Constant-Overhead Zero-Knowledge for RAM Programs

Nicholas Franzese, Jonathan Katz, Steve Lu, Rafail Ostrovsky, Xiao Wang*, Chenkai Weng

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We show a constant-overhead interactive zero-knowledge (ZK) proof system for RAM programs, that is, a ZK proof in which the communication complexity as well as the running times of the prover and verifier scale linearly in the size of the memory N and the running time T of the underlying RAM program. Besides yielding an asymptotic improvement of prior work, our implementation gives concrete performance improvements for RAM-based ZK proofs. In particular, our implementation supports ZK proofs of private read/write accesses to 64∼MB of memory (224 32-bit words) using only 34∼bytes of communication per access, a more than 80x improvement compared to the recent BubbleRAM protocol. We also design a lightweight RISC CPU that can efficiently emulate the MIPS-I instruction set, and for which our ZK proof communicates only ∼320 bytes per cycle, more than 10x less than the BubbleRAM CPU. In a 100 Mbps network, we can perform zero-knowledge executions of our CPU (with 64∼MB of main memory and 4∼MB of program memory) at a clock rate of 6.6 KHz.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCCS 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages178-191
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450384544
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 12 2021
Event27th ACM Annual Conference on Computer and Communication Security, CCS 2021 - Virtual, Online, Korea, Republic of
Duration: Nov 15 2021Nov 19 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference27th ACM Annual Conference on Computer and Communication Security, CCS 2021
Country/TerritoryKorea, Republic of
CityVirtual, Online
Period11/15/2111/19/21

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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