Scalable Zero Knowledge via Cycles of Elliptic Curves

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge for general NP statements are a powerful cryptographic primitive, both in theory and in practical applications. Recently, much research has focused on achieving an additional property, succinctness, requiring the proof to be very short and easy to verify. Such proof systems are known as zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive arguments of knowledge (zk-SNARKs), and are desired when communication is expensive, or the verifier is computationally weak. Existing zk-SNARK implementations have severe scalability limitations, in terms of space complexity as a function of the size of the computation being proved (e.g., running time of the NP statement’s decision program). First, the size of the proving key is quasilinear in the upper bound on the computation size. Second, producing a proof requires writing down all intermediate values of the entire computation, and then conducting global operations such as FFTs. The bootstrapping technique of Bitansky et al. (STOC ’13), following Valiant (TCC ’08), offers an approach to scalability, by recursively composing proofs: proving statements about acceptance of the proof system’s own verifier (and correctness of the program’s latest step). Alas, recursive composition of known zk-SNARKs has never been realized in practice, due to enormous computational cost. Using new elliptic-curve cryptographic techniques, and methods for exploiting the proof systems’ field structure and nondeterminism, we achieve the first zk-SNARK implementation that practically achieves recursive proof composition. Our zk-SNARK implementation runs random-access machine programs and produces proofs of their correct execution, on today’s hardware, for any program running time. It takes constant time to generate the keys that support all computation sizes. Subsequently, the proving process only incurs a constant multiplicative overhead compared to the original computation’s time, and an essentially-constant additive overhead in memory. Thus, our zk-SNARK implementation is the first to have a well-defined, albeit low, clock rate of verified instructions per second

A versatile Montgomery multiplier architecture with characteristic three support

We present a novel unified core design which is extended to realize Montgomery multiplication in the fields GF(2n), GF(3m), and GF(p). Our unified design supports RSA and elliptic curve schemes, as well as the identity-based encryption which requires a pairing computation on an elliptic curve. The architecture is pipelined and is highly scalable. The unified core utilizes the redundant signed digit representation to reduce the critical path delay. While the carry-save representation used in classical unified architectures is only good for addition and multiplication operations, the redundant signed digit representation also facilitates efficient computation of comparison and subtraction operations besides addition and multiplication. Thus, there is no need for a transformation between the redundant and the non-redundant representations of field elements, which would be required in the classical unified architectures to realize the subtraction and comparison operations. We also quantify the benefits of the unified architectures in terms of area and critical path delay. We provide detailed implementation results. The metric shows that the new unified architecture provides an improvement over a hypothetical non-unified architecture of at least 24.88%, while the improvement over a classical unified architecture is at least 32.07%