Formal Verification of Zero-Knowledge Circuits

November 15, 2023 · The Ethereal · 🏛 International Workshop on the ACL2 Theorem Prover and Its Applications

"No code URL or promise found in abstract"

Evidence collected by the PWNC Scanner

Authors Alessandro Coglio, Eric McCarthy, Eric W. Smith arXiv ID 2311.08858 Category cs.LO: Logic in CS Cross-listed cs.CR, cs.SC Citations 9 Venue International Workshop on the ACL2 Theorem Prover and Its Applications Last Checked 2 months ago

Abstract

Zero-knowledge circuits are sets of equality constraints over arithmetic expressions interpreted in a prime field; they are used to encode computations in cryptographic zero-knowledge proofs. We make the following contributions to the problem of ensuring that a circuit correctly encodes a computation: a formal framework for circuit correctness; an ACL2 library for prime fields; an ACL2 model of the existing R1CS (Rank-1 Constraint Systems) formalism to represent circuits, along with ACL2 and Axe tools to verify circuits of this form; a novel PFCS (Prime Field Constraint Systems) formalism to represent hierarchically structured circuits, along with an ACL2 model of it and ACL2 tools to verify circuits of this form in a compositional and scalable way; verification of circuits, ranging from simple to complex; and discovery of bugs and optimizations in existing zero-knowledge systems.