When Locality Implies Globality: Card-Based ZKP Protocol for Shakashaka Puzzle

Shakashaka is an NP-complete Nikoli puzzle that requires to draw white rectangles by filling a grid with black triangles. Verifying that there are only rectangles drawn in the solution was an open problem for card-based ZKP protocols designers. In this paper, we construct a card-based ZKP protocol to show that a prover can prove to a verifier that he knows a solution of this puzzle without revealing any information. For doing this we prove a local property on all possible 2 × 2 subgrids drawn according to the rules of the game and such configurations are possible valid shapes for rectangles. This local property implies a global property on the shape of the constructed areas. Thanks to this local result for all 2 × 2 subgrids, we are able to establish that the only possible shape in the global grid are rectangles. We also verify other classical rules of Shakashaka.