International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We design and build a system that enables clients to verify the outputs of programs executed by untrusted servers. A server provides a succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (also known as a zk-SNARK), which the client verifies to ascertain correct execution.

The system has two components: a cryptographic proof system for verifying satisfiability of arithmetic circuits, and a circuit generator to translate program executions to such circuits. Our design of both components improves in functionality and efficiency over previous work, as follows.

Our circuit generator is the first to be universal: it does not need to know the program, but only a bound on its running time. It is also the first to support programs expressed as code for a von Neumann RISC random-access memory architecture, where programs may use just-in-time compilation and self-modifying code. Moreover, the dependence on program size is additive (instead of multiplicative as in prior works), allowing efficient verification of large programs.

The cryptographic proof system significantly improves proving and verification times, using a new pairing-based cryptographic library tailored to the protocol.

We evaluated our system for programs with up to 10,000 instructions, running for up to 32,000 machine steps, each of which can arbitrarily access random-access memory; and demonstrated it executing programs that use just-in-time compilation. Our proofs are 230 bytes long at 80 bits of security, or 288 bytes long at 128 bits of security. Typical verification time is 5 ms, regardless of the original program\'s running time.