International Association
for Cryptologic Research

We design, implement, and evaluate a zero knowledge succinct non-interactive argument (SNARG) for Rank-1 Constraint Satisfaction (R1CS), a widely-deployed NP language undergoing standardization. Our SNARG has a transparent setup, is plausibly post-quantum secure, and uses lightweight cryptography. A proof attesting to the satisfiability of n constraints has size $$O(\log ^2 n)$$O(log2n); it can be produced with $$O(n \log n)$$O(nlogn) field operations and verified with O(n). At 128 bits of security, proofs are less than $${250}\,\mathrm{kB}$$250kB even for several million constraints, more than $$10{\times }$$10× shorter than prior SNARGs with similar features.A key ingredient of our construction is a new Interactive Oracle Proof (IOP) for solving a univariate analogue of the classical sumcheck problem [LFKN92], originally studied for multivariate polynomials. Our protocol verifies the sum of entries of a Reed–Solomon codeword over any subgroup of a field.We also provide $$\texttt {libiop}$$libiop, a library for writing IOP-based arguments, in which a toolchain of transformations enables programmers to write new arguments by writing simple IOP sub-components. We have used this library to specify our construction and prior ones, and plan to open-source it.

One of the approaches to constructing zero knowledge (ZK) arguments relies on “PCP techniques” that date back to influential works from the early 1990’s [Babai et al., Arora et al. 1991-2]. These techniques require only minimal cryptographic assumptions, namely, the existence of a family of collision-resistant hash functions [Kilian, STOC 1992], and achieve two remarkable properties: (i) all messages generated by the verifier are public random coins, and (ii) total verification time is merely poly-logarithmic in the time needed to naïvely execute the computation being verified [Babai et al., STOC 1991].Those early constructions were never realized in code, mostly because proving time was too large. To address this, the model of interactive oracle proofs (IOPs), which generalizes the PCP model, was recently suggested. Proving time for ZK-IOPs was reduced to quasi-linear, even for problems that require nondeterministic exponential time to decide [Ben-Sasson et al., TCC 2016, ICALP 2017].Despite these recent advances it was still not clear whether ZK-IOP systems can lead to concretely efficient succinct argument systems. Our main claim is that this is indeed the case. We present a new construction of an IOP of knowledge (which we call a zk-STIK) that improves, asymptotically, on the state of art: for log-space computations of length T it is the first to $$O(T \log T)$$ arithmetic prover complexity and $$O(\log T)$$ verifier arithmetic complexity. Prior IOPs had additional $$\mathsf{poly} \log T$$ factors in both prover and verifier. Additionally, we report a C++ realization of this system (which we call libSTARK). Compared to prevailing ZK realizations, it has the fastest proving and (total) verification time for sufficiently large sequential computations.

We study the problem of delegating computations via interactive proofs that can be probabilistically checked. Known as interactive oracle proofs (IOPs), these proofs extend probabilistically checkable proofs (PCPs) to multi-round protocols, and have received much attention due to their application to constructing cryptographic proofs (such as succinct non-interactive arguments). The relevant complexity measures for IOPs in this context are prover and verifier time, and query complexity.We construct highly efficient IOPs for a rich class of nondeterministic algebraic computations, which includes succinct versions of arithmetic circuit satisfiability and rank-one constraint system (R1CS) satisfiability. For a time-T computation, we obtain prover arithmetic complexity $$O(T \log T)$$ and verifier complexity polylog(T). These IOPs are the first to simultaneously achieve the state of the art in prover complexity, due to [14], and in verifier complexity, due to [7]. We also improve upon the query complexity of both schemes.The efficiency of our prover is a result of our highly optimized proof length; in particular, ours is the first construction that simultaneously achieves linear-size proofs and polylogarithmic-time verification, regardless of query complexity.