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Abstract

In Lebanon, the holder of a "Wasta" (political connection conferring preferential treatment) wishes to convince a verifier that they possess a valid connection to a person of sufficient influence, without revealing the identity of that person. This non-disclosure requirement is essential for two reasons. First, the prover requires deniability: they must be able to later deny that wasta was used, preserving the fiction of meritocracy. Second, the proof must not be replayable: if the verifier learns the identity of the connection, they may exploit this information to obtain wasta for themselves or others, depleting a rivalrous resource. We formalize this as a zero-knowledge proof system and show that the traditional Lebanese wasta protocol, involving oblique references, meaningful pauses, and the phrase "you know who my uncle is", can be improved upon. We proceed by introducing ZK-Wasta, a designated-verifier ring signature protocol that achieves honest-verifier zero-knowledge, computational soundness under the discrete logarithm assumption, and unconditional deniability.

Keywords

Zero-knowledge proofs, Ring signatures, Designated-verifier proofs, Social networks

Publication Information

ePrint ID: 2025/003
Date submitted: 2025-12-04
Last revised: 2025-12-04
Category: Cryptographic protocols

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BibTeX Citation

@misc{gacreprint:2025/003,
    author = {Nadim Kobeissi},
    title = {Zero-Knowledge Proof of Wasta with Applications in Lebanon},
    howpublished = {GACR ePrint Archive, Paper 2025/003},
    year = {2025},
    note = {\url{https://eprint.gacr.info/2025/003}},
}