abstract

This paper is a primer on cryptographic accumulators and how to apply them practically. A cryptographic accumulator is a space- and time-efficient data structure used for set-membership tests. Since it is possible to represent any computational problem where the answer is yes or no as a set-membership problem, cryptographic accumulators are invaluable data structures in computer science and engineering. But, to the best of our knowledge, there is neither a concise survey comparing and contrasting various types of accumulators nor a guide for how to apply the most appropriate one for a given application. Therefore, we address that gap by describing cryptographic accumulators while presenting their fundamental and so-called optional properties. We discuss the effects of each property on the given accumulator's performance in terms of space and time complexity, as well as communication overhead.